VII. BEETHOVEN
Beethoven's Later Years and the Conventions of His Childhood
By ERIC WAGNER
Special guest blogger
"More of Beethoven's intelligence is needed, desperately, to create a signal that the current Lenins cannot ignore, that will make them weep, and stop hitting heads."
- Prometheus Rising, pg. 271
Writing about the page around 29:41 - 29:58, Charles Rosen wrote, "This transitional page is one of the most astonishing in the history of music. No other work until then, to my knowledge, combined the effect of almost uncontrolled improvisatory movement with such a totally systemic structure" (The Classical Style, pg. 429).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g5jBD_vxy8w
"Beethoven was conducting celestial astronomy in his own way. Before our eyes (this fugue cannot be completely realized in sound, so the printed music is important in its own right) he demonstrates the various rotations of the planets: retrograde, inversion, augmentation - at the same time reaching the frontier of atonality."
- Wilhelm Kempff on the last movement of the Hammerklavier Sonata
6 comments:
I noticed that Rosen talked about how loud Beethoven's music is compared to Haydn's and Mozart's. When I listened to Beethoven's Third Symphony, I was struck by not only how long it was, but how loud it seemed to be in places, almost as if Beethoven had invented heavy metal.
Thank you for your comment. I like your observation about the Eroica.
I took a nap between jobs today, and I woke up thinking about Beethoven's Appassionata Sonata. I had intended to listen to Schumann and Schubert on the way to work this afternoon, but instead I put on Rosen playing middle period Beethoven sonatas.
Great quotes about Beethoven! The subtitle of this week's chapter doesn't appear in my copy so this seems new to the expanded edition. Seeing another Beethoven chapter when I expected the Epilogue delightfully surprised.
The way Rosen writes of the Waldstein Sonata –"letting the music grow dynamically from a small kernel or central idea" sparks a desire to hear it. Rosen shows some self-awareness when he writes: "Nevertheless, the music hardly ever moves in a purely linear fashion, and listening with a totally innocent ear is no worse than accepting a theory which obscures more than it enlightens.
The quote about the Hammerklavier Sonata above reminds me of an essay I read where it claims that Beethoven said (paraphrasing from memory) that all the secrets of the universe can be found in his music. The author goes on to write that at first he thought Beethoven completely egotistical to say something like but changed his view after getting to know the music of the magus: perhaps he simply stated a fact.
The source of Beethoven's alleged statement doesn't get sourced other than the writer said he heard it in a class so I tried to find it with Google. The AI Overview said he never said that but he did say some interesting things like:
"Don't only practice your art, but force your way into its secrets, for it and knowledge can raise men to the divine."
I wrote the above.
Rasa generated an index for Maybe Magick with AI. 11 listings appear for Beethoven. 11, of course, represents the number of magick.
Thank you for your comments. In one universe in Schroedinger's Cat Beethoven wrote eleven symphonies, I think.
Rosen added this chapter and some introductory material for the book as a whole for the revised edition. The revised edition also came with a great CD of Rosen playing Beethoven's Op. 106 (Hammerklavier) and Op. 110.
Marvin Hamlish played piano for a one man show by Groucho Marx. I got the LP of that concert in junior high school. Hamlish played an introductory medley of songs Groucho had sung in Marx Brothers movies. He opened the medley with the opening of Beethoven's Waldstein Sonata: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9a78JULdNIg (The piano introduction begins at 2:53.)
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