'The Classical Style' reading group, week four

 Frédéric Chopin

2. Theories of Form 

By ERIC WAGNER
Special guest blogger

This parenthetical passage on page 34 really intrigued me when I first read The Classical Style in 1991:  

 (The greater the composer, the larger the terms of his control over the significance of his ideas, even when the range of his conception is deliberately narrowed: that is why Chopin must be considered in the company of the greatest in spite of the limitations of genre and medium that he imposed upon  himself.) 

I started playing string bass in fourth grade, and I tended to value composers who composed orchestral music since I got to play their music in orchestras. I started playing piano in third grade, but bass quickly became my main instrument, and I never played any Chopin on piano. 

In 1995 Charles Rosen’s The Romantic Generation came out, and it floored me. I remember that one sentence from The Classical Style, and roughly one third of Rosen’s large new book made clear why he considered Chopin “in the company of the greatest.” Since 1995 I have learned to love Chopin’s music, and I have come to completely agree with Mr. Rosen. 

Rosen frequently mentions Donald Francis Tovey (1875-1940) and Heinrich Schenker (1868-1935). I had heard music major friends mention Schenker in the 1980’s, but I don’t think I heard of Tovey until I read Kerman’s The Beethoven Quartets. Kerman and Rosen both had a ton of respect for Tovey’s writings on music. Kerman wrote a wonderful tribute “Tovey’s Beethoven” available in Kerman’s Write All These Down. Tovey has become less popular with younger musicologists. As Rosen mentions in this chapter, the arguments can get very nasty. Ethan Iverson quoted Sayre’s Law that “"Academic politics is the most vicious and bitter form of politics, because the stakes are so low." Despite Kerman’s love of Tovey’s writing, he included a famous nasty attack on Tovey in his Norton Critical Score of Mozart’s Piano Concerto in C major, K. 503 (#25) along with a famous Tovey essay on that concerto. 

I enjoyed Jan Swafford biography of Beethoven, but something seemed missing to me. About halfway through I noticed that, although he frequently mentioned Kerman and Rosen, Tovey did not appear in the bibliography or the index. Swafford only mentions Tovey once in a dismissive footnote. The decline in Tovey’s reputation seems to have happened because post-Rosen musicologists tend to overemphasize the similarities between different motives in a piece of music (in my opinion). Tovey emphasized caution in this regard (as do Rosen and Kerman). In Tovey’s long analysis of the Hammerklavier Piano Sonata, he writes: 

The movements of this Sonata, and of Op. 110, show a subtle and elusive relation in their main themes. Such subtleties ought not to be imputed to classical sonatas without very cogent evidence; when people see more than is there they will be very unlikely to see all that is there. But the evidence, both         internal and external, is quite adequate here. 

                    - A Companion to Beethoven’s Pianoforte Sonatas, pg. 221