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If Beethoven never lived...

7K views 58 replies 24 participants last post by  EdwardBast 
#1 ·
Or if Bach didn't, or Wagner, or Schoenberg, or Josquin...

How different would music be? Does erasing any one composer from history change everything, or does the world-spirit of music history carry on unperturbed?

Does it depend on the composer?

Just idle thoughts inspired by the "If Beethoven died young" thread.
 
#9 · (Edited)
How different?

This [-----------------------] different

In all seriousness, most art works by future artists taking what they like about previous artists and developing it and/or mixing it all together with their own sensibilities. Without any given composer, that influence would be lacking on the next generations so they would've focused on other composers and other aspects. However, like most chaotic systems it's impossible to precisely predict how that would've manifested. It's not like one can compose a work by Liszt or Brahms without the influence they took from Beethoven. Perhaps without Beethoven programme music doesn't become a thing so we don't have the Symphonie fantastique and later tone poems. Maybe we also don't have the Brahmsian focus on the kind of extensive motivic development within complex forms. Perhaps we don't have Liszt turning the piano into an almost percussive instrument. Or maybe we do because those composers found similar inspiration in different composers besides Beethoven.
 
#18 · (Edited)
I agree that there isn't much of a figure to point to among those we know. Possibly Schubert (would more support have gained him more lifetime?) or Schumann, but both later arrivals, of course. I guess Berlioz provided a glimpse of it too, but he didn't excel in chamber or piano music. Probably not Weber, and even less so Hummel, Chopin or Raff.
 
#20 · (Edited)
If Beethoven never lived, then it would be necessary to invent him.
 
#24 · (Edited)
He clearly has had influence and one can only speculate how music would be different without him. That said his over all impact I do believe is less than what many of his fans often suggest, and on looking at his music closer even his impact on the Romantic era is less than what I used to think it was.

"The great harmonic innovations of the Romantics do not come from Beethoven at all, and have nothing to do either with his technique or his spirit. They arise from Hummel, Weber, Field and Schubert...and from Italian opera."

"A new conception of harmonic tension was later developed by Schumann, Mendelssohn, and, above all by Chopin, but they could not start from the classical style at its most highly organized, and Beethoven was of no use to them. The Romantic style did not come from Beethoven, in spite of the great admiration that was felt for him, but from his lesser contemporaries and from Bach."

-Charles Rosen
 
#27 ·
He clearly has had influence and one can only speculate how music would be different without him. That said his over all impact I do believe is less than what many of his fans often suggest, and on looking at his music closer even his impact on the Romantic era is less than what I used to think it was...
I think that's quite true. But I also think Beethoven had a deeper influence, nothing to do with his technique or formal innovations or anything like that. Beethoven redefined the limits of music, what music can and should be. I'm not sure how thoroughly that message would have gotten across if he had died, say, in 1800.
 
#29 · (Edited)
Every comment above concerns harmony, reflecting the myopic focus of mid-20thc theory. Beethoven's primary influence on the Romantics wasn't in harmony, although, contra Rosen, he had substantial influence there as well. His primary influence was on thematic processes, multimovement structure, and aesthetics.

After Beethoven's essays in the thematic unification of multimovement cycles (Fifth and Ninth Symphonies, Appassionata, some of the late sonatas and quartets) nearly every Romantic composer took up the practice: Schubert, Schumann, Berlioz, Tchaikovsky, Franck, Liszt, Dvorak, Brahms occasionally, Rimsky-Korsakoff and countless minor figures. The practice was even more pervasive in the 20thc, especially among the Russians. After Beethoven, and influenced by his example, the majority of Romantic Era sonatas and symphonies beginning in the minor mode ended in the major mode. All of this reflected a new aesthetic ideal of imbuing large-scale works with a dramatic, quasi-narrative expressive continuity.

Beethoven changed the profile of first movement sonata forms in ways that were highly influential on Chopin and nearly every major Russian and Eastern European composer through Shostakovich.

And it's worth remembering that composers are not only influential for the paths they open, but for those they close or make perilous as well. Someone above mentioned Brahms's reluctance to compete in the symphonic genre, and I imagine many hearing Beethoven's late sonatas and quartets found the prospect of trying to extend or add something to that madness bewildering or daunting. That too is impact and influence on the future.
 
#31 ·
Sure there are similarities but the function of sonata form itself was altered in the Romantic era.

"...with all their harmonic daring and exploration in other forms, when it came to the 'sonata' they were far more conservative than Beethoven. Their greatest harmonic conceptions could not be applied to the sonata without making nonsense of it, whereas all of Beethoven's most startling innovations took place easily and comfortably within the sonata style."

Indeed the innovations of the Romantics are not closely related to Beethoven but:

"...made possible not by an aesthetic in which the tonic-dominant polarity has been expounded to the limits of its effective power, but one in which it has been loosened and weakened, where the orientation towards a powerful tonic area at the beginning and end has been threatened by a new and pervasive chromaticism, and a more lyric and less dramatic conception of form. It was for example Schubert who first wrote an exposition which went to the subdominant. In the early works of Schubert as in the music of Weber and Hummel, there is the first large development of a truly melodic form, one in which the classical harmonic tension is replaced by a relaxed and expansive succession of melodies."

This is what Beethoven was referring to when he claimed that Spohr's music was marred by his chromatic melodies. It had nothing to do with chromaticism itself as that is found throughout Beethoven's music, but the way it was used in terms of the alteration of the harmonic tension found in the classical forms.

In this sense we can see the Romantics as moving away from Beethoven's aesthetic rather than towards it. The truth is Chopin was not highly influenced by Beethoven, nor was the early and innovative Schubert (before his change of mind which coincided with his retreat late in life into more classical forms). Weber also had problems with Beethoven's music and considered it 'wilfully eccentric'.
 
#25 ·
For the most part, I think the differences would be superficial. Someone else would've been celebrated by the nineteenth century romantics.

Most of the history of music is technological development and social change. If Y had been the most famous composer rather than X, different particular works would have come down to us, but the broad sweep would be the same.
 
#37 · (Edited)
David C F Wright regards Beethoven the greatest of all time, but look what he says about the late works. (which I don't fully agree, as there are gems such as Op.131 in late Beethoven, but Wright does have a good point about Op.106 and Op.111)

"There is probably no greater composer than Beethoven. He achieved in fifty six years and, under the most difficult circumstances for a creative musician, the problem of eventual total deafness, and may have suffered more than many other composers. I willingly accept that many will say that J S Bach is the greatest."
https://www.wrightmusic.net/pdfs/ludwig-van-beethoven.pdf

"The final stage of Beethoven's life was marked by a new trend in his music. His final string quartets became introspective and lacking in vigour. It could be called mellowing or that he had become lazy or found that inspiration was lacking. There were more subdued and lacking in contrast and generally, without any real lively music of which to speak. Many people refer to these quartets are supreme masterpieces. The same is said of the late piano sonatas particularly the Hammerklavier, Opus 106, Sonata in C minor, Opus 111, has a magnificent full-blooded opening movement but the long finale is a set of variations often slow. For the perceptive musician, one variation is clearly jazz almost an hundred years before that word became known."
https://www.wrightmusic.net/pdfs/ludwig-van-beethoven.pdf#page=9
 
#40 ·
David C F Wright regards Beethoven the greatest of all time, but look what he says about the late works. (which I don't fully agree, as there are gems such as Op.131 in late Beethoven, but Wright does have a good point about Op.106 and Op.111)

"The final stage of Beethoven's life was marked by a new trend in his music. His final string quartets became introspective and lacking vigour. It could be called mellowing or that he had become lazy or found that inspiration was lacking. There were more subdued and lacking in contrast and generally, without any real lively music of which to speak. Many people refer to these quartets are supreme masterpieces. The same is said of the late piano sonatas particularly the Hammerklavier, Opus 106, Sonata in C minor, Opus 111, has a magnificent full-blooded opening movement but the long finale is a set of variations often slow. For the perceptive musician, one variation is clearly jazz almost an hundred years before that word became known."
https://www.wrightmusic.net/pdfs/ludwig-van-beethoven.pdf#page=9
Your infatuation with that charlatan David C. F. Wright is fascinating. He's entitled to his odd opinions, but can't we admit that they are indeed odd? Even perverse? To "perceptive musicians" (which Wright calls himself with a straight face) the idea that Beethoven's late quartets lack vigor, inspiration or contrast is just laughable. And no, a syncopated figure in Op. 111 doesn't constitute jazz.
 
#43 ·
Questions like this baffle me. It is a fact of history that LvB existed and you can't unexist him. You might just as well ask if the Manhattan Project hadn't happened. The fact is you cannot jndo history
1000000000+

Threads like this one, despite are interesting, are crazy. I agree with Woodduck's opinions as they are written here. I will add only one comment: There is no human being on this planet, who can make critic to Beethoven, Bach, Mozart, Liszt, etc. To make critic means that you know music in a similar level with these guys. Brahms made critic to Tschaikowsky and the second to Brahms, because BOTH they knew FFFFFFFn lot of music. Journalists, weekend music specialists, faked experts etc. they don't have word for such titans and I don't bother to read their FFFFn opinion.
 
#51 ·
I think Beethoven's influence is pretty clear on the whole Romantic Era. He was the first composer to put more emphasis on expression over form. In Mozart, Bach and others, the two are inextricably linked.
 
#52 ·
I think Beethoven's influence is pretty clear on the whole Romantic Era. He was the first composer to put more emphasis on expression over form. In Mozart, Bach and others, the two are inextricably linked.
This might seem sensible at first glance, but when looked at closer actually Beethoven emphasized form probably more than any composer. As discussed earlier in this thread Beethoven's biggest contribution to music was form. 'Expression' is a vague and hard to define term in music, but if you are talking about using music as a vehicle for personal expression, then I don't think there was more or less of this post-Beethoven. It is actually not a very accurate way to describe the compositional process for most composers. Chopin apparently did not approve of people looking at his compositions as being personal expressions. I think your idea about Beethoven's music emphasizing 'expression over form' is a good example of one of the myths surrounding Beethoven.
 
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