Beethoven style.
In the Beethoven style we work with a larger symphony orchestra, following the expansion within Beethoven himself, from the First and Second Symphonies towards the later ones. The students notice it: the wind instruments are more independent and can carry the texture without the strings, the tuttis feel bigger, and the energy is greater. We discover that many of Beethoven’s stylistic hallmarks in fact have roots in the Haydn style.1
We learn a great deal about the inner necessity that seems to drive Beethoven’s symphonies. Where many Haydn symphonies seem to have manifold solutions that might have solved a symphonic problem equally well, it feels as if Beethoven’s symphonies could only be one way. And we know that Beethoven corrected and refined his material intensely until it found its right form.2 We examine what lies behind this, and come very close to his symphonic craft, his grammar and his drama.
Notes and sources
- Beethoven took lessons with Haydn in Vienna from late 1792 until Haydn left for London in January 1794, but according to Ferdinand Ries (Biographische Notizen, 1838) he said he had never learned anything from him. The roots meant here lie in the music, not in the lessons. ↩
- Beethoven’s sketchbooks, kept from about 1798 until his death, survive almost complete: Douglas Johnson, Alan Tyson and Robert Winter, The Beethoven Sketchbooks: History, Reconstruction, Inventory (University of California Press, 1985). Lewis Lockwood, Beethoven’s Symphonies: An Artistic Vision (Norton, 2015), follows each symphony through its sketches. Arnold Schoenberg, “Heart and Brain in Music”, in Style and Idea (1950), 178–179: the sketchbooks bear witness to the great effort, and the finished work does not reveal whether it came easily or with great labour. ↩
Further reading: Orchestra size, Haydn to Beethoven
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