The beauty of music of the classical period depends on its emotional restraint, on the contrast between the music’s emotional content and the narrow vocabulary in which it is expressed. (This contrast is the source of the melancholy that Stendhal detected as the underlying characteristic of all of Mozart’s music.)
Beethoven’s genius was to use the classical music vocabulary to develop a new musical language, one without an inclusive vocabulary. Every composition of Beethoven’s has a vocabulary all its own.
I always assumed that this was as breathtaking an accomplishment, as much of a leap, as that of the Cubists. The Cubists broke through the constraints of pictorial form; Beethoven broke through the constraints of musical content.
The Cubists were inspired by African art. What inspired Beethoven? Was it Baroque music in which composers, in a quest for a more refined discrimination of emotional content in their works, developed the phraseology which eventually was codified into the classical style? No. While Cubist painting reflects its debt to the primitive, there is nothing Baroque about Beethoven’s romanticism. Beethoven’s music was a leap into the void. Like the pioneer Romantic poets, Beethoven expanded the field of artistic expression: to reverence (religious or political) and love (moral or erotic), he added contemplation (profound or ironic).
Yesterday I listened to (as opposed to simply heard) Mozart’s Piano Sonata in A Minor, K.310. About half way through the second movement, I realized that Beethoven’s leap into Romanticism was not as formidable a leap as I had thought.
(I’m not making value judgments. It doesn’t in the least detract from Beethoven’s leap that other composers were beginning to test the limits. Nor am I saying that the fact that K.310 is Beethovenesque adds to its status as a Mozart piano sonata.)
Beethoven’s genius was to use the classical music vocabulary to develop a new musical language, one without an inclusive vocabulary. Every composition of Beethoven’s has a vocabulary all its own.
I always assumed that this was as breathtaking an accomplishment, as much of a leap, as that of the Cubists. The Cubists broke through the constraints of pictorial form; Beethoven broke through the constraints of musical content.
The Cubists were inspired by African art. What inspired Beethoven? Was it Baroque music in which composers, in a quest for a more refined discrimination of emotional content in their works, developed the phraseology which eventually was codified into the classical style? No. While Cubist painting reflects its debt to the primitive, there is nothing Baroque about Beethoven’s romanticism. Beethoven’s music was a leap into the void. Like the pioneer Romantic poets, Beethoven expanded the field of artistic expression: to reverence (religious or political) and love (moral or erotic), he added contemplation (profound or ironic).
Yesterday I listened to (as opposed to simply heard) Mozart’s Piano Sonata in A Minor, K.310. About half way through the second movement, I realized that Beethoven’s leap into Romanticism was not as formidable a leap as I had thought.
(I’m not making value judgments. It doesn’t in the least detract from Beethoven’s leap that other composers were beginning to test the limits. Nor am I saying that the fact that K.310 is Beethovenesque adds to its status as a Mozart piano sonata.)
I decided not to try and dig up something of Beethoven’s to pair with the Mozart. Nothing immediately sprang to mind, and to browse through Beethoven’s piano music looking for just the right clip would have been the kind of exercise in mindless information retrieval that I try to avoid. I figured that anyone who bothered to read this will be familiar enough with Beethoven, without having listened to a clip, to come to an opinion about my opinion.
Then, serendipitously, immediately following the Mozart sonata, came this:
Then, serendipitously, immediately following the Mozart sonata, came this:
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