I have not studied music and would like to understand why he is considered great, the best of the best. Are there some objective ways to compare him to other composers that would make it easier for me to understand why he was a musical prodigy? What’s the difference between him and Mozart, for example, or, for that matter, between him and any composer out there? How and by what criteria do music scholars determine excellence?
fvb
I love the smell of pencil shavings in the morning. Smells like…homework.
With a reg date of 2001 and a post like this I’m going to note the taste of crow is probably not as pleasant as the smell of pencil shavings. Enjoy it as best you can.
That said, as a layperson I too am curious exactly what qualifies one as being a musical genius. Is there an all-time ranking, like a composer’s who’s who? Surely there’s more to it than “it just sounds good.”
Well, Mozart is considered a genius, too.
Both of them took music (and in Mozart’s case, the idea of “a career as a musician”) into unexplored ground, and both of them managed to explore those new areas in ways that people were still willing to pay to hear. They did things that hadn’t been done before and which others after them copied. I think the word I’m looking for is “groundbreaking.”
I’m not a musician, just took 5 years of solfeo and 1 of music history in school, but the thing is, those are guys whose work created a distinct “before” and “after”. They’re the musical version of the guy who figured out how to make gothic churches.
Not just composers, but any artist. Why did Beethoven, Mozart, Leonardo, etc become famous? Sponsorship? The greatest painter that ever lived might have his stuff in the attic or closet like Emily Dickinson.
I wrote a long post, thought it was too long and not good enough, decided not to post, and finally changed my mind after the post was gone. Here it is, in essence, in point form:
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Beethoven is generally considered as a towering genius, not the towering genius.
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An artwork has no intrinsic value. The value of a musical work appears when it meets with a listener.
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Over a long period, many people have found great value in many works of Beethoven.
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This is in opposition to composers who had only a few well-received works, those who for various reasons were mostly forgotten, or those who are highly regarded by only a small group of people.
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Among the people who, over the time, have found great value in Beethoven’s works there were many people who were either musicians themselves, or wrote about music, or were patrons of music. In other words, people in a position to influence the course of future music being made, and the diffusion of Beethoven’s works.
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Beethoven and the other celebrity musical geniuses like J-S Bach or Mozart not only wrote many pieces that appeal to people knowledgeable about music but also pieces that are very accessible, ensuring that next to everyone would be able to associate the name with a particular tune. Would Beethoven be so famous if he only wrote music like the Grosse Fugue or the Diabelli Variations? I’m not so sure.
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Beethoven was born at just the right time and had just the right personality. His era was that of the birth of Romanticism, which held artistic inspiration as nearly divine and thus elevated artists almost to the rank of demi-gods. Before Romanticism there was art and music, after, there was Art and Music.
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Beethoven was convinced of his own genius.
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He was successful enough that he could pretty much write what he wanted. This was, at the time, very unusual. Mozart wrote trite dances for money, Bach, massive amounts of somewhat repetitive church music. I don’t think there’s a single piece in Beethoven’s catalogue that was written just for the cash. Before being a musician was a job, after, it was a calling. This shift would have happened without Beethoven, but he was the first to embody it.
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As such, he was the model for later Romantic composers. Any one with a claim to genius was going to be compared to him, and likely seek to achieve his success.
Anyway, that’s just to get things started.
Beethoven wasn’t “the best of the best”. He was an extremely talented composer in the right place at the right time.
As a tangent, Mozart and Beethoven were quite different in their approaches. Mozart was, at heart, a synthesizer: he didn’t do much that was intrinsically new but he did it far better than and sometimes put it together in new ways. Beethoven was far more innovative (although a certain amount of credit for technique can go to Haydn, who handed the ball to Beethoven to run with). Mozart played around with formal structural expectations in a light, joking manner; Beethoven seriously moved the goalposts. And some of his later works, especially the string quartets, are harmonically radical.
And just to comment on what jovan said: it is thought that had Mozart lived longer he might have had a lucrative career as a concert pianist (such performances were becoming more commercially viable at the time) in addition to his composition work. Bummer about the whole “death” thing.
I just took a class in which we studied the history of Western classical music, and of course we covered Beethoven. Beethoven composed in every genre of the time except opera. His music was basically the pinnacle of the classical era. He took “symphony” and expanded it to the highest level of art possible. In fact, after his achievements in composition in this area, people didn’t know how they could evolve the genre beyond where he took it, so they had to start composing new types of music.
This is all what my instructor told us in class, so I have no cite for it. However, here is a paragraph from my textbook, “Music: An Appreciation” (6th ed) by Roger Kamien:
“Beethoven mostly used classical forms and techniques, but he gave them new power and intensity. The musical heir of Haydn and Mozart, he bridged the classical and romantic eras; many of his innovations were used by later composers. In his works, tension and excitement are built up through syncopations and dissonances. The range of pitch and dynamics is greater than ever before, so that contrasts of mood are more pronounced. Accents and climaxes seem titanic. Greater tension called for a larger musical framework, and so he expanded his forms; he was a musical architect who could create large-scale structures in which every note seems inevitable. But not all of his music is stormy and powerful; much of it is gentle, humorous, noble, or lyrical.”
In class we also learned that Richard Wagner, who composed really extravagant, over-the-top operas during the Romantic era, placed Beethoven at a level somewhere above God in his estimation.
Not sure if any of that helps your understanding, but it is what I know.
I just took a class in which we studied the history of Western classical music, and of course we covered Beethoven. Beethoven composed in every genre of the time except opera. His music was basically the pinnacle of the classical era. He took “symphony” and expanded it to the highest level of art possible. In fact, after his achievements in composition in this area, people didn’t know how they could evolve the genre beyond where he took it, so they had to start composing new types of music.
This is all what my instructor told us in class, so I have no cite for it. However, here is a paragraph from my textbook, “Music: An Appreciation” (6th ed) by Roger Kamien:
“Beethoven mostly used classical forms and techniques, but he gave them new power and intensity. The musical heir of Haydn and Mozart, he bridged the classical and romantic eras; many of his innovations were used by later composers. In his works, tension and excitement are built up through syncopations and dissonances. The range of pitch and dynamics is greater than ever before, so that contrasts of mood are more pronounced. Accents and climaxes seem titanic. Greater tension called for a larger musical framework, and so he expanded his forms; he was a musical architect who could create large-scale structures in which every note seems inevitable. But not all of his music is stormy and powerful; much of it is gentle, humorous, noble, or lyrical.”
In class we also learned that Richard Wagner, who composed really extravagant, over-the-top operas during the Romantic era, placed Beethoven at a level somewhere above God in his estimation.
Not sure if any of that helps your understanding, but it is what I know.
It should be noted that Beethoven did also compose one opera.
For which he rewrote the overture several times.
Actually, if you want a reason why we label Beethoven as great (as opposed to any actual intrinsic greatness) you can blame the nineteenth century folk for defining our tastes. Mendelssohn dragged J.S. Bach into the limelight from relative obscurity and Handel (who had remained well-known and well-regarded) was revived endlessly (England had some Messiah performances with literally thousands of participants). Beethoven was gushed over by Brahms (who felt intimidated by him) as well as Wagner. And so forth.
It’s also worth noting that American classical music culture and education was influenced very heavily by the Second New England School composers, especially John Knowles Paine whose German-composer-heavy music curriculum for Harvard was subsequently copied by virtually all US universities in some form, hence the Bach-Beethoven-Brahms lovefest that typifies the American classical scene even today. We have been brainwashed. 
The Sonic Death Cannon he built into his harpsichord might have something to do with it.
Ah, the famous “Warhammerklavier”. 
The paragraph Tehanu quotes is really very good, if brief. I’m no expert on classical music, but I was trying to put into words why Beethoven sounds so different than so many others, and this is a good description. He manages the listener’s mood and tension masterfully, and he does so by using all the moving parts of the orchestra. His work is also quite beautiful, but lots of guys wrote beautiful music. Beyond that, it’s just that, to me, Beethoven has what I think of as a “modern” sound – his work would be at home had it been written 80 years later than it was.
Uh, you’re just gonna have to listen to it, y’know?
–Cliffy
I am not a musicologist but there are certain characteristics that tend to…characterize genius or greatness, or at least pretty-goodness. Beethoven’s work is not just music that is thoughtfully laid out and technically correct; it conveys an incredibly powerful depth of emotion. The whole trick about music is that it communicates things in a way that other media cannot. And Beethoven did that amazingly effectively. He was not a Mozart-type genius who just spilled this stuff out; artifacts showed that he would rework his pieces over and over, almost as though being tormented by the search for what he wanted.
An interesting parallel is Jimi Hendrix. He usually tops out polls of guitarists for who was the greatest guitarist ever. Maybe he was and maybe he wasn’t, but he was certainly great and a lot of people just don’t get that at all. But guitarists understand that Jimi had this stuff going on in his head that had never gone on inside anyone else’s head before and it fluidly came out on the instrument as if it were a biological organ instead of an inanimate object played with the hands (and sometimes teeth).
I also see threads here like, “What’s so great about the Mona Lisa?” (I have a harder time conjuring up an answer to that. I also don’t get at all the celebrated artists who do things like a red dot in the corner of the canvas. Last year I saw a triptych piece that consisted of three canvases painted completely white. So go figure.)
But you use the word “objective” in the OP and the arts defy objectivity for the most part. Duke Ellington said, “If it sounds good, it is good.”
Nowadays, Charles Schulz should probably get some of the credit.
Do you really think that people are listening to Beethoven because it was mentioned in a Peanuts comic strip? I don’t think so. Beethoven is a genius because his music is still relevant and listened to two centuries later. (Yes, there is other music of the era we’re still listening to, but he’s still the most popular.)
I think it’s more like the meme of Beethoven as “the number one classical composer” is due to Peanuts.
It’s really too bad that there wasn’t recording technology then (or a time machine now) because I would like to hear these compositions as they were rendered by the composers themselves, not other symphonies versions.