# Beethoven: Coarse, Brutish, Abrupt



## millionrainbows (Jun 23, 2012)

I open this thread with this post by Novelette which was on the Cherubini composer's guestbook thread:



Novelette said:


> Cherubini was a man of obstinate adherence to the forms established by his beloved Haydn, some such a Berlioz would even consider him pathologically conservative, however, Cherubini had an uncommon mastery of music and harmony.
> 
> In fact, as far as music theory goes, Cherubini was the first to give a plausible, theoretical, justification for the avoidance of parallel fifths, namely, that it creates two tonalities simultaneously and is thus "offensive" to the ear. Mendelssohn and, later, Brahms would accept this explanation.
> 
> ...


In the thread *My "Problem" with Beethoven,* I have pointed out this tendency in Beethoven to be abrupt:



millionrainbows said:


> My "problem" with Beethoven is that most of the music never really "recedes" into a background of contours; it's so rhythmic and up-front that this is never allowed to happen, as it does in Robert Schumann, Mahler, or Debussy.
> 
> ...His ideas always have a vertical significance, rather than a "wandering linearity" like the other composers mentioned.
> 
> ...


Apparently these qualities are what Cherubini was referring to. What do you think? Is this "abrupt and coarse" criticism of Beethoven valid, or is it simply a resistance to a new aesthetic which was emerging?


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## hammeredklavier (Feb 18, 2018)

millionrainbows said:


> is it simply a resistance to a new aesthetic which was emerging?


But Beethoven also criticized Spohr, saying that "He is too rich in dissonances; pleasure in his music marred by his chromatic melody." He also told Schindler that Weber's Euryanthe is "an accumulation of diminished sevenths - all the little backdoors". 
https://books.google.ca/books?id=2MPXSVcdzPUC&pg=PA99
https://books.google.ca/books?id=6XQCpJOzhR0C&pg=PA62

I like to think Beethoven had his own ideas about "innovation" in the use of form, rhythm and dynamics, (which would have profound influence on later composers such as Berlioz and Bartok), but there were certain elements of harmony where he did not necessarily agree with his contemporaries. (Perhaps due to his character of being "direct" in expression)


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## Animal the Drummer (Nov 14, 2015)

Those epithets would constitute valid criticism only if they were unintended features of the music Beethoven created, and they aren't. When there's coarseness or abruptness in the music it's because the composer wants it there and, enjoy it or not, I can't see a meaningful criterion by which he could be criticised for that.


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## ORigel (May 7, 2020)

That is an unfair description of Beethoven's music, IMHO, but it is an apt criticism of Berlioz's music.


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## DavidA (Dec 14, 2012)

As Cherubini couldn’t hold a candle to Beethoven as a composer (not many could) who cares what he thought? A case of the mediocre criticising genius which is vastly superior.


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## MarkW (Feb 16, 2015)

Both you and Cherubini are allowed to dislike Beethoven for whatever reasons you want. That doesn't mean neither Cherubini, Beethoven, you, nor anyone else didn't write the best music they were capable of conversant with whatever their notion is/was of what music was supposed to be.


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## Barbebleu (May 17, 2015)

MarkW said:


> Both you and Cherubini are allowed to dislike Beethoven for whatever reasons you want. That doesn't mean neither Cherubini, Beethoven, you, nor anyone else didn't write the best music they were capable of conversant with whatever their notion is/was of what music was supposed to be.


xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx


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## Ethereality (Apr 6, 2019)

These comments from the BBC music survey are about what methodologies really get composers inspired and their creative juices flowing. What encourages them and stirs new perspectives and philosophies inside their imagination.

John Corgliano on his favorite composer from the BBC music magazine survey:
"As a composer, my goal is to achieve the perfect balance between the visceral and the cerebral elements in my music. It is extremely important to me that the listener is drawn into the drama of my work, but equally important that there are many layers of material that can be discovered with repeated listening... ...for me, Ludwig van Beethoven is the one composer that makes music so urgent that one is immediately drawn to it, so powerful that one can hardly resist it and yet so richly layered that one will never entirely plumb the depths of its wondrous constructions. There is no one like him."

Thea Musgrave says:
"For an example of what excites me about Beethoven, take the last movement of his Eighth Symphony. It starts in F major then suddenly the music is interrupted with a startling and unexplained C sharp played forte. The music then resumes almost as if nothing has happened! The ‘explanation’ only comes in the coda several minutes later – a wonderful example of ‘long-range’ harmonic planning. This led me as a composer to think of even my non-programmatic music in dramatic narratives and gestures."


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## Ethereality (Apr 6, 2019)

DavidA said:


> As Cherubini couldn't hold a candle to Beethoven as a composer (not many could) who cares what he thought? A case of the mediocre criticising genius which is vastly superior.


Most people can't hold a candle to Beethoven, so I guess there's something wrong with the rating system?

Ie. If most people agree with you and myself on your comment, does that make it correct? Or are they even worse off for not knowing how to compose. At least Cherubini was a good composer so his critique is valid-no wait. The fact that he's good is also decided by noncomposers. Where do we go?

Supposedly a real correct thing, imo, might be a statement on Beethoven that is profound. It might make me think highly of a composer who brings up a criticism unusually never thought about before. Cherubini doesn't provide this.


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## millionrainbows (Jun 23, 2012)

Ethereality said:


> These comments from the BBC music survey are about what methodologies really get composers inspired and their creative juices flowing. What encourages them and stirs new perspectives and philosophies inside their imagination.


Yes, "stirs them up" and turns them into brutes.



> John Corgliano on his favorite composer from the BBC music magazine survey:
> "As a composer, my goal is to achieve the perfect balance between the visceral and the cerebral elements in my music...for me, Ludwig van Beethoven is the one composer that makes music so urgent that one is immediately drawn to it, so powerful that one can hardly resist it..."


"Visceral, loud abrupt, urgent, powerful, one cannot resist it:" this hyperbole sounds violent, not sublime.



> Thea Musgrave says:
> "For an example of what excites me about Beethoven, take the last movement of his Eighth Symphony. It starts in F major then suddenly the music is interrupted with a startling and unexplained C sharp played forte. The music then resumes almost as if nothing has happened! The 'explanation' only comes in the coda several minutes later - a wonderful example of 'long-range' harmonic planning. This led me as a composer to think of even my non-programmatic music in dramatic narratives and gestures."


"Suddenly, the music is interrupted...with a startlng C sharp...forte..."

All these descriptions only reinforce the idea that Beethoven was "violent and brutish" in his musical gestures, thus paving the way for more violent music of modern times.


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## millionrainbows (Jun 23, 2012)

MarkW said:


> Both you and Cherubini are allowed to dislike Beethoven for whatever reasons you want. That doesn't mean neither Cherubini, Beethoven, you, nor anyone else didn't write the best music they were capable of conversant with whatever their notion is/was of what music was supposed to be.


No, I didn't say I "didn't like" Beethoven. I'm simply using Cherubini's more refined, sublime aesthetic to define and expose Beethoven's tendencies, which are usually consumed and accepted without thinking.

I would be willing to bet that Beethoven has more appeal for men as opposed to women, who are more averse to violent gestures and music which seems to be "yelling" at them.

I hear a lot of anger in Beethoven's music; don't you?


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## erudite (Jul 23, 2020)

millionrainbows said:


> I would be willing to bet that Beethoven has more appeal for men as opposed to women, who are more averse to violent gestures and music which seems to be "yelling" at them.


Yikes!

That's painting it with a rather broad brush isn't it?



millionrainbows said:


> I hear a lot of anger in Beethoven's music; don't you?


I don't.

One exception would be Furtwängler's No. 9 (I think in 1942?) Now there was anger… but that is more about Furtwängler and wartime circumstances than Beethoven.

IMHO.


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## OperasAndPassions (Aug 14, 2020)

I think it is unfair to say that about LvB's music. It seems like a view owned by someone who only listened to a couple of works, and only a couple of times. A very superficial way of describing his music.
I'd describe Beethoven's music as a mix of emotions. Sometimes he expresses anger, others (and in a lot of times) he expresses tender feelings in his melodies. Even a contemplative and meditative scenery (that "mystical and transcending" feeling, very successfully built by both Bach and Schubert), can be found in many of his works. 

My suggestion to anyone who agrees with the view from the topic's title: listen to Beethoven again, pay attention to the music, and not to other "listeners".


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## DavidA (Dec 14, 2012)

millionrainbows said:


> No, I didn't say I "didn't like" Beethoven. I'm simply using Cherubini's more refined, sublime aesthetic to define and expose Beethoven's tendencies, which are usually consumed and accepted without thinking.
> 
> I would be willing to bet that Beethoven has more appeal for men as opposed to women, who are more averse to violent gestures and music which seems to be "yelling" at them.
> 
> *I hear a lot of anger in Beethoven's music; don't you?*


Isn't that what makes it exciting and appealing? Maybe you like bland boring music though


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## OperasAndPassions (Aug 14, 2020)

This roller coaster of emotions is what makes LvB's interesting, exciting, and also helped develop music.
Much better than crap like Mozart, Handel or Chopin.


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## Bulldog (Nov 21, 2013)

If Mozart, Handel, and Chopin are crap, then so is Beethoven.


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## DavidA (Dec 14, 2012)

OperasAndPassions said:


> This roller coaster of emotions is what makes LvB's interesting, exciting, and also helped develop music.
> Much better than crap like Mozart, Handel or Chopin.


Interesting that Beethoven considered Handel the greatest composer ever. Must have known something you don't! :lol:


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## superhorn (Mar 23, 2010)

I think Beethoven was probably the first composer to break out of the mold of the composer as mere craftsman , writing music to please his patrons , such as Mozart and Haydn . Of cos,e this is not do belittle the music of those two giants in any way . 
But Beethoven was the first composer to compose music on his own personal terms , independent of support of the nobility . Yes, he did receive a stipend from the nobility, but he somehow stopped caring about writing just to please others . 
This enabled him to rely on his own imagination as a composer, to try unprecedented experiments in harmony , form , orchestration etc . Naturally , this ruffled many feathers in the world of music , and earned him quite a lot of puzzlement, head shaking and hostility among composers, theorists and critics of his day . 
If you were a cook employed by a member of the nobility, you had better cook food your master likes, or you were dot of a job . It was the same with Mozart and Haydn . Fortunately, count Eszterhazy really liked the music his paid servant Haydn wrote for him . So he had a secure income even though he was literally a servant and had to wear a livery . He lived a comfortable life and even had a servant of his own . 
Mozart felt very frustrated working for the archbishop Colleredo of Salzburg , thought he was a real jerk and spent more time outside of his native Salzburg , which he considered to be a hopelessly dull and provincial place doing free lance work as composer and pianist than his boss liked and was finally able to break free of Salzburg in the last decade of his tragically short life as a free lance composer and pianist . Financially, it wasn't as secret as Salzburg , but he was free to work on his own and with excellent musicians he could hire on a free lance basis for concerts . 
But Beethoven was the first composer to think outside the box and write music on his won terms without thinking too much about whether audiences wold like it or not .


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## hammeredklavier (Feb 18, 2018)

superhorn said:


> But Beethoven was the first composer to think outside the box and write music on his won terms without thinking too much about whether audiences wold like it or not .


"although it (K.426/K.546) also has some hair-raising dissonances that would not have been allowed in the strict style. It was surely bound to please Swieten and may have been written especially for his concerts."
< Mozart, Haydn and Early Beethoven: 1781-1802: 1781-1802, By Daniel Heartz, Page 64 >

"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, By Slavoj Žižek, Mladen Dolar, Page 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, By William Kinderman, Page 46 >

** Just in case consuono wants to disagree with me on this quote again by saying "the author hasn't heard Bach"; I'll add that the quote was said by Basil Lam, an English early music specialist and harpsichordist who published many articles on Bach and Handel (such as "Authenticity and the St John Passion").
"Basil Lam says of Beethoven's Grosse Fuge that it is 'a controlled violence without parallel in music before the twentieth century and anticipated by Mozart in the C minor fugue for two pianos (K.426).' Basil Lam, Beethoven String Quartets (London: BBC, 1986), 109."
< Out of Time: Music and the Making of Modernity, By Julian Johnson, Page 465 >


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## hammeredklavier (Feb 18, 2018)

Beethoven's image as a "misunderstood artist" is a little exaggerated in the general classical music community today. Beethoven's late string quartets were appreciated by Schubert, Berlioz, who were his contemporaries for decades, and also Schumann. More than 40 years after Mozart wrote the Haydn quartets, Fetis was still writing articles that the opening of the dissonance quartet was harmonically " incorrect" and made "corrections" on the score. Haydn in 1785 said that "if Mozart wrote it, he must have meant it". Sarti said that Mozart was an incompetent piano composer who didn't understand proper counterpoint.

"The puzzling chromaticism of the opening of the 'Dissonance' quartet K.465 prompted vigorous discussion in the scholarly musical literature of the late 1820s and early 1830s. Fétis, in particular, devoted much attention to the Adagio in his journal La Revue musicale, believing that Mozart could not have intended such dissonance. In July 1829 he produced a study of these bars in which he printed a revision of his own, to stand comparison with the alleged misprint of Mozart's intentions in all available editions."
< Mozart: The 'Haydn' Quartets , By John Irving , Page 76 >


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## KenOC (Mar 7, 2011)

hammeredklavier said:


> ...Beethoven's late string quartets were appreciated by Schubert, Berlioz, who were his contemporaries for decades, and also Schumann...


To this list you can add the young Felix Mendelssohn, whose 2nd String Quartet in A minor was written in 1827, just one year after Beethoven's Op. 132 quartet was published. It drew heavily on Beethoven's work in both mood and sound, and even shared the same key signature.


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## Ethereality (Apr 6, 2019)

Allerius said:


> Bach is one of my absolute favorite composers, but overall I still prefer Beethoven over him. I think that one of the technical reasons for this is that Beethoven's music is rich in sudden dynamic contrasts and climaxes, what's very appealing to me, while Bach barely notated dynamics in his scores and usually didn't go beyond the range of piano and forte when he did.





Ethereality said:


> These comments from the BBC music survey are about what methodologies really get composers inspired and their creative juices flowing. What encourages them and stirs new perspectives and philosophies inside their imagination.
> 
> John Corgliano says:
> "As a composer, my goal is to achieve the perfect balance between the visceral and the cerebral elements in my music. It is extremely important to me that the listener is drawn into the drama of my work, but equally important that there are many layers of material that can be discovered with repeated listening... ...for me, Ludwig van Beethoven is the one composer that makes music so urgent that one is immediately drawn to it, so powerful that one can hardly resist it and yet so richly layered that one will never entirely plumb the depths of its wondrous constructions. There is no one like him."
> ...


If we take these concepts to the extreme, they would be a great reason to say Dvorak is even better, heh. Steering more away from the Bachian style of immediate contrasts, while Dvorak's music is one that is immediately accessible, it's moreso so broadly and richly developed, in larger stages and passages that unfold like an epoch, that makes emotionally effective use of dynamics and contrasts but within a broader more long-term planned scope. One of the best terms for Beethoven is catchy, and Dvorak is this, but I think Beethoven as a master of rhythm and melodic contrast is more apparently catchy overall. However when I listen to Dvorak as a traditionalist Romantic, I get a sense that he knows exactly what he's doing and where he's going in his goals, striving for a larger perfection in development. I mention this due to there being more to Beethoven's approach than explained. For things like counterpoint and symphonic form, Beethoven takes the cake. Dvorak thinks so large sometimes that he forgets to think small.


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## Caryatid (Mar 28, 2020)

Animal the Drummer said:


> Those epithets would constitute valid criticism only if they were unintended features of the music Beethoven created, and they aren't. When there's coarseness or abruptness in the music it's because the composer wants it there and, enjoy it or not, I can't see a meaningful criterion by which he could be criticised for that.


I agree. Much of Beethoven's music is deliberately abrupt - the opening of the _Serioso _quartet, for example. How is that a weakness?


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## TwoFlutesOneTrumpet (Aug 31, 2011)

To each their own, I guess. I've never thought Beethoven was course, brutish or abrupt. His music has this natural flow - even when it doesn't flow, like the first movement of the 5th, for example - that has engaged me on the deepest level for 30+ years.


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