Originally posted by Steppenwolf:
[background, as an army rides into battle.
Finales which loud clashing and banging that go on and on are gimicky and silly, IMO. If you could just edit out the finale of Movement 4, it would be perfect!
[This message has been edited by Steppenwolf (edited January 28, 2003).][/B]
[background, as an army rides into battle.
Finales which loud clashing and banging that go on and on are gimicky and silly, IMO. If you could just edit out the finale of Movement 4, it would be perfect!
[This message has been edited by Steppenwolf (edited January 28, 2003).][/B]
And some performances of the C minor symphony really do seem to go on forever.
However, I am quite sure Beethoven didn't miscalculate the coda of the Fifth Symphony.
After all, it takes a long time for C major to establish itself in this work (it briefly appears in the second movement) so it has to be overwhelming at the end.
B spent a long time perfecting this symphony. If you listen to his early sketches for the ending of the first movement (which Leonard Bernstein has recorded) you will find that his original ending was a bar or too longer than the existing one. But he wasn't satisfied with that and he wrote a longer ending - a more "romantic" one - and still he wasn't happy. It took him a while to realise that the problem with his first ending was not that it was too short - it was that it wasn't short enough!
So, if he agonised about the final bars of the first movement, you can be sure that the same effort and calculation went into the protracted ending of the finale.
But you have to get the right conductor and orchestra to do it justice.
Michael
[This message has been edited by Michael (edited March 02, 2003).]
Comment