The symphony, and how it changed our world

[Roehre]

....

In writing that "The scherzo is one of Beethoven's most obvious borrowings from Mozart: he quotes and subtly transforms the opening of the finale of Mozart's 40th Symphony to create his own theme", he ignored the fact that Beethoven had already done just that some years earlier in the opening of his first published piano sonata (Op. 2 No. 1 in F minor) - indeed, the connection between this and the Mozart is even closer....

Ahinton, though you are absolutely correct regarding op.2/1, I'm afraid Service is also absolutely right in his "The scherzo is one of Beethoven's most obvious borrowings from Mozart".

Thank goodness we've got Beethoven's sketchbooks with the bulk of the sketches for the Fifth and the Pastoral: Beethoven copied the first 40-odd bars of Mozart's 40's finale where he started sketching op.67's scherzo.

Of course such a straight forward connection might exist between Mozart 40 and Beethoven op.2/1 but we'll never know: none of this work's sketches has survived.

Intriguing however is that the 3 quartets WoO 36 -in their construction based on Mozart violin sonatas-, which contain much of the material which Beethoven recycled in all 3 opus 2 sonatas, predate KV550 by more than 2 years.
Again: no surviving sketches here.

[ahinton]

Ahinton, though you are absolutely correct regarding op.2/1, I'm afraid Service is also absolutely right in his "The scherzo is one of Beethoven's most obvious borrowings from Mozart".

Thank goodness we've got Beethoven's sketchbooks with the bulk of the sketches for the Fifth and the Pastoral: Beethoven copied the first 40-odd bars of Mozart's 40's finale where he started sketching op.67's scherzo.

Of course such a straight forward connection might exist between Mozart 40 and Beethoven op.2/1 but we'll never know: none of this work's sketches has survived.

Intriguing however is that the 3 quartets WoO 36 -in their construction based on Mozart violin sonatas-, which contain much of the material which Beethoven recycled in all 3 opus 2 sonatas, predate KV550 by more than 2 years.
Again: no surviving sketches here.

Very interesting; many thanks for that. Of course Service is correct and I did not seek to undermine what he wrote about that but to point out that this was not the first time that Beethoven had done this!

[Boilk]

Off on a tangent somewhat [apologies] below is artist Gary Andrew Clarke's graphic representation
of the opening of Beethoven's 5th, where the circle colours obviously relate to pitch and their diameters
to dynamic level. But it's bothering me why the last line has 5 circles ... shouldn't there be 6?

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

I still prefer the birds on the telegraph wires.

[Roehre]

I still prefer the birds on the telegraph wires.

Makes two of us