# What Musical Genres Did Beethoven Invent?



## tdc (Jan 17, 2011)

I know there are some, but I defer to the specialists. What are some examples of Beethoven's musical inventions? 

I do know that if we look at the majority of Beethoven's well known compositions - the symphonies, the string quartets, the concertos and the piano sonatas, none of these are genres that Beethoven created.


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## hammeredklavier (Feb 18, 2018)

https://books.google.ca/books?id=rTQrDwAAQBAJ&pg=PA124
"In 1809 he wrote: "In the old church modes the devotion is divine, I exclaimed, and God let me express it someday." And in 1818, when he first thought of writing a choral symphony: "A pious song in a symphony, in the old modes, Lord God we praise Thee-alleluja.""


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## Triplets (Sep 4, 2014)

I am not sure that he “invented” any but he sure brought many of them to previously undreamed of heights. It is possible that he wrote the first Art “Song Cycle”—I am not knowledge enough about this topic to know for sure


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## mbhaub (Dec 2, 2016)

Beethoven invented the symphonic scherzo. Prior to him, it was a Menuet or something akin that Mozart, Haydn and others put into the work. The modern Scherzo was demonstrated first in his Second Symphony and even more prominently in the Eroica.


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## Bruckner Anton (Mar 10, 2016)

I am not sure if he invented genres, but he did change a lot of things in existing major genres.


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## Livly_Station (Jan 8, 2014)

I'm not a specialist, but Beethoven didn't really invent genres -- although he was the first major composer to write a song cycle, so there's that. Instead, Beethoven changed/expanded the genres which already existed, which is a kind of inventiveness on its own.

It's not only that he was the first to do some _novelties_, like the length of some of his works, or the technique to play them, or the first symphony with vocals, or the order and number of movements in his compositions, or whatever else that specialists can point out as new ideas for his time. Also, it's not only about his fresh sense of drama, expressiviness, dynamic range, rhythmic interest, motivic development and other factors that defined his emblematic artistic voice (to the point that people point at Beethoven as the key figure to the transition from the classical period to the romantic).

What explains Beethoven's inventiveness in the genres themselves is that he messed a lot with form (since his earlies works), even if he never completely departed from the classical tradition. You can observe that in the way Beethoven distributed the weight of the composition (sometimes not focusing the weight on the first movement in sonata-form, but rather in the final movement); or his extensive use of the cyclic form; or making the sonata-form less repetitive (with a more interesting recapitulation and avoiding strict repetition); or by extensive use of fugues and variations inside sonatas, string quartets and symphonies (and changing the rules of variations and fugues). In the words of professor Yvonne Lefébure, in his third manner, Beethoven was creating form, just like Debussy and Boulez after him.


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## SanAntone (May 10, 2020)

I think he invented the choral symphony.


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## tdc (Jan 17, 2011)

Thanks for the responses so far. I have also heard the art song cycle was possibly first done by Beethoven and perhaps the choral fantasy? I believe that there is possibly also a chamber music combination that Beethoven was the first to use, but I don't recall which.

I will say looking at these answers it seems to me that Beethoven and Bach both were similar in their 'inventiveness'. Neither responsible so much for brand new forms as much as enriching existing ones. Beethoven's contributions were more an expansion in the horizontal sense, and Bach's was an expansion mainly in the vertical sense, in other words a harmonic/contrapuntal expansion. 

Beethoven's music by and large retains a classicist structure. I think he contributed to the development of romanticism, but there are also other key figures there, like Weber and Schubert. Chopin the composer who was perhaps the first full on romantic is known to have said 'Beethoven turned his back on eternal principles.'


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## Xisten267 (Sep 2, 2018)

Beethoven invented the vocal symphony and the lied cycle, and it seems that the choral fantasy is the first example of a concerted work with piano and orchestra to end with a chorus. Also, his three piano quartets composed in 1785 are amongst the earliest examples of works in the genre, composed at around the same time as the Mozart's and the Hoffmeister's. He did not invent the Scherzo - Haydn was already using this form prior to him.

Perhaps a bit off-topic, but if you're interested in the innovations of Beethoven and other composers (such as Bach) in terms of extremes of music notation (and not only in terms of creation of musical genres), *this page* may be of help. It's not totally accurate, as the author recognizes, but it can give you a big picture of how pioneering some works of art by some composers were (Fans of Cage, behold: ASLSP is not the longest piece of music ever conceived! Such title belongs to a Chopin piece of "infinite" lenght instead.  ).


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## Olias (Nov 18, 2010)

Beethoven blurred the lines that separated genres. The Triple Concerto is a way of blending the piano trio with the full orchestra. The 9th Symphony blurs the lines between Symphony and Cantata/Oratorio. The scope of the Op 59 quartets blur the lines between chamber music and orchestral music.....and so on.


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## Livly_Station (Jan 8, 2014)

tdc said:


> I will say looking at these answers it seems to me that Beethoven and Bach both were similar in their 'inventiveness'. Neither responsible so much for brand new forms as much as enriching existing ones.


Sometimes this feel a little bit like semantics. What is a "brand new form" exactly? Is it when a composer uses a new name to call his works?

Because, you see, nothing in music is ever completely original -- it's always borrowing many things from others. What makes something be called a 'new form' or a 'new genre' may be a rather subtle change, but if it's given a new name or if it's associated with a new time, maybe it'll look more revolutionary. Meanwhile, Beethoven is calling his work a "Symphony", and it does share some traits with the tradition, but perhaps it has more new ideas (in form) than some other works which try to be something "new".



> Beethoven's contributions were more an expansion in the horizontal sense, and Bach's was an expansion mainly in the vertical sense, in other words a harmonic/contrapuntal expansion.


Well, I wouldn't minimize Beethoven's importance in a vertical way either. His more contrapuntual works sound nothing like Bach or anybody else, and he did use unusual modulations and other kinds of unexpected harmonic devices..



> Chopin the composer who was perhaps the first full on romantic is known to have said 'Beethoven turned his back on eternal principles.'


This Chopin quote, despite being intended as a criticism to some of Beethoven's most chaotic compositions, at the same time points at Beethoven being transgressive, therefore original and inventive, turning his back on principles.


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## progmatist (Apr 3, 2021)

Beethoven arguably defined the romantic style. His late quartets were way ahead of their time. The aforementioned Schubert put the actual "romance" in the romantic era, penning hundreds of love songs.


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## SONNET CLV (May 31, 2014)

Was Beethoven the first to utilize the attacca mode for symphonic movements performed without the traditional break, such as in the Fifth and Sixth Symphonies?


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## hammeredklavier (Feb 18, 2018)

SONNET CLV said:


> Was Beethoven the first to utilize the attacca mode for symphonic movements performed without the traditional break, such as in the Fifth and Sixth Symphonies?


C.P.E. Bach has it in Wq.182/3 (1773)


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## hammeredklavier (Feb 18, 2018)

^In non-symphonic instrumental music, L. Boccherini's Op.25 No.6 (1778) 



 and 
J. Haydn's Op.54 No.2 (1788) 




I think J.H. Knecht's (1783) resembles Beethoven the most, by far:


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## Kreisler jr (Apr 21, 2021)

Someone once wrote that despite the reputation Beethoven was a rEvolutionary with a capital E. Unfortunately, there is silly tradition of mentioning small, superficial things as "big innovations" (which they usually are not) and then there is usually some 3rd rate composer who did it earlier anyway, like having trombones or contrabassoon in a symphony, or even the choir in the symphony (I once read this somewhere but I cannot find details). 

Beethoven strongly transformed virtually any genre he touched so that his exemplars mostly "screened off" the predecessors and served as a paradigm for later generations. This includes "odds" like small piano pieces (bagatelles), songs, ouvertures that turned into quasi-symphonic poems, even choral music (less the two masses but a strange piece like "Calm sea and prosperous voyage") and of course "Fidelio" with its almost continous second act and more symphonic style than earlier operas.
In some cases, like piano sonatas this was almost an exhaustion and of the few great romantic piano sonatas (after Schubert whose are contemporary with LvB) many seem to avoid Beethoven. Or a total transformation of the form as in op.131 that had no follower until ca. 1900.
In spite of many Beethoven works (especially symphonies) serving as paradigms for late 19th century composers, I think he is far more "end of an era" or even so by himself that he is quite separate from the typical early romantics.


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## Merl (Jul 28, 2016)

OT: Grime, Screamo and Post-hardcore.


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## Heck148 (Oct 27, 2016)

mbhaub said:


> Beethoven invented the symphonic scherzo. Prior to him, it was a Menuet or something akin that Mozart, Haydn and others put into the work. The modern Scherzo was demonstrated first in his Second Symphony and even more prominently in the Eroica.


Right, he also greatly expanded the instrumentation of the orchestra...not sure this is an "invention" as such, but it hugely increased the colors and the power of the orchestra -

piccolo
Contrabassoon
added horns - 3[Eroica], 4 [Sym #9]
Trombones
chorus, solo voices [9]

He also added movements to established forms - like symphonies, string 4tets, etc...


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## EdwardBast (Nov 25, 2013)

tdc said:


> I will say looking at these answers it seems to me that Beethoven and Bach both were similar in their 'inventiveness'. *Neither responsible so much for brand new forms as much as enriching existing ones. Beethoven's contributions were more an expansion in the horizontal sense*, and Bach's was an expansion mainly in the vertical sense, in other words a harmonic/contrapuntal expansion.


Enriched? Horizontally expanded? Retained a classicist structure? That's how one proves in a few words that one just doesn't get Beethoven.  Beethoven's innovations were deeper and more fundamental than mere changes in formal design. Most important, perhaps, is a new approach to thematic processes as exemplified in the first movement of the Eroica and a number of his other most daring works. Beethoven created themes with internal motivic conflicts and made the changing dramatic relationships among their motives the subjects of development. He also invented ways to create tension, through thematic processes, that persists beyond the tonal-harmonic resolutions of a movement's final cadence. This kind of tension is the motive force for his influential cyclic structures - which, in case you hadn't noticed, were imitated by nearly every major tonal composer who followed.


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## Kreisler jr (Apr 21, 2021)

One difference is that Bach was really the end of an era. There was no composer of note in the second half of the 18th century who took a Bach concerto or suite as a model and composed an important piece by emulating or expanding on it. (Maybe there are a few such works by minor composers but they are hardly known.) Most of the forms were obsolete after Bach, except in some niches (like organ playing and choral music) that were irrelevant for the major genres of instrumental music or opera. 

Whereas the expansions and transformations of the symphony by Beethoven made the genre central for 100 more years. Obviously this is not lack of skill or imagination but mostly a difference in the historical situation. But if Bach had done to ANY baroque genre what Beethoven did with the sonata genres, composers would have been working against the backdrop of such Bach works for two or three following generations. But they didn't, maybe some minor pupils like Krebs or Goldberg, but even Carl Philipp Emanuel mostly went his own rather different path. Maybe one could make a case for keyboard concertos. But I have never seen the claim that the later classical concerto by Mozart and contemporaries had a direct connection to JS Bach. I think the concerti of Bach's own sons are already quite different and I doubt that the next generation even knew Bachs's concerti.


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## hammeredklavier (Feb 18, 2018)

Kreisler jr said:


> Whereas the expansions and transformations of the symphony by Beethoven made the genre central for 100 more years.


Mozart's K.475/K.457 borrow extensively from Bach's Musical offering. And I already refuted your points about the symphony in another thread:


hammeredklavier said:


> As I said, I don't object to any points made by Brahmsianhorn and Xisten267, but all your logic in [post#168] is just absurd. I could argue that the 18th century classicists did not write 1-hour long symphonies and comparing their works with the 19th century works just cause they're all labelled "symphonies" isn't fair, or that the symphony also became less important (especially the Beethovenian Classical symphony) when guys like Wagner, Liszt, Berlioz deemed the practice "obsolete", and replaced it with the symphonic poem and other newer orchestral genres. (Somehow Brahms wasn't "outdated" in his time, according to you) Since then, the symphony has been a vague concept, it could be anything as long as it's playable by an orchestra and labeled a "symphony", just like what Mahler said "it must now contain everything". Bruckner's are nothing like any 18th century symphony. Sibelius 7th could have been named "fantasia for orchestra". Likewise, I could argue any work that that utilizes religious text/title or old church modes is "religious music" (ie. Beethoven Op.132/iii, which can be "sung" in SATB voices, like a motet piece).
> Just like what like what you said in another thread: "There was a time in the early 20th century when some composers like Berg, Bartok and others avoided "symphony" in pieces that might as well have been called symphonies: Instead they used "(Orchestral) pieces", "Music for...""


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## Knorf (Jan 16, 2020)

You can't say Beethoven "invented" the string trio, exactly (specifically, violin, viola, and cello.) There are antecedents from Cambini, Albrechtsberger, and someone named Mozart, not to mention the legacy of Baroque trio sonatas which could utilize this specific combination. 

But truly elevating the string trio into a major chamber music form (at least in his early period, Op. 3, Op. 8, Op. 9), and treating all three voices as equal? You gotta give Luigi van B at least some props for that.


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## tdc (Jan 17, 2011)

Mozart was influenced by Bach. Beethoven played through both books of the WTC, and probably realized that he could not compete with Bach in counterpoint, so he went in a more homophonic direction. All of Beethoven's grand dramatic musical gestures to me sound like someone compensating and distracting from the areas where the compositional style is boring.

Classical structure and romantic approaches to structure differ significantly, so to say that Beethoven was imitated by nearly every major composer tonal composer that followed is misleading and inaccurate. I've already shown that the first romantic composer was not particularly interested in Beethoven. Charles Rosen suggests Bach had more influence on the origins of Romanticism than Beethoven.


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## tdc (Jan 17, 2011)

Knorf said:


> But truly elevating the string trio into a major chamber music form


What do you think of Mozart's k. 563?


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## Knorf (Jan 16, 2020)

tdc said:


> What do you think of Mozart's k. 563?


It's a great & lovely piece, "but" it's still committed as an exemplar of the _divertimento_ genre and form, i.e."light entertainment,"* and it's the only example by Mozart for this instrumentation. And, as I recall, the violin part is almost always the lead voice, the others yet largely subordinate, compared to future developments. Less so than your average Baroque trio sonata, admittedly.

Of course even "light entertainment" by Mozart is elevated to an extraordinary degree by his craft and imagination, but most importantly: it's a one-off. Beethoven wrote five, and pulled no punches.

But anyway, I had already acknowledged Mozart as an antecedent in my post above.

*To be fair, so are Beethoven's Op. 3 and Op. 8. But the three published as Op. 9 go somewhere new.


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## trazom (Apr 13, 2009)

Knorf said:


> You can't say Beethoven "invented" the string trio, exactly (specifically, violin, viola, and cello.) There are antecedents from Cambini, Albrechtsberger, and someone named Mozart, not to mention the legacy of Baroque trio sonatas which could utilize this specific combination.
> 
> *But truly elevating the string trio into a major chamber music form* (at least in his early period, Op. 3, Op. 8, Op. 9),* and treating all three voices as equal?* You gotta give Luigi van B at least some props for that.


I was under the impression Mozart already did this with his k.563, which isn't at all a divertimento despite the title Mozart gave to it. The texture constantly shifts from solos given to the violin, viola, or cello, to duets with accompaniment, and then to purely polyphonic as in the development of the first movement. This is in stark contrast to the early string trios Beethoven wrote in response to Mozart's piece where on some occasions, like Beethoven's e flat string trio, opus 3, where you have 9 whole bars where the viola doesn't play anything.

Your description probably better describes what Beethoven did with the piano trio where he gives more independence to the cello rather than having it double the left hand of the keyboard.


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## Knorf (Jan 16, 2020)

Again. I already acknowledged Mozart as a clear antecedent. 

I also feel the supposed equal footing of the three instruments in K. 563 is exaggerated by those pushing a narrative of Mozart as a innovator, to a degree that's not really supportable. I will acknowledge its textures do involve the accompanying instruments more than most of Mozart's other divertimenti. Still, compare it to the Piano and Wind Quintet, where the five instruments (admittedly winds & piano, not strings) have far more melodic independence.

But the three trios of Beethoven's Op. 9 were something really different, and truly extraordinary. Some aspects of Op. 9 are more boundary pushing than the Op. 18 Quartets! That's what I'm getting at. Unfortunately the string trio as a genre languished somewhat before other composers with something like the boldness of Beethoven took it up.

ETA: as for the piano trio genre, absolutely. Beethoven took them new directions, beyond Mozart or Haydn or anyone. But didn't someone already mention them up thread? Maybe not. If so, sure, maybe I should have mentioned them first, even given there were many examples in the genre well before Beethoven's Op. 1, unlike string trios. I still think there are really special elements to Op. 9 Nos. 1-3 that often get overlooked.

EATA: to my ears, Mozart's K. 563 still has more in common with his other divertimenti than his more "serious" chamber music, for example the string quartets. K. 563 is highly inventive, but not at all as innovative as the likes of K. 452, K. 464, K. 581...


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## Livly_Station (Jan 8, 2014)

tdc said:


> Mozart was influenced by Bach. Beethoven played through both books of the WTC, and probably realized that he could not compete with Bach in counterpoint, so he went in a more homophonic direction. All of Beethoven's grand dramatic musical gestures to me sound like someone compensating and distracting from the areas where the compositional style is boring.


Beethoven's more homophonic approach in many of his compositions, especially in his earlier works, has everything to do with... the principles of the classical style, the music of his time, which Beethoven actually enjoyed (Mozart was his idol) as all of his peers and his audience. The theory that Beethoven avoided counterpoint because he thought he couldn't compete with Bach is just hilarious.

That's not to say that you should like the classical style, and it's totally fine to find it boring -- I, myself, am not the biggest fan of the classical style either... But I'm not psychoanalysing the inner motivation of the composers from that era to justify my biases...

More importantly, you're completely missing the fact that Beethoven was actually great at counterpoint, especially in his later years. Do you actually listen to Beethoven at all?


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## 59540 (May 16, 2021)

Kreisler jr said:


> One difference is that Bach was really the end of an era.


Beethoven was as well. 


> But if Bach had done to ANY baroque genre what Beethoven did with the sonata genres, composers would have been working against the backdrop of such Bach works for two or three following generations.


Beethoven did work against that backdrop in his late works. Bach did that with the fugue and counterpoint in general. Plus the last movement of the Op. 109 sonata is like a mini-Goldberg Variations.


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## trazom (Apr 13, 2009)

Knorf said:


> I also feel the supposed equal footing of the three instruments in K. 563 is exaggerated by those pushing a narrative of Mozart as a innovator, to a degree that's not really supportable. I will acknowledge its textures do involve the accompanying instruments more than most of Mozart's other divertimenti. Still, compare it to the Piano and Wind Quintet, where the five instruments (admittedly winds & piano, not strings) have far more melodic independence.
> 
> But the three trios of Beethoven's Op. 9 were something really different, and truly extraordinary. Some aspects of Op. 9 are more boundary pushing than the Op. 18 Quartets! That's what I'm getting at. Unfortunately the string trio as a genre languished somewhat before other composers with something like the boldness of Beethoven took it up.


I didn't think I was writing anything about k.563 that hadn't already been extensively discussed by musicologists like Alfred Einstein, Cliff Eisen, Simon Keefe, or musicians who've talked about the piece like Arthur Grumiaux, or the Emerson String Quartet. Unless you feel they all exagerrated the features of the work under discussion to push a narrative of Mozart as innovator? I love the quintet for piano and winds by the way. I know the work very well. Still I don't recall any passages from that work with the same independence as this trio, for example:






and 




and 




as some standout exampls from 3 different movements, but there are others. Hopefully the links work.



> But the three trios of Beethoven's Op. 9 were something really different, and truly extraordinary. Some aspects of Op. 9 are more boundary pushing than the Op. 18 Quartets! That's what I'm getting at. Unfortunately the string trio as a genre languished somewhat before other composers with something like the boldness of Beethoven took it up.


I don't disagree with any of this. I am just saying I don't think giving equal primacy to all 3 voices was what makes these works stand out, at least in relation to Mozart's.


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## Knorf (Jan 16, 2020)

trazom said:


> I am just saying I don't think giving equal primacy to all 3 voices was what makes these works stand out, at least in relation to Mozart's.


And I say it's one of the qualities that does, with at most only one antecedent by Mozart utilizing the same instrumentation.

As for Mozart as an innovator, there was a long old run of academics for whom an avant-garde level of innovation was a critical component of a composer's "greatness." They loved Mozart, who was not as obviously as innovative as certain others, so they resorted to a degree of pushing mythology and exaggeration to get Mozart on a level comparable to Haydn or Beethoven. But it's all crapola; scholarship has well moved on. A composer's supposed innovative or avant-garde qualities are irrelevant to their standing as "great", which in itself is a pretty anti-musical and anti-scholarly chimera. But myth lives on. Classical music as an industry is ludicrously dependent on promoting mythology.

Having said all that, I have no problem acknowledging Mozart's innovations. But what I actually wrote was, "I also feel the supposed equal footing of the three instruments in K. 563 is exaggerated by those pushing a narrative of Mozart as a innovator, to a degree that's not really supportable." I'll add for clarity, compared to other of Mozart's most significant chamber works and of course Beethoven's Op. 9.


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## hammeredklavier (Feb 18, 2018)

Knorf said:


> Haydn


is the most exaggerated (of all famous composers) regarding "innovation" and "influence". I've discussed many times and given tons of evidence on this forum; if you would like, we could revive one of those threads and discuss: <Haydn: Just how highly do you estimate him?>


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## hammeredklavier (Feb 18, 2018)

Knorf said:


> It's a great & lovely piece, "but" it's still committed as an exemplar of the _divertimento_ genre and form, i.e."light entertainment,"* and it's the only example by Mozart for this instrumentation. And, as I recall, the violin part is almost always the lead voice, the others yet largely subordinate, compared to future developments. Less so than your average Baroque trio sonata, admittedly.





Knorf said:


> EATA: to my ears, Mozart's K. 563 still has more in common with his other divertimenti than his more "serious" chamber music, for example the string quartets. K. 563 is highly inventive, but not at all as innovative as the likes of K. 452, K. 464, K. 581...


The "seriousness" of the divertimento genre isn't determined by the "independence of voices". Look at K.334, which contains a lot of contrasts in terms of diatonicism/chromaticism, and independence of voices.


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## hammeredklavier (Feb 18, 2018)

hammeredklavier said:


> Mozart's K.475/K.457 borrow extensively from Bach's Musical offering


P. 68: "....From this standpoint, let us take yet another look at one of the works which Mozart studied intensively, the six-part Ricercar from Bach's A Musical Offering. Focus on the end of the opening statement (measures 9-11 in Figure 5.4): As the second voice enters, the first voice continues with a sequence of ascending fourths...."
P. 69: "....The first movement opens with a simple ascending C minor arpeggio, played forte, followed by a contrasting piano sequence consisting of a descending fifth G-C (inversion of a fourth), and a descending diminished seventh A˛- B˝-the same interval which marks the opening motivic statement of Bach's A Musical Offering (Figure 5.6)..."
"....The first voice descends in half-steps: G-Fˇ-F˝-E˝-E˛-D-again an explicit reference to the descending line in the opening of Bach's A Musical Offering. And, as with Bach's work, it is introduced as a mezzosoprano voice...."
<W.A. Mozart's Fantasy in C minor, K. 475, And the Generalization of the Lydian Principle Through Motivic Thorough-Composition by John Sigerson>

"...Mozart C minor Fantasy KV 475 is a perfect illustration example of what Brahms had in mind when proclaiming Mozart as "a fellow modernist."Extremely controversial, generating doubts and questions from the very first measure, musical ideas far ahead of their time make the adventure of exploring this piece with performance purposes one of the most exciting...
...Through the Fantasy's musical discourse, the confirmation of C minor as the main key is held until the end of the piece, justifying the term "musical plot"; the "mystery" will be solved only at the end, like in his operas..."
"... Yes, the missing tonality was in fact C minor; "atonality" is of course not justified, but it was certainly hinted…Adorno's « hegemony of tonality» remains and Mozart's acquisitions anticipate those of Wagner, transforming musical language « only indirectly, by means of the amplification of the tonal space and not through its abolition»."
<Mystery and innovation in performances of Mozart's Fantasy KV 475: following the guidance of three great 20th-century masters, By Zélia Chueke>



hammeredklavier said:


> http://musicstudies.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/Popovic_JIMS_0932106.pdf#page=9
> 
> 
> 
> ...


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## Knorf (Jan 16, 2020)

hammeredklavier said:


> is the most exaggerated (of all famous composers) regarding "innovation" and "influence". I've discussed many times and given tons of evidence on this forum; if you would like, we could revive one of those threads and discuss: <Haydn: Just how highly do you estimate him?>


No thanks. It happens that I've read your posts in that thread and others, and I don't agree with your conclusions.



> The "seriousness" of the divertimento genre isn't determined by the "independence of voices".


Since it's all semantics anyway, it's determined by whatever a reasonable commentator thinks it is. As something to be included as one factor among a number of others, it's a pretty relevant one, given the evolution of post-Baroque chamber music.


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## Josquin13 (Nov 7, 2017)

If I'm not mistaken, Beethoven was the first composer to write stand alone concert overtures that weren't a part of any opera. So, in that sense, his concert overtures are the precursors to the many orchestral overtures & tone poems of the later Romantic era, as Mendelssohn, Berlioz, & Liszt ran with the idea.


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## hammeredklavier (Feb 18, 2018)

Kreisler jr said:


> ouvertures that turned into quasi-symphonic poems, even choral music (less the two masses but a strange piece like "Calm sea and prosperous voyage") and of course "Fidelio" with its almost continous second act and more symphonic style than earlier operas.


Those things are great, but don't quite strike me as stuff "newer" than Bach's WTC in his time.

"In Mozart's time, the symphonic tone poem did not yet exist, but passages in Idomeneo show that Mozart was a born master of the genre, painting with iridescent orchestral color."
https://packhum.org/idomeneo.html

"What then is "Romantic"? How far back should its beginnings, in music, be pushed? To 1793, when a review of a new work by "Citizen Méhul" described him as a Romantic? Or further - to year 1780-81, the year of Mozart's Idomeneo, a work whose use of orchestral colour for structural and psychological purposes anticipates nineteenth-century Romantic opera?"
<Berlioz: The Making of an Artist 1803-1832 / David Cairns / P. 193>

"Look at Idomeneo. Not only is it a marvel, but as Mozart was still quite young and brash when he wrote it, it was a completely new thing. What marvelous dissonance! What harmony!" -Brahms

"Instead of the four long arias that, say, Handel would have given us, we hear, simultaneously, four voices blended, four characters in four different moods singing simultaneously: Idomeneo in despair over his rash vow; Idamante resolved to prove his manhood; Ilia comforting them both; and Elettra tormented by jealousy. Though there are similarly complex pages in Scarlatti and a few earlier composers, Mozart's is by common consent the first great ensemble in opera, a forerunner of the trio in Der Rosenkavalier, the quartet in Rigoletto, the quintet in Die Meistersinger.
The other advances Mozart made in Idomeneo, over a century of earlier opere sere, are-I should say-three. First there is a new musical continuity. Previous operas had been rigidly sectioned off into arias in which the soloists were given ample opportunity for vocal display and even more ample opportunity to acknowledge applause. In Idomeneo, the first aria melts into the following recitative, even as the overture had melted easily into it. This is an anticipation of the techniques of Wagner, but that apostle of musical continuity was well into his forties when he decided that this was the right way to write overture and aria. Mozart knew as much early in his twenties. 
The most famous of the Wagnerian methods of continuity is the leitmotif: the short recurrent theme that carries reminiscences and new implications with every new appearance. But a hundred years before Wagner's Tristan, Mozart, in Idomeneo, experimented with something quite similar, our second new advance over earlier operatic writing: the brief, recurrent phrase pervading the score, changing its form, instrumentation, harmonization, and rhythm as it develops its ever new-associations. On the first page of the overture we hear of these. It is a five-note descending figure:






It soon comes to dominate the overture, depicting the Sturm und Drang, the storm and stress of the sea-music. A few pages later, it reappears in the recitative, as Ilia remembers the fall of Troy, and it appears again in the accompaniment to the aria that follows. Then when Ilia's beloved, Idamante, tells her that he will make her forget her past sufferings, it appears again, much brighter in color. It recurs quietly when King Idomeneo comes safely to land, and a moment later it accompanies his realization that now he will have to keep his vow to the sea god, and sacrifice to him the first living thing he finds on shore. It recurs once again when he looks fatefully on that victim, his own son, and the son doesn't understand why his father tears himself away from his embrace. 
The English critic David Cairns has suggested that by this time the theme has come to bear associations both of nature's cruelty and of our own inner sufferings. In Act II it forms part of the musical line of the powerful aria "Fuor del mar," where Idomeneo sings of both the storm at sea and the storm within himself. It then hovers over the little duet of the two lovers in Act III. And it reappears when Idomeneo finally tells his subjects that he must sacrifice his own son. There it leads to a passage of more chromatic intensity than anyone had ever heard in an opera house before.
And finally, our melodic fragment leads gently into the last recitative, when Idomeneo turns over the kingdom to his son. There it is stated four times over, canonically, by the four separate string sections of the orchestra.
A third new element in Idomeneo is the wholly unprecedented attention to orchestral color. The young Mozart was excited that the finest orchestra in the world, the Mannheim ensemble, was following the elector to Munich for the premiere. It was a virtuoso ensemble. According to a description of the day, "Its piano was a vernal breath, its forte was thunder, its crescendo a cataract, its diminuendo a crystal stream murmuring as it evanesced into the distance." All of those effects Mozart wrote into Idomeneo, using muted tympani, muted trumpets, and massed trombones. The sea that surges and foams around the island of Crete is suggested, in the overture and the storm music, by swirling strings. The color conjured up in those passages is, for me, a kind of grayish green. But many more colors are suggested throughout the opera, especially by the woodwind writing. This was virtuoso music for its day, and music of a wholly new loveliness."
< First Intermissions: Twenty-One Great Operas Explored, Explained, and Brought to Life from the Met / M. Owen Lee / P. 8~10 >


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## 59540 (May 16, 2021)

tdc said:


> Mozart was influenced by Bach. Beethoven played through both books of the WTC, and probably realized that he could not compete with Bach in counterpoint, so he went in a more homophonic direction. All of Beethoven's grand dramatic musical gestures to me sound like someone compensating and distracting from the areas where the compositional style is boring.
> 
> Classical structure and romantic approaches to structure differ significantly, so to say that Beethoven was imitated by nearly every major composer tonal composer that followed is misleading and inaccurate. I've already shown that the first romantic composer was not particularly interested in Beethoven. Charles Rosen suggests Bach had more influence on the origins of Romanticism than Beethoven.


Mozart had enormous influence as well. So did Hummel for that matter. It wasn't really Beethoven that Chopin and Tchaikovsky idolized.


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## Kreisler jr (Apr 21, 2021)

tdc said:


> Mozart was influenced by Bach. Beethoven played through both books of the WTC, and probably realized that he could not compete with Bach in counterpoint, so he went in a more homophonic direction. All of Beethoven's grand dramatic musical gestures to me sound like someone compensating and distracting from the areas where the compositional style is boring.


LOL. This is ridiculous.

You are taking your completely unhistorical Bach fanboy notion that counterpoint a la Bach was the highest ambition of any other composer (Reger was probably the only one, I wonder why nobody listens to his music...) and only because they could not compete with Bach they wrote totally different music...

Virtually composer of note in the second half of the 18th century who studied bits of the WTC had any ambition to compose similar pieces And most didn't know the piece anyway and got their academic counterpoint from Fux.

And no, Hammeredklavier, a fragmentary suite of study fugue by Mozart does not count. These were unpublished minor pieces with very few exceptions (and even the exceptions were usually unpublished).
You sound as if everyone around Beethoven was having a try at similar pieces to the WTC but Beethoven failed badly and had to come up with something different.

If you had read up any music history even on level of sleeve notes you knew that this is complete nonsense. Nobody was composing such pieces, only a few were interested in them for teaching (or because they were old music nerds like Forkel) and no composer who wanted to have a career in 1770 or 1800 or 1820 would focus on preludes and fugues.


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## Kreisler jr (Apr 21, 2021)

hammeredklavier said:


> Mozart's K.475/K.457 borrow extensively from Bach's Musical offering. And I already refuted your points about the symphony in another thread:


You did nothing of this sort. And Mozart's c minor sonata has literally nothing to do with the topic of this thread. But this kind of confusion is unfortunately a quite common strategy that's why people get so annoyed with you.


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## Kreisler jr (Apr 21, 2021)

hammeredklavier said:


> Those things are great, but don't quite strike me as stuff "newer" than Bach's WTC in his time.


What's "new" about the WTC? The tuning was fairly, but no entirely new, the forms are mostly common ("inventions", bipartite/dance forms or concerto preludes) to old fashioned (arpeggio preludes). It's a superlative compendium of maybe two generations of forms and techniques of (keyboard) music from the late 17th cent. to the 1730s) but it's hardly future oriented.
There are at most a handful of more "modern" preludes, mostly in the 2nd book that could be compared with D. Scarlatti (e.g. the D major and B flat major). 
Nothing like turning an ouverture into a tone poem, a major genre of the following century, or writing a key work in the development of German language opera.

Bach was great for some of the more theoretically inclined (not too many) following composers to learn the "nuts and bolts" of composing and counterpoint. But on the level of forms and genres most of his music was obsolete at his death. That's why we see nobody of note composing similarly to Bach until Mendelssohn and others intentionally imitate the style 100 years later.


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## Kreisler jr (Apr 21, 2021)

Knorf said:


> As for Mozart as an innovator, there was a long old run of academics for whom an avant-garde level of innovation was a critical component of a composer's "greatness." They loved Mozart, who was not as obviously as innovative as certain others,


To me the most obvious innovations by Mozart that seem to have been recognized are in the field of piano concerto and opera. The former was screened off a bit by Beethoven (and by the development after Beethoven, "half" of which went again in a different direction of "virtuoso" concerti or "fantasies", not "symphonic concerto") and the latter might be because many people vastly underappreciate "The Magic Flute" because of some silly surface elements.



> But what I actually wrote was, "I also feel the supposed equal footing of the three instruments in K. 563 is exaggerated by those pushing a narrative of Mozart as a innovator, to a degree that's not really supportable." I'll add for clarity, compared to other of Mozart's most significant chamber works and of course Beethoven's Op. 9.


I really like K 563 but like the Schubert quintet I have the impression that the rarity of the instrumentation/form/genre and uniqueness within the composer's oeuvre drives people to exaggerations. If Mozart had written 3 or more mature string trios and only one string quintet probably the latter would be hailed as totally unique etc. because it would not have to share the honors with several other similar pieces.

I agree that Beethoven's op.9 are underappreciated pieces. The c minor trio has a recurring theme that reminds me a bit of the "motto" in op.131, I think it is the best of all the early c minor pieces, much better than op.18/4 and it is the least known of them.

I also agree that even Beethoven's early piano sonatas and trios (and eventually the violin sonatas) are a huge step forward compared to Mozart and Haydn (and also Clementi and other candidates).


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## 59540 (May 16, 2021)

Kreisler jr said:


> What's "new" about the WTC?


One wonders why it was ever played at all if it was the same old same old.


> Bach was great for some of the more theoretically inclined (not too many) following composers to learn the "nuts and bolts" of composing and counterpoint. But on the level of forms and genres most of his music was obsolete at his death. That's why we see nobody of note composing similarly to Bach until Mendelssohn and others intentionally imitate the style 100 years later.


Well except for the last movements of Beethoven's Op. 101, 106, the first movement of the Op. 131 quartet, the double fugue in the last movement of the ninth symphony, the fugue in the Op. 110 piano sonata, "Et vitam venturi" from the Missa solemnis, the Op. 133 fugue...not to mention the last movement of Mozart's Jupiter symphony, K. 394, K. 546...


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## hammeredklavier (Feb 18, 2018)

Kreisler jr said:


> You did nothing of this sort. And Mozart's c minor sonata has literally nothing to do with the topic of this thread. But this kind of confusion is unfortunately a quite common strategy that's why people get so annoyed with you.


Mozart's K.475 Fantasie & K.457 sonata were absolutely influenced by Bach. I've provided the evidence in post #34.



hammeredklavier said:


> And of course, it's always a sacrilege to talk about Romantics disparaging a certain Classical period composer as "a welcome old friend with nothing new to say, outdated, with boring phrases that tired rather than interested the public"... *The double standards are really amusing sometimes*


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## 59540 (May 16, 2021)

EdwardBast said:


> Enriched? Horizontally expanded? Retained a classicist structure? That's how one proves in a few words that one just doesn't get Beethoven.  Beethoven's innovations were deeper and more fundamental than mere changes in formal design. Most important, perhaps, is a new approach to thematic processes as exemplified in the first movement of the Eroica and a number of his other most daring works. Beethoven created themes with internal motivic conflicts and made the changing dramatic relationships among their motives the subjects of development. He also invented ways to create tension, through thematic processes, that persists beyond the tonal-harmonic resolutions of a movement's final cadence. This kind of tension is the motive force for his influential cyclic structures - which, in case you hadn't noticed, were imitated by nearly every major tonal composer who followed.


I don't know how that refutes the point. So yeah, Beethoven wasn't an "inventor" as far as form is concerned (which was the OP's point) but "enriched" existing forms through his compositional techniques and thematic manipulation. The point being that the same could be said of Bach and the fugue.


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## EdwardBast (Nov 25, 2013)

dissident said:


> I don't know how that refutes the point. So yeah, Beethoven wasn't an "inventor" as far as form is concerned (which was the OP's point) but "enriched" existing forms through his compositional techniques and thematic manipulation. The point being that the same could be said of Bach and the fugue.


You should study Beethoven more closely. My point was that talking about the "enrichment of forms," "horizontal expansion," and "retaining a classical structure" isn't even on the right continent when exploring what was new about Beethoven's music. Beethoven invented completely new structures and processes for many of his works. Show me an earlier movement remotely similar to the first movement of Beethoven's Eroica, the Largo e mesto from Op. 10 #3, the opening movement of Op. 101 or any number of other works.


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## hammeredklavier (Feb 18, 2018)

A certain member on this forum who admires a certain late 18th century composer who always gets mentioned alongside Mozart; I've never got the impression he gets what I'm talking about whenever I talk of harmony, counterpoint, chromaticism. Hence the reason why he admires "that composer" (who sucked so bad) so excessively, and always resorts to talk about what genres or works were outdated or not instead of things like expressive depth in harmony, counterpoint, chromaticism , dissonance in voice-leading. I seriously doubt if he is even able to hear or recognize these elements in 18th century music.


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## 59540 (May 16, 2021)

EdwardBast said:


> You should study Beethoven more closely.


Well yeah, no doubt.


> Show me an earlier movement remotely similar to the first movement of Beethoven's Eroica, the Largo e mesto from Op. 10 #3, the opening movement of Op. 101 or any number of other works.


That's a little hyperbolic. The first movement of the 3rd symphony is *remotely* similar to any number of Haydn or Mozart first movements. K 543, for example. The second movement of Op. 10/3 is similar in some ways to the closing measures of K. 511.


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## larold (Jul 20, 2017)

If by invention you mean the first Beethoven's list of firsts is lengthy. 

"Eroica" was the first symphony to have a single movement longer than any other symphony ever written. 

Ditto the "Emporer" piano concerto. 

Ditto the "Choral" symphony -- first time singing in a symphony. 

"Eroica" is also identified as the first romantic symphony the same way Le Sacre du Printemps and Pierrot Lunaire are considered the first pieces of modern music. 

His opera was based on political and humanistic themes rather than national stories, another break with tradition. 

His An die ferne Geliebte wasn't the first such collection (Schubert had a minor one a year earlier) but is nevertheless considered the first song cycle.


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## Coach G (Apr 22, 2020)

Beethoven was the apex of Classicism but also the spiritual father of Romanticism; even if other composers such as Karl Maria von Weber came much closer to inventing the Romantic language. Beethoven was the unattainable ideal for Schubert, Schumann, Mendelssohn, Berlioz, Brahms, Bruckner, Mahler, and Sibelius. His musical vision was big; all-encompassing; all-embracing; heroic; sublime; spiritual; cosmic...

The Brahms symphonies aspire to Beethoven; and even more-so, Bruckner and Mahler with almost every symphony being an attempt to re-compose Beethoven's Ninth with a universal theme on a gigantic canvas, with a long and meditative slow movement that pays tribute to Beethoven's _Adagio_.

Even though Tchaikovsky loved Mozart above all others, he still looked to Beethoven as the prototype to symphonic structure.


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## 59540 (May 16, 2021)

larold said:


> If by invention you mean the first Beethoven's list of firsts is lengthy.
> 
> "Eroica" was the first symphony to have a single movement longer than any other symphony ever written.
> 
> ...


Your heart's in the right place and your intentions are good, but some of that just isn't true. No, the first movement of the Eroica isn't longer than any symphony written prior. Mozart's Marriage of Figaro had a political subtext. And anyway, symphony and opera. Pre-existing forms.


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## hammeredklavier (Feb 18, 2018)

"the fact remains that the "Great Fugue" is "a controlled violence without parallel in music before the twentieth century and anticipated only by Mozart in the C minor fugue for two pianos (K.426)" < Opera's Second Death / Slavoj Žižek, Mladen Dolar / P.128 >
"Mozart later arranged this fugue for strings as well, adding the introductory Adagio, K. 546. The traditional Baroque idiom that is developed in this fugue for two pianos lays great stress on dissonant chromatic semitones and appoggiaturas. The intensity of the fugal writing is startling, foreshadowing the fugal textures in some of Beethoven's later works, such as the first movement of the Piano Sonata in C Minor, op.111, which exploits a variant of the same idiom. Beethoven was so taken by this piece, in fact, that he copied out the entire fugue in score." < Mozart's Piano Music / William Kinderman / P.46 >




"The hypothesis that Mozart learned (presumably in 1782) from his study of the Art of Fugue how to combine a fugue subject with its own inversion ignores the composer's earlier experimentation with rectus and inversus combinations in the revision of the K. 173 finale and in the K. 401 keyboard fugue; there is, moreover, no firm evidence linking Mozart to The Art of Fugue. The only item left on this list, the "full exploitation of contrapuntal devices" in K. 426, is the one aspect of this work that is so atypical - for Mozart, his contemporaries and most of his predecessors - as to suggest the influence of J. S. Bach and no one else." < Engaging Bach: The Keyboard Legacy from Marpurg to Mendelssohn / Matthew Dirst, Matthew Charles Dirst / P.78 >


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## 59540 (May 16, 2021)

Coach G said:


> His musical vision was big; all-encompassing; all-embracing; heroic; sublime; spiritual; cosmic...


Sure, but doesn't that also apply to Bach? And Bach's output is much more varied, really. I love Beethoven and would rank him just behind Bach among my favorite composers, but sometimes he is just a little too bombastic, comparatively.


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## Coach G (Apr 22, 2020)

dissident said:


> Sure, but doesn't that also apply to Bach? And Bach's output is much more varied, really. I love Beethoven and would rank him just behind Bach among my favorite composers, but sometimes he is just a little too bombastic, comparatively.


Bach was great, but I'm not sure how much Bach inspired the Romantic composers compared to Beethoven. I remember reading somewhere that Brahms loved the _Cachonne_ for solo violin, and I know that Mendelssohn popularized the _St. Matthew Passion_, but Brahms and Mendelssohn were just as enthusiastic over the Beethoven symphonies. Could it be that the Age of Bach is fairly recent with conductors on both sides of the HIP divide such as Helmuth Rilling and Masaaki Suzuki taking it upon themselves to complete the monumental task of recording the complete choral works of Bach; in Rilling and Suzuki's case almost limiting their repertoire to ONE composer!


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## 59540 (May 16, 2021)

Coach G said:


> Bach was great, but I'm not sure how much Bach inspired the Romantic composers compared to Beethoven. ...


Of course his influence on the Romantics wasn't as great as Beethoven's...but Beethoven himself was influenced by Bach. That Bach had the influence he did was no mean feat since his complete surviving body of work wasn't published in its entirety until the middle of the 19th century. However, the idea that Bach was unknown until Mendelssohn is discredited.


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## hammeredklavier (Feb 18, 2018)

Kreisler jr said:


> Most of the forms were obsolete after Bach, except in some niches (like organ playing and choral music) that were irrelevant for the major genres of instrumental music or opera.





Kreisler jr said:


> And no, Hammeredklavier, a fragmentary suite of study fugue by Mozart *does not count.* These were unpublished minor pieces with very few exceptions (and even the exceptions were usually unpublished).


Why? How? Explain. Schubert D.940 was influenced by Mozart K.608 (Mozart's homage to Bach)
https://www.jstor.org/stable/1004029
Beethoven copied out the piece for study 
https://library.sjsu.edu/beethoven-auction-database/transcription-beethoven-mozart’s-k-608
and it is said that the A flat slow movement from his C minor sonata (Op.13) was influenced by Mozart's.
https://www.loc.gov/collections/mol...e-to-archives/allegro-and-andante-in-f-minor/
"As Wolfgang Plath has pointed out, the influence of Mozart's Fantasy in F minor, K. 608 was considerable in the nineteenth century. Aside from the editions, manuscripts, and arrangements already mentioned, many public performances can be documented. Beethoven owned the work and made his own arrangement of the fugue. Schubert's F Minor Fantasy for piano four-hands, op. 103 (D. 940, 1828), suggests his reaction to the whole of Mozart's piece, whereas Franz Lachner's Wind Octet in B flat, op. 156 (1859) demonstrates his reception of the Andante."

So what are you going to do now? Repeat the same old "I don't like it so it's outdated and irrelevant!" statements over and over and over and over and over and over and over again in different wordings? Or simply back away, like you do everytime when you realize you can't prove or back up with evidence anything you say?


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## tdc (Jan 17, 2011)

hammeredklavier said:


> always resorts to talk about what genres or works were outdated or not instead of things like expressive depth in harmony, counterpoint, chromaticism , dissonance in voice-leading.


Exactly. This is where I feel my points are lost on some. For example when I brought up k. 563, but that is just one example, and I'm not singling out one member. It is weird how differently people can perceive music.

How about the fact that Beethoven was quite familiar with Mozart and Bach's music and yet Beethoven felt that Handel was the greatest composer? Think about that for a moment. Is that not a pretty good example of Beethoven's lack of musical sensitivity? I think to a very real and substantial extent Beethoven himself was oblivious to the "expressive depth in harmony, counterpoint, chromaticism, dissonance in voice-leading" you describe.


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## tdc (Jan 17, 2011)

For the record Mozart calling k. 563 a Divertimento is misleading, it is tongue in cheek. That work is far from light entertainment. Mozart was being humble with the title. 

I think composers previous to Beethoven, were generally less self aggrandizing.


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## Knorf (Jan 16, 2020)

tdc said:


> Exactly. This is where I feel my points are lost on some.




Yeah, you're both superior. :lol:

Or, maybe it's because your points actually weren't lost on me, I simply _don't agree_.


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## hammeredklavier (Feb 18, 2018)

tdc said:


> For the record Mozart calling k. 563 a Divertimento is misleading, it is tongue in cheek. That work is far from light entertainment. Mozart was being humble with the title.


I don't think he was being humble or sarcastic with the title. "eighteenth-century composers were expected to be adept at producing both 'popular' and 'serious' music, and that there was no categorical difference between the two." (wikipedia: "Mozart and dance"). "When his friend Mozart pointed out that Haydn (who was about to travel to London) did not speak a word of English, he is said to have replied: 'My language is understood all over the world!'"
It's just that Mozart's expressive maturity began to show in the genre as well. (Btw, K.546 was written for van Swieten's concerts. K.608 was funeral music commissioned by Count Deym.)

To me, the slow movement from K.287 is more expressive than his horn concertos (which some argue were hampered by the restrictions of the natural crude horn at the time), for instance: 



These particular passages from his Salzburg colleague (who had studied Bach in his youth, and was a teacher of C.M.v. Weber) are too dark and dissonant for our "stereotypical conception of the genre": 



 (the whole work is a contrapuntal masterpiece) 



 (~6:30)
Like K.334, we have to look at them case by case basis. Mozart's K.388 even became his second string quintet.


hammeredklavier said:


>


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## trazom (Apr 13, 2009)

tdc said:


> For the record Mozart calling k. 563 a Divertimento is misleading, it is tongue in cheek. That work is far from light entertainment. *Mozart was being humble with the title. *
> 
> I think composers previous to Beethoven, were generally less self aggrandizing.


Simon Keefe wrote in "Mozart in Vienna: The Final Decade" that one reason for Mozart calling it a divertimento has to do with the fact that in the 1780s string trios scored for violin, viola, and cello didn't have as strong a tradition of publication as quartets, quintets, and accompanied sonatas, and that Mozart may have intended it for private performances only, in line with the Viennese understanding of a divertimento as "usually not intended for publication." There were only two concert performances of the work and it wasn't published until 1792, a year after Mozart had died.


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## 59540 (May 16, 2021)

tdc said:


> ...
> How about the fact that Beethoven was quite familiar with Mozart and Bach's music and yet Beethoven felt that Handel was the greatest composer? Think about that for a moment. Is that not a pretty good example of Beethoven's lack of musical sensitivity? ...


I don't think that's necessarily so. He was more familiar with Handel than Bach. On the other hand he apparently had a high opinion of Cherubini, who's all but forgotten now among us "civilians".


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## Xisten267 (Sep 2, 2018)

tdc said:


> How about the fact that Beethoven was quite familiar with Mozart and Bach's music and yet Beethoven felt that Handel was the greatest composer? Think about that for a moment. Is that not a pretty good example of Beethoven's lack of musical sensitivity?


No, it isn't. He had his personal taste, just like everybody else. And Mozart also had Handel in high steem. Handel is generally regarded as one of the greatest baroque composers, I don't know why would it be a bad thing for one to admire his music.

By the way, harmony, counterpoint, chromaticism and dissonance are not the only important elements of music, and I think that Beethoven not only had a lot of sensivity working with them but also with elements such as dynamics, form and rhythm as well.

"...Storms, by their very nature, are protean, non-repeating, violent explosions, and that's what Beethoven's music is like too, with some *wild rhythmic and textural effects*: the churning of four against five in the double-basses and cellos, and electric currents of piccolo, timpani, and trombone. Just as suddenly as it has arrived, this lacerating music subsides, and gives way, without a break, to the most deliriously repeat-laden music in the symphony in the final 'Shepherd's Song: Thankful Feelings after the Storm'.

And it's in this movement where Beethoven achieves something more purely spine-tingling and life-enhancingly joyful than almost anywhere else in his output. It's this place, the climax of the whole movement, and the symphony. This music is also a consummation of the symphony's spirals of time and pattern: this is the last in the sequence of ever-more intense unfurlings of the movement's main melodic idea, and *Beethoven takes both extremes of orchestral register - high and low - to their utmost extreme, and then resolves a magnificently aching dissonance through a long, slow, descent in pitch, dynamic, and emotional intensity.* It's a moment that works expressively because of its sheer intensity, but which also is the apex of the symphony's ever-intensifying interplay of cycles and repetitions. There's more: this passage in the fifth movement rhymes with a similar one in the first movement: *the climax of the opening movement is also the resolution of a similar (but not identical) dissonance through a stepwise melodic descent, and it occurs at a similar place in the structure, just before the coda.* It's as if all of these small-scale cycles of repetition are enclosed by an even bigger orbit of time. Orbits and time-flows … 'Pastoral'? This music is 'cosmic', too! Now that's radical." - *Source here*.


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## hammeredklavier (Feb 18, 2018)

tdc said:


> How about the fact that Beethoven was quite familiar with Mozart and Bach's music and yet Beethoven felt that Handel was the greatest composer? Think about that for a moment. Is that not a pretty good example of Beethoven's lack of musical sensitivity? I think to a very real and substantial extent Beethoven himself was oblivious to the "expressive depth in harmony, counterpoint, chromaticism, dissonance in voice-leading" you describe.


I think there's no one right answer in music aesthetics, and I won't comment on the part about Beethoven, who was admired by most Romantics as an innovator of expression. But if a person simply cannot recognize these things (harmony, chromaticism, dissonance) or accept the facts of how they were passed on through classical music history (no matter how long and much he has listened), I'm inclined to suspect he has certain auditory or intellectual limitations as a classical music listener. Already I'm seeing a pattern or correlation cause the same person I meant in my previous post [#47] also "happens" to be obsessed with a certain early 18th century composer's music; he keeps spreading his bullcrap theories that it "dominated" even the late 18th century music scene in "popularity", while never properly understanding concepts like the Doctrine of the Affections and the later deviations from it, or the development of the Neapolitan style. According to him, any choral music with dissonant harmony/counterpoint was a "museum piece" in its time; no questions asked. Never have I felt more strongly on this forum that indulgence in pop-like use of harmonies can make one brain-dead.


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## Knorf (Jan 16, 2020)

hammeredklavier said:


> ...if a person simply cannot recognize these things (harmony, chromaticism, dissonance) or accept the facts of how they were passed on through classical music history (no matter how long and much he has listened), I'm inclined to suspect he has certain auditory or intellectual limitations as a classical music listener. Already I'm seeing a pattern or correlation cause the same person I meant in my previous post [#47] also "happens" to be obsessed with a certain early 18th century composer's music; he keeps spreading his bullcrap theories that it "dominated" even the late 18th century music scene in "popularity", while never properly understanding concepts like the Doctrine of the Affections and the later deviations from it, or the development of the Neapolitan style. According to him, any choral music with dissonant harmony/counterpoint was a "museum piece" in its time; no questions asked. Never have I felt more strongly on this forum that indulgence in pop-like use of harmonies can make one brain-dead.


It's cheap, cowardly, self-aggrandizing swipes like this post that make me regret contributing to this thread and furthermore feel like not continuing to participate on TC at all.

In general, on TC I still find the good outweighs the bad, but this... this post is just bad.


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## hammeredklavier (Feb 18, 2018)

dissident said:


> K. 394






Beethoven Op.53: 









Beethoven Op.37: 







Knorf said:


> this post is just bad.


Sorry about that, but "it" was really getting unbearable.


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## tdc (Jan 17, 2011)

Yes this thread got a little heated, but it is because we are all passionate about the music we like. When I listen to Beethoven's Pastoral I hear the repetition and the homophonic style of all these instruments playing essentially one melody together for long stretches, and it blows my mind that anyone could actually think he was the greatest composer. To suggest Beethoven is the peak of Western music in my view is an insult to the tradition. 

A large part of music appreciation is subjective, and I acknowledge this. I don't want to come across as though my tastes are superior but that tends to happen on both sides. I've been accused of not being able to comprehend Beethoven in this thread.


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## DaveM (Jun 29, 2015)

tdc said:


> Yes this thread got a little heated, but it is because we are all passionate about the music we like. When I listen to Beethoven's Pastoral I hear the repetition and the homophonic style of all these instruments playing essentially one melody together for long stretches, and *it blows my mind that anyone could actually think he was the greatest composer. To suggest Beethoven is the peak of Western music in my view is an insult to the tradition. *
> 
> A large part of music appreciation is subjective, and I acknowledge this. I don't want to come across as though my tastes are superior but that tends to happen on both sides. I've been accused of not being able to comprehend Beethoven in this thread.


Of course, you have a right to your taste in music and whatever your appreciation of it is, but I think one needs a little more than the repeated claim of an alleged homophonic style as applied to one or two works to knock Beethoven off a perch he has held for a couple of centuries.

I can only assume you haven't listened to all the sonatas, all the quartets and all the concertos where one could hardly claim rampant homophony. If you have listened to all of them then, given your taste, that must have been an exercise in masochism.


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## Livly_Station (Jan 8, 2014)

DaveM said:


> Of course, you have a right to your taste in music and whatever your appreciation of it is, but I think one needs a little more than the repeated claim of an alleged homophonic style as applied to one or two works to knock Beethoven off a perch he has held for a couple of centuries.


Not to mention that the 6th has some good counterpoint. The 2nd theme of the 1st movement contains a little _fughetta_ (or _fugato_), which then climaxes in a section that sounds almost like "planing" (parallel motion of chords, like Debussy liked to do). And the development is full of counterpoint too. And that's only the first movement.


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## Hunt Stromberg (Sep 6, 2021)

I don't know the answer about what he invented, but he's at significant risk of de-composition:

https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/09/20/cancelling-classical-music/

Now the mad people are really spoiling for a fight. I'll give up Beethoven when I give up breathing.


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## Xisten267 (Sep 2, 2018)

tdc said:


> Yes this thread got a little heated, but it is because we are all passionate about the music we like. When I listen to Beethoven's Pastoral I hear the repetition and the homophonic style of all these instruments playing essentially one melody together for long stretches, and it blows my mind that anyone could actually think he was the greatest composer. To suggest Beethoven is the peak of Western music in my view is an insult to the tradition.
> 
> A large part of music appreciation is subjective, and I acknowledge this. I don't want to come across as though my tastes are superior but that tends to happen on both sides. I've been accused of not being able to comprehend Beethoven in this thread.


There's plenty of counterpoint in Beethoven. All of his symphonies have it, including many memorable fugal moments (*this video* shows all of them). In the last poll we had here at TC about favorite composers of fugues, Beethoven managed to get a respectable second place (at least until now), being topped only by J.S. Bach. The link to the poll is *here* in case you want to take a look at it.

Personally, I love how Beethoven plays with texture, usually contrasting moments of homophony with those of poliphony in his music, many times in single movements.


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## Livly_Station (Jan 8, 2014)

Xisten267 said:


> Personally, I love how Beethoven plays with texture, usually contrasting moments of homophony with those of poliphony in his music, many times in single movements.


Exactly! -- even when it's not a fugal passage, often you'll hear 2 or 3 voices simultanesouly to add texture and contrast, and some of his contrapuntual ideas are just magical.


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## fbjim (Mar 8, 2021)

virtually nobody in history invented a musical genre except for very specific cases

generally the "revolutionary" view on Beethoven, as inflated as it is (this is not a "bringing Beet down a notch thing", more an anti-Great Man view of musical history) is less on specific formal innovation and more on a change in the view of art which was associated with his personality and music. Weber may have made more formal changes that we associate with romanticism but Beethoven is the more romantic _figure_, in terms of how he informed the context of our view on art, which is more important than it sounds.


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## FrankE (Jan 13, 2021)

tdc said:


> I know there are some, but I defer to the specialists. What are some examples of Beethoven's musical inventions?
> 
> I do know that if we look at the majority of Beethoven's well known compositions - the symphonies, the string quartets, the concertos and the piano sonatas, none of these are genres that Beethoven created.


Non-musicologist here.
Is genre a correct term in classical (sensu latu) music theory c.f period/era form and what have you?


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## progmatist (Apr 3, 2021)

Coach G said:


> Bach was great, but I'm not sure how much Bach inspired the Romantic composers compared to Beethoven. I remember reading somewhere that Brahms loved the _Cachonne_ for solo violin, and I know that Mendelssohn popularized the _St. Matthew Passion_, but Brahms and Mendelssohn were just as enthusiastic over the Beethoven symphonies. Could it be that the Age of Bach is fairly recent with conductors on both sides of the HIP divide such as Helmuth Rilling and Masaaki Suzuki taking it upon themselves to complete the monumental task of recording the complete choral works of Bach; in Rilling and Suzuki's case almost limiting their repertoire to ONE composer!


But for Mendelssohn conducting his St. Matthew's Passion, we in the 21st Century would most likely ask, "Johann Sebastian Who?"


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## Livly_Station (Jan 8, 2014)

progmatist said:


> But for Mendelssohn conducting his St. Matthew's Passion, we in the 21st Century would most likely ask, "Johann Sebastian Who?"


Not really.

Bach was a famous and respected composer in his time (although published works of the baroque period didn't circulate as much continentally as it started happening since the classical style got popular). And even before 1824 there were some _"connoisseur circles"_ where the music of Bach was much appreciated as one of the best ever written, if not the very finest. It was not a fortuitous event that made Mendelssohn knowledgeable of Bach's music, since that was one of the trends of the time -- and the hype around Bach made it much easier for Felix to proclaim St. Matthew's Passion the best composition of all time.

Obviously, Mendelssohn and other famous figures who promoted Bach's music are part of history, so we can't neglect the fact that they contributed for Bach's everlasting fame... but that would probably happen sooner or later anyway.


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## 59540 (May 16, 2021)

progmatist said:


> But for Mendelssohn conducting his St. Matthew's Passion, we in the 21st Century would most likely ask, "Johann Sebastian Who?"


That myth dies hard, apparently.


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## hammeredklavier (Feb 18, 2018)

"Even before 1750, that legacy had begun to spread, slowly but steadily and irreversibly, primarily through his students and his sons, and first and foremost in circles of professional musicians. But knowledgeable admirers of Bach's art could be found outside German lands as well. A representative voice in this regard is that of the composer and theorist Padre Giovanni Battista Martini in Bologna, who wrote to a German colleague in April 1750, more than three months before Bach's death: "I consider it superfluous to describe the singular merit of Sig. Bach, for he is thoroughly known and admired not only in Germany but throughout our Italy. I will say only that I think it would be difficult to find someone in the profession who could surpass him, since these days he could rightfully claim to be among the first in Europe."" < Johann Sebastian Bach: The Learned Musician | Christoph Wolff · 2002 | P. 462 >


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## hammeredklavier (Feb 18, 2018)

tdc said:


> Charles Rosen suggests Bach had more influence on the origins of Romanticism than Beethoven.


Here's another unpopular opinion of Rosen:

"Charles Rosen used the song (Adelaide, Op. 46) to exemplify his claim that, somewhat paradoxically, Beethoven actually drew closer to the compositional practice of his predecessors Haydn and Mozart as his career evolved:

With age, Beethoven drew closer to the forms and proportions of Haydn and Mozart. In his youthful works, the imitation of his two great precursors is largely exterior: in technique and even in spirit, he is at the beginning of his career often closer to Hummel, Weber, and to the later works of Clementi than to Haydn and Mozart ... The equilibrium between harmonic and thematic development so characteristic of Haydn and Mozart is often lost in early Beethoven, where thematic contrast and transformation seem to outweigh all other interests. Beethoven, indeed, started as a true member of his generation, writing now in a proto-Romantic style and now in a late and somewhat attenuated version of the classical style, with an insistence on the kind of broad, square melodic structure that was to find its true justification later in the Romantic period of the 1830s. The early song Adelaide is as much Italian Romantic opera as anything else: its long, winding melody, symmetrical and passionate, its colorful modulations and aggressively simple accompaniment could come easily from an early work of Bellini."


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## tdc (Jan 17, 2011)

hammeredklavier said:


> Here's another unpopular opinion of Rosen:
> 
> "Charles Rosen used the song (Adelaide, Op. 46) to exemplify his claim that, somewhat paradoxically, Beethoven actually drew closer to the compositional practice of his predecessors Haydn and Mozart as his career evolved:
> 
> With age, Beethoven drew closer to the forms and proportions of Haydn and Mozart. In his youthful works, the imitation of his two great precursors is largely exterior: in technique and even in spirit, he is at the beginning of his career often closer to Hummel, Weber, and to the later works of Clementi than to Haydn and Mozart ... The equilibrium between harmonic and thematic development so characteristic of Haydn and Mozart is often lost in early Beethoven, where thematic contrast and transformation seem to outweigh all other interests. Beethoven, indeed, started as a true member of his generation, writing now in a proto-Romantic style and now in a late and somewhat attenuated version of the classical style, with an insistence on the kind of broad, square melodic structure that was to find its true justification later in the Romantic period of the 1830s. The early song Adelaide is as much Italian Romantic opera as anything else: its long, winding melody, symmetrical and passionate, its colorful modulations and aggressively simple accompaniment could come easily from an early work of Bellini."


It seems as though some of Beethoven's early/mid period works were perhaps more experimental, showing early traces of Romanticism, and later in life he enjoyed taking some of those ideas and placing them within tighter classical structural frameworks. The forms and proportions became closer to classicism but his compositional demeanor remained distinct I think, from Mozart and Haydn.


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## Livly_Station (Jan 8, 2014)

tdc said:


> It seems as though some of Beethoven's early/mid period works were perhaps more experimental, showing early traces of Romanticism, and later in life he enjoyed taking some of those ideas and placing them within tighter classical structural frameworks. The forms and proportions became closer to classicism but his compositional demeanor remained distinct I think, from Mozart and Haydn.


Actually not.

Beethoven was much more "looser" with form in his later years, so much so that critics didn't understand it from a classical perspective. Look at Op. 131, which became the centre piece to understand the idiosyncrasies of late Beethoven: 7 movements to be played uninterruptely, starting with a fugue and only using the sonata-form in the last movement, and with a set of variations in the middle movement of the entire thing.

I don't know what exactly Charles Rosen mean, and how he's contextualizing his thoughts with late works.


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## tdc (Jan 17, 2011)

Livly_Station said:


> Actually not.
> 
> Beethoven was much more "looser" with form in his later years, so much so that critics didn't understand it from a classical perspective. Look at Op. 131, which became the centre piece to understand the idiosyncrasies of late Beethoven: 7 movements to be played uninterruptely, starting with a fugue and only using the sonata-form in the last movement, and with a set of variations in the middle movement of the entire thing.
> 
> I don't know what exactly Charles Rosen mean, and how he's contextualizing his thoughts with late works.


I think the key word is 'closer', which doesn't mean his forms became old fashioned. I agree there are some quirky things he did with form in the late works. The format of the 9th symphony is unique and there is that 2 movement late piano sonata.


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## tdc (Jan 17, 2011)

I think I'm starting to enjoy Beethoven more lately. My tastes have evolved in the last year or so, and I'm appreciating some things I wasn't before. Stravinsky is a composer I had minimal interest in previously and now he has become one of my favorites.

The other day I listened to this and I liked it:


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## Livly_Station (Jan 8, 2014)

tdc said:


> It seems as though some of Beethoven's early/mid period works were perhaps more experimental, showing early traces of Romanticism, and later in life he enjoyed taking some of those ideas and placing them within tighter classical structural frameworks. The forms and proportions became closer to classicism but his compositional demeanor remained distinct I think, from Mozart and Haydn.


Actually not.

Beethoven was much more "looser" with form in his later years, so much so that critics of the 19th century didn't understand it from a classical perspective of form. Look at Op. 131, which became the centre piece to understand the idiosyncrasies of late Beethoven: 7 movements to be played uninterruptely, starting with a fugue and only using the sonata-form in the last movement, and with a set of variations in the middle movement of the entire thing. It's not the only "weird" late work, and I wouldn't put some other pieces of his middle period as conventional either.

I don't know what exactly Charles Rosen mean, and how he's contextualizing his thoughts.


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## tdc (Jan 17, 2011)

Livly_Station said:


> Actually not.
> 
> Beethoven was much more "looser" with form in his later years, so much so that critics of the 19th century didn't understand it from a classical perspective of form. Look at Op. 131, which became the centre piece to understand the idiosyncrasies of late Beethoven: 7 movements to be played uninterruptely, starting with a fugue and only using the sonata-form in the last movement, and with a set of variations in the middle movement of the entire thing. It's not the only "weird" late work, and I wouldn't put some other pieces of his middle period as conventional either.
> 
> I don't know what exactly Charles Rosen mean, and how he's contextualizing his thoughts.


Double post, I responded in post #82.


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## EdwardBast (Nov 25, 2013)

Livly_Station said:


> Actually not.
> 
> Beethoven was much more "looser" with form in his later years, so much so that critics didn't understand it from a classical perspective. Look at Op. 131, which became the centre piece to understand the idiosyncrasies of late Beethoven: 7 movements to be played uninterruptely, starting with a fugue and only using the sonata-form in the last movement, and with a set of variations in the middle movement of the entire thing.
> 
> I don't know what exactly Charles Rosen mean, and how he's contextualizing his thoughts with late works.


Yes. Rosen had an agenda, a comprehensive view of what defines the Classical Era. His various dubious attempts to shoehorn Beethoven into it are, IMO, a weak point in _The Classical Style_.


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## hammeredklavier (Feb 18, 2018)

EdwardBast said:


> Yes. Rosen had an agenda, a comprehensive view of what defines the Classical Era. His various dubious attempts to shoehorn Beethoven into it are, IMO, a weak point in _The Classical Style_.


I still think that he's overrated as a critic/author/academic; he has too many unprofessionally subjective opinions on various topics, and lacks variety of composers for the examples he discusses. I would say anyone with a background of interest and education in classical music history and fundamentals could write like him. But it's also a bit understandable because, in the 20th century, there was less revival of Baroque and Classical period music than there is now, and so, people's view on (knowledge of) the history was relatively limited.


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## SONNET CLV (May 31, 2014)

EdwardBast said:


> Yes. Rosen had an agenda, a comprehensive view of what defines the Classical Era. His various dubious attempts to shoehorn Beethoven into it are, IMO, a weak point in _The Classical Style_.


Of course Beethoven, born in 1770, was a "Classical" composer, but one for whom the "rules" of classicism were not all confining. Growing up in an era of Romantic revolution (both political and artistic) could only affect him, especially because his mind was vast enough to allow for growth rather than to be permanently stunted by the strictures of musical art as classicism presented them. So Beethoven becomes one of the initial artists of a new age, dubbed Romanticism.

William Wordsworth is an analog in poetry. Born the same year as Beethoven, Wordsworth never totally detached from the "Classical" ages of Milton and Pope. Wordsworth could write a mean sonnet and a rhymed heroic couplet, strict to form. But he was not only a sonneteer or a rhyming aphorist. The revolutionary spirit expanded his poetic possibilities, too, and gave us some wonderful "lyrical ballads" built on firm classical foundations but with "new" touches (or a Romantic nature) in the upper-story construction, much as we find in Beethoven's music.


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## Kreisler jr (Apr 21, 2021)

Livly_Station said:


> Beethoven was much more "looser" with form in his later years, so much so that critics didn't understand it from a classical perspective. Look at Op. 131, which became the centre piece to understand the idiosyncrasies of late Beethoven: 7 movements to be played uninterruptely, starting with a fugue and only using the sonata-form in the last movement, and with a set of variations in the middle movement of the entire thing.


You correctly put in the scare quotes because this would be a very superficial way to look at it and one major point of Rosen's book (although it is not mainly about Beethoven) is to get deeper intot the workings of the classical style. (For analysis of late Beethoven and how op.131 is the very opposite of "loose", in fact it may be the most unified piece Beethoven wrote, but of course it does this in a highly unconventional way, look into Joseph Kerman's book on Beethoven's quartets although it is both more technical and at least as opinionated as Rosen's)



> I don't know what exactly Charles Rosen means


Maybe you should try to read and understand The Classical Style and parts of "The romantic generation". Rosen might have some dubious or exaggerated claims but I think he also has some very valuable insights into the classical style, especially the relation of details and larger forms. Rosen thinks that the earlyish Beethoven tended towards are looser, often more flamboyant style (basically what became then the style of Weber's and Schubert's piano sonatas, maybe some other composers like Hummel would also be there) with a less coherent relation between details and whole. A piece like the Kreutzer sonata is for Rosen a wild mix with a first movement that shows the high logic and coherence of the mature Beethoven and a second movement still in that "superficial" ornate mode that is more characteristic for someone like Weber.
I also think that Rosen strongly exaggerates here because there are lots of very tightly organized movements by early Beethoven (like the first movements of op.2/1, op.10/1 and 3 etc.) and some of the "loose" works (like op.2/3) are great for other reasons (hugely expanding in form vs. Mozart and Haydn and integrating the virtuoso element convincingly etc.)


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## vtpoet (Jan 17, 2019)

//Bach was great, but I'm not sure how much Bach inspired the Romantic composers compared to Beethoven. I remember reading somewhere that Brahms loved the Cachonne for solo violin, and I know that Mendelssohn popularized the St. Matthew Passion, but Brahms and Mendelssohn were just as enthusiastic over the Beethoven symphonies. Could it be that the Age of Bach is fairly recent with conductors on both sides of the HIP divide such as Helmuth Rilling and Masaaki Suzuki taking it upon themselves to complete the monumental task of recording the complete choral works of Bach; in Rilling and Suzuki's case almost limiting their repertoire to ONE composer!//

It's hard to really get a firm fix on Bach's influence soon after his death and in the decades that followed, but the notion that he was "forgotten" is greatly exaggerated. His music continued to circulate among avid musicians and collectors. Mozart was always interested in counterpoint, which was still a living tradition in choral music, and both he and his father exchanged the manuscripts of contemporary composers writing in that tradition (see Hammeredklavier's comments and examples), but one gets the sense that Bach was always something of a surprise and revelation when composers, even twenty and thirty years after his death, rediscovered him. The example I always think of is Baron van Sweiten's invitation to Mozart and others in his circle to re-acquaint themselves with (and discover) Bach and Händel's compositions. (Bach's Motets stopped Mozart dead in his tracks.) There's a subtle and marked change in Mozart's compositions, commented on by other scholars, after Mozart's exposure to Bach and Händel, including the use of sequencing. Mozart's Bach-like use of a Lutheran hymn in the Magic Flute (sorry if I don't look it up) suggests that Mozart's renewed exposure to JS Bach was fairly consequential (along with his arrangements of fugues from Bach's WTC). When Bach's Mass in b was published and performed in the early 19th century, it was published as the greatest work of music ever written (no doubt trying to sell copy but still). So, Bach's influence on the Romantics probably was less stylistic than intellectual. Beethoven wrote his fugues to prove that he too, like Bach, could write a great fugue (by his own testimony) and when a young Lizst showed up, Beethoven invited him to play something from the WTC. Beethoven's Diabelli variations are said to be a kind homage to Bach's Goldberg variations---their number being one more than Bach's. Beethoven's Great Mass in c was said to be his answer to the b minor Mass. A Lutheran Hymn shows up in Mendelssohn's 5th symphony, clearly influenced by JS. Berlioz dismissed JS Bach. Chopin's Preludes were originally planned as Preludes and Fugues, or so I've read. Again, the influence seems more intellectual than stylistic. Romantic composers profoundly admired the Bach they were familiar with but their musical vocabulary was so different that the influence was more intellectual than musical. It was much easier to be influenced by Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven (and even CPE Bach), precursors of Romanticism. JS Bach came at the end of a whole other era, and was less a precursor than the final word on an entirely different musical tradition, language, philosophy and outlook.


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## whispering (Oct 26, 2013)

Please for the sake of a musical novice on the road to knowledge can you develop your statement a little further Knorf when you state “classical music as an industry is ludicrously dependent on promoting mythology”. I am trying to read more about the major composers and as a novice I take things mostly as read. Am I making a mistake in doing so? Thank you.


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## Livly_Station (Jan 8, 2014)

Kreisler jr said:


> You correctly put in the scare quotes because this would be a very superficial way to look at it and one major point of Rosen's book (although it is not mainly about Beethoven) is to get deeper intot the workings of the classical style. (For analysis of late Beethoven and how op.131 is the very opposite of "loose", in fact it may be the most unified piece Beethoven wrote, but of course it does this in a highly unconventional way, look into Joseph Kerman's book on Beethoven's quartets although it is both more technical and at least as opinionated as Rosen's)


I do agree with you that Beethoven's late work are super "tight" in structure, which is the opposite of "loose", the word I used before, lol. It's tight because there's a lot of coherence between movements, thematic connections, cyclic form, and I believe things develop very organically from an emotional point of view.

However, I don't know how much of his late structures subscribe to the "classical form". While Beethoven still had a care for "form" in his later years, no doubt, maybe more than ever, it was of a different, new kind of form.

I think that "classical form" should be understood in more strict terms. For example, if you invite me to a wedding party where there's a dressing etiquette for the guests to be in a tuxedo, that's the "form" of the event. So if I don't wear a tuxedo, I'm not following the form, even if my clothes of choice are also classy, thoughtful and beautiful.

Likewise, the way I see it is that Beethoven is getting a lot more "loose" with form at the end of his life if you look at it from a classical style perspective, even if Beethoven didn't abandon all of his influences from the past. It should be said that late Beethoven was incomprehensible to his contemporaries, which is sign of something rather unconventional. But maybe I'm wrong, and there's something much more intrinsically classical to his approach than I can see right now.



> Maybe you should try to read and understand The Classical Style and parts of "The romantic generation". Rosen might have some dubious or exaggerated claims but I think he also has some very valuable insights into the classical style, especially the relation of details and larger forms. Rosen thinks that the earlyish Beethoven tended towards are looser, often more flamboyant style (basically what became then the style of Weber's and Schubert's piano sonatas, maybe some other composers like Hummel would also be there) with a less coherent relation between details and whole. A piece like the Kreutzer sonata is for Rosen a wild mix with a first movement that shows the high logic and coherence of the mature Beethoven and a second movement still in that "superficial" ornate mode that is more characteristic for someone like Weber.
> I also think that Rosen strongly exaggerates here because there are lots of very tightly organized movements by early Beethoven (like the first movements of op.2/1, op.10/1 and 3 etc.) and some of the "loose" works (like op.2/3) are great for other reasons (hugely expanding in form vs. Mozart and Haydn and integrating the virtuoso element convincingly etc.)


I understand the claim that Beethoven was flamboyant when he was young. I'd add that some of his sonatas had a "fantasy" quality to them, and Beethoven loved to make musical jokes with the classical form like playing with expectations and frustrating them before doing the "right" thing. Nonetheless, even his "looser pieces" still look and sound more classical since they mostly follow the structure. Even the jokes insert them as classical pieces, since it's acknowledging the form the music is subscribed to.

There's a lot more ingenuity with structure in late Beethoven, but the thing about form is that it doesn't need to be genius or complicated. It just needs to follow the rules, and the rules are "simple".


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## JTS (Sep 26, 2021)

I cannot think of any genre that Beethoven invented. He expanded just about everything he did apart from perhaps opera


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## Xisten267 (Sep 2, 2018)

JTS said:


> I cannot think of any genre that Beethoven invented. He expanded just about everything he did apart from perhaps opera


I'm not aware of any vocal symphony, lied cycle or concertante work for piano and voices prior to Beethoven's. I think that it's fair to recognize that he was at least the first famous composer to create them, practically inventing them.


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## Tikoo Tuba (Oct 15, 2018)

https://www.pri.org/stories/2021-09...r-scientists-completed-beethoven-s-unfinished

The Tenth Symphony has just been invented. It took Beethoven a while to do get this done.


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## Rogerx (Apr 27, 2018)

Tikoo Tuba said:


> https://www.pri.org/stories/2021-09...r-scientists-completed-beethoven-s-unfinished
> 
> The Tenth Symphony has just been invented. It took Beethoven a while to do get this done.


You are somewhat late, a whole thread about that.


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## tdc (Jan 17, 2011)

Xisten267 said:


> I'm not aware of any vocal symphony, lied cycle or concertante work for piano and voices prior to Beethoven's. I think that it's fair to recognize that he was at least the first famous composer to create them, practically inventing them.


There is another genre he was apparently first in chamber music, I recall member Allerius pointing it out, I just can't remember (it wasn't string trio).


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## hammeredklavier (Feb 18, 2018)

tdc said:


> Allerius


is Xisten267, btw.


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## tdc (Jan 17, 2011)

hammeredklavier said:


> is Xisten267, btw.


Hmm...well maybe I'm mistaken. I just looked through the list of Beethoven's chamber works and couldn't find it.


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## Livly_Station (Jan 8, 2014)

Xisten267 mentioned Beethoven's three piano quartets as some of the first ever in the "genre". They date from 1785, when Beethoven was 14, and as a set they make the WoO 36 (works not published with an opus number).


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## Xisten267 (Sep 2, 2018)

Livly_Station said:


> Xisten267 mentioned Beethoven's three piano quartets as some of the first ever in the "genre". They date from 1785, when Beethoven was 14, and as a set they make the WoO 36 (works not published with an opus number).


Yes. If one looks at the "piano quartet" page on wikipedia he will see that the earliest works of this formation shown in the list are all from 1785, and were composed by Mozart, Beethoven and a certain Hoffmeister.


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## Kreisler jr (Apr 21, 2021)

Beethoven's cello sonatas were also among the first "real" ones, i.e. not baroqueish cello + b.c. but equal piano+cello. One should probably not overestimate "inventions" like the choral fantasy because nobody really followed this piece. It was a singular piece for a particular occasion, not the founding of a genre.

I wonder why the 14 yo Beethoven wrote piano quartets instead of trios but never again a piano quartet or piano quintet as an adult. Unlike Mozart and Brahms he apparently saw not much in diversity of larger or mixed chamber music ensembles after his early period. The septet was among his most popular pieces and although one can hardly speak of an invention because this was just a particular case of mixed wind/string divertimento it was very influential from the 1800s to 1830s with Hummel, Schubert, Spohr, Berwald and several others following with septets, octets, nonets for similar ensembles.
(I think Brahms should have written such a string/wind divertimento (or a wind octet); his first serenade started as a nonet or so but was expanded and the 2nd serenade is maybe the closest overall with its reduced woodwind dominated orchestra.)

"An die ferne Geliebte" might be the most unexpected Beethovenian invention.


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## Xisten267 (Sep 2, 2018)

Kreisler jr said:


> Beethoven's cello sonatas were also among the first "real" ones, i.e. not baroqueish cello + b.c. but equal piano+cello. *One should probably not overestimate "inventions" like the choral fantasy because nobody really followed this piece. It was a singular piece for a particular occasion, not the founding of a genre.*


I disagree. Not only the choral fantasy was an important predecessor to Beethoven's own Ninth symphony, but it inspired some (only a few, I agree) composers of the 20th century to also create concerted pieces for piano with vocal parts.

"The Piano Concerto in C major, Op. 39 (BV 247), by Ferruccio Busoni, is one of the largest works ever written in this genre. The concerto lasts around 70 minutes and is in five movements; in the final movement a men's chorus sings words from the final scene of the verse drama Aladdin by Adam Oehlenschläger, who also wrote the words of one of the Danish national anthems.

The first performance of the concerto took place in the Beethoven-Saal, Berlin, Germany, on November 10, 1904, at one of Busoni's own concerts of modern music.

(...)

It seems to have been Beethoven who first included a chorus in a concerted work with piano and orchestra, in his Choral Fantasy, Op. 80, of 1808; since then only a handful of works have been scored for similar forces, including Daniel Steibelt's Piano Concerto No. 8 (first performed March 16, 1820, in Saint Petersburg) and the Piano Concerto No. 6, Op. 192 (1858) by Henri Herz which also have a choral finale." - *Source: wikipedia.*


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## Livly_Station (Jan 8, 2014)

I may be wrong, but I also believe it was not easy for a composer to add a choral to an orchestral piece. I mean, I suppose it was already difficult to arrange deals for the premiere of a symphony, and many were under-rehearsed, so imagine the trouble of also having a choral.


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## Kreisler jr (Apr 21, 2021)

The reason for the choral fantasy was supposedly to have a final? work for the evening bringing everyone together. It was that monster concert from December 1808 with the 5th+6th symphonies, 4th piano concerto, two parts of the C major mass (thus the singers and choir), a concert aria and probably a solo improvisation by Beethoven.

This was an extreme case but they loved having a mix of everything in their concerts! 

Arias and even choral pieces were not uncommon. They would maybe do just some famous choruses and arias from Haydn or Handel oratorios (real church pieces were forbidden, therefore the parts of the Missa solemnis that were given at the premiere of the 9th were announced as "hymns".
Unfortunately, shorter pieces with choir and orchestra (like the Choral fantasia, or "Meeresstille und glückliche Fahrt" or Brahms' "Schicksalslied") are almost restricted to recordings nowadays because they take too much rehearsal time for a 10-15 min. "filler".


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## Tikoo Tuba (Oct 15, 2018)

Tikoo Tuba said:


> https://www.pri.org/stories/2021-09...r-scientists-completed-beethoven-s-unfinished
> 
> The Tenth Symphony has just been invented. It took Beethoven a while to do get this done.


I see the orchestral premier and release of a recording are for October 9. Previous discussions? Ha! Be so entertained with yo' attitudes. The Tenth Symphony is an invention. LVB did it.


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## hammeredklavier (Feb 18, 2018)

Tbh, I don't consider the [xxxx] quartet and the [xxxx] quintet really that different (in terms of techniques of composition) as "genres". It's the content that matters more to me, and I'm generally in agreement with arguments that Beethoven was innovative in many ways.


hammeredklavier said:


> The *Piano Quintet in A minor* (ca. 1770) can lay claim to being one of the earliest examples of its genre, though its appearance as a kind of reduced-forces piano concerto is also pointed out in the booklet. ...


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## larold (Jul 20, 2017)

_I'm not aware of any vocal symphony, lied cycle or concertante work for piano and voices prior to Beethoven's. _

Correct on all counts through Schubert had some collections of songs before An die ferne Geliebte though not considered cycles.

Beethoven's Triple Concerto was the first to include the piano in the concerto grosso or concertante format.

The Ninth symphony was of course the first to include singing.

Beethoven was the first to do all sorts of things.


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