Beethoven's "Orpheus" concerto : Op. 58

[Bonn1827]

You've reinforced the idea of the cadenza-style of the piano in that 1st movement, which isn't suggested by those brooding, opening chords at all. But you put it far more eloquently than I!!

During the reading of the score I wondered how a pianist could actually play a lot of it. Yes, the quasi-melismatic style is something I hadn't considered before. Beethoven reveals himself every inch the musical scholar throughout his oeuvre, BTW, doesn't he? I was listening to "Diabelli Variations" again the other day and realized that without JSB the No. 32 just probably wouldn't have been possible.

I've just put the "Diabelli" on as it's a sublime way to start the day. All the moods for the day are to be found there.

[Sludlinger]

Not just to talk about the first movement, but let’s look at the beginning of the recapitulation, always a difficult place for the concerto composer. The quiet repeated notes of the piano are now thundering chords played double time and the serene, ethereal orchestral answer in the mediant major is now encircled in piano embroidery. That! – is a magical moment.

I agree about the spookiness of the second movement. It’s a pallet cleaner but also a deep sleep place in half light with locked doors hiding scary things. It’s there to annoy us and disturb us. Somewhat like the Waldstein he needs a near dead distraction between the sublime and the playfully heroic. A full slow movement after a dreamy allegro would be another andante favori. And the pianissimo C major announcement of the final allegro is the first voice you hear when awakening from a dream. The G major forte, with trumpets and drums heard for the first time, is someone ripping the curtains open. No more dreams.

Who else writes music like this? What composer at that time so openly played with the listener’s mind? – no one, that’s who.

I hope this doen't sound too much like corny liner notes. It's what I see.

[Bonn1827]

I'll have another look at the score and the specific parts you mention. What do you think of the 1st movement "cadenzas"?

I also love the "tico-tico" of the 1st concerto in the 3rd movement - playful and completely out of the blue!! So, yes, there's nobody else in this league.

Broadly, I have always thought of late baroque/classical/romantic music in these broad terms: sequential and diatonic/motivic development/thematic transformation and ALL totally structurally reliant upon:

1. the cadence and, (tonality)
2. the dotted double bar line/da capo. (structure and form)

I think the 2nd Viennese school removed both of those elements!!

For better or worse, these are my own ideas and, no, I don't think of your ideas as "corny liner notes" (I don't read these anyway).

[Sludlinger]

Where Beethoven stands between the classical school of formal structural development and the free-wheeling fantasia world of Schumann and Liszt is a very interesting question, if I understand you correctly. Beethoven’s large structures, if I correctly agree, are built upon a concept of temporal (da capo and double bar) and the newly understood long-term harmonic (tonal) structure. This was challenged by the new composers as being stodgy and didactic. Why always go to the dominant right off? – or even the mediant? - when you can more easily and comfortably go to the subdominant and relax? - or just go anywhere? It worked to a certain extent for smaller pieces but the extended forms suffered and sort of vanished and when they appeared seemed atavistic. Mid 19th century multi-movement sonatas are like Mozart fugues.

[Bonn1827]

No matter what key the development sections went to these were still shaped and expressed within a cadential paradigm - that is, tension and relief, which I think is absolutely fundamental to art music pre-Wagner and Schoenberg, despite the fact that changes were evolving during the mid-late 19th century, and with the increasingly chromatic chords of, say, Chopin. Playing around with keys and conventions was part of that "freewheeling" style you mention with respect to Schumann and Chopin, but it was still embedded inextricably within the system of tension and relief so characteristic of cadence. And don't forget the technical possibilities of musical instruments, which changed everything. It was as though sounds of the past could break free into new colorations once dynamics and registers were expanded. Oh, it's so interesting.

I don't tend to think of extended mid-19th century sonatas as Mozartean in any terms, except perhaps lyricism, so we have to disagree there.

[Sludlinger]

I only meant that Mozart writing Bach-like fugues is like Chopin, Schumann or Liszt writing a sonata. It was something they did because it was expected of an accomplished composer rather than a natural and modern form of expression. Rosen talks about this, how the sonata begins to diminish in importance during Beethoven’s last years and finally becomes an antique art form.

The thing about tonality and going somewhere else than the dominant is not about developments but the act right after the opening. In classical music one moves almost always to the dominant or, in a minor key, to the mediant, but Romantic composers seem to have tendency to go to the sub-dominant, or just about any place else. It has the effect of disturbing the carefully worked out system that permits large-scale compositions to have a sense of interesting direction. In classical music the real ‘find’ was learning to prepare the conclusion with the sub-dominant – after you have emphasized the dominant, or various dominants, at the front end. All this, which took hundreds of years to figure out got set aside. The result is often apparent aimlessness.

This is not really all that concrete. The whole subject is so complex generalizations of any kind are fraught with danger.

[Sludlinger]

Bonn1827, that tico-tico grabbed me when I was a teenager and first heard the concerto. I thought, “What the heck is Xavier Cougat doing here?” It really floored me as well. Where could he have heard that? Maybe in a dream.

[Bonn1827]

I would prefer to think of these things as "observations" and "perceptions" rather than generalisations, since I am not a harmony professor - I've relied upon my ear and knowledge and understanding of music.

And one of my understandings is that those composers from the mid-late 19th century who wrote in sonata form did so because of convention, yes, but might this not also have been because of the challenges this form poses? That, and attempting to find a suitable, complex substitute? It was Brahms who said he was standing on the shoulders of giants, so he was acutely aware of this legacy, and yet he was criticized for "pouring new wine into old bottles".

I read Charles Rosen's "The Classical Style" and found it a difficult read - not well written at all and I have a masters degree (not in Musicology, but English). I didn't think he gave a particularly good account and, at times, felt he was thinking in a stream of consciousness way with his pen. I cried out for clarity and lucidity and all I got was dense syntax and arcane ideas. He presumed I knew what he meant!! I had read Claude Palisca's "Baroque Music" and found that eminently readable.

Xavier Cougat indeed!! We had a discussion on previous threads about LvB's possible exposure to music from other cultures, i.e. Spain, and people suggested that there was a solid history of this practice and, of course, there is. But this comes like a such a bolt out of the blue in the way LvB uses it and that, I think, is the major part of its charm. Tonight I'm signing off with String Quartet opus 132.

[Roehre]

We had a discussion on previous threads about LvB's possible exposure to music from other cultures, i.e. Spain, and people suggested that there was a solid history of this practice and, of course, there is. But this comes like a such a bolt out of the blue in the way LvB uses it and that, I think, is the major part of its charm. Tonight I'm signing off with String Quartet opus 132.

And exactly the "Dankgesang" in opus 132 is an example where a past musical world did influence Beethoven strongly.

[Sludlinger]

Your comments about Rosen are very interesting. I had this stuff beaten into me in college so Rosen is like a review course and his stream of conscience style is not a problem. His fascination with Haydn piano trios is most amazing – I don’t get it.

I think the thing about classical music is that form really trumps almost everything. When we listen to Mozart or Haydn or Rosetti or Pleyel we know what’s going to happen, and that's considered good. Haydn’s most problematic works are the odd-ball ones from the 1760s and 70s sturm und drang where he really challenges standard form. Mozart was a master of the routine. If you look closely at his music he really is quite smooth, very few sharp elbows, very few surprises, and he really never challenges form. But the surprises that are there are so clever and inoffensive that we love them. He is never clumsy. Haydn can really go off the rails at his most experimental. Sometimes it works, sometimes not. But Mozart always gets it right. Even his first G minor symphony, one of his few sturm und drang works, is never off balance and sounds like regular Mozart, just different; and it's about the most successful sturm und drang we have, along with the D minor piano concerto. Beethoven also respects basic form, both harmonic and structural. When he seriously violates them he usually does it in piano sonatas – his little experimental workshops. The big works are almost always very regular in form and pretty regular harmonically. A rare example of harmonic experimentation is the triple concerto, which has large-scale harmonic movement that is rather odd, lots of sub-mediant and sub-dominant rather than dominant, but he makes it work. Another are the odd modulations in the opening tutti (1st exposition) of the C major piano concerto – very strange, but very well-done, very effective. CPE Bach’s failure is that he thinks only for momentary effects and the overall impact is disjointed. Beethoven and Mozart never allow this to happen.

[Michael]

Odd coincidence here.
My son is doing Mediaeval Studies and last week, at his university, he had to deliver a paper on an anonymous Middle English narrative poem. I picked up his typescript to have a look at it and - lo and behold - it was entitled "Sir Orfeo" which is a version of the Orpheus story.
As he is a huge Beethoven fan (I wonder why that is) I alerted him to the Fourth Piano Concerto. He was familiar with it but not aware of the (presumed) Orpheus connection. It wasn't really related to his particular subject, but he was listening to the concerto all weekend.

[Bonn1827]

Sludlinger, thanks for those insights and thoughts on Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. Unless I have a score in front of me, and I don't have a lot, I can only hear those interesting moves or modulations - and often I will smile or laugh at the unexpected, whether it "works" or not. I enjoy those sharp "elbows" you describe and I actually have heard these in Mozart in some of his piano sonatas (of which I have the Henle Verlag complete edition), but we are probably not on the same page about the nature of those elbows. To me, these are harmonic and melodic movements within a work rather than form per se. I've played little sections over and over (not very well!!) in some sonatas (some I've studied and some I've heard in recordings) and said to myself, "that's interesting, what he does here with those key changes - who'd have thought that would work!! (like a mad relation??). All very thought-provoking. I was at university studying Musicology and, yes, Rosen was a text forced on me, but the one I found least accessible. I literally "enjoyed" the others!! (Need to get a life?)

Michael - that Orpheus story may be just an apocryphal tale spun about LvB's intentions that has taken hold of some musicologist with an ax to grind. (Sorry about the jarring metaphor). The point is, anyone can make a musical argument with a great work - especially when the composer is not alive to refute it. I can remember an especially fraught argument by a Hungarian musicologist, Lendvi I think his name was, who tried to persuade me that Bartok's Music for String, Percussion and Celeste was entirely unified by the Pythagorean golden mean. Trouble is, he had to take rests at the end of the work (and there wasn't an anacrusis) into the equation to make his thesis work. I remember Dr. Eakins thinking that terribly funny.

It is just a joy that you have a child who loves Beethoven, BTW. Good luck to him!

[Michael]

Michael - that Orpheus story may be just an apocryphal tale spun about LvB's intentions that has taken hold of some musicologist with an ax to grind. (Sorry about the jarring metaphor). The point is, anyone can make a musical argument with a great work - especially when the composer is not alive to refute it.
!

Oh, absolutely. I don't hold any stock in those fanciful appropriations of mythology. I don't know if it was E T A Hoffmann, Franz Liszt or E M Forster who latched onto the Orpheus scenario but we are saddled with it since. The movement can be enjoyed in a totally musical way without all this baggage. I am reminded of Toscanini's remarks on the opening of the Fifth Symphony:
"Some say it is Fate knocking at the door, others say it is approaching deafness, more say it is the call of the yellow-hammer. I say it is 'Allegro con brio .........'.."
Then again, Beethoven himself has muddied the waters by declaring at one stage that he always had an extra-musical idea in mind when composing.
He intended to "explain" all his piano sonatas at one time, but mercifully he didn't get to do that! In general, I have always believed that, if you need a programme or story to enjoy the music, then the music is at fault. (An honourable exception will be made for the "Pastoral symphony". )

[Bonn1827]

Roehre, I presume by this you mean LvB's use of one of the church (Lydian) modes in Op. 132? In what other ways, if any, is this quartet looking back because its 5 movement structure is certainly unconventional - to match "the shock of the new" with the last, great quartets.

The liner notes suggest that "phrases of a hymn are framed by more rapid figurations in the manner of a Baroque chorale-prelude". Is this what you meant? Was he looking back to Bach deliberately in a final homage? What thoughts have you on this?

[Roehre]

Roehre, I presume by this you mean LvB's use of one of the church (Lydian) modes in Op. 132?

Bonnie, this is what I meant. It was during the composition of the Missa solemnis that Beethoven got interested on "old music", and he was able to study some music of the Burgundian (Franco-Dutch) polyphonists as well as Palestrina in the library of Archduke Rudolph.