Bach or Beethoven re most influential

[JoshLilly]

You're right in that Haydn was the 'father' of so much innovation during the classical period.

As a huge fan of both Haydns, I'd be really curious to learn what some of these innovations were. I can't think of any right off-hand.

[(poco) Sforzando]

I cannot accept Monteverdi or Schoenberg as being as influential as Beethoven or Bach, and I think James gets it largely right. To quote an essay written for rec.music.classical.recordings by David Gable, a professional musicologist:

The fact remains that Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven and many lesser lights among
composers who were their contemporaries were intimately familiar with WTC
through manuscript copies.  You don't need the whole of Bach but only one
compendious collection for his influence to be overwhelming.  WTC is the most
influential music in the history of music.  Its influence began with C.P.E.
Bach, Haydn, and Mozart.  However large the public for his music at any given
time, Bach has been the most influential composer in the history of music from
the first maturity of Haydn on down to our day.  The first essay in the first
collection of essays by Pierre Boulez is entitled "A Time for J.S. Bach."

There is a sense in which the Viennese classical style made possible "the
standard repertory."  Haydn is the first composer in history some of whose
music has never left the repertory.  There was no mass public for music before
1750 until the 20th century.

But the history of music has never been determined by "the public."  It has
been determined by practitioners, professionals, by what composers have wanted
to write and what performers have wanted to play, although there's no denying
various commercial considerations.  Let's go generation by generation.
Schubert and Weber knew Bach.  Chopin, Schumann, Mendelssohn, and Liszt knew
their Bach.  Brahms, Bruckner, and even Wagner knew their Bach.  Even Berlioz,
who found Mendelssohn's idolatry of Bach somewhat amusing, listened to Saint
Saens playing WTC late in life and was overwhelmed by it. Even in Italy,
Rossini and Verdi already knew something of Bach as students.

For Chopin, whose music is a curious amalgam of Bach and Italian opera, Bellini
in particular, and who considered the music of Beethoven and Berlioz barbaric,
Bach was an important corrective to the way harmony was taught in Chopin's
lifetime.  The C major prelude of Chopin is an explicit tribute to Bach, the
rest of his music inconceivable without it.  And the cognoscenti knew who Bach
was.  Delacroix is not the least bit quizzical when Chopin mentions him.
(Delacroix's diaries are an important Chopin source.)   This is in the 1830's.

In many respects, Romantic style represented a return to the textures and
locomotion of the Baroque and a rejection of the clear articulated and dramatic
forms of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. The massive final build-up from the
Liebestod is a massive quasi-Baroque sequence.  And "the Baroque" means above
all Bach.  Only half-jokingly Charles Rosen illustrates this thesis in his book
The Classical Style by claiming that the ultimate 19th century work is Gounod's
Ave Maria, in which the first prelude from WTC serves as an accompaniment to a
long limbed lyrical melody by Gounod.  When the poet in Dichterliebe sings a
song about the Cologne Cathedral, Schumann provides a Bach-ian double dotted
accompaniment:  for Schumann, Bach is the great Gothic composer and the Cologne
Cathedral is a Gothic cathedral.

[DavidW]

Nowhere in that quote are any points of what I said refuted though!

Since the quote doesn't really reply to what I said, I'll reject it out of hand as a pedestrian attempt at appeal to authority by you.  You can do better.  Just reply to what I said, because I'm not going to be intimidated by you quoting musicologists!

[(poco) Sforzando]

Nowhere in that quote are any points of what I said refuted though!

Since the quote doesn't really reply to what I said, I'll reject it out of hand as a pedestrian attempt at appeal to authority by you.  You can do better.  Just reply to what I said, because I'm not going to be intimidated by you quoting musicologists!

No, actually it's a direct rebuttal to your post #44. Your rejection "out of hand" doesn't intimidate me either, so there! You've claimed Bach and Beethoven were not influential, and I found material from someone who knows his stuff to reject that point of view. Since I had remembered Mr. Gable wrote that essay very effectively at rmcr, I saw no reason to state in my own words what someone else had done better than I might have.

The fact, for example, that Monteverdi "revolutionized music during his lifetime," which was undeniable, does not mean he was necessarily broadly influential on composers who followed him. Monteverdi's operas, for example, derive most of their expressive power from his intense use of recitative, contrasted with brief choral movements based on madrigals. But by the turn of the 18th century, c. 60 years after Monteverdi's death in 1643, opera seria as practiced by Handel and his contemporaries had started to use recitative mainly as rapid, heightened speech; there was no use of madrigal; and the primary expressive component of his operas was the da capo aria, which had no precedent in Monteverdi.

I'll talk about Haydn and Schoenberg later.

[Haffner]

I'll talk about Haydn and Schoenberg later.

Cool!

[DavidW]

No, actually it's a direct rebuttal to your post #44. Your rejection "out of hand" doesn't intimidate me either, so there! You've claimed Bach and Beethoven were not influential, and I found material from someone who knows his stuff to reject that point of view.

No you still don't get it.  Being able to cite great composers that studied, listened to, or had high opinion of Bach and Beethoven does not imply that those composers were directly influenced by them.  Romantic era composers didn't emulate baroque and classical era composers.  You can't even say that about Brahms, by that time the composers that you (or actually Gable) quote were writing music, they were writing it from a very different aesthetic.  And during their time Beethoven and Bach were not in touch with the rest of the musical community.  The composers I mentioned made waves in music during their time.  Other composers were either emulating them or evolving from their design.

The reason why I rejected your rmcr quote out of hand is that it doesn't rebuke what I said, especially by quoting romantic era composers that simply appreciated the music of Beethoven and Bach.  That's why you need to do much better.

[(poco) Sforzando]

That's why you need to do much better.

I don't need to do anything. I'm under no obligation to jump at your command. If I care to spend more time on this subject, I'll do so - starting with a questionable statement like the following: "Romantic era composers didn't emulate baroque and classical era composers.  You can't even say that about Brahms."

Are you, for example, familiar with the way the finale of the Brahms 1st concerto is explicitly modelled on that of the Beethoven 3rd; or how his C major sonata, op. 1, derives from the Beethoven Hammerklavier; or how the form of the finale to Schubert's A major sonata, D. 959, has been traced to the parallel movement in Beethoven's Op. 31/1; or how much in Mendelssohn's earlier works responds directly to late Beethoven?

Perhaps I'll deal with Bach later, perhaps not. But to quote Gable again: "The C major prelude of Chopin is an explicit tribute to Bach..."

[(poco) Sforzando]

And there's much more to it. To stay with Beethoven for the while, you can point to how Wagner felt his operas to grow out of the 9th symphony, how every opening of a Bruckner symphony is an outgrowth of the opening of the same work, how the motific development in Bartok (who claimed Bach, Beethoven, and Debussy as his strongest influences), all have a great deal to do with Beethoven's example.

To continue: the expansion of symphonic form starting with the Eroica - leading ultimately to the behemoths of Bruckner and Mahler, the prestige given to the symphony as the most significant musical genre, the image of the composer no longer as a craftsman working for a patron a la Haydn but as an independent genius suffering in isolation - these things are owed directly to Beethoven. It's only following Beethoven that composers start to think of their work as personal intellectual property, and that there is a shift from the idea of music as ephemeral to a more-or-less permanent canon. As a result, composers feel much more the burden of music written in the past (Brahms perhaps most obviously - the "tread of that giant" making the 1st symphony so long in its gestation). Moreover, Beethoven's example, in which a composer produces far fewer works in his lifetime (compare Beethoven's 9 symphonies to Haydn's 104, or Mozart's 41+), means that composers following him work more slowly and individualize their compositions more. Following Beethoven, music becomes harder to write. There is much more to influence than I think David here is acknowledging.

[Haffner]

Yes.. well some of that I suppose ...further formal & structural expansions leading to queen-size works of varying quality... and the shift toward ego-centric based thinking/gesture, self-indulgence etc...the shift from music devoted to God & service, to music devoted to the concert hall and wanting to be worshipped like a God and all that ...don't know it that's truly all good, but Beethoven did influence things nonetheless, but J.S. Bach is on a much higher plane overall.

What an interesting interpretation...

[bassio]

but J.S. Bach is on a much higher plane overall.

Isn't that true! Can we ever find someone like him these days?

[Josquin des Prez]

Bach missed any influence on the following Classical and Rococo era;

You mean the classical era which was largely influenced by his sons? Whom do you think they took from?

[Haffner]

The younger Bachs as well as the elder. For one, J. Haydn's op.20 to op.77 String Quartets show measure after measure of Sebastian's influence.

[bassio]

You mean the classical era which was largely influenced by his sons? Whom do you think they took from?

Indeed, but the influence of Bach's sons (notably in CPE), even if huge, I would not count that as a "Direct Bach Influence" as to pass through them to the generation next to them and/or their contemporaries, especially they did not write in similar forms as the old man's then "out-of-fashion" styles.

Mozart admired CPE but he only stood in awe when he was introduced to the old Bach through Van Sweiten, so I will conclude that there is a huge difference between old Bach and his youngsters .. even if he is the one who taught them? 

Or perhaps you have another opinion? Do you think that CPE's (and the others) music transferred a direct Bach influence? (I am not a regular listener of CPE's Bach music.)

[BachQ]

A point which some might not have considered about this thread's OP: Could we actually be talking about which of these two composers was more influential than the other, rather than more influential than any other composer, including Mozart?

Just a thought ...

Mark, if that were the case, then shouldn't the thread title have been Bach vs. Beethoven re: most influential .......?

[quintett op.57]

You're right in that Haydn was the 'father' of so much innovation during the classical period. But after Beethoven, whom did Papa influence? It strikes me that Johann, Wolfgang and Ludvig have probably made the greatest impression on successive generations of composers.

Hear the orchestration of the Seasons (despites some reminiscences of the baroque era) or the last London plz, 101 & 103 for example.
Motivic developments in all later symphonies have a great debt toward him.
The supremacy of symphony and quartet started with him, he showed the potential of these genres.

His influence can be heard in Brahms chamber, Shosta's quartets & quintet, Bruckner symphonies, liszt's poems....

[Haffner]

Hear the orchestration of the Seasons (despites some reminiscences of the baroque era) or the last London plz, 101 & 103 for example.
Thematic developments in all later symphonies have a great debt toward him.
The supremacy of symphony and quartet started with him, he showed the potential of these genres.

His influence can be heard in Brahms chamber, Shosta's quartets & quintet, Bruckner symphonies, liszt's poems....

This post tells alot about Haydn's influence. And, in my opinion, Haydn's op.20 to op.77 String Quartets were unmatched in his time (Mozart mostly aped them), and the Creation as an oratorio not bettered from the time it was written until well after Haydn's death. As for symphonies, the last 2 to 8 were pretty much the Height until Beethoven's 3rd (I believe the Symphonies Mozart wrote that were overall superior to Haydn's [40,41] were written before #'s 96 to 104. I may be wrong).

Again, this all just my opinion.

[(poco) Sforzando]

His influence can be heard in Brahms chamber, Shosta's quartets & quintet, Bruckner symphonies, liszt's poems....

If so, where? I hear some Haydn in Brahms (e.g., the Bb major quartet), but I would not particularly associate him with any of your other composers.

[quintett op.57]

If so, where? I hear some Haydn in Brahms (e.g., the Bb major quartet), but I would not particularly associate him with any of your other composers.

Among the 4 examples I chose (less or more randomly), Brahms is the only one which is very close in style. The sextets remind you of Haydn's quartets at first hearing.
Regarding Shostakovich, If you listen a bit carefully to the quintet, you'll hear many resemblance in structure and rythms, in 4 of the 5 movements if I remember well (the 2nd is quite different, probably more in the style of Bach , it's a fugue). This is neo-classicism, it can't escape Haydn's influence, naturally. Of course, you have to pay attention because, on the contrary of Brahms, it's very different sonically.
Regarding Bruckner, who is not a classical composer, the influence is more to be found in the development of the themes. However different his symphonies are, they are of austrian tradition.
I also read he was very inspired by Haydn's masses, it's probable but I've not heard them often enough to confirm.
Regarding Liszt, I found some similarities in the orchestration, I think Haydn's orchestration was the starting point of his own numerous innovations, the other great influence on his orchestration being Berlioz, of course. (I'm only talking about orchestration, allright? I think Liszt was overall influenced by Beethoven, as he confessed himself).

[Josquin des Prez]

And, in my opinion, Haydn's op.20 to op.77 String Quartets were unmatched in his time (Mozart mostly aped them)

Actually, not only are Mozart's quartets wholly superior to Haydn's, but he also went on to create further amazing works of chamber music with his Piano Quartets, String Quintets and the final String Trio.

[DavidW]

Actually, not only are Mozart's quartets wholly superior to Haydn's, but he also went on to create further amazing works of chamber music with his Piano Quartets, String Quintets and the final String Trio.

Agreed, Haydn's SQs were bowlegged for a week when Mozart was done with them.