Author: Tord Romstad
Date: 15:53:34 12/22/05
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On December 22, 2005 at 17:47:00, Dann Corbit wrote: >This last remark is very odd to me. Beethoven's music is [to me] very simple >patterns. [Fur Elise and the 5th Symphony are obvious and clear examples of >it]. The frequency of my off-topic posts is now so high that I will probably soon receive a life-time CCC ban, but I can't resist taking the risk once more: I was mainly thinking about Beethoven's late music, which is the only part of his work which holds any great interest for me. Early Beethoven sounds like charming, but somewhat clumsy attempts to imitate Haydn or Mozart, while middle Beethoven is pompous, noisy and repetitive (like the 5th symphony). The Hammerklavier sonata is the perfect example of what I was thinking about. It is one of the most impressive pieces of music I have ever heard. It is staggeringly complicated and ingenious, clearly a work of phenomenal genius, and yet it leaves me completely cold. Great fun to analyse and pick apart, but I don't hear any beauty. "Für Elise" can hardly be seen as representative for Beethoven's work. It is a very simple and unambitious little piece which was not published at all in Beethoven's lifetime, and which was probably only composed for pedagogical reasons. It is ironic that several of the most famous pieces by the greatest composers are not really characteristic for the composer at all (two other notable examples of this are Ravel's Bolero and Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D minor). Tord
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