# Were Beethoven and Schubert the rebirth and death of music? Atonal excluded



## Swosh (Feb 25, 2018)

Schubert: "What else is there to do after Beethoven?"

Bach will always be the god of music for me. Schubert, Beethoven and Mozart were all miracles.

However, I think music and composers slowly declined after Beethoven and Schubert. Mahler was a giant composer but the last giant composer was probably Reger in the late romantic. 

Did Beethoven/Schubert tower so high that their height is unreachable? The amount of leaps Beethoven took was incredible. 

Just a thought lol


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## Phil loves classical (Feb 8, 2017)

No way. Stravinsky Rite of Spring, Prokofiev's War Sonatas, Bartok's String Quartet 4, and others are masterpieces that took things beyond common practice at the time, without sacrificing anything to me. Even Berlioz and Liszt wrote stuff that is quite amazing. I think the more listeners are accustomed to chromaticism, the more doors are opened up. I was content to see Mozart and Beethoven as the "greatest", and incomparable before also when I was hesitant to expand my scope.


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## tdc (Jan 17, 2011)

Not at all in my view. 

It depends on one's perspective and taste in music. Personally I prefer many 20th century composers such as Ravel, Debussy and Bartok (none of which are "atonal") to Beethoven or Schubert. Even if we are using the Romantic era as a cut off point in this discussion I prefer Brahms to them as well.

So I see Beethoven and Schubert as the less interesting ones that are between the earlier periods of J.S. Bach and Mozart and the late Romantics and Modernists.

I'm not sure why Reger is even in this discussion.


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## DaveM (Jun 29, 2015)

Some would say that Bach and Mozart towered to unreachable heights. Much as I love Schubert’s work, I don’t rate him as high as the first three greats. There was never to be another Beethoven, but rather than his being a negative factor for future classical music, he actually inspired many great composers who followed. There are many examples, but I’ve always found Brahms to be the most dramatic since it is well known that he avoided composing symphonies and concertos until he felt they would be somewhere close to the level of Beethoven.

Classical music didn’t decline after Beethoven. The great composers that followed Beethoven knew they couldn’t emulate him so they created their own new music, some of it, in its own right, as great as Beethoven.


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## MarkW (Feb 16, 2015)

No .


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## Guest (Aug 7, 2018)

MarkW said:


> No .


Beat me to it.........


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## PlaySalieri (Jun 3, 2012)

No it did not decline - it evolved - not into something better of course - but fortunately there were in the 19th and 20th always great composers to carry forward the musical baton from Beethoven etc. Had there not been a Mendelssohn, Schumann, Grieg Tchaik, Brahms - let us say 20 notable composers from the 19th and 20thC - then I might be inclined to say it declined.

As for post 1950 - I dont know what to say so will leave it at that.


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## millionrainbows (Jun 23, 2012)

Swosh said:


> Did Beethoven/Schubert tower so high that their height is unreachable? The amount of leaps Beethoven took was incredible.


No, there will never be another "history" like "history." Too bad they quit making it. Meanwhile, back in the real world...


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## SONNET CLV (May 31, 2014)

And here I thought it all ended with Palestrina!


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## millionrainbows (Jun 23, 2012)

Things are too fast now; too much TV and movies and internet; too many CDs, records, and music files; too many people. 

No, there will never be another Beethoven, because nobody on the internet would be able to agree that he is great. The "age of heroes" is dead anyway; we'd have to destroy him by involving him in some sort of scandal or character assassination.


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## aleazk (Sep 30, 2011)

So, with the exception of some 'miracles' after him, music basically ended with Bach? Gimme a fu**ing break, that's one of the silliest things I read here, and I have read plenty of them in all these years.


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## aleazk (Sep 30, 2011)

SONNET CLV said:


> And here I thought it all ended with Palestrina!


Wow, that's really avant-garde. After, Leonin, and with the exception of the miracle of Perotin, music ended for me.


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## Enthusiast (Mar 5, 2016)

It could be that music became less about one towering genius at a time and more about a more diverse group of towering geniuses. Certainly, I think there was a flowering that is evident in the music of the 20th Century but probably started around the time of Brahms and Wagner, both of whom were as great as anything that had come before.


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## Forss (May 12, 2017)

The main issue here, I think, is the introduction of industry, which affected even the classical music scene. Wittgenstein famously tolerated nothing later than Brahms, and even in Brahms, he once said, "I can begin to hear the sound of machinery."


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## larold (Jul 20, 2017)

_ Did Beethoven/Schubert tower so high that their height is unreachable?_

Of course not for the entirety of the Romantic movement was yet to be realized. Beethoven and Schubert began romance in music but hardly finished it.

Consider just two composers -- Berlioz and his Fantastic Symphony and Wagner and the Ring cycle -- to see just how much space remained to be explored in just the Romantic 19th century after those two.

I think Wagner perhaps was the final genius of Romanticism for composers like Bruckner and Mahler would likely never have happened without his revolutionary methods.

Then the 20th century, with Stravinsky's La Sacre du Printemps and Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire, began another way of looking at music that influenced a century.

This was all quite distant from Beethoven and Schubert.


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## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

Swosh said:


> Schubert: "What else is there to do after Beethoven?"
> 
> Bach will always be the god of music for me. Schubert, Beethoven and Mozart were all miracles.
> 
> ...


I once read a book where the innovations of Beethoven and Schubert where compared. The writer said that if Beethoven was like an explorer who had gotten right up to the edge of an uncharted territory, then Schubert was like one who was already exploring said territory. I can't remember which writer it was, but this has stuck in my mind ever since.

Certainly Schubert was in the know about Beethoven's latest pieces right up until the end. That quote was by Schubert at the premiere of one of the late quartets. Beethoven's influence was there, but so was something else. Much talked about are the wild modulations in the String Quintet, 15th Quartet and Unfinished Symphony. A Schubert trademark pretty much unprecedented in music of this kind.

Schubert's influence cast a long shadow over the 19th century as did Beethoven's. The big difference was that apart from his songs, most of Schubert's music lay unperformed at the time of his death. Later in the century, Eduard Hanslick wrote of Schubert as being very much alive, due to the fact that so many premieres of his music happened as if they where new, but decades after his death. The Unfinished Symphony for example was premiered in 1865. That's one of those exact pieces where Schubert goes deep into uncharted territory. There's such anguish there that I find it almost as disturbing as the most psychopathic music closer to our own times.


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