BaL 18.01.20 - Beethoven: Symphony no. 1 in C, Op.21

[Oakapple]

When I was in primary school, as a frequent exercise we were played a piece of classical music and we had to write what it suggested to us. I just thought you'd like to know that.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Please tell me you wrote "it suggests to me that the teacher has left his/her Lesson Preps at home"!

[Oakapple]

That probably was the reason, now that I think of it.

[Ein Heldenleben]

When I was in primary school, as a frequent exercise we were played a piece of classical music and we had to write what it suggested to us. I just thought you'd like to know that.

If it gets primary school children listening or thinking about classical music great...
At my 60’s primary school a piece of classical music was played at each assembly . But with limited albums three tracks kept coming up. Scheherazade, Peter and the Wolf , and Romeo and Juliet. I now literally cannot bear to listen to the first two.....
On thread : Beethoven’s 1st would have been a blessed relief and brought a smile to my face...

[gurnemanz]

That second Stravinsky quote I am not familiar with but it strikes me as an excellent summation. It is possible to construct quite complex narratives to gloss Beethoven symphonies e.g. Forster’s goblins in the Beethoven 5 section of Howard’s End or the many narratives on the Eroica 1st Movement outlined by Scott Burnham in Chapter 1 of Beethoven Hero. But ultimately the real meaning is in the notes and the the relationship between them. There is nothing wrong with a verbal narrative indeed a lot of musicians use them to help to perform. There is a Vengerov masterclass where one fiendishly difficult violin passage is described as a mouse running up the finger board and then chomping the cheese.
But music like all art has an emotional narrative - something that Cooke tried to nail down in The Language Of Music looking largely at specific musical intervals . Where it gets complicated is that Beethoven has been so influential in constructing that language that it is difficult to disentangle cause and effect. Do the large repetitive harmonic blocks (based on the second part of the opening phrase of the Pastoral ) which build to to such a tremendous climax in the development section represent the elemental side of nature , Beethoven’s emotional response to it , or is it just a superb piece of harmonic development : a working out of a pretty mundane (shepherds pipe? ) tune - who knows? But because of the Pastoral’s all pervasiveness when I hear a similar effect in another work I tend to think “Pastoral.”

I have followed this discussion (for the most part, ie where I understood it) with interest, hesitating to get involved, not having a strong music-theoretical background, but am pitching in with some random comments nonetheless. I do know that I agree with Jayne (which I do quite often) on smiling (which I also do quite often), even while listening to "abstract" music. If, for instance, a composer writes "scherzo" (= joke) above the music, then smiling is presumably not an unexpected or undesired response.

The above message reminded me of studying Thomas Mann as part of my university German course. We were doing Doktor Faustus and the lecturer, who was a good pianist, gave us a special extra lecture which took us through the character Wendell Kretschmar's analysis of op 111. (Found a useful paper here). He also illustrated to us non-musicians what he thought was meant by Mann's referring to music as "die Zweideutigkeit als System" (ambiguity as a system) by playing bits of the Appassionata Sonata. Music can take us into transcendent spheres, a realm of ineffability, a seductive spiritual paradise, can for Schopenhauer even be the expression of the pure will. As such, for Mann, it can be dangerously like a disease or diabolical temptation which takes you away from the wholesome real world. Hans Castorp, the sensible boy from Hamburg, previously mainly interested in ocean-going steamships, is thus tempted on the Magic Mountain. Gustav von Aschenbach succumbs fatally to the pure beauty of the youth Tadzio in Venice, in which place, of course, Wagner also found his death. Wagner wrote very little pure music and preferred to set text or to tie the sounds he created directly to archetypes within the human psyche via leitmotivs. He called Beethoven "a sublime and supernatural being".

I enjoy succumbing to the mystery of pure music but my background is linguistic and I most often prefer listen to music tied to text. (My namesake Gurnemanz in Parsifal is a well-intentioned old bloke who happily rambles on and on). The likes of Bob Dylan, Tom Waits, Randy Newman, Lucinda Williams, The Beatles, Joni Mitchell, Cole Porter, Franz Schubert, Kurt Weill, Hugo Wolf, Richard Wagner etc (ie word setters) would figure rather prominently on my Desert Island list. Growing up as a child and in my early teens, vocal music was the only music I really listened to, with the exception of the Shadows. Apache (1960), which I still own and was one of my first singles and Telstar from the Tornados. Nearly all pop and rock is text based. I tend to listen to jazz singers more than pure jazz.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

I’m still puzzling though over why Edwin Fischer and Claudio Arrau could come to such wildly varying responses over three Beethoven chords .

I suspect that DannyB is exaggerating the reactions on each side to make his point - but I don't think it's the three chords themselves that create the different responses, rather the silence between them, and their subsequent repeat. Instead of an extended or a flowing thematic phrase (as more frequently found in Music of this period), Beethoven just gives us three quick notes ... and then nothing. For Fischer (and for me) that silence is teasing; filled with a metaphorical raising of the eyebrows ... "you weren't expecting that, were you? Shall we do it again?" - or the suggestion that the player has forgotten what comes next. For Arrau, the silence is of someone struggling to find the right sounds to follow - an emptiness of despair. (I can't hear it in those terms at all - it reeks of those "Death Mask Beethoven" performances, which present the Music as if the composer went through life with a scowl forever on his face. Had the Music been in the minor, slower, and with a longer pause between the micro-phrases, I might have understood such a way of thinking a little better.)

I don't think wither approach can be described as "over-thinking" ... after all, they went on to act after/before such thinking by playing the work itself!

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

At my 60’s primary school a piece of classical music was played at each assembly . But with limited albums three tracks kept coming up. Scheherazade, Peter and the Wolf , and Romeo and Juliet. I now literally cannot bear to listen to the first two.....
On thread : Beethoven’s 1st would have been a blessed relief and brought a smile to my face...

My synapses were encouraged by exactly the same sort of experience in exactly the same decade, Heldy - except we didn't have the three works you mention (which hasn't stopped listening to Scheherazade an unbearable experince for me). We actually had Beethoven (the Pastoral - either 1st, 2nd, or 5th Movts - and the First) and bach, Chopin, Mozart, Haydn ... and pieces by someone described as "Tschaikowsky" - imagine the effect on my five-year-old eyes of seeing that written down.

Many experiences of School I resented at the time and still do; but I shall forever praise the name of Ben Kirkham for exposing kids to the sound of this unfamiliar and very different Music.

[Ein Heldenleben]

Re post on Barenboim
- By overthinking I mean you don’t need a “story” or a concept to play the movement well.
It’s a very interesting sonata movement - I love the plunge into the minor in the coda with the almost jazzy cycle of fifths syncopated section leading back to the dominant. And then a nice easy chromatic run and a few flashy arpeggios to impress the listener . Just wish I could nail the trickier bits....

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

By overthinking I mean you don’t need a “story” or a concept to play the movement well..

- yes; these can as often as not hinder as help. (It's because I find the idea of Arrau or Fischer basing their performances on such simplistic ideas that I [like to] believe that DB is exaggerating to make a point.)

[jayne lee wilson]

We may or may not find this "clear" - I find it richly suggestive, and have been thinking about it ever since I read it, and would say that if the statement were more "clear" (in a sort of tabloid sense) it wouldn't have been worth saying in the first place. Nor was RVW's statement "trite", by any means, but touches on questions central to aesthetics. We may (or may not) think we know better, for ourselves, but we cannot dismiss their opinions so easily.

But I'm repeating myself. Jayne, you don't seem willing to give these two composers the credit they deserve for knowing something interesting about the wellspring of their extraordinary art, and trying to put it into words. As the debate started with questions arising from your demand that we should smile along to the Pastoral Symphony, and "all those giggle-and-guffaw-inducing jokes in No.8" (your post #120) we've wandered along a very thorn-strewn path, and so I suggest we leave it at that!

What a crass, wilful misrepresentation of what I said. ("Smile along to"...).
I never "demanded" anything, only described or suggested or responded (impassioned as ever...), I elaborated my continuously developing views and comments further and deeper and broader as I could, and paid Stravinsky the "credit" of quoting him very fully indeed - more than you were prepared to do, offering instead your own speculative gloss/paraphrase.... as for RVW's statement...a comment "on questions central to aesthetics"?... some forcing of the text going on in your own comment upon it, surely....

Still, many more views today ....... very pleased and fascinated to read them...

[Cockney Sparrow]

Repeated today.

Still unable to produce a new BAL, in the Covid-19 disruption.

[Barbirollians]

Repeated today.

Still unable to produce a new BAL, in the Covid-19 disruption.

They are perfectly able to but they are now commissioned to do twofers only Andrew McGregor admitted on Twitter.

[DracoM]

Harnoncurt for me.

[jayne lee wilson]

OWA/Haselböck a great new kid on the block for me this year...recorded in the gorgeously painted and ornamented Palais Niederösterreich, one of Vienna's most important concert halls after 1813, where all 9 symphonies were performed from 1819-27, in the "Concerts Spirituels"...

[BBMmk2]

OWA/Haselböck a great new kid on the block for me this year...recorded in the gorgeously painted and ornamented Palais Niederösterreich, one of Vienna's most important concert halls after 1813, where all 9 symphonies were performed from 1819-27, in the "Concerts Spirituels"...

Seems to be the one then. I’m glad Harnoncourt came through. I’m disappointed that Claudio Abbado didn’t.