Your Desert Island Era în Classical Music

[Henk]

I still don't get it. If, say, Schumann's music expresses neither nature nor human nature, then what does it express?

I have to look up Nietzsche for that somewhere in 'Human all too Human'.

You're wrong. Our world is still governed by many Romantic ideas.

Enlighten me. I saw a video yesterday of a crowd of Italians doing the Hitler gesture. Otherwise I wouldn't know. I'm serious. Romanticism might have been emancipatory, but I suspect it also had a very dark influence on areas as diverted as science and politics with cross-pollination between them.

[Florestan]

I have to look up Nietzsche for that somewhere in 'Human all too Human'.

What I asked for was your own thoughts, not Nietzsche's... (and anyway Nietszche for me is hardly an authority on anything).

Enlighten me.

Art and artists should be original and provocative. There is high art for enlightened people and low art for the masses. If a form of art is incomprehensible to the general public, the fault lies always with the latter, never with the artist. Serious, thought-provoking art (preferably of the gloom-and-doom variety) is superior to joyful, cheerful and life-affirming art. German music is superior to all other.

These ideas, and many more, are still current. 

[Henk]

What I asked for was your own thoughts, not Nietzsche's... (and anyway Nietszche for me is hardly an authority on anything).

Art and artists should be original and provocative. There is high art for enlightened people and low art for the masses. If a form of art is incomprehensible to the general public, the fault lies always with the latter, never with the artist. Serious, thought-provoking art (preferably of the gloom-and-doom variety) is superior to joyful, cheerful and life-affirming art. German music is superior to all other.

These ideas, and many more, are still current.

Sounds awful to me for a big part.

It was selfmockery about Nietzsche. Should have put a smiley.

[Florestan]

It was selfmockery about Nietzsche. Should have put a smiley.

Yes, please do. In my experience, emoticons help enormously to avoid misunderstandings. 

[(poco) Sforzando]

Chopin rejected Beethoven on esthetical grounds. Here is an excerpt from Delacroix's Journal:
It's obvious that he was spiritually incompatible with Beethoven.

Look at what Chopin does, not what he says. The Sturm und Drang of the C minor etudes in both books as well as the first movement of the Bb minor sonata is very Beethovenesque. And as for pianistic texture, what's most characteristic of Chopin - the highly ornamented melodic figurations set against widely spaced bass lines - is to be found in the slow movement of the Hammerklavier Sonata.

[(poco) Sforzando]

a) I don't claim that Chopin's music is not Romantic, only that it is the product of a non-Romantic personality.

b) Well, if rigorous use and treatment of sonata form marks one's music as Classical, then Medtner was the last Classical composer.   

c) Wagner dismissed Chopin's music, calling him "a composer for the right hand". And I doubt that a German nationalist would have modeled anything on the music of a half-French Pole.

a) I don't even know what that means.
b) I don't know Medtner's music well enough to comment.
c) Look at what Wagner does, not what he says. Then take a look at the structure of the Meistersinger prelude vs. the 3rd Ballade. Wagner dismissed Meyerbeer as well (partly because the latter was a Jew), yet scholars have detected a great deal of Meyerbeer in the operas of Wagner. Denial of influence does not prove absence of influence.

[Florestan]

a) I don't even know what that means.

It means that Chopin's music is Romantic (albeit in a different way than Schumann's or Liszt's) whereas Chopin's personality is not. The contrast between him and highly Romantic personalities such as Liszt and Berlioz is almost as great as that between the latter two and Mendelssohn. Schumann is a borderline case in that in him highly Romantic impulses coexisted with highly bourgeois ones, a tension which is in no small part responsible for the eventual disintegration of his mind.

b) I don't know Medtner's music well enough to comment.

Taneyev once said about him that "he was born with sonata form".

c) Look at what Wagner does, not what he says. Then take a look at the structure of the Meistersinger prelude vs. the 3rd Ballade. Wagner dismissed Meyerbeer as well (partly because the latter was a Jew), yet scholars have detected a great deal of Meyerbeer in the operas of Wagner. Denial of influence does not prove absence of influence.

The influence of Meyerbeer on Wagner is both amply documented and quite obvious. I have never ever encountered, though, the slightest allusion or reference to Chopin's influence on Wagner. But if you feel there is one, I have no problem with that.

[atardecer]

It's not nature and human nature, the nature of civilisation that they express aesthetically in music, which they pretend, it's a delusion.

But I listened to Berlioz's Fantastic Symphony yesterday, and I must say I liked what I heard. The Romantic Age has quite some enigma and charm, but I don't think that it lasted, like Mozart and Haydn did. It was a peak in European culture that soon flattened. Today we don't recognize any truth in it. Even Nietzsche was manipulated by it, because of which his authority to me has diminished slightly.

The music of Haydn and Mozart in their time was seen as essentially 'Faux Classical'. Something mimicking Classical Greek art in an idyllic way. The music also 'fakes' simplicity. In that sense it is kind of a deceptive and illusionary style.

I think there is some 'pretending' going on in both eras. Some say art is truth, some say it is a lie. I think it is both.

[Florestan]

The music of Haydn and Mozart in their time was seen as essentially 'Faux Classical'. Something mimicking Classical Greek art in an idyllic way.

Do you have a source for this claim? What contemporary of Haydn and Mozart said about their music that it is an idyllic mimicry of Greek Classical art?

[Florestan]

Look at what Chopin does, not what he says. The Sturm und Drang of the C minor etudes in both books as well as the first movement of the Bb minor sonata is very Beethovenesque.

Of any music which is Sturm-und-Drang-ish in feeling it could be said that it's Beethovenesque, because Beethovenesque has become a marker for turbulent music in minor keys --- which music, of course, predates Beethoven's own by decades, although you never hear about Vanhalesque or Krausesque or CPE-Bachesque music, while Haydnesque or Mozartian have become markers for almost the opposite of Beethovenesque.

And as for pianistic texture, what's most characteristic of Chopin - the highly ornamented melodic figurations set against widely spaced bass lines - is to be found in the slow movement of the Hammerklavier Sonata.

Which actually sounds nothing like Chopin.

[atardecer]

Do you have a source for this claim? What contemporary of Haydn and Mozart said about their music that it is an idyllic mimicry of Greek Classical art?

There is definitely something along these lines in Rosen's The Classical Style. I couldn't find everything related to it but here is a quote that relates to it from Rosen regarding the pastoral nature of Haydn's symphonies: (p.162)

"The pretense that Nature is as we have imagined her to be, and that Phillis and Strephon herd sheep, gives us a form of art more direct than the realistic novel in that its unabashed artificiality openly calls for an act of faith." 

[Henk]

The music of Haydn and Mozart in their time was seen as essentially 'Faux Classical'. Something mimicking Classical Greek art in an idyllic way. The music also 'fakes' simplicity. In that sense it is kind of a deceptive and illusionary style.

I think there is some 'pretending' going on in both eras. Some say art is truth, some say it is a lie. I think it is both.

Maybe it's just all a matter of taste, though argumentation can affect taste. There's a communication between the rational and sensitive.

[Florestan]

There is definitely something along these lines in Rosen's The Classical Style. I couldn't find everything related to it but here is a quote that relates to it from Rosen regarding the pastoral nature of Haydn's symphonies: (p.162)

"The pretense that Nature is as we have imagined her to be, and that Phillis and Strephon herd sheep, gives us a form of art more direct than the realistic novel in that its unabashed artificiality openly calls for an act of faith."

Hmmmm... Rosen can be hardly considered a contemporary of Haydn and Mozart. I strongly suspect that his considerations (in which he mixes Poussin and Goldoni, Wieland and the Marquis de Sade) would have been met not only by such contemporaries, but by Haydn himself, with amused incomprehension. To reduce Haydn's huge and varied symphonic output to the common denominator of "heroic pastoral" and to claim that "His melodies, like the shepherds of the classical pastoral, seem detached from everything they portend, unaware of how much they signify" is sheer nonsense and the fact that it has a scholarly stamp on it makes it all the graver.

[(poco) Sforzando]

Of any music which is Sturm-und-Drang-ish in feeling it could be said that it's Beethovenesque, because Beethovenesque has become a marker for turbulent music in minor keys --- which music, of course, predates Beethoven's own by decades, although you never hear about Vanhalesque or Krausesque or CPE-Bachesque music, while Haydnesque or Mozartian have become markers for almost the opposite of Beethovenesque.


Which actually sounds nothing like Chopin.

Whether others have said what I am saying is irrelevant; the only consideration is the music itself. I invite you to look at 22:30 or so in the video, at the turn to D major, and tell me if the textures here are not Chopinesque:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=erD1Yy-4F5M&t=1378s

Same with the 3rd Ballade and the Meistersinger prelude. Both are short (8-10 minute) works that first present a procession of themes without decisively departing from the tonic key, then there is a short development, and finally a peroration on the main theme at the end. This is very different from the Classical model (to oversimplify greatly of course) of an exposition that moves to an active key, then a development section that explores a set of remote keys, followed by a recapitulation of the exposition material in the home key. Whether Wagner knew the Chopin, or was influenced by it, or denied the influence, or adapted such a model independently, is unknowable; the point is that they both came to a conception of form that moves away from the Classical principle that remains active in (say) Brahms.

[Florestan]

Whether others have said what I am saying is irrelevant; the only consideration is the music itself. I invite you to look at 22:30 or so in the video, at the turn to D major, and tell me if the textures here are not Chopinesque:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=erD1Yy-4F5M&t=1378s

There are a few seconds indeed during which the sound is approximately Chopinesque but if this is proof that Chopin was influenced by Hammerklavier, then how about Weber's Piano Sonata in A-flat major Op. 39, where the Chopinesque moments are much more frequent and extended, scattered throughout all movements, and which was written before the Hammerklavier, or again how about Fields'first 3 nocturnes, which predate both Weber and Beethoven and in which the pre-Chopinesque atmosphere is unmistakable? Or even Mozart's Rondo in A minor KV511? Given Chopin's musical education and preferences all those are much more likely influences on his style than Hammerklavier.

Same with the 3rd Ballade and the Meistersinger prelude. Both are short (8-10 minute) works that first present a procession of themes without decisively departing from the tonic key, then there is a short development, and finally a peroration on the main theme at the end. This is very different from the Classical model (to oversimplify greatly of course) of an exposition that moves to an active key, then a development section that explores a set of remote keys, followed by a recapitulation of the exposition material in the home key. Whether Wagner knew the Chopin, or was influenced by it, or denied the influence, or adapted such a model independently, is unknowable; the point is that they both came to a conception of form that moves away from the Classical principle that remains active in (say) Brahms.

And yet when Brahms composed his own Ballads, he didn't cling to strict sonata form either.

https://www.classicalconnect.com/node/11464

I'd say that in all three cases, as in countless others, the form is dictated by the content. Strict adherence to sonata form is ill-suited both for ballads and operatic overtures / preludes. Even Mozart modified it in his overtures.

[(poco) Sforzando]

a) There are a few seconds indeed during which the sound is approximately Chopinesque but if this is proof that Chopin was influenced by Hammerklavier, then how about Weber's Piano Sonata in A-flat major Op. 39, where the Chopinesque moments are much more frequent and extended, scattered throughout all movements, and which was written before the Hammerklavier, or again how about Fields'first 3 nocturnes, which predate both Weber and Beethoven and in which the pre-Chopinesque atmosphere is unmistakable? Or even Mozart's Rondo in A minor KV511? Given Chopin's musical education and preferences all those are much more likely influences on his style than Hammerklavier.

b) And yet when Brahms composed his own Ballads, he didn't cling to strict sonata form either.

https://www.classicalconnect.com/node/11464

I'd say that in all three cases, as in countless others, the form is dictated by the content. Strict adherence to sonata form is ill-suited both for ballads and operatic overtures / preludes. Even Mozart modified it in his overtures.

a) There could be a variety of possible influences or coincidences. It's not always as clear-cut as, for example, Wagner imitating the turn to a big major chord near the end of the Dutchman overture, modelled on the same event in Freischutz. But one could at least say that some hint of Chopinesque texture is found in the Beethoven.

b) Sonata form is a general term subject to numerous variations. The concept was not a formula handed down to composers, which would have been deadening, but rather a principle described after the fact by musicologists such as A.B. Marx. Mozart's overtures sometimes lack development sections (Figaro), although DG has one. There is no one "form" for the Ballade either; however, in the 3rd, Chopin used a structure that was similar to that found in the Wagner preludes I described.

[Florestan]

one could at least say that some hint of Chopinesque texture is found in the Beethoven.

One could say that.

b) Sonata form is a general term subject to numerous variations. The concept was not a formula handed down to composers, which would have been deadening, but rather a principle described after the fact by musicologists such as A.B. Marx. Mozart's overtures sometimes lack development sections (Figaro), although DG has one.

Yes, and perhaps no other Classical composer treated it more cavalierly than Haydn, both as a form and as a genre.

There is no one "form" for the Ballade either; however, in the 3rd, Chopin used a structure that was similar to that found in the Wagner preludes I described.

That's a fact. However, you seem to infer from it a direct Chopin influence on Wagner. From what I know, this is unwarranted.

[(poco) Sforzando]

you seem to infer from a direct Chopin influence on Wagner.

I don't think I said that, or at least I will revise my thoughts not to imply as much. There may be no way of knowing if Wagner had even heard the Chopin. I do believe there is a similarity of structure, in that the Wagner seems to have some basis in a classical sonata style but goes in a rather different direction that parallels what Chopin is doing.

[Florestan]

I don't think I said that, or at least I will revise my thoughts not to imply as much.

Here's what you said:

Even in Chopin's larger works like the Ballades and Fantasy, which are each about the dimensions of a single movement of a Beethoven sonata, you will not find anything quite like sonata form. The 3rd Ballade for example which comes closest, does not start its brief development section until quite late in the piece, and then is succeeded by a return to the main theme which is more like a coda than a typical classical recapitulation. (I have an unprovable theory that Wagner modelled the forms of his Meistersinger and Parsifal preludes on a piece like this.)

It's not absolutely impossible but I believe it's highly improbable.

[atardecer]

Whether Wagner was influenced by Chopin or not, I'm not sure, however Florestan's suggestion that Wagner would never be influenced because he was a German nationalist, is again I think too focused on extra-musical elements. I don't think that is how musical influence works.

A person can hear something and be unconsciously influenced by it. A person may not like another musician's work in its totality, but may like some particular element of it and be influenced by that specific idea. This could also be the case in Beethoven having some influence on Chopin. In both cases I'm not familiar enough with the pieces in question to say for sure.