Unpopular Opinions

[Christo]

Florestan on Beethoven might be the most unpopular opinion in this thread...

No. At least he's right about Richard Strauss. 

[amw]

TD:

Beethoven is singlehandedly culpable for introducing, promoting and championing the false and pernicious notions that (1) great music is / should be all about one's own idiosyncrasies and (2) aggressiveness, loudness and unruliness equal profundity. He singlehandely altered the course of Western music along these lines ---  for worse.

I wouldn't blame Beethoven for that; it's his generation of critics and literary people who promoted him and these romantic ideas. Beethoven's own artistic philosophy was mostly influenced by thinkers of an earlier generation (Schiller, Goethe etc). His music is not different from e.g. Scarlatti in its idiosyncrasy and loudness it's just that the critical landscape in post-napoleonic Europe was very different. If you've gotta blame someone, blame Bonaparte >.>

[Florestan]

I wouldn't blame Beethoven for that; it's his generation of critics and literary people who promoted him and these romantic ideas. Beethoven's own artistic philosophy was mostly influenced by thinkers of an earlier generation (Schiller, Goethe etc). His music is not different from e.g. Scarlatti in its idiosyncrasy and loudness it's just that the critical landscape in post-napoleonic Europe was very different. If you've gotta blame someone, blame Bonaparte >.>

You do have a point. However, see reply #2541. 

[amw]

I missed that first time around Telegraph articles on classical music are always good for a laugh though

[Jo498]

People usually blame Rousseau...

The "Sturm-and-Drang" and other romantic tendencies in German literature precede the Revolution by about a decade and Bonaparte (*1769) was only child at this time. Goethe's Werther was published in 1774, so the appropriate music for Werther's romantic dilemmas and suicidal tendencies would be Bach sons and Haydn, Schiller's "Die Räuber" (the one the early Verdi piece is based on) in 1781.
It gets all  more complicated because both Goethe and Schiller did a turn (not quite U, but maybe 120-150°) away from romanticism (and they were also abhorred by the terreur and gave up the revolutionary tendencies in favor of a more moderate enligthenment) and their humanist classicism ("Weimar") was the main foil for the first generation of German romantics in a narrower sense.

So one has several "dialectic" steps during Beethoven's lifetime:
- mid-18th-century rationalist enlightenment
-> first subjectivist/romantic reaction with pieces like the ones just mentioned
-> late 18th/early 19th century "classicism" (mainly Schiller and Goethe, Herder in German literature)
-> early 19th century romanticism or any other dialectical reaction against Goethe-style classicism, e.g Kleist) etc.

Many strains are mixed together here. And people always take what they need from predecessors or contemporaries.
(While Goethe's Faust was more an abstract drama of ideas for many Germans, Berlioz's seems to have focussed on the romantic, even "gothic" side, similarly with the political/historical Schiller plays when they were turned into operas.)

And all this cannot be simply mapped onto music, of course.

Already in that founding document of musical romanticism, Hoffmann's essay on Beethoven (mainly the 5th symphony) a very important point is how Beethoven explores the frontiers of *music*, rather independent of whatever it could "mean" or express. 20th century critics like Tovey and Riezler, Charles Rosen have expanded this very clearly. How Beethoven is above all pushing *music as such* forward, not imposing personal or literary allusions. (And in fact, there is very little factual basis for such allusions although they have been there from the beginning.
And I think that this is almost exactly the same at the beginning of the 20th century. Sure, there are some pieces of expressionist music matching decadent and dark fin de siècle literature ("Erwartung"). But overall the development towards more dissonant music is an exploration of inherent musical possibilities.

So the revolution Beethoven could stand for is not that music that used to serve the church or the nobility was now made to serve the personal pathologies of romantic composers, but rather that music was not to serve anything else at all but rule according to its own peculiar dynamics. (Of course, (late) Bach and many other composers before Beethoven already did this but rarely so stubbornly as Beethoven)

(That telegraph essay by Dylan Evans, "senior lecturer in intelligent autonomous systems", seems certainly more autonomous than intelligent...)

[Madiel]

The thing about Beethoven is, he wrote quite a lot of pieces that are not terribly loud and unruly.

But they're not the famous ones. The ones that everyone nowadays goes bananas over are the "loud" and "unruly"... I think the point is that they're the incredibly dynamic ones, because Beethoven was able to create a force and momentum and dynamism in his music that was pretty well unprecedented.

And so people don't tend to listen to genial, good-humoured Beethoven. Or if they do they tend not to be amazed by it. And so the name Beethoven has become synonymous with the music that is at one end of his emotional spectrum.

[Jo498]

Among the most famous Beethoven the "heaven storming" pieces dominate. But the Pastoral symphony, the violin concerto, the 4th piano concerto. the "Spring sonata" and a bunch of others are also very well known and they are mostly lyrical.
Actually, almost everything by Beethoven is fairly well known so people play and listen also to the humorous or lyrical works (there are actually more of them than "heroic" ones).

[Florestan]

The thing about Beethoven is, he wrote quite a lot of pieces that are not terribly loud and unruly.

But they're not the famous ones. The ones that everyone nowadays goes bananas over are the "loud" and "unruly"... I think the point is that they're the incredibly dynamic ones, because Beethoven was able to create a force and momentum and dynamism in his music that was pretty well unprecedented.

And so people don't tend to listen to genial, good-humoured Beethoven. Or if they do they tend not to be amazed by it. And so the name Beethoven has become synonymous with the music that is at one end of his emotional spectrum.

Good points.

[Florestan]

Actually, almost everything by Beethoven is fairly well known .

Not quite. Probably his best kept secret are the Bagatelles for piano, and they are indeed genial and good-humoured --- a very different Beethoven.

[Mandryka]

Not quite. Probably his best kept secret are the Bagatelles for piano, and they are indeed genial and good-humoured --- a very different Beethoven.

I think op 126/2 is an example of loud dynamic forceful Beethoven.

By the way have you real Milan Kundera on Kitsch, and some of the comments he makes specifically about kitsch in Beethoven?  I think you may find what he says interesting, I know I did.

[Florestan]

By the way have you real Milan Kundera on Kitsch, and some of the comments he makes specifically about kitsch in Beethoven?  I think you may find what he says interesting, I know I did.

No, I didn't. Is it anywhere online?

[Mandryka]

No, I didn't. Is it anywhere online?

That I don't know. The "classic" text on Kitsch is in section 6 of The Unbearable Lightness of Being. The comments on Beethoven are somewhere else, either Ignorance or Immortality, I cant remember offhand, though it's obvious what he will say given his idea of Kitsch and Beethoven's Promethean tendencies.   

[Florestan]

That I don't know. The "classic" text on Kitsch is in section 6 of The Unbearable Lightness of Being. The comments on Beethoven are somewhere else, either Ignorance or Immortality, I cant remember offhand, though it's obvious what he will say given his idea of Kitsch and Beethoven's Promethean tendencies.

Oh, great. I have that book and I have even read it many years ago but I don't remember much. Time for a re-reading. Thanks for the tip.

[LKB]

Even ancient statues are facepalming this ridiculous assertion.

This caused me to laugh hard enough to move the furniture.

,

LKB

[Monsieur Croche]

People usually blame Rousseau...

The "Sturm-and-Drang" and other romantic tendencies in German literature precede the Revolution by about a decade and Bonaparte (*1769) was only child at this time. Goethe's Werther was published in 1774, so the appropriate music for Werther's romantic dilemmas and suicidal tendencies would be Bach sons and Haydn, Schiller's "Die Räuber" (the one the early Verdi piece is based on) in 1781.
It gets all  more complicated because both Goethe and Schiller did a turn (not quite U, but maybe 120-150°) away from romanticism (and they were also abhorred by the terreur and gave up the revolutionary tendencies in favor of a more moderate enligthenment) and their humanist classicism ("Weimar") was the main foil for the first generation of German romantics in a narrower sense.

So one has several "dialectic" steps during Beethoven's lifetime:
- mid-18th-century rationalist enlightenment
-> first subjectivist/romantic reaction with pieces like the ones just mentioned
-> late 18th/early 19th century "classicism" (mainly Schiller and Goethe, Herder in German literature)
-> early 19th century romanticism or any other dialectical reaction against Goethe-style classicism, e.g Kleist) etc.

Many strains are mixed together here. And people always take what they need from predecessors or contemporaries.
(While Goethe's Faust was more an abstract drama of ideas for many Germans, Berlioz's seems to have focussed on the romantic, even "gothic" side, similarly with the political/historical Schiller plays when they were turned into operas.)

And all this cannot be simply mapped onto music, of course.

Already in that founding document of musical romanticism, Hoffmann's essay on Beethoven (mainly the 5th symphony) a very important point is how Beethoven explores the frontiers of *music*, rather independent of whatever it could "mean" or express. 20th century critics like Tovey and Riezler, Charles Rosen have expanded this very clearly. How Beethoven is above all pushing *music as such* forward, not imposing personal or literary allusions. (And in fact, there is very little factual basis for such allusions although they have been there from the beginning.
And I think that this is almost exactly the same at the beginning of the 20th century. Sure, there are some pieces of expressionist music matching decadent and dark fin de siècle literature ("Erwartung"). But overall the development towards more dissonant music is an exploration of inherent musical possibilities.

So the revolution Beethoven could stand for is not that music that used to serve the church or the nobility was now made to serve the personal pathologies of romantic composers, but rather that music was not to serve anything else at all but rule according to its own peculiar dynamics. (Of course, (late) Bach and many other composers before Beethoven already did this but rarely so stubbornly as Beethoven)

(That telegraph essay by Dylan Evans, "senior lecturer in intelligent autonomous systems", seems certainly more autonomous than intelligent...)

This is a beautiful post.

It so concisely ~ and rather elegantly ~ makes that point which is of such a primary importance if one hopes to understand a significant bulk of the repertoire from across the eras. Composers often compose with the sole intent and purpose of pursuing the possibility of an innately musical idea, "independent of whatever it could "mean" or express."



 

[Jo498]

I might have recruited Hoffmann for something he does not really make explicit, at least does not stress that much. (But he does make the point that what to many listeners appears willful and wild is in fact more tightly organized than most other music.)
This is irrelevant for the main point but I think what I thought of when I wrote was not mainly Hoffmann's comment but Grillparzer's eulogy for Beethoven. (And note that Grillparzer could be a quite a philistine, he completely trashed Weber's Euryanthe and called it an example of music that would have forbidden by the police in "the good times of Ancient Greece". He admired Beethoven but especially late Beethoven went probably far past his taste and understanding)

"Wie der Behemoth die Meere durchstürmt, durchflog er die Grenzen seiner Kunst. Vom Girren der Taube bis zum Rollen des Donners, von der spitzfindigsten Verwebung eigensinniger Kunstmittel bis zu dem furchtbaren Puncte, wo das Gebildete übergeht in die regellose Willkühr streitender Naturgewalten, alles hatte er durchmessen, alles erfaßt. Der nach ihm kommt, wird nicht fortsetzen, er wird anfangen müssen, denn sein Vorgänger hörte nur auf, wo die Kunst aufhört."

Like Behemoth passing through the seas he [Beethoven] flew past the frontiers of his Art. From the cooing of the dove to the growl of thunder, from the most sophisticated weaving together of peculiar artistic devices to the dreadful point where the artfully formed passes into the lawless caprice of battling forces of nature, he passed through everything, grasped everything. Whoever comes after him, cannot continue, he will have to begin because his predecessor only stopped where the Art stops.

https://beethovenfest.wordpress.com/2012/03/26/zum-185-todestag-ludwig-van-beethovens-die-gr/

[ComposerOfAvantGarde]

Opinion:

For two American composers born in the 70s..........James Eckardt wrote better music than Aaron Cassidy.

THoughts?

[Madiel]

My only thought is: who are these people?

Honestly, I tried. I googled James Eckardt and came up with a whole lot of hits for a book reviewer in Thailand. At that point I gave up.

[North Star]

My only thought is: who are these people?

Honestly, I tried. I googled James Eckardt and came up with a whole lot of hits for a book reviewer in Thailand. At that point I gave up.

I seemed to have better luck finding them...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jason_Eckardt
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Cassidy

[ComposerOfAvantGarde]

Hmmmm Aaron Cassidy seems to be the one who gets more exposure from what I have noticed