I couldn't believe how utterly empty, how pointlessly rhetorical and just plain bad was the music pouring out of my car radio. To Tucson from Phoenix on I-10 is a notoriously boring drive, but the drivel on KBAQ, 89.5 FM, was making it far, far worse.
What was the piece? Having tuned in mid-drivel, I had to stab at a guess. Late 18th-century for sure, and written for some ceremonial, or other heavily redundant, purpose. Egad. Sounds like...like...like Czerny, or Clementi in a bad mood, or some very young and not terribly gifted composer imitating Beethoven. Beethoven. Omigod, it's...Ludwig van!
So it was. Seems that as a very young composer - well, not Mozart/Mendelssohn young, but 20 or so - Beethoven had scribbled music to a ballet that was passed off as a piece composed by a certain nobleman by the name of Waldstein. You probably know the piano sonata Beethoven later dedicated to him. Anyway, this work, a score that Waldstein commissioned and then claimed as his own, is actually Beethoven's Wo0 1 - that is, the very earliest surviving work attributable to him.
And man, does it suck. Every negative you can think of applying to Beethoven at his worst - superficial rhythmic gestures; over-dependence on scales; repetition, seemingly for effect, that comes off as repetition for the sake of repetition; and the melodic/harmonic rhetoric, my God, the rhetoric! - is all there in abundance.
Only...hmmm. The negatives, turned on their head, would evolve into Beethoven's positives, wouldn't they? "Superficial rhythmic gestures" eventually became striking rhythmic ideas, such as the galloping eighth notes at the outset of the piano sonata that was a much happier marriage of Beethoven and Waldstein. "Over-dependence on scales" became the brilliant deployment of scales in the most startling manner; think of almost any transitional passage in Beethoven. Repetition did achieve its desired effect when Beethoven used it in dramatic fashion; what would even the Allegro of the Fifth Symphony be without the clenched and driven - and thereby compelling - repetition of that opening rhythmic motif? As for the rhetoric, Beethoven later tamed the beast and elevated it into transcendence. What are the hypnotic moments in the late sonatas and quartets, but rhetoric given spiritual substance?
The very first keyboard sonatas by Mozart, the so-called "Munich" sonatas, are pretty in an almost distracting way, but the prettiness bloomed at length into that deep femininity which is such a mystery in Mozart's later works. Wagner's flat-affect harmonies in his early operas became revolutionary harmonic method in his later ones. Charles Ives wrote a First Symphony that shouted boisterously, "I am heroic!" Then he wrote a Second Symphony that shouted heroically, "I am boisterous!" The difference was everything.
Young composers need to flaunt their flaws, the better to turn them inside-out later on.
- Kenneth LaFave
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