Bridging I, II and III (2016)

Andrew Norman

Born October 31, 1979 in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

“Andrew Norman’s work,” according to the composer’s website (andrewnormanmusic.com), “draws on an eclectic mix of sounds and performance practices. By turns experimental and traditional, lyrical and thorny, intimate and epic, rigorously structured and freely intuitive, Andrew’s music casts a wide sonic and conceptual net in order to explore, reflect and challenge the experiences of our own time. He believes in the transformative energy of live performance, and he is often drawn to music-making that harnesses the beauty, power and fragility of risk.”

Andrew Norman was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan in 1979, raised in central California, and earned his undergraduate degree at the University of Southern California Thornton School of Music, where he studied composition with Donald Crockett and Stephen Hartke and piano with Stewart Gordon, and an Artist Diploma from the Yale School of Music, where he was mentored by Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Aaron Jay Kernis. Norman joined the faculties of the USC Thornton School in 2013 and the Juilliard School in 2020, and also serves as director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s Young Composers Fellowship Program. His orchestral and chamber works have been commissioned and premiered by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Aspen Music Festival, London Symphony Orchestra, Minnesota Orchestra, Zurich Tonhalle Orchestra, Tanglewood Festival of Contemporary Music, and many other noted organizations and soloists. His residencies include the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, Opera Philadelphia, Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra and Utah Symphony, as well as Carnegie Hall’s Debs Composer’s Chair for the 2020–2021 season. Among Andrew Norman’s rapidly accumulating distinctions are fellowships from the American Academies in Rome and Berlin and the MacDowell Colony, Grawemeyer Award, Jacob Druckman Prize from the Aspen Festival, Charles Ives Scholarship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, two nominations as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Music, two Grammy Award nominations for “Best Classical Music Composition” (Play [2016] and Sustain [2018]), and selection as the “2017 Composer of the Year” by Musical America.

Andrew Norman wrote, “Bridging I, II and III were composed specifically to be performed with Beethoven’s three Op. 30 Violin Sonatas. Each interlude begins with the end of one of the sonatas and transforms it, through repetition and variation, into the beginning of the next.”

Violin Sonata No. 6 in A major, Op. 30, No. 1 (1802)

Violin Sonata No. 7 in C minor, Op. 30, No. 2 (1802)

Violin Sonata No. 8 in G major, Op. 30, No. 3 (1802)

Ludwig van Beethoven

Born December 16, 1770 in Bonn.

Died March 26, 1827 in Vienna.

In the summer of 1802, Beethoven’s physician ordered him to leave Vienna and take rooms in Heiligenstadt, today a friendly suburb at the northern terminus of the city’s subway system, but two centuries ago a quiet village with a view of the Danube across the river’s rich flood plain. It was three years earlier, in 1799, that Beethoven first noticed a disturbing ringing and buzzing in his ears, and he sought medical attention for the problem soon thereafter. He tried numerous cures for his malady, as well as for his chronic colic, including oil of almonds, hot and cold baths, soaking in the Danube, pills and herbs. For a short time he even considered the modish treatment of electric shock. On the advice of his latest doctor, Beethoven left the noisy city for the quiet countryside with the assurance that the lack of stimulation would be beneficial to his hearing and his general health.

In Heiligenstadt, Beethoven virtually lived the life of a hermit, seeing only his doctor and a young student named Ferdinand Ries. In 1802, he was still a full decade from being totally deaf. The acuity of his hearing varied from day to day (sometimes governed by his interest — or lack thereof — in the surrounding conversation), but he had largely lost his ability to hear soft sounds by that time and loud noises caused him pain. Of one of their walks in the country, Ries reported, “I called his attention to a shepherd who was piping very agreeably in the woods on a flute made of a twig of elder. For half an hour, Beethoven could hear nothing, and though I assured him that it was the same with me (which was not the case), he became extremely quiet and morose. When he occasionally seemed to be merry, it was generally to the extreme of boisterousness; but this happens seldom.”

In addition to the distress over his health, Beethoven was also wounded in 1802 by the wreck of an affair of the heart. He had proposed marriage to Giulietta Guicciardi (the thought of Beethoven as a husband threatens the moorings of one’s presence of mind!), but had been denied permission by the girl’s father for the then perfectly valid reason that the young composer was without rank, position or fortune. Faced with the extinction of a musician’s most precious faculty, fighting a constant digestive distress, and unsuccessful in love, it is little wonder that Beethoven was sorely vexed.

On October 6, 1802, following several months of wrestling with his misfortunes, Beethoven penned the most famous letter ever written by a musician — the “Heiligenstadt Testament.” Intended as a will written to his brothers (it was never sent, though he kept it in his papers to be found after his death), it is a cry of despair over his fate, perhaps a necessary and self-induced soul-cleansing in those pre-Freudian days. “O Providence — grant me at last but one day of pure joy — it is so long since real joy echoed in my heart,” he lamented. But — and this is the miracle — he not only poured his energy into self-pity, he also channeled it into music. “I shall grapple with fate; it shall never pull me down,” he resolved. The next five years were the most productive he ever knew. “I live only in my music,” Beethoven wrote, “and I have scarcely begun one thing when I start another.” The Symphonies Nos. 2-5, a dozen piano sonatas, the Fourth Piano Concerto and the Triple Concerto, Fidelio, three violin and piano sonatas (Op. 30), many songs, chamber works and keyboard compositions were all composed between 1802 and 1806.

The Op. 30 Sonatas for Piano and Violin that Beethoven completed by the time he returned from Heiligenstadt to Vienna in the middle of October 1802 stand at the threshold of a new creative language, the dynamic and dramatic musical speech that characterizes the creations of his so-called “second period.”

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One of the keys Beethoven used to unlock this revolutionary stylistic advance was the complete interpenetration of melody and accompaniment, the hewing of all the lines of a musical passage and even an entire movement from a small set of thematic atoms. Such a working method generates the main theme of the opening movement of the A major Sonata, in which most of the violin line and both hands of the piano are derived from either the quick turn figure or the flowing quarter-note motive introduced at the outset. The second subject, an arching melody with a trill, provides thematic and tonal contrast while continuing the genial, lyrical nature of the movement. The second theme and the turn figure provide most of the material for the development section. A full recapitulation of the exposition, properly adjusted as to key, rounds out the movement.

Of the Sonata’s second movement, Jelly d’Aranyi, the brilliant Hungarian violinist who inspired works from Ravel, Bartók and Vaughan Williams, wrote, “The Adagio is a great favorite of mine. The blend of the two instruments is so perfect a thing.... The whole movement has such a feeling of tenderness and sorrow it reminds me, if I am allowed the comparison, of Michelangelo’s Pietà, and his unfinished marvel, the Descent of the Cross. I do not want to suggest that this Adagio could be called religious music, I am only thinking in both cases of the expression of infinite tenderness and sorrow, whether put into sound or carved in stone.”

Beethoven’s original finale for the A major Sonata was a large, brilliant and difficult rondo — indeed, too brilliant, according to his student Ferdinand Ries, and it was ultimately used to cap the “Kreutzer” Sonata. Beethoven next devised a new, gentler theme for a more modest rondo, but this melody finally ended up as the subject for the set of variations that closes the A major Sonata.

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The C minor Sonata, the second of the Op. 30 set, shares its impassioned key with several other epochal creations of those years, notably the Fifth Symphony, Third Piano Concerto, “Pathétique” Sonata, Coriolan Overture and Op. 18, No. 4 String Quartet. The work opens with a pregnant main theme, announced by the piano and echoed by the violin, which, according to British musicologist Samuel Midgley, “is like a taut spring about to snap.” This motive returns throughout the movement both as the pillar of its structural support and as the engine of its tempestuous expression. The second theme is a tiny military march in dotted rhythms. The development section, which commences with bold slashing chords separated by silences (the exposition is not repeated), encompasses powerful mutations of the two principal themes. A full recapitulation and a large coda round out the movement.

The Adagio, one of those inimitable slow movements in which Beethoven created music seemingly rapt out of quotidian time, is based on a hymnal melody presented first by the piano and reiterated by the violin. A passage in long notes for the violin above harmonically unsettled arpeggios in the keyboard constitutes the movement’s central section before the opening theme is recalled in an elaborated setting. The coda is dressed with ribbons of scales by the piano.

The Scherzo, with its rhythmic surprises and nimble figurations, presents a playful contrast to the surrounding movements.

The Finale, which mixes elements of rondo (the frequent returns of the halting motive heard at the beginning) and sonata (the extensive development of the themes), renews the troubled mood of the opening movement to close the expressive and formal cycle of this excellent Sonata.

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The Sonata No. 3, in G major, is the most compact and cheerful such piece in Beethoven’s creative output. The main theme of the opening sonata-form movement balances, in good Classical fashion, a frisky motive in rolling scale steps with a more lyrical idea. The second theme is full of incident, with mercurial shifts of harmony, a half-dozen thematic fragments, sudden changes of dynamics and sharply accented notes. The trills and bustling rhythmic activity that close the exposition are carried into the development section, which provides only a brief formal deflection before a full recapitulation of the exposition’s materials rounds out the movement.

Though the second movement is marked to be played “in the tempo of a minuet,” this is music grown from song rather than dance, sweet and lyrical and gracious, that returns to its lovely opening strain throughout in the manner of a refrain.

The closing movement is a genial rondo whose sunny vivacity and sparkling passage work recall Haydn’s Gypsy rondos.

©2025 Dr. Richard E. Rodda