Along with the 12 minuets (WoO 7), Beethoven’s 12 German dances (WoO 8) were also composed for the masked ball held on 22 November 1795 to benefit the Gesellschaft der Bildenden Künstler (Society of Fine Artists) pension fund. All the minuets and dances are in ¾ time.
Beethoven’s 12 minuets and 12 German dances are all structured the same in minuet-and-trio form: AABBCCDDAABB, where each section is almost always 8 measures in length, and the C and D sections constitute the trio.
In both WoO 7 and WoO 8, Barry Cooper detects “a carefully planned key sequence in which the tonic triads of adjacent dances invariably have one note in common” (“Beethoven” p. 65). For WoO 8, the keys of the 12 dances are C, A, F, B♭, E♭, G, C, A, F, D, G, and C.
#Beethoven250 Day 65
12 German Dances for Orchestra (WoO 8), 1795
A studio recording of the twelve dances. The score calls for a tambourine in the Dance No. 10 Trio section (starting at time 14:18). A Coda begins at 18:15 after Dance No. 12.
Following the twelfth dance without pause, the whole orchestra lets loose in a rousing symphonic coda, sure to provoke clamorous applause after 45 minutes of dancing, and reinforce in everyone’s minds the name of the rising young composer, Beethoven.
#Beethoven250 Day 65
12 German Dances for Piano (WoO 8), 1795
After dancing the night away at the masked ball, you could purchase the sheet music of Beethoven’s own piano arrangement and relive the evening in your home.
Although the minuets and German dances mark Beethoven’s Vienna debut as an orchestral composer, he had previously written orchestral music in Bonn that was publicly performed, and all through 1795 he was working on something big for orchestra — a symphony in the key of C.