Originally posted by PDG
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Most beautiful Beethoven melody?
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Originally posted by AeolianHarp View PostAdd The Quartet in A minor, Op. 132: Movement V (Allegro appassionato; Presto) to this...oh there are no adequate words....
Pretty much any two consecutive notes written by Beethoven represent a great melody, in my view.
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Originally posted by PDG View PostI stated the case for this a few posts back!
Pretty much any two consecutive notes written by Beethoven represent a great melody, in my view."Life is too short to spend it wandering in the barren Sahara of musical trash."
--Sergei Vasilyevich Rachmaninoff
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Originally posted by Harvey View PostI love the opening two notes of the Eroica! --see my avitar
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Originally posted by hal9000 View PostIt is quite amazing how one only needs to hear two Eb major chords and one instantly thinks of the Eroica first movement. Beethoven had a knack for doing this, I feel. I hear a loud sustained root C minor chord on the piano and I immediately think of Op. 13. I only need to hear the opening A minor chord of the Allegretto of the 7th for my mind to start playing out that movement in my head.'Man know thyself'
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The melody I like the most is/are those famous opening notes in the Fifth: ta - ta - ta - tam. Seriously, Beethoven and his contemporaneous did not use to write beautiful melodies. Plenty of his themes are simple stuff, generally built from the notes of the tonic chord, which are the ones that offer more opportunities for development. The first theme in the Eroica's first movement is a perfect example. We must wait for the successors of the master to find melody as a central component of a musical work. But this precisely is what makes Beethoven so attractive. It is not the bricks, but the building. Not this or that melodic element, but the way they are interconnected. In short, development and more generally, architecture. Beethoven is logic translated into music. But so is Mozart, and Haydn. What makes Beethoven unique is that he was born in a time when form and content were about to unite in a perfect equation. And of course, that his name happened to be Beethoven.Last edited by Enrique; 03-13-2014, 06:20 PM.
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Originally posted by Peter View PostYet we know those two opening chords caused Beethoven some difficulty - the sketchbook reveal several different openings to the famous theme, including those two chords as dominants instead of the tonic. Likewise the opening of the Adagio in Op.106 - the first bar opening wasn't originally there!
.Last edited by Michael; 03-13-2014, 02:40 PM.
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Glad it does. As another example of succinctness, just consider such trivial stuff as the main theme in the Ninth finale. But this simple melody is presented in ever renovating forms, including the exultant counterpoint with the Said umschlugen theme. Even the passage with the solo tenor is another way of putting the theme (sing the first few notes of the famous melody and then do the same with the tenor part: you'll see they precisely the same). So Beethoven paints this magnificent fresco out of a few colors. It is this economy of means that makes Beethoven so appealing, a thing taken to extremes in the first movement of the fifth symphony, which seems to be written with a single stroke of the pen.
PDG put it more plainly: "Pretty much any two consecutive notes written by Beethoven represent a great melody, in my view".
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Regarding the "Ode to Joy" theme, we know that it gave Beethoven some trouble, but there seems to be some foreshadowing to it in the preceding three movements. Can anyone shed light on this compositional chicken or egg timeline?Last edited by hal9000; 03-13-2014, 08:47 PM.
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