Festivity. Expressive Quality and Historical Semantics in Beethoven (original) (raw)
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Festiveness: Expressive quality and historical semantics in Beethoven
The focus of this article on the so-called festive quality of Beethoven’s music rests on two mutually related areas of interest, namely, the increasing role loudness played in nineteenth-century music and an understanding of the emotional effect music had on listeners of that era. An examination of the expressive quality and meaning of the finale of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony—a prototype of festiveness—encompasses three lines of inquiry: an investigation of the tradition from which such qualities stem; the consideration of texts accompanied by the same type of music (for instance Egmont, Choral Fantasy); and a determination of the specific dramatic manifestation of this expressive quality in Beethoven’s music. Finally, a socio-psychological hypothesis concerning the significance of this mode of expression is proposed.
The Ode to Joy: Music and Musicality in Tragic Culture
Beethoven's Choral Symphony, also called the Ninth, is first performed in Vienna in 1824. From the start it is considered a most troubled masterpiece. Thirty years later, the Viennese critic Eduard Hanslick declares it a "spiritual watershed" interposing itself between embattled currents of conviction. 1 Reflecting widespread opinion, Hanslick regards this symphony, with its momentous choral finale, as having more fueled than calmed the acrimony between composers producing symphonies as opposed to operas, or absolute works in contrast to programmatic ones. Three purely instrumental movements, why doesn't the work continue in this specifically musical way to the very last note? During its long compositional gestation Beethoven even poses this question to himself, though probably for reasons different from the one Hanslick offered when, in desiring once and for all to clarify the musical genres, he argues that it is logically impossible for a truly musical work both to obey the laws of specifically musical beauty and to adapt itself to the demands of extramusical expression. In 1854, Hanslick is arguing against the emerging supremacy of a Wagnerian aesthetic that is declaring opera or, as Wagner prefers to call it, the total music drama to be more advanced than the symphony. Further, he is resisting the dominant materialist-historicist argument that, with Beethoven's Ninth, the symphony has reached the limits of its purely musical possibility-i.e., what it can achieve by means of tones alone-and thereby now proclaims its need for the word. As Wagner summarizes the thought: "wo die Musik nicht mehr weiter kann, da kommt das Wort." 2 Hanslick observes that although the critics of the Ninth might admire Beethoven's abstract intention, this does not mean that they have to like what they are hearing. Or even if they admire the message sung-Schiller's expression of how persons of lonely suffering are brought to joy through the collective of human brotherhood-they may still find the accompanying tonal forms "unschön." 1 "Wir meinen Beethovens ‚Neunte.' Sie ist eine jener geistigen Wasserscheiden, die weithin sichtbar und unübersteiglich sich zwischen die Strömung entgegengesetzter Überzeugungen legen" (Eduard Hanslick: Vom Musikalisch-Schönen: Ein Beitrag zur Revision der Ästhethik der Tonkunst. Wiesbaden, Breitkopf & Härtel, 1966, 90-2n). All discussion of Hanslick is drawn from this extended footnote.
2013
Beethoven?s vocal works are often neglected or overshadowed as a result of his prominent involvement with large-scale instrumental genres such as sonata, symphony, or string quartet. Nevertheless, he sustained throughout his life a significant interest in literature and poetry; his personal library, as well as his letters, Tagebuch, and conversation books all document this by way of numerous direct quotations from?and indirect references to?the literary materials that interested him. The numerous vocal works he produced between 1783 and 1826 are one relevant manifestation of this interest and engagement with words. Beethoven produced a significant body of vocal works, the majority of which have not received the same intensity of analytical treatment as the instrumental works. Specifically, this study examines the relationship between words and music in the solo songs and other vocal works of Beethoven. The points of intersection between literary and musical expression are evaluated ...
Pour the sweet milk of concord into hell': Theories of Unity and Disunity in Late Beethoven
Music Analysis, 1999
Evidently disenchanted with the vein of criticism that typically greeted his music, Beethoven wrote to the music publisher Adolf Martin Schlesinger in July 1825 congratulating him on his choice of Adolph Bernhard Marx as editor-inchief of the recently-founded Berliner allgemeine musikalische Zeitung. In so doing he voiced the hope that Marx would 'continue to reveal more and more what is noble and true in the sphere of art', a process the composer of the recently-completed Ninth Symphony saw as involving infinitely more than 'the mere counting of syllables'. 1 Fifteen years earlier, as Bettina Brentano wrote to Goethe, the composer expressed a similar viewpoint when he reportedly said that 'Music, verily, is the mediator between the life of the mind and the senses', the 'one incorporeal entrance into the higher world of knowledge … the electrical soil in which the mind thinks, lives, feels'. 2 After an extended hiatus during which questions of musical meaning were viewed with scepticism if not out-and-out disdain, the position ostensibly endorsed by Beethoven is again enjoying favour. Indeed, the last two decades or so have brought with them an incredible transformation of what it means to engage in musical reflection. With the seeming force of continental plates colliding head-on, modes of understanding have shifted to the point where-in a great many quarters at least-it is no longer deemed sufficient to treat music as if it were a science whose substance is to be laid bare beneath a microscope, an isolated phenomenon where meaning is be ascertained solely within the notes. Nowadays, cultural context, gender, genre, hermeneutics and narrativity are among the near-myriad number of interdisciplinary perspectives which have found their way into a field formerly predicated on the empirically objective. As Rose Rosengard Subotnik put it almost a decade ago, 'emotion and meaning are coming out of the musicological closet'. 3 Looking back on all of these dazzling, sometimes dizzying developments, it is worth noting that Beethoven studies have almost always led the way in explorations of new critical methods; indeed, just about every analytical system from the nineteenth century to the present day has been inspired in some way by this composer. Focusing particularly on the composer's 'middle period', critics as diverse as Hoffmann, Schumann, Hanslick, Wagner, Riemann, Schenker and
On Narrativity in Music: Expressive Genres and Levels of Discourse in Beethoven
1991
Narrative literature assumes two fundamental notions, the tale and the teller. Music could be said to share these aspects, to the degree one may speak of a sequence of musical events as akin to a story, or plot, and the composer-or better, his persona (Cone 1974) as implied narrator. Closer correspondences may be seen in opera or song, where recitative or speech-like passages typically accompany the more literal narration of events. But in "absolute" music the analogy appears a little more tenuous, since often a sequence of emotional states, rather than referential events, appears to be pnmary. Nevertheless, I find the analogy ofnarrativity in the "absolute" music of Beethoven to be helpful, and I will illustrate why with a brief survey of two areas corresponding to the tale and the teller, respectively. The first concerns what I call expressive genres that coordinate larger scale organization of the expressive "plot" of a movement. Since expressive genres are negotiated with formal schemes such as sonata, they can help explain events and formal departures that might appear incompletely motivated from a purely formalist perspective.
Expression Types of 19th-century Symphonic Music: The Cases of the Glorifying Hymnic and the Majestic Chorale, OSF Preprints , 2018
We take music’s expressive power for granted. Yet, this aspect poses many puzzling problems for musicological research. One of them is how to approach the effect of music historically since satisfactory sources about music’s emotional qualities are rare and one needs to be cautious in transferring results of recent music psychology or cognitive musicology back to the 19th century. Therefore, the present article proposes a kind of historical music psychology. Developing a method partly inspired by systematic musicology, yet clearly historical, this study offers a possible solution to that problem. It does so by way of a case study on two specific and closely related kinds of loud music passages that have been labeled the ‘Glorifying Hymnic’ and the ‘Majestic Chorale’ respectively. It provides a definition of these types of music passages and—combining qualitative and quantitative approaches—it investigates the contemporary perception of these passages using evidence from contemporary witnesses. The sample focuses on orchestral music such as symphonies, concertos, symphonic poems, and overtures including works from Beethoven, Berlioz, Mendelssohn, Bristow, Brahms, Saint-Saëns, Tchaikovsky, Cliffe, and many other composers. In a final step, the article explores the dissemination of the ‘Glorifying Hymnic’ in 19th-century music and draws attention to contemporary historical events in an attempt to link the expression type of the ‘Glorifying Hymnic’ to historical events and phenomena such as nationalism, religion, and imperialism.
Musicologist, 2023
In a video commentary, pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim (2016) discussed the dangers of verbal descriptions of music by presenting two seemingly contradictory explanations about the 'meaning' of the theme of the final movement of Beethoven's Piano Sonata Op.10/3 given by pianists Edwin Fischer and Claudio Arrau. We examined the tempo and dynamic fluctuations obtained from the studio recordings of this theme by Fischer in 1948 and 1954, and by Arrau in 1964 and 1985 by using the Sonic Visualiser software (Cannam et al., 2010), and interpreted these results by using Steve Larson's (2012) theory of musical forces, and Robert Hatten's (2018) theory of virtual agency in western music. According to our analyses, the differences in the performances of Fischer and Arrau can be metaphorically correlated with the different meanings these pianists attributed to Beethoven's theme. We concluded that the seemingly contradictory verbal descriptions of these pianists indicate different aesthetically warranted emotions they aimed to communicate through their performances of Beethoven's theme.
Current Musicology
In some contexts, classical music is described as capable of evoking powerful emotional experiences in listeners, while in others it is associated with a restrained response on the part of the audience. Against the backdrop of this observation, the article aims to apply a discourse-analytic approach to investigating how symphonic music is constructed and legitimated as an emotional resource, and how listeners’ reactions are articulated in relation to ideas about the emotional qualities of music. The material comprises texts and a small number of images taken from concert programs of two leading symphony orchestras: the London Symphony Orchestra (LSO) and the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra (GSO). The results demonstrate variation in both the feelings that are highlighted in the concert programs and the conceptions or ideas about musical meaning that are referred to in the descriptions. While some descriptions draw on a formalist artistic ideal, emphasizing the music’s independent esth...