Beethoven and the 9th Symphony

[Zakalwe]

@samclem

I’ll have something to post about this later tonight. Sorry to be so cryptic, but I’m doing wash and have kids. I want to do it right.

Yes, there is evidence that is more contemporary, though not the next week in the Wien Gazette.

I’ll find it and post about it hopefully in a bit.

We’re still waiting…

[GorillaMan]

@John W. Kennedy

Sir George Grove was a historian. His Dictionary of Music and Musicians is a standard reference work comparable in its field to the Britannica or the Oxford English Dictionary.

He died over a hundred years ago. His dictionary isn’t a standard reference work, any more than any other Victorian text. The modern dictionary which bears his name, however, is a different creature entirely.

[Jackmannii]

@clambam

My daughter was complaining to me that she had to write a report on a classical composer and they were so “boring” compared to today’s rockers. I told her, pick Robert Schumann. Among other things he permanently crippled himself with a home-made contraption to prevent him from using one of his fingers (so the others would grow stronger), thus ending his stellar concert piano career and died of syphilis in an asylum, stark raving mad. Beat that, Sid Vicious!

She might also be “inspired” by the story of Hector Berlioz, whose life at times rivalled that of his protagonist in Symphonie Fantastique (whom he autobiographically portrayed as an obsessed lover, who in a drug-induced dream sequence murders his beloved, is graphically executed by guillotine, goes to Hell and winds up in a witches’ Sabbath) - the music lending a chilling air to at least two popular modern films (The Shining and Sleeping With The Enemy).

That rocks.

As for Beethoven, after hearing the touching story of the performance of his Ninth, I wondered whether it might be largely true, except that Beethoven knew full well he was being applauded and and milked the moment for dramatic effect.

Cynical, I’m sure.

[Dennis_C.Myers]

@EddyTeddyFreddy

Rehearsal is different from performance. I have watched musician friends practicing, then watched them perform in concert, and there’s no question in my mind that performance takes them to a different level of intensity and involvement with the music.

Rehearsal is for disassembling the piece into its parts and aspects, studying them, putting them back together this way and that till the whole feels right, polishing, fine-tuning, with breaks in the flow to go back and go over things till they’re where one wants them.

Performance is music on the cliff’s edge, dancing across a tightrope, no second thoughts, no going back to fix this or tweak that, no stepping out of the torrent of music sweeping the performer to the conclusion.

Consider also how the emotions of the audience at that performance would have been rocking the hall, feeding back to the musicians as they played. Consider how they must have felt, caught up in the rapture of this incredible music, seeing its composer in the center of it all, the one who created such magnificence alone unable to hear it.

I’m not sure I accept everything EddyTeddy Freddy said in reply to me, but I love his respect for the art.

[EddyTeddyFreddy]

I emailed selected posts from this thread to a close friend who’s a professional violinist, the head of a local chamber ensemble, who’s played with such institutions as the Handel and Haydn Society. This was her reply:

I would have wept, to see a beloved genius deprived of the ability to hear his amazing work performed, at his bravery in trying to conduct in his own silence. It is not about what rehearsal is versus performance.

That is my take.

[II_Gyan_II]

Jumping off the bibliography in Lewis Lockwood’s fine Beethoven biography, I consulted Elliot Forbes’ Thayer’s Life of Beethoven. Sure enough, in the 2nd. volume, pg 909, it is mentioned that, in 1860, Thayer met one of the musicians who performed at the premiere and the recollection was that the incident occured at the end of the scherzo. However, Unger herself met with Grove in 1869, and said that it happened at the end of the symphony.

Also, some have theorized that Beethoven was never “completely” deaf, but via technology, did retain functionality throughout his life.

[aruvqan]

@aruvqan

Bwahahaha … have her read Ogden Nash’s biography of composers <quick amazon-fu>

Damn, cant find it … but it is wonderfully scandalous.

Apologies, found my copy … is actually “My Favorite Intermissions” by Victor Borge.

Just reread it. bwahahaha…

[percussion]

@Cervaise

I am an actor, not a musician, so take this for what it’s worth, but even the most committed dress rehearsal doesn’t begin to compare in intensity to the first actual performance with an audience.

hehe, I just read this with Tibas’s voice from Arested Development in my head

[DSYoungEsq]

@samclem

I’ll have something to post about this later tonight. Sorry to be so cryptic, but I’m doing wash and have kids. I want to do it right.

Yes, there is evidence that is more contemporary, though not the next week in the Wien Gazette.

I’ll find it and post about it hopefully in a bit.

Um, Samclem, did you simply forget about this???

[samclem]

@DSYoungEsq

Um, Samclem, did you simply forget about this???

Well, actually, I never could seem to find that earlier cite.

Better late than never. And, before someone says ZOMBIE THREAD, this is factual info which pertains to this thread. As a moderator, I allow this all the time in General Questions.

Thanks to the good folks over at Google Books, we can now search for things like this.

The Dial

Read page 199.

This festival afforded him a complete triumph. The audience
applauded and applauded, till, at one time, when
the acclamations rose to their height, Sontag perceiving
that Beethoven did not hear, as his face was turned from
the house, called his attention. The audience then, as
for the first time realizing the extent of his misfortune,
melted into tears, then all united in a still more rapturous
expression of homage.

This passage is from an article in English, based on a translation of Schindler’s just published biography of Beethoven(1841)

My conclusion is that Sontag, not Ungher(Unger), was the soloist who tapped Beethoven on the shoulder. The incident almost certainly occurred, although the details might have been fuzzied-up over time. As to whether the timing was after the scherzo, or at the end of the total performance, or any time in between, I doubt that we will ever know.

[DSYoungEsq]

I am so glad that you found this again!

[Polycarp]

@samclem

… And, before someone says ZOMBIE THREAD, this is factual info which pertains to this thread. As a moderator, I allow this all the time in General Questions.

Not to worry, Sam. If anyone alleges that you engaged in misconduct, all us Dopers will be deaf to the complaint!

::: flees :::

[susan]

Okay, but now I want a full zombie performance of the 9th.

[Barrett_Bonden]

@Dennis C. Myers

I have to wonder about this “some of the players reportedly wept” stuff. Surely the debut of the symphony wasn’t the first time they had played it. Wouldn’t they have learned to compose themselves after all the rehearsals? This sounds like more of the same. The greatness of the Ninth can certainly stand on its own without all this fakelore.

I believe it.

I sang Beethoven’s Ninth (in the chorus) almost ten years ago. It was a deeply moving experience. The conductor, David Epstein, was waiting at the door as we filed offstage after the performance. I was unable to speak, so I shook his hand with tears in my eyes.

[AHunter3]

Is it kosher within a revived-zombie to reply to the older content?

(well, heck, everyone else does, don’t they?)

OK, I’m no Beethoven, but I am an amateur musician and I do compose a bit. If I had orchestrated one of my compositions and was conducting an orchestra that I could see but not hear:

• Conducting isn’t where you fling your arms around beating out 4/4 time or whatever; as you approach the part where the flutes come in lightly over the top of the tympani, you’ve asjusted the pace just a bit to emphasize the deep percussive tympani and the emphatic violin responses; now you want to slow it ever so slightly as the flutes start, then pick up the pace by the 2nd bar, so you catch the eyes of the flute section as they have the flutes to their lips a few beats before they begin; you expect them to be looking to you for any specific cues modulating how they attack that phrase. As other woodwinds join in you’re upping the volume and mixing the relative volume of the different sections. With the baton arm or with the other, you’re lifting or depressing volume of specific sections, requesting more legato or indicating an actual “shape” of a swell then fallback in volume across a phrase, pulling it from them here, tamping it back there.

• As such, if at any point the orchestra wasn’t playing exactly the part of my own composition that I thought they were playing, I would damn well know it. If they were ignoring me, I would damn well know it. If they were so much as a sixteenth of a second off from where I was specifically trying to coax them in a given two-second phrase within a measure, I would damn well know it. Even with ordinary working ears, a conductor is going to rely a lot on visual cues. The inhalation and purposeful leaning into the reed of the oboe player lets you anticipate the first note of the oboe countermelody and your eyes switch to the french horn player to see similar poise and intent as she prepares to come in one note behind with the long harmony note.

• The musicians in an orchestra are not properly being an aggregate collection of individual biological machines that each produces specific pitches of specific durations as per the sheet music at a specified tempo. Instead the orchestra is an entire instrument that the conductor plays. The professional orchestra musician doesn’t have to be staring with fixation at the sheet music in order to ascertain what notes come next, whereas the amateur orchestra musician who might have otherwise been in that situation would by the time of public performance have mostly memorized the music over the course of many many rehearsals and practice sessions. In both cases, the attention is only partially on the sheet music, with the balance granted to the conductor. Cooperating as a part of the instrument called orchestra in being played by the conductor. There’s a reason the orchestra applauds the conductor when the conductor takes a bow. It isn’t to acknowledge that the conductor successfully kept the beat with a baton. Conductors perform.

• All of the above would be ever more true whenever the conductor is also the composer. One would expect the composer to be more specific and picky about exactly how the composition is to be rendered.
In short, no way in hell was Beethoven up there still waving his arms around beating out time while the orchestra, having ignored him, reached the end of the piece and quit playing, the audience applauded, and there’s old clueless Beethoven still doing the old “one and two and”. Not unless he was blind and senile as well as deaf. I wasn’t there (obviously), I haven’t read any interviews with those who were, but I can still state categorically that that did not happen.

[Ludovic]

@John W. Kennedy

That depends on your style. Richard Strauss once remarked that the proper position for a conductor’s left hand was in his pocket. (I confess that I’m glad I never had to sing in an opera he was conducting, but perhaps he wasn’t talking about opera.)

Is that a baton in your pocket, or…?

[C_K_Dexter_Haven]

Is it kosher within a revived-zombie to reply to the older content?

It’s generally OK in this forum, and in CoCC and Cafe Society. It’s NOT so OK in other forums, such as GD, GQ, IMHO, or MPSIMS… and it’s very much not OK in the Pit.

[sreeja]

Beethovan was a great man.I cannot heard his 9th symphony.

[Zebra]

It would be like being at Babe Ruth’s final game.

And then he crushes a grand slam home run and the ball is never found.