# Beethoven´s late style



## Heliogabo (Dec 29, 2014)

Beethovens´s late style has been studied as one of the most revolutionary in the history of music, I think. Breaking of achieved forms, silence disruption, fragmentations, unsolved new forms advanced, etc.
Last sonatas, last string quartets and last opus of bagatelles has been said that are the most representatives of this kind of early avantgarde that is Beethoven's late style, but what movements or fragments of his music do you think that shows it at it's best?
Recommendations, texts and you tube links would be welcome :tiphat:
Thanks in advance!


----------



## SONNET CLV (May 31, 2014)

Though a good case can be made as well for the last handful of string quartets and Piano Sonatas 30 and 31, the Piano Sonata No.32 in C Minor is about as "strange" as it gets in Beethoven. Certainly _avant_ Beethoven, this. But the most remarkable thing, and one that leads to the greatest pleasure of this sonata, is the facility it has for interpretation. Which means that the listener can enjoy so many "versions" of the piece since every pianist who takes it on enables in it something new and uniquely his/hers. The Sonata certainly does not suffer from interpretation and part of the reason is _because_ of its inherent strangeness.

Harold Bloom, the great literary critic whose specialty is Shakespeare but who has essentially read everything there is to read, once noted that a distinguishing mark of a great literary work is its inherent _strangeness_. One thinks of Homer's _Odyssey_, Dante's _Commedia_, Shakespeare's late tragedies ... Samuel Beckett's _Waiting For Godot _... the list goes on. And a certain strangeness dominates all.

I believe this note marks other art forms as well and especially can be applied to music. Think of the great works, those we today hail as the masterpieces of the musical literature. How could any of them be received in their own day but as "strange"? One might cite Monteverdi's _Orfeo_, Bach's _Brandenburg Concerti_, Mozart's _Don Giovanni_, so much by Beethoven, Bruckner's symphonies, Debussy's brand of impressionism, Stravinsky's _Rite_ ....

One certainly encounters such strangeness in the final piano sonata of Beethoven. And, it remains strange even today, nearly 200 years on. Strange.


----------



## KenOC (Mar 7, 2011)

SONNET CLV said:


> Harold Bloom, the great literary critic whose specialty is Shakespeare but who has essentially read everything there is to read, once noted that a distinguishing mark of a great literary work is its inherent _strangeness_.


Oxford defines "strange": "Unusual or surprising in a way that is unsettling or hard to understand: Not previously visited, seen, or encountered; unfamiliar or alien."

Since a work of genius is almost by definition unique, totally new in some way, and unlikely to be replicated at the same level, it's little wonder that it might be perceived as "strange"!


----------



## chesapeake bay (Aug 3, 2015)

For me it would be the Grosse Fugue op 133. I have a few recordings but I think the Tokyo String Quartet is my favorite






And if you haven't read it yet "The Classical Style: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven" by Charles Rosen is an excellent introduction to what made those three composers what they were.


----------



## Larkenfield (Jun 5, 2017)

I would hesitate to use the word “strange” to describe some of Beethoven’s later works. To the historian or critic it might seem literally accurate, but I do not find it satisfying or aesthetically pleasing in meaning because there are too many ordinary things in life that could simply be considered “strange”. In some of Beethoven’s later works he seems to be in a world of his own and cut off from ordinary reality because of his deafness and without his ability to hear outwardly what he was hearing inwardly inside his head—and that condition had been going on for years, perhaps fueling his imagination or expanding his consciousness along mystical lines. His writing seems so far beyond the boundaries of the known universe that I doubt if he could ever have imagined that anyone else could possibly understand his state of mind. How could the word “strange,” or any one word, possibly cover that entire range of experience? So I don’t view these works as “strange” but more logically unfathomable, transcendental or tremendously expanded spiritually--anything other than the bland word “strange” that could mean 1,000,001 things within the ordinary context of daily life.


----------



## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

KenOC said:


> Oxford defines "strange": "Unusual or surprising in a way that is unsettling or hard to understand: Not previously visited, seen, or encountered; unfamiliar or alien."
> 
> Since a work of genius is almost by definition unique, totally new in some way, and unlikely to be replicated at the same level, it's little wonder that it might be perceived as "strange"!


This is reasonable, but I suspect it falls short of Bloom's meaning.

The works of art the world has deemed "great" are not merely unique or "strange" as objects. We feel it as an essential aspect of their greatness that they open our consciousness to the inherent strangeness of existence, the ultimate mystery of human life and death. The ways in which they take us to levels of experience we can't adequately express but can recognize, and for which we reach for words like "spiritual" and "sublime," can be approached in terms of objective artistic forms and procedures, but never quite accounted for.

Great art not only does what art has never done, but "boldly goes where no one has gone before," and convinces us for a moment that we're at home there. It may even teach us that, indeed, we are.


----------



## larold (Jul 20, 2017)

Beethoven was deaf at the end of his life, meaning the relationship to him and his compositions was completely cerebral. There is some question whether humans had advanced far enough by the 1820s to have developed what we today call our "mind's eye," or the ability to vision something that wasn't tangible. Beethoven probably had that quality, I would guess. I would say the greatest example of Beethoven's late music is the final movement of his Piano Sonata No. 32 which begins quietly and then becomes a journey almost beyond human experience. His Sonatas 28, 30 and 31 all lead up to this but nothing in them can prepare a person for the finale of No. 32. I would call it the closest music I know to an experience beyond the earth and its boundaries.


----------



## Heck148 (Oct 27, 2016)

Woodduck said:


> The ways in which they take us to levels of experience we can't adequately express but can recognize,............


yes, most definitely....great art seems to express that which most people "feel", but cannot articulate clearly or eloquently...but we can certainly recognize when somebody else expresses it so convincingly.....so it isn't always about new, or unexplored, but very often contains much that is common, and shared experience. this may be expressed in a new or different way, but the "commonality" of it gets our attention most effectively.


----------



## Josquin13 (Nov 7, 2017)

I don't feel entirely comfortable with the word "strange" either. It suggests elusiveness or something oddly out of place. While there may be an element of truth here--as it can be "strange" to be human (and perhaps Beethoven's influence on later composer's was indeed translated into music that is odd and elusive), I don't think that's the core reason why people are drawn to listen to Beethoven's late String Quartets or Piano Sonatas. It's the opposite really--that we feel an overwhelming sense of discovery. Not only does his late music connect to us in a very personal way, to each of our own individual journeys or experiences, but we also sense and recognize that what's being expressed in this music is part of a collective universal, shared human experience. In other words, he's defining what it means to be human.

Even the Grosse fugue has an immediate impact. We may not like it, we may not feel comfortable listening it, but its emotional & psychological truths are unmistakable, unavoidable. Although, with that said, I do think that his adagio movement from the 'Hammerclavier' Piano Sonata, or the String Quartets Op. 127, 130, 131, and most especially Op. 132--arguably Beethoven's most profound utterance--serve as better examples of what I'm trying to say.

For me, the great conductor Eugen Jochum understood & defined Beethoven and his music more perceptively (and eloquently) than most in a brief essay that Jochum wrote for his Concertgebouw Beethoven Symphony cycle back in the 1960s: an essay that found its way onto the back covers of the old Phillips LPs, but inexplicably wasn't included in the Decca CD box set reissue. Here's what Jochum wrote,

"What the New Testament is for Christians, Beethoven could be--and even is to a larger extent--for those who strive after the humanitarian ethos. Is it perhaps that the human being is the subject of all he has to say?

The human being who in Bach lived, believed, suffered, and died sheltered but also confined within the strictly defined bounds of Protestant Christian existence, humble, bound to a God in an objective order. The human being who in Mozart already enjoyed full freedom in the seraphic beauty of a perfect harmony, almost innocent, in spite of every refinement touching only in 'Don Giovanni' the dark substratum of the world, hubris and destruction, but in the confrontation of forces returning to the law.

But what is the human being in Beethoven? He is the entity entirely filled with consciousness of himself, the hazards of his existence, his suffering, his nobility, and his greatness. This man Beethoven, who was he?

Certainly no hero in the sense of the martial victor, no Achilles, radiant even in downfall, but a man pursued by the demons of his inmost being, seaching for freedom, greatness, and above all love. And all wrung under the most adverse circumstances from humiliation and misery, and in the unimaginable lonliness to which deafness condemned him, without ever the sound of a loving voice to break this barrier.*

As 'God gave him the power to say what he suffered,' he could only put all that white hot emotion, mute suffering, humiliation, and intimations of an ineffable sublimity into musical form. And so he transmuted in the forge of his suffering the human means of expression into musical form, relentlessly wrought into the most exact design. And then the miracle happens, that in this most pure, virile music all that stirs the heart of a human being is turned to speech; suffering, grief, lonliness, but also, and above all, the indescribable sweetness of consolation, happiness, dance, ecstasy carried to the bounds of mystical transport; from the Virgilian secular piety of the 'Pastoral' symphony and the 'Concalescent's hymn of thanks to the Godhead,' of the String Quartet Op. 132, to the visionary perception of a Father beyond the stars and the devotion of the 'Missa Solemnis.' The entire span of the human heart and spirit is in that work, perceptible, communicable. There is appeal and reassurance, the courage to shoulder one's own destiny in the faith in the indestructible, invincible dignity which makes human beings what they are.

That is Beethoven for me.

[*That he enjoyed a social position among the Viennese nobility which was exceptional for a musician of the day alters nothing. To him this position was a mere veneer, more or less arrogated, and at the same time despised. Nor was there solace in his many erotic episodes, none of which led to the marriage he so earnestly desired. They only deepen the shadows in the picture of this Goyaesque life.]"


----------



## millionrainbows (Jun 23, 2012)

I think Beethoven became OCD because of his deafness, but instead of hearing "voices" he heard musical patterns, many of them being of a repeating, obsessive nature. The Grosse Fugue is a prime example.

Also, like in the late F minor quartet, the music became curiously animated, as if it were alive, as entities or beings of some sort in his mind (and mine). Is insanity contagious? There is a "cartoon-like" quality to some of it, as if the music were a physical gesture embodying movement, a living force. This is pure idea, pure concept, pure in its Platonic "Is"-ness.


----------



## EdwardBast (Nov 25, 2013)

larold said:


> *Beethoven was deaf at the end of his life, meaning the relationship to him and his compositions was completely cerebral.* There is some question whether humans had advanced far enough by the 1820s to have developed what we today call our "mind's eye," or the ability to vision something that wasn't tangible. Beethoven probably had that quality, I would guess. I would say the greatest example of Beethoven's late music is the final movement of his Piano Sonata No. 32 which begins quietly and then becomes a journey almost beyond human experience. His Sonatas 28, 30 and 31 all lead up to this but nothing in them can prepare a person for the finale of No. 32. I would call it the closest music I know to an experience beyond the earth and its boundaries.


Beethoven's deafness didn't prevent him from hearing his music. Humans in the 1820s had the same ability to use the mind's eye and ear as "modern" homo sapiens. Even those who think the bicameral mind existed in modern humans believe its breakdown occurred in ancient times, not in the 19thc.


----------



## hammeredklavier (Feb 18, 2018)

KenOC said:


> Oxford defines "strange": "Unusual or surprising in a way that is unsettling or hard to understand: Not previously visited, seen, or encountered; unfamiliar or alien."


Sometimes, with Beethoven's late works, _"the hardest thing to understand"_ is _"why people find them especially hard to understand"_.

"elegant symmetries":




[ D B D G ~ A B C E - G F# ~ ] [ D B D G ~ A B C F# - F# G ] ...




[ G - A - D D D D G ~ ] [ G - A - D D D D B ~ ] ...




Op.130/v: a "Haydnesque" adagio movement:













Yes, there is the Grosse fuge, but Beethoven wasn't even the only/first to use dissonance in a striking/unique way for expression in a string ensemble work.


----------



## progmatist (Apr 3, 2021)

EdwardBast said:


> Beethoven's deafness didn't prevent him from hearing his music. Humans in the 1820s had the same ability to use the mind's eye and ear as "modern" homo sapiens. Even those who think the bicameral mind existed in modern humans believe its breakdown occurred in ancient times, not in the 19thc.


The best composers have music playing in their head, then write it down note for note. I would harken back to Mozart and the Miserere legend. The Pope kept Allegri's Miserere under lock and key, because he felt it was too beautiful for mere mortals. He would allow it to be performed only on Christmas Eve. When Mozart was 6, he attended one such performance. He went home and wrote it down note for note from memory. The cat was out of the bag so to speak.


----------



## EdwardBast (Nov 25, 2013)

progmatist said:


> The best composers have music playing in their head, then write it down note for note. I would harken back to Mozart and the Miserere legend. The Pope kept Allegri's Miserere under lock and key, because he felt it was too beautiful for mere mortals. He would allow it to be performed only on Christmas Eve. When Mozart was 6, he attended one such performance. He went home and wrote it down note for note from memory. The cat was out of the bag so to speak.


Sigh. This is a series of myths long since debunked. Every assertion about Mozart is false. The transcription of the Miserere took place at a different age and required two hearings and an unspecified amount of time futzing around on a keyboard to reproduce.


----------



## Manxfeeder (Oct 19, 2010)

EdwardBast said:


> Sigh. This is a series of myths long since debunked. Every assertion about Mozart is false. The transcription of the Miserere took place at a different age and required two hearings and an unspecified amount of time futzing around on a keyboard to reproduce.


Say it ain't so, Joe! Like Huxley defining a tragedy: the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.


----------



## Couchie (Dec 9, 2010)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miserere_(Allegri)

According to the popular story (backed by family letters), fourteen-year-old Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was visiting Rome when he first heard the piece during the Wednesday service. Later that day, he wrote it down entirely from memory, returning to the Chapel that Friday to make minor corrections. Less than three months after hearing the song and transcribing it, Mozart had gained fame for the work and was summoned back to Rome by Pope Clement XIV, who showered praise on him for his feat of musical genius and awarded him the Chivalric Order of the Golden Spur on July 4, 1770.


----------



## hammeredklavier (Feb 18, 2018)




----------



## EdwardBast (Nov 25, 2013)

Couchie said:


> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miserere_(Allegri)
> 
> According to the popular story (backed by family letters), fourteen-year-old Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was visiting Rome when he first heard the piece during the Wednesday service. Later that day, he wrote it down entirely from memory, returning to the Chapel that Friday to make minor corrections. Less than three months after hearing the song and transcribing it, Mozart had gained fame for the work and was summoned back to Rome by Pope Clement XIV, who showered praise on him for his feat of musical genius and awarded him the Chivalric Order of the Golden Spur on July 4, 1770.


I would stick to the letters and forget about the popular story. Agents in any age promote artists in similar ways; Miracles sell, professionalism and smart working methods don't. I see no reason to think Mozart would approach the problem of transcribing the Allegri any differently than he would the problem of getting his own musical ideas onto paper. If that's so, then he would likely have taken down the principal voices - melody and bass (or perhaps some figures to indicate harmonies) - and plotted the overall structure on his first hearing. Then he would have retreated to his room to play what he had at the keyboard while working out a logical solution for the inner voices or whatever else he might have missed. He would check that against his memory of the performance and, for all we know, against what he remembered from hearing other pirated versions of the Miserere - Mozart wasn't the only person with ears who wanted to transcribe it, and there were apparently pirated editions circulating at the time. After he had worked out a good approximation, he would fold up his sketch and return with it concealed on his person to hear the work again while penciling in corrections and notes to himself. Then he would retreat once again to his room to work the corrections into a final version, repeating the previous day's process at the keyboard.


----------



## golfer72 (Jan 27, 2018)

I remember listening to the Beethoven late sonatas years ago before i really knew anything about his different "periods". I thought they were terrific and had an almost spiritual quality to them. This was reinforced when i started to read about them and his different periods. The fact that i felt this totally umprompted added validity to the spiritual aspect for me.


----------



## larold (Jul 20, 2017)

the mental illness section, late in Missa Solemnis -- one of his last works -- probably qualifies as strange.


----------



## Kreisler jr (Apr 21, 2021)

larold said:


> the mental illness section, late in Missa Solemnis -- one of his last works -- probably qualifies as strange.


Do you mean the "plea for inward and outward peace" (Bitte um inneren und äußeren Frieden)? I have never heard referred to this as "mental illness" and I don't find it appropriate.


----------



## Kreisler jr (Apr 21, 2021)

I am not sure, I think the first late Beethoven (besides the 9th symphony and Missa solemnis) were the quartets 127 and 135 and the sonata 106. I didn't get much out the sonata, way too long and complicated. But the last string quartet was not a big problem and neither, I think, was the op.127. As a beginner I was simply used to some stretches of music that had to be endured "between the good melodies" and the Eroica was tougher in this respect tha op.135 despite the more austere sound of a quartet.
A year later or so I heard the orchestral version of op.131 with Bernstein and was blown away, immediately appealing music. I heard Moonlight/Pathetique/Appassionata before any late sonata but I don't think I heard any early or middle quartet before several of the late quartets.
The reputation of the late works seems to me rather exaggerated although it is not totally wrong. For some reason, the 9th symphony that is every bit as late as the sonatas and quartets is not deemed too difficult. Overall, there are about a handful of movements that can be uncommonly tough for a listener (op.133, finale of op.106, maybe the first movements of op.130 and 132 etc.), some slow movements are very long but usually emotionally/melodically very appealing. The oddities in detail would hardly be realized by a newbie. 
Overall I think there is a continuity. As the cliché goes, the late work of an artist pushes features to extremes that had been characteristic already in earlier works. It certainly does fit late Beethoven. The expansion and innovative use of forms is mostly cranked up a bit, and so are the contrasts of all kinds.


----------



## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

Late Beethoven is classical. The music is a reaction from Rossini and Weber, a return to the aesthetic ideals of Mozart and Haydn and Bach. There are fugues, there are minuets, there are slow movements in the style of baroque sarabandes and allemandes. Counterpoint comes first, not harmony -- the dissonances resulting from contrapuntal clashes remain.


----------



## Kreisler jr (Apr 21, 2021)

I don't think there is a contradiction between late Beethoven being classical in a plausible ("technical") sense (as shown by Rosen etc.) and very unconventional and extraordinary. But I dislike artifical halos that the music doesn't need at all.


----------



## Knorf (Jan 16, 2020)

progmatist said:


> The best composers have music playing in their head, then write it down note for note.


This is false, a fantasy with no basis in truth. While it is true that the greatest musical imaginations can create a tremendous amount of music in their head, the art of composing requires the further reworking and refinement of those ideas, either on paper or at a keyboard, or most likely both.

It's not true at all that Mozart never sketched music, nor wrote drafts, but conceived it all in his head. He absolutely did make use of sketches! We have many sketches and drafts and exercises by Mozart, despite Constanze's effort to destroy them all.

And Beethoven famously made extensive use of sketches and drafts!


----------



## Kreisler jr (Apr 21, 2021)

We also have accounts of Beethoven using the piano for composing even when he was mostly deaf. And of course he had thousands of sketches. I never believed that the deafness had such a big impact on his music


----------



## Knorf (Jan 16, 2020)

Pertinent to this thread, even though it was left unfinished, Edward W. Said's _On Late Style_ is worth a read.

Edward Rothstein's excellent review of this book:
https://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/16/books/review/16rothstein.html


----------



## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

Is it really the case that composers hear the music in their head and write it down? It doesn’t leave any room at all for the performers to be creative! Best give the score to a computer to play.


----------



## Knorf (Jan 16, 2020)

Mandryka said:


> Is it really the case that composers hear the music in their head and write it down?


Absolutely it is the case. Source: am a composer, with publications, paid commission, awards, etc.

But there are several caveats. First, if I want anyone else to hear it, I have to get the music out somehow. Writing it down allows others to add their own creativity, and great performers always add something unexpected. I love that! It's the most transcendent component of the composition process: allowing someone else in part to make your music theirs.

Secondly, no matter how good a composer is with their memory and ability to audiate music (i.e., hear it in their head), as I wrote above, the art of composing still demands further working out, whether on paper, at the computer, or at the piano, or all three.

If you just want to argue that any music you "only" hear in your in head is by definition not really music, but rather the memory of music, well I'm not going to disagree. But I'm also not going to go there, because that discussion will derail this thread.


----------



## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

What interests me is that when you publish a score in standard notation, you know that you’re releasing it into a community where there’s a tradition of performer discretion - about rubato, about which dynamic and tempo markings to follow, about repeats, about tuning, indeed about every aspect of the music except relative pitch. 

So on publishing a score there is immediately a gap between the “work” and the sounds in the composer’s head, if indeed the composer hears the work in his imagination. I want to say that what the composer imagines has a much more complex and much less tight relation to the work. 

But as you say, this is irrelevant to the subject of the thread, though IMO fundamental and difficult.


----------



## Parley (May 29, 2021)

Couchie said:


> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miserere_(Allegri)
> 
> According to the popular story (backed by family letters), fourteen-year-old Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was visiting Rome when he first heard the piece during the Wednesday service. Later that day, he wrote it down entirely from memory, returning to the Chapel that Friday to make minor corrections. Less than three months after hearing the song and transcribing it, Mozart had gained fame for the work and was summoned back to Rome by Pope Clement XIV, who showered praise on him for his feat of musical genius and awarded him the Chivalric Order of the Golden Spur on July 4, 1770.


You will find the best explanation of this legend in Jan Swafford's Mozart.

If you read Andre Previn's book 'No Minor Chords' you will find he used pretty much the same technique when a young Hollywood arranger. Not in the same class as WAM but same principles


----------



## Sondersdorf (Aug 5, 2020)

Something was discussed on this thread that has always interested me, and it is relevant to the deaf Beethoven. Just how important is it to a composer to do a cross-check of what he has notated, either on keyboard or other instruments? How important is hearing the composed music during the process?

At one extreme we have the mythical Mozart perfectly transcribing the music flowing into his head from the heavens. At the other extreme we have the "composer-wanna-be" who noodles on a keyboard until they hear something they like and then struggles to get it written in standard notation. (Gosh, there is even software that does that for you these days, right?)

I expect that composers come down on many different places on this spectrum, and it is really more than a linear universe. I would appreciate hearing what anyone knows about this, first-hand, second-hand or even by rumor.


----------



## fbjim (Mar 8, 2021)

Isn't it relatively common among even highly skilled composers to have works with deficiencies in orchestration because the composer never actually heard the work performed?

I frankly give very little credence to "late beethoven sounds so weird because he was deaf!!!" stuff-maybe I'm *slightly* amenable to the arigment that the infamous metronome marks are a result of this, since rhythm is the hardest thing to get down mentally (have you ever heard a song in your head and found that the actual recording you're thinking of is at a significantly different tempo?)


----------



## Enthusiast (Mar 5, 2016)

If Beethoven's late works are as they are because he was deaf then how come they are so absolutely marvellous?


----------



## Sondersdorf (Aug 5, 2020)

fbjim said:


> (have you ever heard a song in your head and found that the actual recording you're thinking of is at a significantly different tempo?)


I hate to admit that I calibrate with the standard disco bpm at 120.


----------



## progmatist (Apr 3, 2021)

Knorf said:


> This is false, a fantasy with no basis in truth. While it is true that the greatest musical imaginations can create a tremendous amount of music in their head, the art of composing requires the further reworking and refinement of those ideas, either on paper or at a keyboard, or most likely both.
> 
> It's not true at all that Mozart never sketched music, nor wrote drafts, but conceived it all in his head. He absolutely did make use of sketches! We have many sketches and drafts and exercises by Mozart, despite Constanze's effort to destroy them all.
> 
> And Beethoven famously made extensive use of sketches and drafts!


I didn't mean to imply Beethoven, Mozart and others never did any of the work involved in composing. I'm simply saying there's a major difference between composing based on music playing in one's head, and simply noodling around on the keyboard, happening upon phrases which work.

*EDIT:* Perhaps a more apt example would be one of the most prolific rock songwriters, Kerry Livgren of Kansas. In the 70s, he had no idea how to read or write music, thus no way of sketching anything out. He would say to one fellow band member "play this part this way," to another "play that part that way," and so on. It all came together, forming one of the most impressive bodies of work in rock music history.


----------



## Bruckner Anton (Mar 10, 2016)

It is hard to make the choice. Op.131 could best represent his late works and the most avant-garde one is the op.133. Beethoven's late works has a lot of unique features that worth notice. Here are just a few examples: 
1. the movement layout
2. the tonal relationship between themes or movements (such as the interval of third)
3. the use of fugue or fugato
4. the use of variation forms


----------



## Kreisler jr (Apr 21, 2021)

Bruckner Anton said:


> It is hard to make the choice. Op.131 could best represent his late works and the most avant-garde one is the op.133. Beethoven's late works has a lot of unique features that worth notice. Here are just a few examples:
> 1. the movement layout


For this op.131 is the most striking example of this but an exception. Anything else is found in middle Beethoven, op.27+28 [edit: of course op.26 and 27, op.28 is most regular] are almost as uncommon in their sequence of movements as the late sonatas, op.130 has roughly the divertimento form (like the op.3, the septet op.20 or Mozart) and the addition of a second short "marcia" in op.132 is not more daring than e.g the Pastoral symphony.



> 2. the tonal relationship between themes or movements (such as the interval of third)


This gets more frequent in the late works but there are several earlier examples, e.g. the C major Waldstein sonata has the second subject in E major, the c minor 3rd piano concerto has the slow movement in E major (and a section of the final, I think).



> 3. the use of fugue or fugato
> 4. the use of variation forms


Both is not as frequent but still quite common in earlier/middle Beethoven; the Eroica even has two fugato sections (and the "schoolbook counterpoint" with the theme bass at the beginning) within a variation movement.

So, most of them are points for continuity, not for exceptionality of the late style.


----------



## Kreisler jr (Apr 21, 2021)

fbjim said:


> Isn't it relatively common among even highly skilled composers to have works with deficiencies in orchestration because the composer never actually heard the work performed?


I don't know. I know that Mahler (with a huge orchestral apparatus) did make adjustments in instrumentation after some rehearsals or premieres. Not sure about any other such cases.
There are only about three late orchestral works of Beethoven. He heard well enough probably even for the premieres of the 7th and 8th. So is the 9th fundamentally different or "deficient" in instrumentation than the earlier pieces? One also has to keep in mind the changing wind and brass even during Beethoven's lifetime and that the winds would be doubled/tripled if there was a large body of strings.


----------



## EdwardBast (Nov 25, 2013)

Mandryka said:


> So on publishing a score there is immediately a gap between the "work" and the sounds in the composer's head, if indeed the composer hears the work in his imagination. I want to say that what the composer imagines has a much more complex and much less tight relation to the work.


You're describing the normal state of affairs everyone knows and accepts as if it's somehow surprising or contrary to composers' conceptions. The composer relates to performers in the same way a dramatist relates to actors. Playwrights write words and don't provide more than general hints about inflections, pauses, and the countless nuances of speech and gesture necessary to give them life. The playwright _might_ imagine some sort of ideal performance (probably not), but all of the unwritten stuff is the actor's job. Same with music. The composer provides a text with as much nuance as historical convention has decided is reasonable, and the players do the rest, contributing a thousand little nuances and interpretive decisions. As Knorf describes, and just as in stage drama, the performers can surprise and delight the composer by interpreting an abstract line in their own personal and imaginative voice, sometimes finding substance the composer himself didn't know was there. That "gap" isn't a problem, it's room for ingenuity and imagination.



Kreisler jr said:


> We also have accounts of Beethoven using the piano for composing even when he was mostly deaf. And of course he had thousands of sketches. I never believed that the deafness had such a big impact on his music


We have accounts of him pounding the piano and screaming like a banshee. He also used numerous amplification technologies, like ear trumpets with a metal stylus pressed into the piano's sounding board. I think KenOC is up on this 19thc high-tech.


----------



## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

EdwardBast said:


> You're describing the normal state of affairs everyone knows and accepts as if it's somehow surprising or contrary to composers' conceptions.


My real point was that if it really is



Knorf said:


> Absolutely it is the case.


that



Mandryka said:


> composers hear the music in their head and write it down


more needs to be said. Some composers may hear something in their head of course . . . but what they hear internally relates to what they create, and how what they create relates to a physical performance, is not completely clear to me (and it isn't in the analogous question about drama either.)


----------



## EdwardBast (Nov 25, 2013)

Mandryka said:


> more needs to be said. Some composers may hear something in their head of course . . . but what they hear internally relates to what they create, and *how what they create relates to a physical performance, is not completely clear to me (and it isn't in the analogous question about drama either.)*


Of course it's not clear. It's not clear because it's not determined by the composer, unless the composer is also the performer. That's the fundamental nature of performing arts and it's why they're called performing arts.  Composer provides script, performer creates a physical performance from it. Answering your query would in each case require interviewing the performer, because that's who (normatively) determines how what the composer creates relates to actual sounds.


----------



## Bruckner Anton (Mar 10, 2016)

Kreisler jr said:


> For this op.131 is the most striking example of this but an exception. Anything else is found in middle Beethoven, op.27+28 [edit: of course op.26 and 27, op.28 is most regular] are almost as uncommon in their sequence of movements as the late sonatas, op.130 has roughly the divertimento form (like the op.3, the septet op.20 or Mozart) and the addition of a second short "marcia" in op.132 is not more daring than e.g the Pastoral symphony.
> 
> This gets more frequent in the late works but there are several earlier examples, e.g. the C major Waldstein sonata has the second subject in E major, the c minor 3rd piano concerto has the slow movement in E major (and a section of the final, I think).
> 
> ...


You are right. I should avoid using the word "unique", it is not accurate. Also, it is not difficult to find polyphonic sections in large scale compositions such as a symphony. What I want to express is the growing trend/increase in frequency or scale of certain things in his late works comparing with his earlier ones.


----------



## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

Nbsmnxb bamjxbaan


----------



## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

EdwardBast said:


> Of course it's not clear. It's not clear because it's not determined by the composer, unless the composer is also the performer. That's the fundamental nature of performing arts and it's why they're called performing arts.  Composer provides script, performer creates a physical performance from it. Answering your query would in each case require interviewing the performer, because that's who (normatively) determines how what the composer creates relates to actual sounds.


What is determined by the composer? On the "music in the head" hypothesis, the music is _not_ determined by the composer. In fact I think music in the head of the composer is a read herring. If there is music in the head of the composer, it has nothing intrinsic to do with the thing the composer creates.


----------



## SanAntone (May 10, 2020)

Mandryka said:


> What is determined by the composer? On the "music in the head" hypothesis, the music is _not_ determined by the composer. In fact I think music in the head of the composer is a read herring. If there is music in the head of the composer, it has nothing intrinsic to do with the thing the composer creates.


I take it you are not a composer?

The "music in the composer's head" is the same music he finally notates in the score (as best he can) and what is used for every performance of the work. The specifics of an interpretation of the score remain somewhat fluid, however, offering myriad options to performers, which are impossible for a composer to completely anticipate and account for in his score.


----------



## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

SanAntone said:


> I take it you are not a composer?


Don't be unpleasant.


----------



## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

I'll deal with your post one step at a time. First this assertion



SanAntone said:


> The "music in the composer's head" is the same music he finally notates in the score (as best he can)


Do you think this was true for French baroque unmeasured music? Or all that baroque music for keyboard which doesn't specify the type of keyboard? That bit in Schumann where he wrote _So rasch wie möglich_ and then _Schneller _and then _Noch schneller_?

Not to mention Plus-Minus, or Four6, or The Great Learning . . .

One of the things a composer does is decide what matters so much to his work that he needs to specify it, and what can be left to the discretion of the performers. It's perfectly possible that what matters to the composer is not sufficient to generate an private mental run through.

I will subsequently argue (using a modification of The Private Language Argument) that, even when the composer does have a private mental run through, that does not determine the meaning of the work he created.


----------



## SanAntone (May 10, 2020)

Mandryka said:


> I'll deal with your post one step at a time. First this assertion
> 
> Do you think this was true for French baroque unmeasured music? Or all that baroque music for keyboard which doesn't specify the type of keyboard? That bit in Schumann where he wrote _So rasch wie möglich_ and then _Schneller _and then _Noch schneller_?
> 
> ...


I think it is true for any music conceived in a composer's head and then written down in some form of notation. A composer probably has an idealized version of his work he hears in his head, but which may never be achieved in an actual performance, even if he is the performer or conductor. When dealing with venue, instrument, and human limitations ideal performances are usually not possible.

The "meaning of the work" is a vague concept best left up to an individual perceiver to contemplate. Or not, which is usually my approach.


----------



## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

SanAntone said:


> I think it is true for any music conceived in a composer's head and then written down in some form of notation. A composer probably has an idealized version of his work he hears in his head, but which may never be achieved in an actual performance, even if he is the performer or conductor.


I doubt this is always or indeed often the case, but I don't want to argue it except for two points:

1. It is a contingent, empirical claim
2. IMO it has nothing to do with the meaning of the score, even if true, just as the meaning of a phrase is not constituted by mental representations.



SanAntone said:


> The "meaning of the work" is a vague concept best left up to an individual perceiver to contemplate. Or not, which is usually my approach.


No it's not vague, the meaning of the work is constituted by the use that the musical community makes of it, in particular, how the community of musicians turn the score into sound. This is analogous to the way that the meaning of a phrase in natural language is constituted by its use by the community of speakers.


----------



## SanAntone (May 10, 2020)

Mandryka said:


> I doubt this is always or indeed often the case, but I don't want to argue it except for two points:
> 
> 1. It is a contingent, empirical claim
> 2. IMO it has nothing to do with the meaning of the score, even if true, just as the meaning of a phrase is not constituted by mental representations.


Having composed myself I can tell you that first a composer imagines/hears music in his head and then he notates it. This is not a "claim" it is a fact. The meaning of the score is nothing more than the materials used to offer a musician what he needs to realize the music. Unless the music has a text, it has only a vague narrative aspect which not everyone will hear or agree on.



> No it's not vague, the meaning of the work is constituted by the use that the musical community makes of it, in particular, how the community of musicians turn the score into sound. This is analogous to the way that the meaning of a phrase in natural language is constituted by its use by the community of speakers.


Music is far vaguer than natural language, open to many different interpretations of a composer's intent or meaning. The phrase in English, "I am hungry" is not vague. Conveying that simple phrase in music so that it would be as obvious as the English would be a huge challenge, if not impossible.


----------



## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

SanAntone said:


> Music is far vaguer than natural language, open to many different interpretations of a composer's intent or meaning. The phrase in English, "I am hungry" is not vague. .


This is not the place for a discussion of this complex matter.


----------



## PeterAccettola (Jun 5, 2021)

Certainly the Late String Quartets. I have The Emerson String Quartet on DG label.
But his late piano sonatas are also revolutionary, to use your word.
When, for example, I listen to The Hammerklavier, # 29 in B flat, op. 106 it sounds like he has really transcended the forms of composition, and is now just making pure music as if in a state of grace, so to speak. It is really tremendous !
Then there is the 3rd movement in the same sonata, witch goes in to some inner space for about 21 minutes. I have never heard anything like it. And when you think of when it was composed it just takes your breath away.
And then the 9th Symphony is such a magnificent and unique work in many respects. At least to my ears.
Just some of my thoughts anyway.


----------



## Sondersdorf (Aug 5, 2020)

Relevant to the question of whether a composer just writes down what he hears in his head is this quote from 2018 concerning Prokofiev's Symphony No. 1



EdwardBast said:


> To sort out some of the background on the "Classical" Symphony that was confused earlier in the thread:
> 
> Jeremy Marchant had it exactly right back in 2011: The impetus for the symphony was tied up with Prokofiev's desire to compose away from the piano. Why did he want to do this? As he explained it, he usually composed at the piano but had noticed that "thematic material composed without the piano was often better in quality." He also believed, and the symphony seems to bear this out, that "a composition written this way would probably have more transparent orchestral colors."
> 
> ...


----------



## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

Deleted because I remembered this



Mandryka said:


> This is not the place for a discussion of this complex matter.


----------



## hammeredklavier (Feb 18, 2018)

Mandryka said:


> Deleted because I remembered this


Did you type something like:

awefabnwfkljbawjefb

again?


----------

