Musical Style and Innovations of Beethoven Essay Example for Free

Musical flare and Innovations of van Beethoven EssayMusical Style and InnovationsBeethoven is viewed as a transitional figure between the Classical and Romantic eras of euphonyal history. Above all, his works distinguish themselves from those of any prior composer through his origin of large, extended architectonic structures characterized by the extensive growing of musical material, themes, and motifs, usually by means of modulation, that is, a change in the feeling of the home key, through a mix of keys or harmonic regions.Although Haydns subsequent works often showed a greater fluidity between distant keys, Beethovens innovation was the ability to chop-chop establish a solidity in juxtaposing different keys and unexpected notes to join them. This expanded harmonic part creates a sense of a vast musical and experiential space through which the music moves, and the development of musical material creates a sense of unfolding drama in this space. In this way Beethovens music parallels the simultaneous development of the novel in literature, a literary number focused on the flavor drama and development of one or more individuals through complex life circumstances, and of contemporaneous German idealisms philosophical notion of self, mind, or spirit that unfolds through a complex process of contradictions and tensions between the indwelling and objective until a resolution or synthesis occurs in which all of these contradictions and developmental phases have been intractable or encompassed in a higher unity.Beethoven continued to expand the development section of works, extending a trend in the works of Haydn and Mozart, who had dramatically expanded both the length and substance of putzal music. As Beethovens major immediate predecessors and influences, he looked to their harmonic and formal models for his own works. However, both Mozart and Haydn placed the great lean of a musical campaign in the statement of ideas called the exposition, f or Beethoven the development section of a sonata form became the heart of the work. Beethoven was able to do this by making the development section not hardly longer, but overly more structured. The very long development section of the Eroica Symphony, for example, is divided into four near equal sections, making it, in effect, a sonata form within a sonata form. The first base movement unaccompanied of this symphony is as long as an entire typical Italian-style Mozart symphony from the 1770s. His focus on the developmentwould, like others of his innovations, set a trend that later composers would follow.Although Beethoven wrote many beautiful and lyrical melodies, other radical innovation of his music, compared especially to that of Mozart and Haydn, is his extensive use of forceful, marked, and plane stark roundic patterns throughout his compositions and, in particular, in his themes and motifs, just about of which are primarily rhythmic rather than melodic. Some of his m ost famous themes, much(prenominal) as those of the first movements of the three, Fifth, and Ninth symphonies, are primarily non-melodic rhythmic figures consisting of notes of a single chord, and the themes of the last movements of the Third and Seventh symphonies could more accurately be described as rhythms rather than as melodies.This use of rhythm was particularly well suited to the primacy of development in Beethovens music, since a single rhythmic pattern provoke more easily than a melody be taken through a succession of different, even remote, keys and harmonic regions while retaining and conveying an underlying unity. This allowed him to combine different features of his themes in a wide variety of ways, extending the techniques of Haydn in development (see Sonata Form).He also continued another trend towards bigger orchestras that went on until the first decade of the 20th century, and moved the center of the sound downwards in the orchestra, to the violas and the low er register of the violins and cellos, big(a) his music a heavier and darker feel than Haydn or Mozart. Gustav Mahler modified the orchestration of some of Beethovens music most notably the 3d and 9th symphonies with the idea of more accurately expressing Beethovens intent in an orchestra that had grown so much larger than the one Beethoven used for example, doubling woodwind parts to compensate for the fact that a innovational orchestra has so many more strings than Beethovens orchestra did. Needless to say, these efforts remain controversial. In his Fifth Symphony Beethoven introduced a striking motif, drawn from a late Haydn symphony, in the very opening bar, which he echoed in various forms in all four movements of the symphony.This is the first important occurrence of cyclic form. He was also fond of making usual what had antecedently been unusual in the Fifth Symphony, instead ofusing a stately minuet, as had been the norm for the dance movement of a four-movement work, h e created a dark march, which he used as the third movement and ran into the fourth without interruption. While one can point to previous works which had one or more of these individual features, his music, combined with the use of operatic scoring that he learned from Mehul and Cherubini, created a work which was altogether novel in effect too novel, in fact, for some critics of the time. On the other hand, his contemporary Spohr found the finale too baroque, though he praised the second movement as being in good Romantic style.His Ninth Symphony included a choir and solo voices in the 4th movement for the first time, and made extensive use of fugues, which were generally considered to be a different form of music, and again unusual in symphonies.He wrote one opera, Fidelio. It has been said that he wrote beautiful vocal music without regard for the limitations of human singers, treating the voice as if it were a symphonic instrument even though his conversation books note his d esire to make his music singable and include references that level that he had remembered his fathers singing lessons.Beethovens development and works are typically divided into three halts an early period in which his works show especially the influence of Mozart and Haydn a middle, mature period in which he developed his distinctive individual style, sometimes characterized as heroic and a late period, in which he wrote works of a highly evolved, individuated, sometimes fragmented and unorthodox style sometimes characterized as a priori and sublime, where he tried to combine the baroque ideas of Handel and Bach with his icons Mozart and Haydn. In his late years he called Handel my revered master.In contrast to Mozart, he labored heavily over his work, leaving intermediate drafts that provide substantial insight into his creative process. Early drafts of his Ninth Symphony used rough vertical marks on the score in place of actual notes, to indicate the structure he had in mind for the melody. Studies of his resume books show the working out of dozens of variations on a particular theme, changing themes to fit with an overall structure that evolved over time, and extensive sketching of counter-melodies.