# What did Beethoven mean?



## KenOC

He said of Weber's opera, " 'Euryanthe' is an accumulation of diminished seventh chords -- all little backdoors!"

I have no idea what this means. Anybody?


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## Mahlerian

Diminished seventh chords have an odd quality because they are symmetrical. One of them can fit into a few keys depending on interpretation, so I believe that he meant that they are "backdoors" in that they can lead out to different places.


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## KenOC

Mahlerian, you mean that a diminished 7th can support modulations to several different keys? Makes sense. BTW there are remarkably few Beethoven quotes that bear on the techniques of music, surprising (to me) since he seemed to take a good deal of pride in his technical prowess.


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## Piwikiwi

KenOC said:


> Mahlerian, you mean that a diminished 7th can support modulations to several different keys? Makes sense. BTW there are remarkably few Beethoven quotes that bear on the techniques of music, surprising (to me) since he seemed to take a good deal of pride in his technical prowess.


Yes, it can support modulation to different keys. Jazz musicians have actually taken stuff like that to another level of crazy weird tonal stuff. They often use the upper structures of a chord to suggest another chord. Like in this song:






Link to the chords

The reason why composers probably don't often talk about the techniques is that it is like a writer talking about grammar; a writer/composer/painter have such a control over the tools that they use that it almost becomes an unconscious process to use it.


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## Il_Penseroso

It was quite common in the first half of the 19th. century that the composers of dramatic music used to dazzle their public by featuring diminished seventh chords whenever they found tense, passion or any source of extraordinary emotions in librettos. It soon turned into a cliché which was considered insipid monotonous or even stupid by many music critics. Eduard Hanslick for example, in his famous review on Tannhäuser, was displeased by Wagner's use of diminished seventh chords in Venusberg and some other scenes of the opera as 'this method has been led into an extreme banality by the modern composers' he said.


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## Dim7

Yep... Schoenberg thought that I have become "banal and effeminate".


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## The Member Who Forgot

It all depends when he said it does it not?
He went mad didn't he?


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## Bridge

The fact that diminished seventh chords are symmetrical and completely homogenous at that (stacks of minor thirds) means that there is no such thing as a diminished ninth chord built with minor thirds alone because the "ninth" is actually the octave. Moreover, because of its perfect symmetry, there is no such thing as an inversion when it comes to diminished seventh chords and really the only thing that determines what note is the tonic is what note is in the bass. Of course, diminished seventh chords can have a strong implied function in a harmonic context and it is not that ridiculous to talk about inversions if the ear anticipates one bass note and gets another. Where it gets crazy, and this took me some time to realize, is that there are only three different dim7 chords because after three chords you have exhausted the chromatic scale. It stands to reason that if diminished seventh chords are chords with a dominant function that resolve to chords with a tonic function that each diminished seventh chord sonority can resolve to four different tonics (basic math, 12/3 = 4). The late romantics abused this useful feature of the diminished chord and often used it as a get out of jail free chord for adventurous modulations which has become somewhat trite and boring.


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## EternalStudent

Bridge said:


> The fact that diminished seventh chords are symmetrical and completely homogenous at that (stacks of minor thirds) means that there is no such thing as a diminished ninth chord built with minor thirds alone because the "ninth" is actually the octave. Moreover, because of its perfect symmetry, there is no such thing as an inversion when it comes to diminished seventh chords and really the only thing that determines what note is the tonic is what note is in the bass. Of course, diminished seventh chords can have a strong implied function in a harmonic context and it is not that ridiculous to talk about inversions if the ear anticipates one bass note and gets another. Where it gets crazy, and this took me some time to realize, is that there are only three different dim7 chords because after three chords you have exhausted the chromatic scale. It stands to reason that if diminished seventh chords are chords with a dominant function that resolve to chords with a tonic function that each diminished seventh chord sonority can resolve to four different tonics (basic math, 12/3 = 4). The late romantics abused this useful feature of the diminished chord and often used it as a get out of jail free chord for adventurous modulations which has become somewhat trite and boring.


Great explenation. I am somewhat conflicted about your last sentence though. While it is true that allot of late romantic, or what i will call "free", music modulates without real use of neighbour and family chords using the diminished chords it does not mean that this is boring or a "get out of free jail chord". It can, of course, mean exactly that but I just see it as an extra "tool" for composers to use.

Overal, the diminished 7th chord is a very easy way to modulate to almost any key (be it close or far). Baroque masters like mozart, handel and bach used it constantly..

When improvising and composing myself I find that far too often I rely on the diminished 7th myself, something which annoys me. It just shows I need to study harder.


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## Ukko

Dim7 said:


> Yep... Schoenberg thought that I have become "banal and effeminate".


Hah. I wonder where he got 'effeminate'.


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## EdwardBast

KenOC said:


> He said of Weber's opera, " 'Euryanthe' is an accumulation of diminished seventh chords -- all little backdoors!"
> 
> I have no idea what this means. Anybody?


The overuse of diminished 7ths, as Il Penseroso points out with the citation of Hanslick, was hackneyed by the mid-nineteenth century. A new set of magic doors came into use thereafter based on altered mediant and submediant relationships. There is a strange kind of symmetry here too. In a major key, the flat-VIb chord (a minor triad built on the flatted 6th degree) can act as a dominant, and in a minor key, the sharp-III# (a major triad built on the sharped 3rd degree) can as well. This sounds complicated but what it amounts to is, taking the example of the keys of E major and C minor: An E major chord can perform a dominant function in the key of C minor, and a C minor chord can perform a dominant function in E major(!) Either could be dominant or tonic in relation to the other! Below is a musical example illustrating this. The first system spells them as common triads. However, I suspect what is "really" going on is better illustrated by the spellings in the second system. (Speculating: One could add a note to each chord to make them altered seventh chords built on the 7th scale degree. So, adding A to the "C minor chord" yields: D#, F-double sharp, A, C; Adding D to the "E major chord" yields B, D, Fb, Ab.)









From Rimsky-Korsakoff on, these relationships were a standard part of the vocabulary of Russian (and probably other) composers.


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## SixFootScowl

KenOC said:


> He said of Weber's opera, " 'Euryanthe' is an accumulation of diminished seventh chords -- all little backdoors!"
> 
> I have no idea what this means. Anybody?


More interesting to me is whether he meant it as a compliment or as a disparaging remark.


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## Dim7

Ukko said:


> Hah. I wonder where he got 'effeminate'.


Probably from my posts.


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## Dim7

Somewhat ironically ATM I am not a huge fan of dim7 chords. Well I'm not a hater either. But they often strike now me as a bit trite way of being "dramatic".


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## Mahlerian

Dim7 said:


> Somewhat ironically ATM I am not a huge fan of dim7 chords. Well I'm not a hater either. But they often strike now me as a bit trite way of being "dramatic".


They're great in a traditional context, but I would only stick one in one of my pieces in a "dramatic" situation as a joke, because they sound ridiculous in any other context.


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## Rik1

EternalStudent said:


> Great explenation. I am somewhat conflicted about your last sentence though. While it is true that allot of late romantic, or what i will call "free", music modulates without real use of neighbour and family chords using the diminished chords it does not mean that this is boring or a "get out of free jail chord". It can, of course, mean exactly that but I just see it as an extra "tool" for composers to use.
> 
> Overal, the diminished 7th chord is a very easy way to modulate to almost any key (be it close or far). Baroque masters like mozart, handel and bach used it constantly..
> 
> When improvising and composing myself I find that far too often I rely on the diminished 7th myself, something which annoys me. It just shows I need to study harder.


I guess like any tool in any medium, overuse gets boring and trite. At a time when lots of composers were suddenly using this tool for everything then of course it becomes cliche and boring. Any harmonic 'dramatic' device used multiple times to do the same trick in one piece of music could sound trite. As a music teacher used to say to me 'don't **** at every post'. At the end of the day it's all a matter of taste. Some people like the over the top cliche sounds, others like restraint.


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## Rik1

Rik1 said:


> I guess like any tool in any medium, overuse gets boring and trite. At a time when lots of composers were suddenly using this tool for everything then of course it becomes cliche and boring. Any harmonic 'dramatic' device used multiple times to do the same trick in one piece of music could sound trite. As a music teacher used to say to me 'don't **** at every post'. At the end of the day it's all a matter of taste. Some people like the over the top cliche sounds, others like restraint.


Hmmm, I wasn't aware that p-i-s-s was a swear word (it's not in British English) just in case people were wondering. My phrase above was not intended to be profanity! lol


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## EternalStudent

I did not read it as such, no worries. 

I would say music, like all arts, like life itself, is about balance. Just counterpoint is boring, just harmony is boring, just sound texture/rhythm/orchestration/vocal etc. etc. is boring. Real art is the culmination of vast fields of knowledge synergised into a well composed expression, whatever form that might take.


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## Truckload

EdwardBast said:


> The overuse of diminished 7ths, as Il Penseroso points out with the citation of Hanslick, was hackneyed by the mid-nineteenth century. A new set of magic doors came into use thereafter based on altered mediant and submediant relationships. There is a strange kind of symmetry here too. In a major key, the flat-VIb chord (a minor triad built on the flatted 6th degree) can act as a dominant, and in a minor key, the sharp-III# (a major triad built on the sharped 3rd degree) can as well. This sounds complicated but what it amounts to is, taking the example of the keys of E major and C minor: An E major chord can perform a dominant function in the key of C minor, and a C minor chord can perform a dominant function in E major(!) Either could be dominant or tonic in relation to the other! Below is a musical example illustrating this. The first system spells them as common triads. However, I suspect what is "really" going on is better illustrated by the spellings in the second system. (Speculating: One could add a note to each chord to make them altered seventh chords built on the 7th scale degree. So, adding A to the "C minor chord" yields: D#, F-double sharp, A, C; Adding D to the "E major chord" yields B, D, Fb, Ab.)
> 
> View attachment 77688
> 
> 
> From Rimsky-Korsakoff on, these relationships were a standard part of the vocabulary of Russian (and probably other) composers.


Very, very good post. I would add that mediant relationships were utilized heavily by many romantic era composers. I have been studying this exact subject myself this past month. Tchaikovsky wrote a little book called "Guide to the Practical Study of Harmony" in which he refers to these mediant motions as movement by "common tones". Your explanation of the functionality of these chords was better than Tchaikovsky's in my view.

I have been studying "Audacious Euphony" by Cohn and "Thinking About Harmony" by Damshroder, and both have been helpful in the understanding of mediant relationships, especially the Cohn.

Do you know of any other texts which address the subject of mediant and submediant functionality? We need a methodology akin to the roman numeral analysis shorthand that is as fluent in working with the romantics as roman numeral analysis is with the Baroque and High-classical era.


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## mDecksMusic

Are you sure Beethoven said that?


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## KenOC

mDecksMusic said:


> Are you sure Beethoven said that?


It was a remark reported by Schindler, who is not considered reliable any more. Whole chunks of older Beethoven biographies have been invalidated by the discovery of Schindler's various dishonesties. So I guess the answer is "no".


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