# What would they have thought?



## KenOC (Mar 7, 2011)

Violadude writes in another thread, "It would have been really nice to know Beethoven's reaction to Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique, if only he had lived a couple more years.... oh ya and had not lost his hearing."

A fascinating question! Musical history seems rife with discontinuities, and the same question arises any number of times. For instance:

If Bach had live to 80, he would have heard Haydn's early symphonies. What would he have thought? Would he have dismissed them, like he did operas, as "pretty tunes"?

What do you think? Other examples, other questions?


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## ptr (Jan 22, 2013)

In theory, Gustav Mahler could have conducted the première of Schönberg's Gurrelieder (a work quite influenced by Mahler) had Arnold been slightly quicker with the orchestration, what would he have thought and what would he think about how Schönberg developed his musical ideas for the coming 40 years.. Gustav was just 14 years older than Arnold, so had his health been better it would not have been unthinkable that he would have lived at least another 30 years? 

What would Mahler have thought of a work like Pierrot Lunaire and would Sprechgesang have influenced his writing for voices?

/ptr


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## Forte (Jul 26, 2013)

Mozart would have noticed the Beethoven phenomenon and it's quite possible the two geniuses would have influenced each other directly or ended up completely disagreeing.

Chopin might have had unfavorable views about late Romanticism... he didn't like pompous music or believe that bigger was better.

There are many 20th century composers that might have become disappointed at what music ended up becoming popular into the 21st century.


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## Mahlerian (Nov 27, 2012)

ptr said:


> In theory, Gustav Mahler could have conducted the première of Schönberg's Gurrelieder (a work quite influenced by Mahler) had Arnold been slightly quicker with the orchestration, what would he have thought and what would he think about how Schönberg developed his musical ideas for the coming 40 years.. Gustav was just 14 years older than Arnold, so had his health been better it would not have been unthinkable that he would have lived at least another 30 years?
> 
> What would Mahler have thought of a work like Pierrot Lunaire and would Sprechgesang have influenced his writing for voices?
> 
> /ptr


Mahler did live to hear the premiere of Schoenberg's Second String Quartet, and defended the work in public (unlike, say, the compositions of his great friend Bruno Walter), although he expressed some reservations in private about this new music he had difficulty understanding. He did continue to support Schoenberg, though, and even on his deathbed, he was worrying about who would support him in the future.

When Schoenberg learned of Mahler's death, he wrote the Sixth of his _Six Little Pieces_ for piano, with its tolling funereal bells, and dedicated his _Theory of Harmony_ to his late friend.

I've always thought that his music might have turned out not entirely unlike Alban Berg's, although probably more on the traditional side.


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## violadude (May 2, 2011)

Mahlerian said:


> Mahler did live to hear the premiere of Schoenberg's Second String Quartet, and defended the work in public (unlike, say, the compositions of his great friend Bruno Walter), although he expressed some reservations in private about this new music he had difficulty understanding. He did continue to support Schoenberg, though, and even on his deathbed, he was worrying about who would support him in the future.


Aww from what I read, Mahler could be a real sweetie when it came to supporting new composers in whatever musical direction they were going.

Except when it came to Strauss....I guess "could be" is the key phrase there.


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## violadude (May 2, 2011)

KenOC said:


> Violadude writes in another thread, "It would have been really nice to know Beethoven's reaction to Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique, if only he had lived a couple more years.... oh ya and had not lost his hearing."
> 
> A fascinating question! Musical history seems rife with discontinuities, and the same question arises any number of times. For instance:
> 
> ...


The fact that I just now saw this thread makes me wish that this website had a tagging feature so you could know when you were being quoted.

Whoever encodes this website should spend less time thinking about how many characters they think is necessary for a "proper" reply and more time thinking of cool ideas like that.


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## Mahlerian (Nov 27, 2012)

violadude said:


> Aww from what I read, Mahler could be a real sweetie when it came to supporting new composers in whatever musical direction they were going.
> 
> Except when it came to Strauss....I guess "could be" is the key phrase there.


Yeah, he could also be a real b*****d when something didn't line up with his own aesthetic views, even to his friends like Walter, but he's more complex than that alone.

Anyway, I'm interested in what Webern would have thought of Boulez and the others who declared themselves his successors.


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## drpraetorus (Aug 9, 2012)

Louis Spohr on Beethoven
I confess freely that I could never get any enjoyment out of Beethovens last works. Yes, I must include among them even the much-admired Ninth Symphony, the forth movement of which seems to me so ugly, in such bad taste, and in conception of Schillers Ode so cheap that I cannot understand how such a genius as Beethoven could write it down. I find in it another corroboration of what I had noticed already in Vienna, that Beethoven was deficient in esthetic imagery and lacked the sense of beauty. 

Louis Spohr Autobiography, quoted in "Lexicon of Musical Invective" Nicholas Slonimsky.


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## waldvogel (Jul 10, 2011)

One of the guests of honour at the opening of the Bayreuth Festspielhaus could have been the 79-year-old Franz Schubert, composer of 35 symphonies, 52 string quartets, 72 piano sonatas, but still waiting for his first successful opera.


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## PetrB (Feb 28, 2012)

All the known or conjectured aesthetic differences put aside, I like to think (pollyanna-ish?) that each of these protean and intelligent composers would at the very least give a nod in recognition of the other music being intelligent, cohesive, and not "cacophony" or "noise"  

I not only like to think that, but believe it. "I do / don't care for what you're doing, but you certainly know what you are doing and it works." kinda thingy.

One listen to the Adagio movement of Mahler's Tenth shows us he was already in some aspect fascinated with the high-chromatic / serialist principles of organization, and if he had "gone there" I'm sure he would have, as did Berg, Webern, and later Stravinsky, put it entirely to his own use and purposes, altering whatever mechanics needed altering to his impulses and interests while his personality -- identity as a composer -- would have been indelibly stamped upon those conjectured works.


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## Sudonim (Feb 28, 2013)

Speaking of Mahler, if he had lived a few more years he would also have lived through World War I. Aside from purely musical influences, that might have had some effect on his composing as well. I haven't studied the question, but surely it's no coincidence that the twelve-tone system and more "dissonance" (for lack of a better term) emerged in the years following 1918. I'm sure someone can enlighten me (or correct me) on this.


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## Mahlerian (Nov 27, 2012)

Sudonim said:


> Speaking of Mahler, if he had lived a few more years he would also have lived through World War I. Aside from purely musical influences, that might have had some effect on his composing as well. I haven't studied the question, but surely it's no coincidence that the twelve-tone system and more "dissonance" (for lack of a better term) emerged in the years following 1918. I'm sure someone can enlighten me (or correct me) on this.


I think by general consensus, Schoenberg's most "extreme" and "dissonant" work is the monodrama _Erwartung_, which was written in 1909, although the premiere had to wait 15 years. There are works that are directly tied to the war (Schoenberg's unfinished Jacob's Ladder, Berg's Wozzeck), and the war was certainly one factor in Schoenberg's re-evaluation of his own methods, but it led, in his case as well as others', to a desire for increased order and a rapprochement with "classical" forms and structures. Stravinsky and others went to Neoclassicism and new treatments of diatonic harmony, while the Second Viennese School tried to control the complete chromatic via the 12-tone method.

As for Mahler, certainly it would have affected his style, but for all we know he too might have "stepped back from the edge" as well, perhaps even return to smaller ensembles and structures (like songs for voice and piano).


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## PetrB (Feb 28, 2012)

I can never second guess which direction anyone might have taken after having been so affected by WWI, but will say that the very late 1800's and the earliest 1900's already had, for many, the visible strain or disinterest in the affair with romanticism and late romanticism plainly showing. This was true within many of the general populace as well as artists from that time.

World War one, for those who lived through it, was the divorce, filed, granted, made official.

In Mahler's 9th symphony, with its omnipresent arabesque (or turn) that ornament very much part of music's historic past going back to late renaissance through to the baroque and classical eras, it is surmised Mahler was in a way saying 'goodbye to all that,' sensing that world was already in its death-throes. 

If he had lived, he might have tried to restore a more ideal musical world in attempts to retrieve an idealized past, rather like Frank Capra's sentimental construct of the perfect American small town filled with nothing but nice people, cozy houses with their picket fences -- i.e. a past that never really was. He may have gone to the more modern post-expressionist modes to express his sorrow and horror about the war, or as Mahlerian suggested, retreated into a more interior (quietly reflective, smaller, more intimate) area of his psyche.

Interesting fun to make conjectures, but it is anyone's guess.


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## Rapide (Oct 11, 2011)

Speaking of Mahler as a symphonist who wrote large scale canvases and if he lived to 92 years, what would he have thought of the emptiness of Cage's _4'33"_....


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## GraemeG (Jun 30, 2009)

Sudonim said:


> Speaking of Mahler, if he had lived a few more years he would also have lived through World War I. Aside from purely musical influences, that might have had some effect on his composing as well.


Might have had a similar effect to that it had on Elgar... an elegaic lament and then virtual silence.

Mozart only had to make it to age 50 to have heard _Eroica_. Haydn didn't write another symphony after _Eroica_, despite living 6 more years. I wonder what the effect on Mozart whould have been?
GG


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## Ondine (Aug 24, 2012)

I think that Mozart will have had words of admiration toward Beethoven. Mozart line of evolution was very different from that of Beethoven.

Mozart's line of evolution extinguished. It was rooted in a more 'Italian' style; a style that was blurring as happened with Bach's sons influence from where Mozart 'learnt' indirectly. 

Instead, that of Beethoven was becoming a dominant one; more 'Germanic' and inherited directly form Haydn. If we pay careful attention and after a sustained attentive listening to Haydn's and Mozart's they sound different and I dare to use 'very'. 

So I think that both -Mozart and Beethoven- could have had respect to each other with Mozart having admiration for Beethoven but not feeling threatened by him.

Just guessing.


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## KenOC (Mar 7, 2011)

Ondine said:


> Mozart's line of evolution extinguished. It was rooted in a more 'Italian' style; a style that was blurring as happened with Bach's sons influence from where Mozart 'learnt' indirectly.
> 
> Instead, that of Beethoven was becoming a dominant one; more 'Germanic' and inherited directly form Haydn. If we pay careful attention and after a sustained attentive listening to Haydn's and Mozart's they sound different and I dare to use 'very'.


Without disagreeing, I'll just note that Beethoven esteemed Mozart much more than Haydn, per his own words. And where a "model" can be found for a work, it's almost always Mozart, not Haydn (e.g., the Op. 16 Quintet and the Op. 59 #3 quartet). Also, he could be quite Italianate at times, especially early on -- listen to the opening of the Op. 18 No. 6 quartet; pure Mozart opera buffa!

He seems never to have realized that the ocean he swam in was Haydn until late in his life.


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## Forte (Jul 26, 2013)

GraemeG said:


> Mozart only had to make it to age 50 to have heard _Eroica_. Haydn didn't write another symphony after _Eroica_, despite living 6 more years. I wonder what the effect on Mozart whould have been?
> GG


Or rather, what the effect on Beethoven would have been...


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## superhorn (Mar 23, 2010)

I wonder if Mahler might have gotten around to writing an opera or operas if he had lived longer , and I wonder what dsubjects 
he might have chosen, and who the librettists might have been, or if he might have written the librettos himself .
There were a couple of abortive attempts at operas in his erly 20s , and he completed Weber's 
"Die Drei Pintos" ,which was unfinished at Weber's untimely demise . There have been two recordings
of it . I remember the RCA recording from long go on LP conducted by the late Gary Bertini .It'sa very
entertaining comic opera set in Spain .
Hans von Bulow made a clever pun bout it ; he said it ws hard to tell whether it contained weaving ,
Weberei in German or Mahlerei Malerei -painting ), or something to that effect . Thtis, it was hard to tell
the weaving from the painting in the opera .


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## ComposerOfAvantGarde (Dec 2, 2011)

Rapide said:


> Speaking of Mahler as a symphonist who wrote large scale canvases and if he lived to 92 years, what would he have thought of the emptiness of Cage's _4'33"_....


Well, Cage's famous work 4'33" is all about listening to the world around you, something Mahler tried to capture musically in his symphonies....so he probably would have at least been very interested in it and a supporter of the philosophy Cage was putting forward.


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## ComposerOfAvantGarde (Dec 2, 2011)

I wonder what Debussy would have thought of Toru Takemitsu had he lived longer!


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## aleazk (Sep 30, 2011)

ComposerOfAvantGarde said:


> I wonder what Debussy would have thought of Toru Takemitsu had he lived longer!


'Thief!' .


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## aleazk (Sep 30, 2011)

I wonder what Debussy would have thought after composing the first minute of this (



) if he had the chance to listen to some Jazz (say, Bill Evans) immediatly after.


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## drpraetorus (Aug 9, 2012)

"I played over the music of that scoundrel Brahms. What a giftless *******! It annoys me that this self-inflated mediocrity is hailed as a genius. Why, in comparison with him, Raff is a giant, not to speak of Rubenstein, who is, after all a live and important human being, while Brahms is chaotic and absolutely empty dried-up stuff."
Tchaikovsky Diary entry October 9, 1886


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