Re: Classical Composers
Posted: Fri Jan 26, 2018 5:19 pm
So not a lot of interest in Mozart, I take it?
Anyway, I've decided to split the Beethoven post up, so as to avoid massive walls of text. So...
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Ludvig van Beethoven
1770-1827 (late Classical / early Romantic)
b. Bonn; d. Vienna
The man: Beethoven was the son of a very minor German music teacher who, on recognising his son’s talent, was determined to produce a money-spinning child performer to follow in the footsteps of Nannerl and Wolfgang Mozart; as a result, Ludwig was beaten and berated from an early age, and dragged from his bed at night by an insomniac family friend to practice by candlelight. As a teenager, he attempted to escape to Vienna to study with Mozart (he seems to have heard the master play, but whether they ever met in person is unclear), but was forced immediately to return when his mother’s death and his father’s incapacitating alcoholism left him the primary care-giver for his two younger surviving brothers (four further brothers having died in childhood). His troubles were just beginning. He eventually was successful in reaching Vienna, this time to study with Haydn, and he was able to gain the financial support of a number of noblemen, eventually establishing himself both at the forefront of the new generation of composers and as an accomplished concert pianist – but his personal life was marked by a series of passionate and unrequited infatuations (usually with women far his social superior), his health was continually plagued by both great and small disorders, his moods were uncontrollable and he was increasingly dependent upon alcohol.
In 1798, somebody interrupted Beethoven when he was working – Beethoven was so consumed with rage that he collapsed with a seizure, and when he regained consciousness, he had gone partially deaf; his hearing loss was to worsen continually from that point on. His moods worsened, as did his relationships; he detested social rank, extolled the virtues of the guillotine, and could only fit into high society at all because the Archduke, one of his supporters, personally decreed that he was to be considered exempt from all social norms. He descended into suicidal depression, until reaching a turning point in 1802 when he wrote his “Heiligenstadt Testament” – a will, and an anti-suicide note, in which he determined to remain alive for the sake of his work. Nonetheless, alcoholism, illness, being an arsehole, his refusal to care for his appearance, and total deafness gradually forced him out of public society. He rowed with his brothers over their “immoral” wives, watched one brother die of tuberculosis, and fought through a lengthy custody battle for guardianship of his nephew, which ended in his nephew running away, and later attempting suicide before leaving to join the army. In his later years, he was sometimes left bedbound for weeks at a time by various mysterious ailments, and he died at 56, during a thunderstorm. The most likely cause of death appears to be chronic lead poisoning from the cheap, adulterated wine he was dependent upon, although theories such as lupus and syphilis have also been put forward.
The Style: more than perhaps any other composer, Beethoven evolved musically throughout his life. As a result, it’s common to speak of his Early, Middle (or ‘Heroic’) and Late periods.
Early Beethoven was a dedicated student of the works of Mozart (from whom he sometimes borrowed themes), and to a lesser extent those of Haydn, with whom he studied briefly. His earliest work can be regarded as competent but uninspired work in a Mozartian idiom, but his style gradually grew more confident and individual, and his piano sonatas in particular were highly accomplished. In these works, he can be thought of largely as an extension of Mozart’s more romantic impulses – different, on average, in interests from his predecessor, but fundamentally similar in approach. Early Beethoven is therefore at the culmination of the Classical era.
Following the Heiligenstadt Testament, and under the shadow of his growing deafness, Beethoven’s music took a radical turn, beginning with the astonishing 3rd symphony (the ‘Eroica’), for which he began compiling notes within days of writing his Testament. The Eroica is generally considered the single most important work of Western music, for the way in which it changed the conventions of music at a single stroke and became the model for the entire following century. Most obviously, it is at least twice the length of any previous symphony – the first movement alone is longer than many entire Classical symphonies – which it accomplishes through its greater structural complexity, which in turn allows it to be more surprising in its course, more traumatic in its emotional contours. Harmonically and orchestrally, it is richer, subtler, and also plain louder than what had come before, and it indulges in wild swerves in mood – most famously into its jet-black funeral march second movement. After the Eroica, some composers sought to continue its journey into more and more experimental territories, while others tried to reconcile its advances in harmonic and structural language with the greater cohesion and ready accessibility of Mozart or Haydn; but nobody could ever simply ignore it. Beethoven himself followed the Eroica with a rapid series of masterpieces in a similar vein: fist-shaking Romantic quests in which the human soul grapples at length, heart bloodily and messily exposed, with the implacable fates.
After a few years, however, his output slowed dramatically once more, and for the best part of a decade his writing was sporadic, before a final flourishing of new work in the last years of his life. At some point during the 1810s, he moved into his ‘Late’ style: less overt in its struggle, more indebted to his late study of Bach, and even more fundamentally experimental and unpredictable. This style is held to have come to its peak in his final works, the late string quartets, dismissed by contemporaries as “indecipherable horrors”. Indeed, his late period has never, with some exceptions, had the same popular appeal as his earlier work; yet in its prophetic foresightedness and fearless individualism, it has inspired composers ever since.
Anyway, I've decided to split the Beethoven post up, so as to avoid massive walls of text. So...
----------------
Ludvig van Beethoven
1770-1827 (late Classical / early Romantic)
b. Bonn; d. Vienna
The man: Beethoven was the son of a very minor German music teacher who, on recognising his son’s talent, was determined to produce a money-spinning child performer to follow in the footsteps of Nannerl and Wolfgang Mozart; as a result, Ludwig was beaten and berated from an early age, and dragged from his bed at night by an insomniac family friend to practice by candlelight. As a teenager, he attempted to escape to Vienna to study with Mozart (he seems to have heard the master play, but whether they ever met in person is unclear), but was forced immediately to return when his mother’s death and his father’s incapacitating alcoholism left him the primary care-giver for his two younger surviving brothers (four further brothers having died in childhood). His troubles were just beginning. He eventually was successful in reaching Vienna, this time to study with Haydn, and he was able to gain the financial support of a number of noblemen, eventually establishing himself both at the forefront of the new generation of composers and as an accomplished concert pianist – but his personal life was marked by a series of passionate and unrequited infatuations (usually with women far his social superior), his health was continually plagued by both great and small disorders, his moods were uncontrollable and he was increasingly dependent upon alcohol.
In 1798, somebody interrupted Beethoven when he was working – Beethoven was so consumed with rage that he collapsed with a seizure, and when he regained consciousness, he had gone partially deaf; his hearing loss was to worsen continually from that point on. His moods worsened, as did his relationships; he detested social rank, extolled the virtues of the guillotine, and could only fit into high society at all because the Archduke, one of his supporters, personally decreed that he was to be considered exempt from all social norms. He descended into suicidal depression, until reaching a turning point in 1802 when he wrote his “Heiligenstadt Testament” – a will, and an anti-suicide note, in which he determined to remain alive for the sake of his work. Nonetheless, alcoholism, illness, being an arsehole, his refusal to care for his appearance, and total deafness gradually forced him out of public society. He rowed with his brothers over their “immoral” wives, watched one brother die of tuberculosis, and fought through a lengthy custody battle for guardianship of his nephew, which ended in his nephew running away, and later attempting suicide before leaving to join the army. In his later years, he was sometimes left bedbound for weeks at a time by various mysterious ailments, and he died at 56, during a thunderstorm. The most likely cause of death appears to be chronic lead poisoning from the cheap, adulterated wine he was dependent upon, although theories such as lupus and syphilis have also been put forward.
The Style: more than perhaps any other composer, Beethoven evolved musically throughout his life. As a result, it’s common to speak of his Early, Middle (or ‘Heroic’) and Late periods.
Early Beethoven was a dedicated student of the works of Mozart (from whom he sometimes borrowed themes), and to a lesser extent those of Haydn, with whom he studied briefly. His earliest work can be regarded as competent but uninspired work in a Mozartian idiom, but his style gradually grew more confident and individual, and his piano sonatas in particular were highly accomplished. In these works, he can be thought of largely as an extension of Mozart’s more romantic impulses – different, on average, in interests from his predecessor, but fundamentally similar in approach. Early Beethoven is therefore at the culmination of the Classical era.
Following the Heiligenstadt Testament, and under the shadow of his growing deafness, Beethoven’s music took a radical turn, beginning with the astonishing 3rd symphony (the ‘Eroica’), for which he began compiling notes within days of writing his Testament. The Eroica is generally considered the single most important work of Western music, for the way in which it changed the conventions of music at a single stroke and became the model for the entire following century. Most obviously, it is at least twice the length of any previous symphony – the first movement alone is longer than many entire Classical symphonies – which it accomplishes through its greater structural complexity, which in turn allows it to be more surprising in its course, more traumatic in its emotional contours. Harmonically and orchestrally, it is richer, subtler, and also plain louder than what had come before, and it indulges in wild swerves in mood – most famously into its jet-black funeral march second movement. After the Eroica, some composers sought to continue its journey into more and more experimental territories, while others tried to reconcile its advances in harmonic and structural language with the greater cohesion and ready accessibility of Mozart or Haydn; but nobody could ever simply ignore it. Beethoven himself followed the Eroica with a rapid series of masterpieces in a similar vein: fist-shaking Romantic quests in which the human soul grapples at length, heart bloodily and messily exposed, with the implacable fates.
After a few years, however, his output slowed dramatically once more, and for the best part of a decade his writing was sporadic, before a final flourishing of new work in the last years of his life. At some point during the 1810s, he moved into his ‘Late’ style: less overt in its struggle, more indebted to his late study of Bach, and even more fundamentally experimental and unpredictable. This style is held to have come to its peak in his final works, the late string quartets, dismissed by contemporaries as “indecipherable horrors”. Indeed, his late period has never, with some exceptions, had the same popular appeal as his earlier work; yet in its prophetic foresightedness and fearless individualism, it has inspired composers ever since.