RE: Beethoven's 6th - yeah that is interesting that it just hasn't been your thing. I freaking love it. And maybe 100 is too strong a rating, but meh for now. It's just that every movement is incredible to me for reasons already stated.
Era: Classical
Year: 1810 (Egmont)
Form: Marches/Incidental Music
Score: 86
Beethoven's incidental music is nothing to get excited about, like any incidental music. Egmont overture of course is fantastic, and there are some piercing soprano movements, and some other interesting out pours of emotion, but overall I wouldn't consider the full Egmont worth listening to again unless I were witnessing it live... then again maybe it was the recording but I doubt it. Of course the last movement of the victory is a "popular" one.
Also on this recording were some marches, some pretty generic and others that were kind of "fun" like the Wellington or victory symphony or Siegsymphonie.
I can't read scores, but I feel like this is the best performance to my ears... the timing is perfect compared to the Karajan performance... wouldn't recommend his... the phrasing is too slow for something like this (something he is often criticized of doing, and half the time I have to agree with how he allows the notes to breath a bit more like a fine wine, but really this tempo is perfect, imo... I also love either the choice to have a strong bass/cello section or perhaps the recording style was just better:
When a commission to provide a music score for Goethe's Egmont was offered, Beethoven eagerly snatched up the opportunity. The subject matter of Egmont appealed to him: the struggle for freedom. This general theme had already been explored, albeit in a quite different story and venue, in the opera Fidelio.
Goethe's play depicts the Spanish persecution of the people of the Netherlands in 1567-1568 via an inquisition. Count Egmont, a Catholic loyal to the Spanish, pleads for tolerance from the Spanish King, who instead dispatches the malevolent Duke of Alva to command the forces to maintain order. Egmont is eventually arrested by Alva and sentenced to death. His love, Clara (a fictional character; the real Egmont was married and the father of 11 children), plots his escape but fails. She poisons herself, and Egmont is executed, but with the knowledge that the rebellion is in progress and the people will be free.
Egmont opens with its justly famous overture, for years a staple in the concert hall. It begins in a somber, serious mood, marked Sostenuto ma non troppo. The music seems to portray oppression and darkness, the opening motif revealed to represent the tyrant, but when the tempo picks up with a vigorous Allegro, the mood shifts to one of heroic defiance with a theme that seems descending into the depths to do battle. The tyrant's motif evolves throughout the overture and near the end becomes rhythmic and dark and brings on Egmont's execution. The mood of the piece then turns triumphant and celebratory, providing a glorious close.
Next is one of Clara's two songs, "Die Trommel gerühet." She mixes feelings about love and the military, longing to be with Egmont, marching in his army. Entr'actes Nos. 1 and 2 follow, the former maintaining the sweet mood from Clara's song, then turning agitated, while the latter, marked Larghetto, is very touching. Clara's second song follows, "Freudvoll und leidvoll," a quite moving outpouring of love.
Entr'acte No. 3 ensues, wherein the theme from the love song is developed at the outset, with the mood tranquil and bright. The music turns martial then to depict the rebellious forces. The fourth entr'acte, marked Larghetto, begins with a wail of pain, then presents a melancholy and beautiful melody. Clara's death is portrayed by sad, touching music, in another Larghetto tempo.
The Melodrama is next. With soft, soothing music, Egmont falls asleep and dreams of Clara. He sees her as a spirit of liberty, who tells him that the Netherlands will have freedom. He then ponders his imminent execution, but revels in thoughts of the freedom his people will soon enjoy. In the last section, Siegessymphonie, Beethoven reprises the heroic and triumphant music from the close of the overture. This score was unusual for Beethoven in the large amount of slow music he composed. The first performance of the play with the music came on June 15, 1810. A performance of it (apart from Goethe's drama) lasts about 40 to 45 minutes.
It's still hard to believe that a hands on musician as himself (unlike many composers who just write the sheet music, I think part of why Beethoven was so powerful is he also was a great violinist and pianist... he knew it both emotionally and theoretically) lost his hearing... not because "how do you write" but how can you keep going... doing a thing you can no longer enjoy and still be amazing at it. Ok, so enjoy is relative... but you can't even hear your own premier of his glorious 9th... it's an interesting experiment if you will of the human spirit... amongst other things.
RoundTheBendI miss the comfort in being sadProfile Ground Control
Era: Classical
Year: 1811
Form: Incidental Music, etc.
Score: 84
While I enjoyed the Ruins of Athens the most, this was overall, incidental music, something I'm not much a fan of, even if it's Beethoven. It is fitting though that it's the a Hungarian recording (for König Stephan). I mean none of this was bad, just as good as my experience with most of Haydn.
Anyway here's some info about these less known Beethoven works:
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The Ruins of Athens, incidental music, Op. 113
In 1811 Beethoven was commissioned to provide incidental music to August von Kotzebue's Prologue (König Stephan) and Epilogue (Die Ruinen von Athen), which were to be performed at the opening of the new imperial theater in Pest on February 10, 1812. Because the occasion was patriotic, the works are filled with flattery for the current emperor, Franz. Both works were well received at their premieres; the Overture to Die Ruinen von Athen was published in 1823 by Steiner in Vienna, but the complete piece was not printed until 1846.
Die Ruinen von Athen (The Ruins of Athens) tells the story of Minerva, who, after sleeping for 2,000 years, awakens to find the Parthenon destroyed and Athens occupied by the Turks. Culture and reason have disappeared from what was the ancient Greek world, but these human qualities have been preserved in Pest by the enlightened Emperor Franz.
In addition to solo soprano and bass, four-part chorus, and a full orchestra with paired woodwinds and four horns, Beethoven calls for piccolo and percussion -- instruments associated by the Viennese with Turkish Janissary bands. This instrumentation would reappear in Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, in the Turkish March variation of the finale.
Beethoven constructed the Overture to Die Ruinen von Athen in an unusual manner: the key relationships follow the sonata-form pattern, but the treatment of the melodic material does not. Marked Andante con moto, a slow introduction begins with a brief gesture, in G minor, stated first by the string basses and then moving through the rest of the orchestra. An arching tune in the strings gives way to the first theme, Allegro ma non troppo, set in G major and played on the oboe. Transitional material modulates to the dominant, where the second theme, more angular than the first, also appears in the oboe. A diminutive development refers to the introduction by briefly touching on the minor mode with melodic material drawn from the transition -- not the first or second theme (this is the main deviation from standard sonata form). After the return to the tonic, we hear neither the first or second themes, but rather a recapitulation built almost entirely on transitional material, which closes the overture in G major. To Beethoven, key relationships -- not an ordered repetition of melodic material -- were the crux of the Classical style.
Aside from the overture, the "Chorus of the Dervishes" and the "Marcia alla Turca" remain the most effective and appealing selections from the incidental score, composed in a popular "Turkish" style. -Description by John Palmer
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König Stephan (King Stephen), incidental music, Op. 117
As the Napoleonic wars turned nineteenth-century Europe inside out, members of the nobility and the well-to-do found themselves with increasingly fewer locations at which to spend their summer holidays. Because it was in neutral territory, Teplitz (Teplice, now in the Czech Republic) became the destination of choice for numerous Viennese aristocrats and other citizens. It was here, in the summer of 1811, that Beethoven quickly composed the incidental scores to both König Stephan, Op. 117, and Die Ruinen von Athen, Op. 113 while taking "the cure" under doctor's orders.
Both works had been commissioned for the opening of the new imperial theater in Pest on February 10, 1812. The occasion was patriotic, and though König Stephan is ostensibly a tribute to an earlier Hungarian king (the work's subtitle is "Hungary's First Benefactor"), it actually pays homage to the then-current Austro-Hungarian Kaiser, Franz.
The overture, in the key of E flat major, is the only section of König Stephan that is still regularly performed. Marked Andante con moto -- Presto, it opens with a brief brass outburst that initiates a slow introduction. The main theme is a syncopated, arpeggiated tune that almost immediately dissolves into a transition to a new key. An arching melody in which each note is of equal duration heralds the second theme group; the closing theme is similarly built of equal note values. Typically, overtures in sonata-allegro form forego a repeat of the exposition, and König Stephan is no exception, though a return of the introductory material momentarily suggests that a return of the exposition will follow. Woodwinds initiate the development with part of the first theme, and an exhilarating dynamic expansion from pianissimo abruptly halts at total silence before the recapitulation. A further key change marks the beginning of a coda that further develops themes from all three parts of the exposition.
The women's choruses in the body of the work owe a debt to similar sections in Haydn's oratorio The Seasons (1799 - 1801). Most curious to twentieth-century listeners are the melodramas of numbers 5, 7, and 8, in which spoken dialogue is accompanied by the orchestra -- a common form of entertainment in eighteenth-century Austria that was only occasionally revisited in subsequent centuries.
-Description by John Palmer
I chose this recording based on a Gramophone suggestion or something. Never heard of either. Anyway, Symphony No. 7... I remember liking it...and so I put it on and sadly I'm bored to death by the first movement... I don't remember that at all... then the 2nd and 3rd movements come on and start remembering it... anyone have a better reading of the 1st movement and why it's matched with the 2nd and 3rd? It seems a bit out of place... I almost wonder if Beethoven was like F it... I'm NOT writing a powerful 1st movement... I'm going to mix this one up? Dunno... I'm not saying it's bad, it's just different... not only for the symphony form at large, but also different as to how I remember it. Anyway, it is indeed the job of a great composer to surprise you, but I'm not sure I was "ready" for that one. It took me for the wrong surprise I suppose. Anyway, I remember hearing some kind wife's tale about the second movement and how the inspiration came to him for it, but I forget what it was... in a dream or something? 🤣
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From the 7th symphony wiki:
Composer and music author Antony Hopkins says of the symphony:[11]
The Seventh Symphony perhaps more than any of the others gives us a feeling of true spontaneity; the notes seem to fly off the page as we are borne along on a floodtide of inspired invention. Beethoven himself spoke of it fondly as "one of my best works". Who are we to dispute his judgment?
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Symphony No. 7 in A major, Op. 92
Ludwig van Beethoven completed this work in 1812, but withheld the first performance until December 8, 1813, in Vienna. It is scored for pairs of flutes, oboes, clarinets, bassoons, horns, and trumpets, plus timpani and string choir.
1812 was an eventful year for the very famous, seriously deafened Beethoven. July was especially noteworthy. At Teplitz he finally met Goethe (1749-1832), but was disappointed to find (he felt) an aging courtier who was no longer a firebrand or kindred democrat; worse yet, a musical dilettante. A week before that only meeting of German giants, Beethoven had written the letter to his mysterious "immortal beloved" that was discovered posthumously in a secret drawer. Then, toward the end of the year, he meddled unbidden in the affairs of his youngest brother, Johann, who was cohabiting contentedly with a housekeeper. Somehow, he found time to compose the last of his ten sonatas for violin and piano and to complete a new pair of symphonies -- the Seventh and Eighth -- both begun in 1809. He introduced the Seventh at a charity concert for wounded soldiers, and repeated it four nights later by popular demand.
Richard Wagner called Symphony No. 7 "the apotheosis of the dance," meaning of course to praise its Dionysian spirit. But this oxymoron stuck like feathers to hot tar, encouraging irrelevant and awkward choreography (by Isadore Duncan and Léonide Massine among others) and licensing the music appreciation racket to misinterpret Beethoven's intent as well as his content. Wholly abstract and utterly symphonic, the Seventh was his definitive break with stylistic conventions practiced by Mozart, Haydn, and a legion of lesser mortals who copied them. He stretched harmonic rules, and gave breadth to symphonic forms that Haydn and Mozart anticipated. If, in his orchestral music, Beethoven was the last Austro-German Classicist, he did point those who followed him to the path of Romanticism.
While the poco sostenuto introduction begins by observing time-honored rules of harmony, within 62 measures it modulates from A major to the alien keys of C and F major, then back again! The transition from solemn 4/4 meter to 6/8 for the balance of an evergreen vivace movement (in sonata form) further exemplifies Beethoven's conceptual stretch.
Coming from the 20-minute funeral march of his earlier Eroica Symphony, Beethoven created an allegretto "slow" movement. He established a funerary mood (without its being specifically elegiac) through the repetition of a 2/4 rhythmic motif in A minor, the most somber key of the tempered scale. A minor serves more than an expressive function, moreover; it readies us for the reappearance of F major in a tumultuous five-part Scherzo marked Presto. Two trios go slower (assai meno presto), in D major -- a long distance harmonically in 1812 from the work's A major tonic. The beginning of a third trio turns into a short coda capped by five fortissimo chords.
A major finally returns in the final movement. Here more than anywhere else in his orchestral music, Beethoven became a race-car driver. As in the "slow" movement, the rhythm is 2/4, but sonata-form replaces ABA. And there's a grand coda longer than the exposition, the development, or the reprise, which, furthermore, begins in B minor! But modulations bring it back to A major in time for a heart-pounding final lap with the accelerator pressed to the floor.
- Description by Roger Dettmer
More on 8 later...
I looked for a Honeck/Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra recording as recommended by AfterHours on the YouTubes for ya'll, but didn't find one... so Bernstein will do:
I think I might be missing something here. Symphony No. 8 feels really like a great exercise in dynamics - an AB dynamic of Something fast and energetic and then a serene and slow. It's great writing, but it just isn't interesting to me emotionally or conceptually. Perhaps I don't have the same value in some of the "experiments" here. I mean it clearly has great musical figures, but as a whole, it's lacking for me. Easily my least favorite Beethoven symphony, even if in parts it is indeed interesting, beautiful, and clever.
Quote:
Beethoven completed this work in 1812, and conducted the first performance at Vienna on February 27, 1814. The year 1812 was both eventful and productive for the very deaf but very famous Beethoven. In July, at Teplitz spa, he finally met the great Goethe (1749-1832), but was disappointed to find (in his opinion) an aging courtier who was neither a firebrand nor a fellow democrat, and furthermore a musical dilettante. In turn, Beethoven's power both as a person and as an artist impressed Goethe, but the old poet-playwright was fatigued by his high-pitched intensity and offended by a lack of manners bordering on rudeness.
Withal, Beethoven somehow made time in 1812 to compose a final violin and piano sonata (Op. 96), and to complete a new pair of symphonies. Nos. 7 and 8, begun in 1809 (the year of the Emperor Concerto), were related in much the way his Fifth and Sixth symphonies had been. In 1813 he conducted the Dionysian Seventh to great acclaim, but saved the elfin Eighth for an 1814 concert where it was fatally sandwiched between the Seventh Symphony and Wellington's Victory, or the Battle of Vittoria. This last was adored by the audience in direct proportion to its awfulness, but they only sniffed at the Eighth.
Compared to the Seventh, No. 8 is benign as well as brief. There are four movements, in all of which the old Classical forms are clearly delineated but somehow thrown out of balance by a constant barrage of curiously humorous distortions. Were the work not such an essentially lyrical joy, one might divine hints of the creative crisis to come for its maker. Its metronomic second movement (which is perhaps an actual tweaking of the recently invented metronome) has only 81 bars -- the fewest in Beethoven's symphonic canon. The composer asked that the third movement be played Tempo di minuetto (in fact it is a Ländler), rather than at scherzo speed. The movement's heavy, graceless accents seem to poke fun at the courtly world only recently passed.The first and final movements are both written in sonata form, both marked Allegro vivace -- con brio, too, in the first.
Beethoven reserved for the finale a leviathan-length coda, by then one of his musical signatures -- 236 bars, only 30 fewer than the combined exposition, development, and reprise! The movement wears its complexity so lightly that its true subtlety may all too easily pass unnoticed. Sudden loud interruptions in a very remote key herald still more radical explorations in the development. Here, the main rondo theme is debated in counterpoint, with cross rhythms and unexpected harmonic twists. But the giant coda is only the last joke in a work of cloudless skies and merriment. As John N. Burk summed the work up in his evergreen Life and Works of Beethoven: "[His] humor seems to consist of sudden turns in the course of an even and lyrical flow, breaking in upon formal, almost archaic periods. It is a sudden irregularity, showing its head where all [had been] regular -- an altered rhythm, an explosion of fortissimo, a foreign note or an unrelated tonality...like divine play in that pure region of tonal thinking [where] melody and invention pour forth...and fancy is furiously alive." Beethoven himself thought it one of his best symphonies, while Robert Schumann praised its "profound humor" and wrote that the second movement particularly filled him with "tranquility and happiness." - Description by Roger Dettmer
Not much to say about the incidental music. It's never been a big part of my listening schedule and the links here don't really do anything to change my mind.
I've always been a big fan of #7 and if you were bored, the specific performance was probably at least partly to blame. Still, having recently poured over 1, 3, 5, and 6, I can see that it might not quite rise to expectations by any performance. I can also see the relative disappointment in #8... another one I quite like, but it certainly doesn't have the uniqueness, let alone pack the emotional punch that the aforementioned symphonies do. Among the evens, I put it at third out of four. Were it by any other composer up to that date, it'd rank pretty well, but compared to the rest of Beethoven, it's gonna' fall at least a little flat.
RoundTheBendI miss the comfort in being sadProfile Ground Control
Not much to say about the incidental music. It's never been a big part of my listening schedule and the links here don't really do anything to change my mind.
I've always been a big fan of #7 and if you were bored, the specific performance was probably at least partly to blame. Still, having recently poured over 1, 3, 5, and 6, I can see that it might not quite rise to expectations by any performance. I can also see the relative disappointment in #8... another one I quite like, but it certainly doesn't have the uniqueness, let alone pack the emotional punch that the aforementioned symphonies do. Among the evens, I put it at third out of four. Were it by any other composer up to that date, it'd rank pretty well, but compared to the rest of Beethoven, it's gonna' fall at least a little flat.
Yeah I mean even with the first movement getting an 80 from me, the remaining 3 get a 100 on the 7th... so average gets a 95. It's still a great Symphony. I suppose I need to listen to the 8th a few more times before I dismiss it... and possibly from this Kurt Masur recording... I liked it more. The timing of the attacks, etc. felt better. Anyway, 7th is totally still awesome... 8th just was a mess for me is all... I can't really say I loved as a whole.
RoundTheBendI miss the comfort in being sadProfile Ground Control
Era: Classical
Year: 1814 (last premier v.3 if you will)
Form: Symphony
Score: 85
And thus concludes my full deaf Beethoven journey... will return in 1821. Interestingly enough it looks like he wrote a lot of "folk songs" during this time it appears a few/many(?) people think he went completely dormant in.
While I felt like the musical elements here were just as good as a less amazing Mozart opera, I didn't find anything musically stunning. I've only read the synopsis... it could be if I spent more time with this, it'd be quite the powerful work, but as it is for now, I'm less interested in it/getting to know it more. I was, however, still very much so into the musical elements of the vocals - very powerful and emotional performances... more so than any other opera I've heard so far on this journey. Clearly the subject matter demands it, but I can't help but think if Beethoven had written other Opera's what they'd be like as this was a great vocal performance, even if overall I was left in a meh state.
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Fidelio, opera, Op. 72
Fidelio, Ludwig van Beethoven's only opera, takes as its subject a theme close to the composer's heart: the defeat of tyranny through man's innate desire for liberty. The first version of the opera, premiered in 1805 under the title Leonore (the name of the heroine), was staggeringly unsuccessful. This was largely the result, however, of circumstances beyond Beethoven's control: Vienna was then occupied by Napoleon's troops, who made up a large part of the audience. It seems likely that the Beethoven-loving but troubled Viennese had more pressing concerns than attending such an entertainment. And the members of Napoleon's army might not have appreciated the opera's themes, which ran counter to the soldiers' very presence in Vienna.
Beethoven retooled the opera in 1806, shuffling certain sections and making cuts. In this form Leonore was revived with considerable success, although Beethoven withdrew the opera from performance because of suspicions that he was not receiving his full share of the proceeds. In 1814 Beethoven revised the opera yet again, changing its name to Fidelio. This final version was a success, both in the theater and in the composer's own esteem, and it is this version that is generally regarded as the "definitive" incarnation of the opera. Each of the three "Fidelios" featured a different overture: the first version used what is now called the Leonore Overture No. 2; the second, Leonore No. 3; and the final used the Fidelio Overture. (Beethoven composed Leonore No. 1 for a Prague staging which never took place.) Though rarely heard in performances of the complete opera, each of the "Leonore" overtures has retained a place in the concert repertory.
The original libretto was fashioned by Joseph Sonnleithner after Jean Bouilly's Leonore (1798). The text for the final version was reworked by the Leipzig-born playwright and poet Georg Friedrich Treitschke, whom Beethoven had met in 1811. The story concerns Leonore, who is trying to free her political-prisoner husband, the Spanish nobleman Florestan, from the prison of the evil Pizarro by disguising herself as a man, Fidelio, and working in the prison.
Highlights from the score include the Act One quartet "Mir ist so wunderbar," which is certainly the most famous excerpt from the opera; Marcellina's Act One aria, "O wär' ich schon mit dir vereint," in which she discloses her burgeoning love for Fidelio; Florestan's Act One aria, "In des Lebens Frühlingstagen," which he sings in his cell thinking of his wife; and the lovely "O namenlose Freude," a moving duet between Florestan and Leonore that follows her foiling of the murder plot. There is much spoken dialogue throughout Fidelio; some have cited this aspect in criticism, saying that it robs the work of its momentum. That view is a minority one, however, and Fidelio has generally been held in high critical esteem; despite its sometimes shaky plot, the music is unassailably great and blazes with Beethoven's steadfast commitment to liberty and humanity. Fidelio makes explicit the strand of political idealism that seems to simmer beneath the surfaces of many of his other works, and if it does not have the universal appeal of some of his better-known orchestral classics, it nevertheless seems very close to Beethoven's own heart. -Description by Rovi Staff
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