Ludwig van Beethoven - Minuet from String Trio in E flat, Op.3

A lot of music the world over has to do with singing, or dancing-or both. This is a dance: a minuet, one of the most popular dances of the time, and regularly included as one of the movements (separate sections) of a symphony or other composition. A minuet had three beats in the bar, so the music seems to be counting 1-2-3, 1-2-3-but check how this one starts. It also had phrases four bars long, enough for the dancers to move a certain distance, then move back. Minuets in symphonies and smaller pieces have a contrasting middle section, which in this case is in the minor key, with the violinist now breaking away from the other two, and sounding perhaps like a gypsy musician in a Viennese café.

This minuet is the fifth of the six movements of a string trio-that is, a piece for a group consisting of a violin, a viola and a cello. More common was the string quartet, with two violins, but we could imagine that Joseph Haydn, who was Beethoven's teacher at the time, advised him to start with the simpler trio. He was 22 or 23.

We could tell it was an early composition just from the opus number ('opus' is Latin for 'work'), because Beethoven numbered his compositions this way as he went along. He got as far as Opus 135.

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)

Ask people to name a classical composer, and the chances are they'll come up with this one. Writing at a time of revolutionary change, Beethoven expressed a new spirit of challenge and struggle, hope and progress. And he did so largely without words, in symphonies and other works for instrumental groups (or solo piano). That way his music could speak powerfully to people all over the world, as it has continued to do. He spent almost all his adult life in Vienna, where he went as a young man because that was the city of the two great composers before him: Haydn and Mozart. They were the ones he had to learn from. Then he could go his own way. In his personal life, too, he became a loner, largely because he felt isolated and embarrassed by his increasing deafness. What mattered was the music going on in his head.