Music Rant: Unmusical Excuses For Not Fixing Beethoven's Trumpet Parts
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- čas přidán 22. 08. 2024
- Specifically, I refer to the notorious passage at the end of the "Eroica" Symphony's first movement, which has become the subject of some ridiculous notions by otherwise respectable musicians and listeners. .
I am reminded of Britten recording his own _St. Nicolas_ as told by Imogen Holst. Apparently, the bass with the loudest voice had forgotten his glasses that day and, for some reason, this meant he took forever to turn pages. At one point, Britten realised he needed to give the guy a fraction longer to do the deed and so put in a rallentando to buy the guy some time.
And his joking comment in the recording studio was along the lines, "Well, _that_ will give the musicologists of the next century something to talk about!"
In other words: you make a lot of sense. Composers do and did things to suit their particular circumstances, not to have it writ in stone thereafter!
Nice talk, well argued, much appreciated. Thank you.
Let me add that Arturo Toscanini, who was frequently characterized as playing exactly what was on the score, had the trumpets play the whole passage on a recording he made in 1949.
He did in all his performances that I've heard. He also did lots of other changes to help the music "sound." All the way up to and including Debussy. He was never the mindless literalist some make him out to be.
Thank you so much, Dave. Of all your rants, this may be the one I appreciate most. The Eroica is my favorite Beethoven symphony, so I care very much how it sounds and how it is played. But beyond that is the conceptual issue that a composer's "real" or only "authentic" intentions can be reduced to just one, and only one, moment in time and or to just one scribbling on a specific page of paper. I can't speak for every composer, but it would seem that the vast majority compose as part of a creative process that's active their entire lives. To say that only a first thought, or a specific publication, represents the end of a composer's ideas about a piece of music seems at odds with the very notion of creative thought. The idea of elevating an Urtext (such as the trumpetless measures in the Erioca) above every other musical consideration strikes me as bizarre. I guess you said it more briefly when you said Beethoven wrote as much for the future as for his own moment in time. Thanks again.
My pleasure. Thank you for watching and adding your thoughts.
As a composer, i agree! Also, in Beethoven's case, i reckon a lot of us can hear how his music in particular was crying out for ensembles and performances that weren't up to the task yet.
What are the recordings of the Eroica symphony? Include the added trumpet part? I would definitely like to investigate this and add them to my library.
Wes @user-et8mh2ki1c, I share your view of the Eroica and your views on authenticity. Your "one moment in time" -idea resonated with me. I think one's interpretive preferences, as a listener and as a conductor of course, often change over time as well. For the Eroica, mine have relaxed significantly; that is I can enjoy a much wider range of "how it should go" ideas than those of Klemperer's 1959 recording that I obtained during my adolescence. The old 1942 Mengelberg/Concertgebouw I found in a closet was imprinted on me early in life. Then around puberty my affections turned when a Markevitch Symphony Of The Air record hit me. Later on that granitic Klemperer recording infected me and it took 40+ years for other conductors to make their case.
I must add that I, too, appreciated David's "rant" very much as well. His several videos that have mentioned or, like this, featured the Eroica have helped me realize why it has taken me twenty record purchases of Eroica for every one I could keep. I mean, how could it possibility be the demigod Beethoven's fault that I went broke during this quest!? Cheers...
The irony is, for all the talk from the HIP crowd about historical authenticity, the idea of complete and total fidelity to a score is a very 20th century idea. 18th century composers would probably be shocked at the idea of their scores being treated as sacred ur-texts. Think of the sheer quantity of music that 18th century composers had to churn out, and just how much they had to do: two string quartets and a symphony for the Duke's dinner party on Friday, plus a couple cantatas for the next church service, as well as harpsichord lessons for the Duke's bratty son, you have to frantically copy out all the parts for each musician, and your second violin just walked in so drunk he's falling out of his chair.
For someone like Stravinsky or Mahler, you can definitely make the argument that they thought deeply about every dynamic and accent mark. But the contemporaries of Haydn and Beethoven were practical craftsmen just trying to get their jobs done, not people who thought they were writing texts that would stand as permanent monuments for eternity.
Mahler did not view any score as sacrosanct. As a conductor he made huge changes in everyone from Beethoven to Schumann to Bruckner. As for his own work, he insisted on the right of conductors to change anything that they felt didn't sound as it should.
I think it works perfectly well as Beethoven wrote it. In either version, you get a bit of blaring trumpets, then they go away(a little sooner or a little later as the case may be) and the rest of the orchestra takes over. It kind of ties in with what i think is the benefit for composers of the limitation of natural brass and only 2 timpani, which is, your loudest, most bombastic instruments are more or less stuck to the tonic key, so that moments of arrival are emphasized by their blaring. I have Harnoncourt's cycle with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe, I love the Eroica on that set to death, and the trumpets going away there never felt odd to me personally ( though i agree with you that his idea about that moment foreshadowing defeat is a bunch of hooey, it sounds plenty triumphant to me)
That's a perfectly reasonable and valid perspective!
Fun, enjoyable video.
You have the best rants 👍
Excellent episode, Dave! The audio examples were hugely appreciated and I wish it was a common feature to more of your videos. I don't have either example you played (although I may have to get that Kletzki version. Sounded great). I have a Bernstein, Solti, and Walter version and am amazed at how different they sound. How did I not notice before? The Solti version does the drop out, Walter fills it in (my favorite), and Bernstein fills it in loudly (blazing fast tempo, too).
Thanks for the video and the great work you do!
You're welcome. I try to use sound clips when I have copyright permission. Otherwise, I'm stuck.
Wow!! Amazing!! I never even realized this knew about this discrepancy in his score. That explains why I like some versions of the eroica more than others probably!
Well, that and a zillion other reasons!
Wow. First time, ever, I bought a complete Beethoven Symphonies cycle, I was so excited (it came in the mail) that I skipped school -- only time playing hooky -- just to hear it. I started with the Eroica just because I wanted to hear that first. Since then, I have bought and listened to complete Beethoven cycles more than ANY other thing... But I've never realized this little difference. I was prepared to argue for Beethoven's original but hearing it "fixed" here (MANY thanks to the label that allowed you to play it for us) I am more than 1,000% in favor of your opinion. It's GLORIOUS when the trumpet plays BOTH HALVES of the passage. THIS REMINDS ME of the opposite situation, those "blats" in the bass trombone in Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra where Bartok is making fun of the tedium of Shostakovich's 7th Symphony's "Tribute to Bolero" theme, Bartok writes a glissando for the bass trombone that cannot be played on the modern bass trombone. The result is that musical instrument makers have created the "Bartok Concerto for Orchestra" Bass Trombone, which is owned by a few orchestras and available for rent to others -- if you happen to live in the right neighborhoods. This reminds me, also, of the argument that all Mozart symphonies should be played with the same scrawny string sections that were available for Mozart during his lifetime. It is well known that Mozart himself wrote about how great it would be to hear them played by a larger orchestra. Then there's the argument that because musicians weren't as good, their instruments weren't that good, etc., all music composed before 2010 should be played without vibrato, using tree twigs instead of fine bows, and without expression of any kind. My vote is for the best possible sound, creating the most enjoyable outcome. I'm sure all the great composers would agree.
I think you're right. And let's remember that Mozart was thrilled to hear is "Paris" Symphony played by and orchestra with (he claimed) 40 violins and 10 double basses (that may have also included violas and cellos somewhere), but composers always wanted optimal forces, and that never meant the bare minimum to get through the piece. The orchestra for the premieres of Haydn's London Symphonies approached modern size--more than 60 players--that was part of the attraction of the concert series.
This discussion is just an example of why this site is so valuable. A seemingly tiny point, but how it’s played makes a big effect on the listener. I recall my first exposure to the truncated trumpet part, it was on an ancient Audio Fidelity disc with the Vienna State Opera Orchestra conducted by by the then - young Michael Gielen (wouldn’t you know it?)
Yes, he never met a victorious climax he couldn't undermine. Positive emotions were impossible after (name horrific atrocity of your choice), of course.
Reportedly, this recording was actually by Swarowsky, not Gielen. Gielen did add the trumpet line to his 1981 Vox recording in Cincinnati. Gielen’s 1981 recording was noteworthy mostly just for its fast tempos; it appears that Gielen’s rather unhappy Cincinnati tenure has fallen into the memory hole.
Beside Harnoncourt, among conductors who stick to Beethoven score (leave out trumpet) are Bruggen, Jansons, Abbado and Monteux
Thanks for the rant, I quite enjoyed it! However, I was asking myself, why Beethoven would choose an instrument for the climax that cannot play the part and to continue with another instrument that is guaranteed to create an „anti-climax“ for every listener? After all, I guess there is enough evidence that he did know how to write an effective climax with the given instruments. If he hadn't cared about the capacities of the instruments, as you suggested, he would have simply written unplayable notes, and someone who relies on success during their lifetime wouldn't compose in a way that the piece can only be played posthumously. Wouldn't it be more plausible to say that he was aware of the problem but made a virtue out of necessity? That he basically tells us: You don’t get the final victory in the first movement, you have to wait until the end? Isn’t it quite common to deny the relief at one point to be even more effective later on?
In short, "no." Whether or not the gambit you describe is "common" is irrelevant to the consideration of what is happening in this specific passage in this specific work. The reason losing the trumpet is stupid is because the music DOES offer the final victory, trumpet or not. It's just better sounding with the trumpet. That was my point. The absence of the trumpet doesn't change the meaning of the music at all. It merely dilutes it. Artists have to make due with all kinds of problems. Much more likely is that Beethoven understood he could use the trumpet for some of the passage but not all of it, and that giving the tune to the trumpet was so important that he used it as much as he could. He would have continued had it been possible.
Thank you, I think I get your point. The dilution, if it’s not an „anti-climax“, is however noticeable and one would indeed expect the trumpets to hit the home run. But the fact that the woodwinds take over *is* a bit disappointing and creates an emotional response of some kind, as your rant (I think quite rightly) proves. I guess I kind of feel the same hearing the woodwinds but tend to rationalize my disappointment differently. Anyway, these are the ambiguities I love about classical music, so I definitely will keep on listening!
Yes, there is a lot of ambiguity because "the work" is more than just "the score"--the notes on the page--and so any recreation also requires a certain level of imagination, hopefully of a sympathetic and idiomatic kind! Thanks for sharing your thoughts.
I once listened back to back to Szell and Harnoncourt to compare thw trumpets. “Damp squib” was how I then regarded the Harnoncourt - and I imprinted on his recording. It is like Aida with the last part of the triumphal march’s trumpets removed.
My first exposure to the Eroica was through the Monteux/VPO recording, where the trumpets cut off after four bars, which sounded all right to me--you could still hear the theme in the woodwinds. Then I heard the Szell/Cleveland recording, with the eight-bar blazing trumpets. That took some getting used to, but I could accept Szell showing us what Beethoven meant, even though it didn't invalidate (in my mind) Monteux showing us what Beethoven actually wrote. The concept of not quite reaching the heavens due to the limitations of 1803 has never ruined the piece for me--I still feel the triumph of the climax through the orchestra as a whole. I have no strong preference on whether to fix, or not to fix.
Fair enough.
David, there are so many things that you’ve pointed out that I would’ve never noticed on my own. You’re constantly edjumicating me!
dear Dave, you're a blessing, and well beyond whether I agree with your points (often enough) or not (which also happens). thank you, take care!
And Liszt adds big chords in the discussed bars in his transcription of the Eroica.
Yes! Thank you! A few extra observations: ) The Eroica is not narrative program music. Each movement does not need to explain the next. If they did, how would the third and fourth movement be explained. It’s still just a symphony, with musically heroic aspects. 2) as a trumpeter there are other important. (or simply fun) trumpet “inserts”. For example: c-c#-d at the turn to the recap in Karajan recordings of the 1st mvt. of Brahms’ 1st (Brahms never wrote a chromatic passage like that for trumpets) it sounds great! Also in Brahms 1st, at the climax of the 4th mvt, the 1st trumpet usually plays a high A at the beginning of the return of the trombone chorale…Brahms didn’t write it, but it sounds so perfect. In the finale of the Tchaikovsky fifth, the trumpet rises up to a high B, also not written, but always played. Lastly, my favorite, a “Hojotoho!” given to the trumpet in Szell’s recording of the Ride of the Valkyries. Since there were no sopranos, Szell had the trumpet, Bernard Adelstein, play one. Its thrilling!
Thanks for these inside tips.
If it were Bruckner, there would be more than one version, even if there were only one edition!
I cannot agree more with you. And I would add, even though it seems not controversial, the ending of Schubert's 9th has a similar disappointing trumpet part, totally underwhelming ... except in George Szell's recording with Cleveland, where the trumpet rises accompanying the strings and giving it a resounding and victoriously optimistic timbre. Good for Szell for tinkering with the score!
That was great fun, thank you! Tonight I shall activate my time machine and go back to chat with Ludwig regarding what he had in mind. I will recommend to him that he have two more natural trumpets to play the required notes to complete his phrase via the application of different tuning crooks, or let a boosted horn section blast out the phrase where the trpts drop out, or (my favorite) take some of my trumpets with me and play in the premier to add the 'missing' notes. Regardless of the option, tomorrow everyone's Eroica recordings will sound different, Then your next discussion will regarding the symphony's sudden change. It will be the 'Mandela effect! People will be mystified on the 'thing' they always swore they heard as being different. You'll get even richer by writing new books and making more of these videos. Then we can have Dave, rather than Shatner, hosting - The Unexplained. You'll guest frequently on - Ancient Musicalnauts. Fun starts tomorrow!! Seriously, I knew the discussion was around, but had never heard any details. Thanks again.
I enjoyed your discussion tremendously! Agree that movt 1 without the second trumpet phrase is a let-down. The trumpets play a key role in Op 55 (including the funeral march), and they should not be disappointing at the 1st movt climax. I don't think of the Eroica as program music. It is an emotionally complex journey, and the music itself should be the storyteller--we should not impose a story on the music. In my mind, Beethoven is the true "hero" of the Eroica.
Interestingly enough, I just yesterday posted a question in a Facebook group about why Beethoven included a funeral march into the Eroica, and what the musical and psychological effect it has on the listener.
Then I read more about it, and he actually started with composing/scetching the Marcia funebre, and went on with the finale (which he already had the music for in the ballet Prometheus and the piano variations on that tune). He then composed the first movement and the scherzo.
His purpose with the march was to express the grief and pain of all the struggle and suffering during war, that would hopefully in the end lead to victory for the hero.
Besides, I agree fully on that Beethoven certainly would have let the trumpets play the whole theme, if they had been able to.
I've always thought that the extreme contrast in mood between the 1st and 2nd movements is exactly that - an attempt to find the sturm und drang of the greatest possible contrast of mood in music, which to Beethoven was elation and grief, the triumph of life and the tragedy of death.
@@mikeknowles5848 Good point!
I agree.
In the trio of Chopin's Scherzo No. 3, there is a passage where Chopin's piano did not have the high notes for a phrase that was completely analogous to several others, so Chopin omitted them. They are usually added anyway and why not? I'd like to know how anyone could come up with any other explanation for the omission.
I can't quite agree. He also doesn't continue the phrase in the horns, even though the pitches are there. In fact the only pitch not available on the Eb trumpet is the written F, which he could have skipped if he really wanted to continue as much of the phrase as possible. And interestingly, he does use that written F in the C trumpets in the next movement quite a lot. He could simply have left the trumpets out completely - it seems way more deliberate to me than "welp, don't have the pitches..."
Yes, there could have been other reasons as well. We don't know for sure, but the bottom line is that the passage sounds much better with the trumpets than without.
@@DavesClassicalGuideto an extent I agree. This is one of many passages in this movement where the main melodic material is accompanied by the opening theme as countermelody - if you're playing on modern instruments, where trumpets and horns are already too loud to hear the primary material in the low strings, you may as well go whole hog and rewrite the trumpet and horn parts and treat it like it's the main thing. There are lots of justified adjustments like this throughout the rep, but they tend to obscure things
Esa-Pekka Salonen said in an interview that Strauss marked out some of the horn parts in his personal score of Salome - the one he conducted from. “But of course I can’t do that,” Salonen said. I remember thinking, why the hell not? If there’s a problem, fix it!
Might that have been a comment made in jest, perhaps? You know, with Salonen being an excellent horn player himself.
It’s so striking to hear the sensible balances in the Kletzki right next to Fischer’s tuneless mistake of an ending. I hope we can have more videos like this where you point out shitty interpretive decisions side-by-side with how things ought to be played, because that’s when the latter really becomes most obvious.
Edit: And to Mr. Harnoncourt: It’s called the Heroic, not the Programmatic! The music is plenty heroic without us trying to assign it some demented story which can never make sense in light of the second, third, and basically fourth movements’ contrasting moods, which would be irreconcilable in any such story.
A slippery slope to be sure. Where does it end? Should we go all out and incorporate all of the suggestions in Weingartner's book? Or follow Norman Del Mar's much more conservative changes? Can we change the "wrong" timpani notes? Stokowski's Phase-4 recording of the Ninth is the example of what not to do to Beethoven's scoring, but some people think it's great.
It's not a "slippery slope." It's called "interpretation." It's what musical performance is all about, and the element of taste and judgment is an integral element to be evaluated on a case by case basis.
I think we could also ask when does literalism end? A precisely accurate rendering of an urtext could lead to rote repetition. The extreme would be to have a machine or synthesizer play the score perfectly over and over again. The life of music resides in the inherent ambiguity of the notes; we "play" music, rather than reproduce it.
@@smurashige You think so?? I don’t see the logic in that. Well you do say “could”. Widely divergent interpretations occur with absolutely zero correlation to these textural issues. Do you think that Furtwangler and Toscanini doing the exact same unaltered “urtext” could possibly be repetition or clones of each other?
@@nealkurz6503 I think you missed my point. Of course they’re different, because they don’t try to be literalists. As Dave says, they interpret. If you try to be “authentic” by adhering to a so called urtext score as accurately as possible, and that is ultimately your goal, how do you not sound more and more like others trying to do the same thing? The result is what I hear in many HIP recordings - conductors trying hard to be different, oftentimes with little musical sense and often to the detriment of the music. What I was trying to point out was how a certain presumed “faithfulness” to the score could result in the utter absence of music. I think the goal should be to do Justice to the music and to the composer, and of course, the score is where we start, but always built into it, no matter how detailed its prescriptions, is a fruitful ambiguity that goes beyond the notes.
Perhaps it is I who has misunderstood your point, and that basically we’re in agreement.
@@smurashige I do agree regarding HIP-sters flogging some of the same ideas to death. There was a time when string players using baroque bows all exaggerated the “bulge” in the middle of the bow. Thankfully this has been walked back a bit these days. I think the original players would have worked to MINIMIZE that tendency, not exaggerate it, but of course, we don’t know. I hope nobody jumps on the bandwagon of Franz-Xavier Roth arpeggiating the opening chords of the Eroica, barf! So yes, I think we’re dancing around with concern for the same issues, but from slightly different perspectives.
Brilliant especially around 6:09
An interesting parallel is the opening of Schumann's Spring Symphony, originally written for horns in B flat, but which sounded horrible at the time because some notes were "stopped" notes, so Schumann had to substitute trumpets and transpose it up to D. Ironically valve horns became available shortly afterwards.
I don’t know enough about trumpets then and now to understand why the trumpets of that time could play the notes in the first phrase but could not play exactly the same notes in the second phrase.
Because they are not exactly the same notes. They are different notes, foreign to the key of the prior phrase, and thus not available on a trumpet which consists of an X-foot length of metal tubing. In order to get those notes, you have the change the length of the tube. Valves do this. On the natural trumpet, you could use "crooks," or inserted bits of tube of varying length, but there's no time to do it in this case.
“Great men die all the time” 😂 I don’t think there is a single video from you where I don’t laugh at least once. Anyway, I agree with you that the trumpet part should be installed for the second phrase, but I kinda like the staccato woodwinds. I’m of the opinion that had trumpets been able to produce those pitches in Beethoven’s time, he might have made the trumpets do the staccato thing in tandem with the woodwinds. Curious to know your thoughts on that, Dave.
No, they would have just played the tune. The woodwinds are not in fact marked to be played staccato, and their accompaniment in exactly the same for the first part of the tune, so no major different.
Thank you Dave
Brilliant rant. Absolutely correct in every way.
I am convinced that if Beethoven had really wanted trumpets, he would have written the coda differently. Same for the horns in the 5th.
They are very different cases. The horns in the Fifth I can accept--it's a brief, isolated moment and it can be played in a way that doesn't sound foolish; but the trumpets in the Eroica, where you are dealing with the timbre of a continuous musical phrase at the climax of a large paragraph, is another matter entirely. There's a much more complex and expressively significant musical issue.
And we know Beethoven really wanted trumpets, because he used trumpets.
Amen, amen! Let's also add why should we have to do with bassoons in the recap, 1st mvt of the Fifth just because Beethoven had to, since his horns couldn't play that bit like they had done in the exposition. It's so much better when we take advantage of our valved horns. Or are we supposed to say the weaker bassoons add a note of pathos, of subdued humanity, etc. etc.?
So many of the so-called Weingartner emendations make great sense.
I suspect that some of the interpreters who believe you must not extend the trumpet passage are also those who believe Schubert's emphatic accent over the last bar of the 9th is actually a diminuendo, in contradiction to all possible musical sense.
The 4th movement of the 7th Beethoven symphony has a recurring second theme where the horns have to cut out in the descent of the tune and it leaves the woodwinds sounding thin. Again at the very end of the Lenore overture #3 where the horns play two bars of a c major triad then STOP while the woodwinds continue to play. It's only reasonable to keep the horns playing.
In my opinion, not extending the trumpet part at the end of the first movement is nothing short of criminal. I don't care what modern scholarship purports to tell us about Beethoven's intentions; omitting the trumpets just makes zero musical sense. We just heard 15 minutes of a titanic struggle, featuring courage and strength in the face of adversity and setbacks, and right at the moment of final victory, everything just disappears? Simply insane.
The fact that the prevailing opinion these days is to play something so clearly musically wrong suggests to me that we've lost something as a culture. We've become so dedicated to worshipping the notes these composers wrote, and yet we don't understand anything about what they were actually trying to express.
Bingo!
I wish I knew more about the classical trumpet. I thought the Haydn Trumpet Concerto already required a keyed trumpet which could play chromatically across its range - unlike the “harmonic series only” Bach-era trumpet. Couldn’t Haydn’s trumpet have played the missing notes in Beethoven Three (written maybe two years after Haydn’s concerto)? I guess not.
BTW Bach, who is often considered especially uninterested in the constraints on human performers - especially singers - seems to my ears to have written incredibly well for the clarino trumpet of his day. From Brandenburg Two to Cantata 51 to the B Minor Mass, his trumpet parts are just so exciting to listen to!
Haydn's concerto was written for an experimental instrument that was felt to be a failure. It was never manufactured or used more generally. Indeed, Haydn's concerto almost vanished with it. It only survived in a single manuscript copy.
@@DavesClassicalGuide Okay. Thanks for that!
Are we sure about people of Haydn's time regarding the keyed trumpet a failure? Because the Hummel trumpet concerto was written for the same instrument and player (Anton Weidinger) just a few years later. As Weidinger was able to persuade both Haydn and Hummel to write concertos for him, he may well have sounded very good on his keyed instrument. It is possible that other players of lesser ability did not sound good on the keyed trumpet. And within a few years, valved trumpets became available, making the keyed instrument obsolete.
A modern analogy would be the soprano saxophone. In the hands of someone like Paul Winter or Phil Woods, it can be a superb musical instrument. But I have heard players who sounded quite bad on it. It is well known (by wind players) that the higher saxes have more variable intonation, requiring more correction by the player, via embouchure adjustments. Mediocre players do not do this correction well, and so can sound very out of tune on the soprano sax. I can see the same problem occurring with the keyed trumpet--Weidinger may have learned to play it in tune with a consistent sound, but that did not mean other players of the time would have been equally successful. In that respect, the modern valved trumpet is much more forgiving.
@@2leftfield So you could perhaps say that the keyed trumpet worked well in the hands of its inventor but wasn't suitable for general use, hence a "failure". And of course when valve trumpets came along that solved the problem. We can be very grateful that it led to the Haydn and Hummel trumpet concertos to show off the new instrument, and strange that no really major concertos have really come along since then for the valve trumpet.
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Being a trumpeter in the classical period must have been pretty dull - I wonder what the attraction was.
They were not orchestral musicians. They were attached to the military, the municipal guard, or some other function. "Art" music was a sideline.
For your next music rant, explain why some conductors play the ending of the second movement of the 7th symphony with pizzicato and others play with the bow. I think that would be an interesting discussion.
It's a Kleiber eccentricity. No one knows why Daddy and Jr. did it.
@@DavesClassicalGuide Klemperer does it too.
Dave, I’d like to know your opinion (and anyone else’s) on a similar but much subtler moment I recently found in the Scherzo of the 7th Symphony:
I was recopying it for my own study (trying to make sense of the macrorhythm), and I noticed a spot where the timpani (with horns) play 1 bar earlier than we might expect! It’s m. 101, marked pianissimo. It’s the 3rd bar of an obvious 4-bar group, while right before and after the timp punctuates on the 4th bar of each group.
I searched and found that every edition is the same, including the autograph manuscript. Eventually I realized that he wrote it in that bar because the timp doesn’t have a C for the dominant in the following bar. So here’s the question: Should the timp and horns change the parts and play C’s in the following bar, 102??
Sure, if they want to and if it makes the passage sound better. You don't want to get me started on timpani parts.
Really enjoyed this! Thank you
On the Nagano/Osm recording I can't even hear the trumpet play the first phrase, it is drowned in the background. It maybe an easier way to lead to the trumpet -less 2nd phrase but I can't say it is more convincing.
Actually in the spot I just discussed.....the timpani could have resounded the Eb and it would have been alright! Handel does that himself....and Beethoven sometimes gives the timpani the 5th or even the 7th of a chord when he really wants to keep it in the texture!
That's because most of the time you can't really hear the pitch of the timpani as a separate component of the sound. And in Beethoven's day he could probably count on someone just as loud to be even more out of tune.
Very interesting. I'm not sure whose side I am on here. There is a similar issue in Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. In the 1st movement exposition, the E-flat horn plays a phrase leading to the subordinate theme - in E-flat. In the recap, the same phrase, now in the key of C, is played by the bassoon, since the valveless horn can't do it. Nobody tries to "fix" this. Do you think it should be fixed?
Many versions fixed it--it's just not the thing to do at present.
Whenever I come across this kind of dogmatic literalism, I think about Leopold Auer's comments on tradition: "Beauty and not tradition is the touchstone of all style. The truth of one age is bound to be modified by the events of another, for truth is progressive. For each age set sits own standards, forms its own judgements. Tradition, in reality, weighs down the living spirit of the present with the dead formalism of the past."
Well, yes, but the tradition in this case is for fix the trumpet parts, which is the right thing to do.
I have to agree with your rant. When did common sense get a bad rap. It makes sense to do the second phrase. As a horn player, I have several rants. The modern valved horn has made playing chromatic passages possible. Do we really want to play some of the classical era pieces using stopped notes that we had to do on the old natural horn? NO. And why is it that we still have orchestal parts written in every in the original key and have to mentally transpose them to sound correctly when they could be transposed by the publisher and make it easier on the musicians? It is hard enough to keep an emboucher intact to the end of a concert and still be able to think clearly as well. And regarding melody lines that get truncated in Beethoven, the most annoying one is the horn line in the 4th movement of the 7th symphony. Beethoven wrote it for horns in A, and the part is marked FF , and the line is e"-d"-c"-e"-d"-c"-d"-c"-g"-g"-g"-g"-g"-g", and all of the g's are marked staccato. The upper winds are playing a descending scale pattern, and the strings are playing eightnote chords on the first and second beats(with rest on the upbeat of each count). What do you actually hear when the horns get to those 6 high g's? The descending woodwinds and mainly strings and the horns, who have the continuation of the melodic line, are entirely swallowed up by the rest of the orchestra. Granted that those high notes are in the highest register on the horn, but in most recordings they might as well not be playing. One of the few that gets it pretty close is Blomstedt with the Gewandhaus. I'm fairly certain that the reason they aren't heard is the fear of blotched and split sounds, which means they don't have confidence in their musicians.
Very interesting! Some other conductors:
Paavo Jarvi - No trumpets
Rattle Berlin - No
Blomstedt Gewandhaus - No
Wand - No
Barenboim Dresden - Yes
Gielen - Yes
Bernstein NYP - Yes
Dudamel - Yes
My pet hate are HIP orchestras that leave out the clarinets of Mozart's 40th symphony. My view: he wrote for them, then leave them there.
Bohm also preferred the original version without clarinets. That's conductor's choice.
What has happened to Adam Fischer? Between the Brahms and this, seems like the zombies got him.
Good.
In your example...did you notice that the timpani dropped out at an inopportune time because of the change of chord? That too could be corrected on modern drums of course.....in fact a similar place in Brahms 4 is usually filled in....
Wow. What a difference. I think it is wonderful to rationally complete a phrase as it would have been written with mondern instruments available. Seriously, we are not talking about a version where we anticipate what Beethoven would have done if he had saxaphones in his day.
To be fair, the orchestra that originally played Eroica was much smaller than what we are used to today. I think they only had 6 first violins. The 8 woodwinds would have no problem coming through the string accompainment. I'm sure it sounded quite satisfying back then in the way that Beethoven wrote it.
But since we don't have orchestras like that anymore, I agree with you that the trumpet part should be updated.
As for Harnoncourt, he said a lot of things like that, especially in the context of Beethoven. For instance, he also said that the ending of the 5th symphony must be played in a comical way, because in his view there's no way that Beethoven would write a triumphant ending. In his words: "Triumph is always ridiculous."
This is a symptom of typical Austrian fetishisation of irony. As an Austrian myself, I'm always frustrated about the fact that Austrians are culturally inhibited from enjoying or even acknowledging grandeur. It's as if art must be either tragic or ironic, but never grand. One could say that grandness vanished from Austrian music when Bruckner died. Mahler made irony fashionable, and the collective guilt over WW2 turned grandeur into an anathema.
You assume Beethoven actually wrote for that size ensemble, which is completely false. He merely had to put up with it, and as for theorizing about clarity of texture, our own experience with tiny, foggy HIP groups tells us that small does not equal clear. It depends on the performers, the room, etc.
Has anyone ever written a list of suggested changes to Beethoven's orchestrations? 'In bar twenty-three of the second movement, add second horn an octave lower" etc? Where can I find all this interesting information? Many thanks!
There have been many such over the years. Norman Del Mar is one example, although more focused on the conductor.
Felix Weingartner wrote a whole book on the performance of Beethoven symphonies with hundreds of recommendations and suggested changes. Many of them you can hear on his recordings, although the ancient sound is challenging. Many modern conductors have adopted some of his ideas. However...Weingartner later recanted and said to ignore all of his book: maybe Beethoven knew best after all.
Ah yes! I'd forgotten about those. Thank you.
There is a similar issue with piano music, especially from the classical (i.e. Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven) era. Pianos at that time had a more limited range than modern instruments, so it was not unusual for the composer to run out of keys, at either the treble or bass end of the keyboard. When this happened, they would suddenly drop down an octave in order to fit in the highest part of the theme, or jump up an octave in the bass. I think most pianists today ignore the written score on this point, and just continue playing in the original register, since a modern instrument will have the range, and it usually sounds more natural. That being said, there are some pedants who insist on playing exactly what is written, in spite of the fact that it is nothing more than reproducing a limitation of older instruments, just as Beethoven was faced with limitations of trumpets of his day in the Eroica.
There’s quite a bit of argument for each point of view regarding this issue to this day! I remember being surprised at a few examples of altering these passages in the Kempff stereo Beethoven Concerto cycle, probably my first exposure to it many years ago, and it’s still very convincing to me to this day.
That's quite true.
The funeral march could also simply mean the death of Beethoven's hope for a Europe governed by the ideas he thought Napoleon exemplified. The death of hope can be as devastating as an actual death and make a solemn funeral march an appropriate response to the occasion. No? .
No. Absolutely not. Pointless and musically irrelevant speculation.
What else is your description of the first movement as being about a hero but extra-musical speculation? I was only following up on your idea.
When you call a symphony "Heroic" it is not speculation that it's about a hero, especially when he initially called it "Bonaparte." I accepted that as reasonable. Beethoven did not call the symphony, "Thoughts On the Political Situation In Europe And The Disappointment I Feel About Napoleon's Failure To Live Up To My Ideals," which is what you are suggesting.
I was simply suggesting that the death of a Hero might also mean the death of an ideal that Hero represented for Beethoven when Napoleon betrayed Beethoven's ideas of freedom. if indeed Napoleon was the Hero, as you say, why does that seem so controversial to you?
First, because at the time Beethoven wrote the Eroica, Napoleon had not betrayed those ideals at all. You have your chronology out of order. Second, because we have no evidence anywhere that for Beethoven the death of a hero might also represent the death of an ideal. None. Or that Beethoven's idea of "freedom" had anything to do with the hero of the Eroica, for that matter. Or that Beethoven believed that textless music can even express such a thing (it can't). So I don't find your opinion controversial. It's just plain wrong--a happy example of an aesthetic question NOT being just a matter of taste or opinion!