Movement I - Measures 57 to 61

Measures 57 to 60 modulate back to the tonic for the repeat of the exposition:

In the transcription, I have, of necessity, eliminated the low Cs in the accompaniment:

I brought the first violin in on measure 59 to handle the extra chord tones. That's not an entirely satisfactory solution. The return of the main theme in measure 61 would be more dramatic if the first violin were tacit until that point. Perhaps it would be better to handle the extra chord tones with double stops in the viola? I'm curious to see how Beethoven solves this problem.

Before we get to his solution, however, let's take a look at how he arranges measure 57 and 58:

Beethoven eliminates the opening eighth note rest and has all four instruments play on the downbeat. Recall that he did something similar in the first measure of this movement.

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In measure one, Beethoven voiced the first chord differently than in the rest of the measure, which helped to articulate the downbeat. In measure 57, however, Beethoven voices the chord the same way. So the effect is different here than it was in measure one. We don't feel the downbeat so strongly, and the passage feels more like a transition than a beginning, as it should.

If accentuating the downbeat is not Beethoven's purpose in making this change, then what is his purpose? I suspect he was simply giving the players a helping hand. A slight retard was implicit in the previous measure, so it will be difficult for the players to get back in tempo unless they begin this measure together. This is why Beethoven adds the apparently extraneous quarter-note C in the first violin part. The players will look to the first violin for their cue, so Beethoven must give him something to play.

So how does Beethoven solve the aforementioned problem? That is, how does he fill out the chords in the accompaniment without destroying the dramatic effect of the return of the main theme? He borrows a trick from Mozart.

In the retransition in the first movement of Mozart's Clarinet Quintet (a work we've already compared to this quartet in a different context), Mozart has the clarinet hold an E for three measures while the strings modulate back to A major. Only when we reach A major on the downbeat of the fourth measure do we realize that this E we've been hearing in the clarinet is actually the first note of the primary theme. The recapitulation has actually already begun; we just didn't know it yet. The clarinet began the theme by itself, then waited for everyone else to catch up. It's one of my favorite moments in all of Mozart:

(Score in concert pitch)

It wouldn't surprise me to learn that Beethoven had the Clarinet Quintet in mind when he scored this passage. Like Mozart, he has the soprano instrument begin the primary theme three measures early, then wait for everyone else to finish the modulation. But, instead of just holding the note for three measures, he elaborates it with a couple of turns.

These turns serve two purposes:

(1) They hark back to the secondary theme. The secondary theme began with the same opening gesture as the primary theme--a dominant rising to tonic--but with a turn thrown in:

This transition is an elongation of that same idea.

(2) They fill out the harmony in the accompaniment. The two turns are not identical. Beethoven manipulates them so that, on the first and last of the three eighth-note chords, the first violin plays the precise chord tones that are missing in the lower strings.

So Beethoven fits in the extra chord tones not by adding the first violin to the accompaniment as I did in the transcription nor by using double stops as I speculated he might do. Instead, he slyly incorporates the extra chord tones into a new melody that prepares us for the return the primary theme. All in all, it's quite an elegant solution.