Matthew Monday: Für Elise

I have not had a Matthew Monday is a while.  He’s always had a love of music and he really loves the piano.  Six years ago I posted how he had his first piano recital at the age of six.  He was taking young kiddy lessons then but unfortunately we couldn’t continue because of one thing or another.  But he has been learning on his own.

He recorded himself with my phone playing the Beethoven piano piece, Für Elise.  Well, the first minute of the piece.  Mind you he is not reading off a music score.  This is pure memorizing from someone who teaches this on the internet.  Here is Matthew playing Fur Elise.

 

Not bad.  I really want to get him lessons.  Covid really threw a wrench in that but now that it has died down I will start looking for a piano teacher. 

Now here is a professional playing the entire piece.

 

I think Matthew captured it pretty well.  But I am his loving father.  ;)

Personal Essay: "A Great Man is Always Willing to be Little" -Ralph Waldo Emerson

Today, December 16^th is sometimes attributed to be the birthday of Ludwig van Beethoven, perhaps the greatest musical composer who ever lived.  There’s no official birthday since there is no record.  There is a record of him being baptized on the 17^th, and so they assume he was born the day before.  [I like to think he was born two days before actually, the 15^th, and so it would make him born on my birthday!]  It’s not just any birthday; it’s the 250^th anniversary of his birth, and should be a moment for reflection.  When one thinks of Beethoven, one’s thoughts have to go toward just how great a composer he was.  We know of his greatness: the nine symphonies, the five piano concertos, the one violin concerto, the sixteen string quartets, the countless sonatas of various instrumentation, and so on, all of the highest craftsmanship and sublimity. 

And his ego went along with all of that greatness.  He knew he was great, and he acted on the belief that fate had led him to greatness.  Even as a young man when he came to Vienna to study under the almost equally great composer and his senior, Joseph Hayden, and let us say that after some lessons the twenty year old Beethoven began to scorn at his elder.  Their two styles are very different.  Hayden seems to always strive for a certain elegance and order, and even humor, while Beethoven can be dark, chaotic, and brooding.  I’ve always felt that Beethoven’s innovation of making the third movement of his symphonies into a scherzo was a direct mock at Joseph Hayden.  Typically, before Beethoven, and perfected by Hayden, the third movement of symphonies was traditionally set as a Minuet and Trio, a highly ordered and stylized dance genre.  Scherzo means joke in Italian and Beethoven, as Romantic era egoist, by overturning the tradition with a “joke”is ridiculing the order and formulaic style of the classical era. 

And this brings me to my quote of the day, "a great man is always willing to be little,” articulated by the Romantic era essayist, and perhaps also a bit of an egoist, Ralph Waldo Emerson.  Now by egoist I don’t mean to say Beethoven was necessarily selfish.  I don’t believe he was.  By egoist I mean to say that his aesthetic was built on the ego of the individual and the greatness that one perceives the artist to be.  He was bold and self-affirming, and thought of himself as a “great man.”  The roots of the artist as a self-inspired genius might be traced to Beethoven. 

And yet, later in life, we get a sense that he had gained humility.  He was not in good health for most of his later years, and he only lived to 56.  His output was immense, so one gets a sense of a man having lived a long life.  But that is not so.  Besides his deafness, he had intestinal problems, kidney problems, probably Paget’s Disease of the bone, and some sort of virus (perhaps measles) that kept recurring.  All these ailments produced an irritable man who drove people away.  He couldn’t hear them, and they didn’t want to hear him. 

But in 1825, two years before his death, he had an intestinal issue which brought him close to death.  From that near-death experience came what some call his greatest musical composition, the third movement of his String Quartet in A minor Op. 132 (No. 15), the third movement given the name “Hymn of Thanksgiving.”  You can read about his illness and the composition here in this BBC article by Andrea Valentino, “Beethoven 250: The ultimate songof health after illness.”  

In the piece, the great man becomes small.  The full name of the movement that Beethoven himself gave it is "Holy song of thanksgiving of a convalescent to the Deity, in the Lydian mode" ("Heiliger Dankgesang eines Genesenen an die Gottheit, in der lydischen Tonart").  The piece is slow, meditative, a conversation with God, thanking him for his recovery.  What I get is pure humility, the early dissonance resolving into harmonious psalm.  Valentino from the article tries to describe the piece.

 

How, then, to explain the Heiliger Dankgesang? Perhaps the fifth and final part of the movement can help. At the end of the second New Strength section, the slow pace returns again – but only for a moment. From there the original eight-note chorale is reduced to five notes, then three, then two, then one. At the same time, the simple accompanying prelude becomes more complex, turning the whole soundscape into a floating world of transcendental emotion, the composer ordering musicians to play with the “utmost, deepest, and sincere feeling”.

On his 250th anniversary of his birth, please listen to a great man turn small before the face of God.

Very few of us will ever be acknowledged on the 250^th anniversary of our birth.  I know I won’t.  Only a great man will have such acknowledgments.  But remember, even a great man returns to the littleness of dust, and unto dust we shall all return.

Edit: If I may point out something about the composition, the fifth and final part of the piece that Valentino refers to starts at about 10:20 and is about a third of the entire length. Leading up to 10:20 you have sections that could be described as slow/fast/slow/fast, and I think they are supposed to reflect illness, semi-recovery, relapse, recovery. The fifth part is an expression of thanks to the Almighty for his ultimate recovery. The melody in that fifth part is heart wrenching. When one puts it into the context, the psalm – as I called it – is a beautiful prayer of gratitude.

Music Tuesday: “Ode to Joy” by Ludwig van Beethoven

Is Beethoven greater than Mozart?  When you’re dealing with the greatest of the great of any artistic medium, it’s impossible to say one is greater than another.  It becomes a matter of preference.  At the catholic blog, Inebriate Me, Pascal-Immanuel Goby wrote a post titled “Beethoven > Mozart.”    The “>” symbol signifies “greater than.” 

I like Goby’s blog, though it can be more philosophical than my tastes run in reading about Catholicism.  But he’s got an interesting, out of the box, yet still traditional take on things.  I like his perspective on economics and Catholicism.  Most Catholic bloggers don’t understand economics, but Goby does.  I never refer to him in my head as Goby.  From writing literary essays I’m trained to use last names but the way I think of him is by the first half of his name, Pascal.  He seems to share a number of things with the famous Pascal: an intellectual Catholicism and that he’s French.  I know he lives in France, but he does write in English, so if he’s not French, then his parents were certainly Francophiles to name him Pascal.

In “Beethoven > Mozart” Goby wonders bemoans that theologians prefer Mozart as their favorite composer, while Goby clearly believes that Beethoven is the greatest.  Why this this preference for Mozart over Beethoven.  Here’s part of what he wrote:

We need more theologians who love Beethoven. (We need more theologians who love Led Zeppelin!)

I love Mozart. Truly. He had access to the Forms. However…

We have many theologians who love Mozart. Balthasar and Barth connected (in part) on their shared love of Mozart as the greatest composer in history. Ratzinger, as is well known, is a devotee of Mozart. All good.

But, but, but.

No, Mozart is not the greatest. Mozart is not the greatest, because for all his attempts to move beyond, all his pathos, he remains the classical composer par excellence. Mozart is the Parthenon. Mozart represents art understood as submission to, and fulfillment of, form.

No. This is not the full truth of art. The full truth of art must have as its primary impulse the expression of human subjectivity (an expression of subjectivity which only through its embrace of itself can then point to universality), even as it incorporates, uses, and in its fullness, transcends, aesthetic rules. And here we are talking about Beethoven. Mozart expressed the fullness of humanity within the classical rules. Beethoven expressed the fullness of humanity by transcending (through incorporating) the classical rules.

Beethoven is not afraid of being off-balance. Mozart raises the mind to contemplation, Beethoven grabs you by the throat. Mozart is Aquinas, wonderful Aquinas, building angelic cathedrals. Beethoven is Paul, frustratingly unsystematic, cajoling, browbeating, repudiating, pleading, ordering, crying on the page.

The comparison of Aquinas to Mozart, Beethoven to St. Paul is kind of apt.  But I don’t see why that would make Beethoven greater than Mozart.  Here’s my comment to his post.

Mozart is not the greatest because he died too young. Had lived another twenty years he would have been the greatest. I agree it would be great if more theologians loved Beethoven as they do Mozart (I'm surprised they don't) but I think you're being silly with Led Zeppelin. Bach is probably the greatest of them all. Where I disagree is with how you value aesthetics. It's not that Beethoven is greater because he is subjective in his art or because he is off balance. Neither of those makes art greater or lesser. They are just different approaches. Greatness comes from how well you create and how well your vision is represented aesthetically. We are still under the guiding force of Romanticism, so off balance appears to the general person to be of greater aesthetic quality. If and when we return to a neo-classical zeitgeist, Beethoven might appear to be ugly, or I should say uglier. Is Dante's Divine Comedy any lesser because of its balance and interconnectiveness and rational form? I would argue that Dante is closer to Mozart than Beethoven. And then perhaps one could say that Shakespeare might be closer to Beethoven than Mozart, though perhaps that's arguable. Dante and Shakespeare, as Mozart and Beethoven, have different approaches. It's not the approaches that make them greater or lesser.

Goby never replied to my comment; he usually does, but I sense he’s been busy lately.  Another person replied to me and we had an interesting conversation about Led Zeppelin, so you can go over to check that out if you wish.  Goby’s central thesis is that Christian theologians are too neo-classically oriented and lack the passion of Romanticism.  He does end his post with this summation: “We need, in other words, Appasionnata theology, we need Hymn to Joy theology, we need 5th and 6th symphony theology.”  The “Hymn to Joy” allusion is actually a reference to Beethoven’s concluding Ninth Symphony movement where Friedrich Schiller’s poem “Ode to Joy” is set in a choral.  I’m sure people here know of it.  

And just a few days after reading the Goby post, I came across in almost divine guided happenstance a post written by Stephen Klugewitz at The Imaginative Conservative, titled “Did Mozart Write the “Ode to Joy”?”  Klugewitz’s claim is that Beethoven took the theme from Mozart.

Only a few pieces of music in the Western canon rival the fame of the “Ode to Joy” theme: the opening chords of Beethoven’s own Fifth Symphony, “Spring” from Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries,” the first notes of Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, to name a few. The “Ode to Joy,” however, seems to stand above these, due to its hymn-like, sublime character and its elevated call to universal brotherhood. It will be forever associated with Beethoven’s name, and alone would ensure his legacy as one of the greatest composers—in the estimation of many, THE greatest composer—who ever lived.

The problem is that the “Ode to Joy” theme is not entirely Beethoven’s. He borrowed the main part of it from none other than Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

In 1775, at the age of nineteen, Mozart composed the “Misericordias Domini,” K. 222, a six-minute sacred work that is little recorded and seldom performed today, yet which constitutes a minor masterpiece. Mozart employs what became the germ of the “Ode to Joy” theme three times throughout the work

You can read the rest of Klugewitz’s thoughts there and here Mozart’s “Misericordias Domini” side by side to Beethoven’s fourth movement.  Tell me if they sound similar.  They do to my ear.  What Klugewitz doesn’t show is that Beethoven was aware of this little known Mozart piece.  It’s quite possible that it coincidental.  But after listening side by side I tend to agree; I think Beethoven stole it!  Even the arrangement is similar.

For Music Tuesday I offer Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy.” section of the fourth movement of his Ninth Symphony, here conducted by the late, great Leonard Bernstein.  The actual “Ode to Joy” theme starts at about 3:50; the chorus stats at 7:55.

Music Tuesday: Für Elise by Ludwig van Beethoven

Now that I’ve decided to expand beyond blues, let’s play a wonderful little piano piece by Beethoven.  I’m sure a lot of you will recognize it.  What’s amazing is that this piece was discovered after Beethoven’s death.  Who is “Elise” is a bit of a mystery, and you can read about it here. 

 The composition is considered to be a bagatelle, a piece that is “usually short and somewhat whimsical in nature.”  You can read about the composition at another tab on that link.  It may be whimsical and short, but there is a profundity to it.  The key of A minor certainly helps, but I think the recurring moments where a single note is repeated suggests a moment of soul searching.  As the site says the piece is in the form of a rondo, a recurring melody.  Here the form is ABACA, “A” being the recurring home theme.  The “B” and “C” contrasting themes suggest an attempt to break out of this melancholy mood.  “B” theme I think starts at 1:06 in this video and “C” about a minute later.  I can’t quite reach a conclusion to how the piece ends.  Does the mood shift in the last play of the home theme, and therefore come to some sort of resolution, or does the piece end on the same dispirited mood?  I can almost hear both.  What do people think?

 

 

 

No one creates tension like Beethoven!  I don’t know Tzvi Erez, but he plays this beautifully.  I sampled a few videos and I really think his was the best.  You can read about him here.