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Popular history being what it is, we should not be surprised that Beethoven's early works for violoncello and piano, especially the sonatas, have been undervalued. For, in traditional Beethoven biography and criticism, his early works in all genres have often been portrayed much more as forerunners of later greatness than as significant products of their own time and circumstances. Linked to this has been the tendency to stress the heroic and monumental qualities of many of the middle period and later works, at the expense of discerning a persistent and lifelong strain in Beethoven's musical imagination towards modes of expression we can characterize as restrained, elegant, and graceful. Yet these tendencies emerged from the matrix of his first period quite as much as did the elements efforce and power for which he became legendary. In all, what Beethoven wrote between the ages of fourteen (1785) and twenty-nine (1800) justifies the view that if he had never composed beyond the String Quartets, Opus 18, and the First Symphony, Opus 21, he would still rank as one of the fundamental figures of the late eighteenth century and of the Classical style altogether.
To forge a major career in Vienna in the 1790s was not easy, even for a widely heralded young composer and pianist who had come from the Rhineland in 1792 to make his way in the musical capital of central Europe. Armed with the prophecy, entered into his album by a friend at Bonn, that he would receive "the spirit of Mozart from the hands of Haydn," he continued to learn from Haydn as composer during these years despite difficulties with Haydn as counterpoint teacher and mentor.1 And in the wake of Mozart's death in 1791, he continued to enrich the knowledge of the Mozartian canon that he had already strongly developed at Bonn, and to apply what he learned. By 1796, his first published works (the Piano Trios, Opus 1, and the Piano Sonatas, Opus 2) showed mastery of formal and tonal procedures, along with enough unorthodoxy to alarm musical conservatives but deeply impress open-minded patrons and connoisseurs.
In this context the two Sonatas for violoncello and piano are innovative in genre and structure. Published in Vienna in 1797 as Opus 5, these...