The opening movement of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony and the second in his Ninth are the obvious ones that come to mind. What other compositions are similarly loaded with violent emotion? Any response will be greatly appreciated.
The ballet for which Stravinsky wrote The Rite of Spring ends with a human sacrifice. The music becomes appropriately percussive and chaotic.
Just about every Mahler symphony has such moments.
Poulenc’s opera Dialogues of the Carmelites. Ends with a group of nuns being led off to the guillotine.
Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique. No words, but the accompanying program describes the sequence of events to which the music is set. Opium-smoking, murder, hell, etc.
The Farewell Symphony, but only if you’re passive-aggressive.
Just about every opera ever written.
More, if we’re talking about violent emotion, rather than physical violence. Again, Poulenc. La Voix Human (not sure of the spelling) is a one-woman opera, consisting entirely of a telephone conversation. It’s sung by a character breaking up with her lover. Very emotional and neurotic.
Panache45 mentions “just about every opera ever written.” Not quite true (there are lots of comic operas), but sure, opera is all about extreme emotion. And sometimes actual violence. Anything by Wagner qualifies. Mozart’s Don Giovanni is (literally) hellish.
Someone cited Beethoven’s Fifth and Ninth Symphonies. The Sixth ought to be there too, for the storm stuff (it’s program music, essentially, like Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique, and there’s a movement describing (aurally, of course) a violent storm.
Any votes for Schoenberg’s Transfigured Night?
Still, I’m gonna go with Dialogues of the Carmelites for the most emotionally violent music I’ve heard (obviously, this is a pretty subjective judgement).
Never heard the Sixth in my life.
The most violent segment of a composition I’ve heard is the “clash of themes” in Shostakovich’s Seventh, middle of first movement. It’s not structured violence, though, but more like a frenzied battle inside a burning building amidst an artillery strike and an earthquake.
Shostakovich’s Symphony 10 always leaves me feeling beat up.
Ever seen Fantasia? The sequence with the satyrs and centaurs running around in pastoral glens with the swimming and the frolicking and the storm and rain and lightning and all? That’s Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony (The Pastoral).
What about Mozart’s Requiem? The part that he dictates to Salieri in Amadeus? Pretty frantic and awe-inducing.
Okay, so basically anything with fortissimo jarring chords? :rolleyes:
Can you refine your premise a bit?
FWIW, Feminist musicologist Susan McClary of the University of Minnesota wrote this about Beethoven’s 9th in Getting Down off the Beanstalk, 1987:
She also claimed to find themes of male masturbation in Mahler and Richard Strauss. I think a :rolleyes: is appropriate.
In Orff’s Carmina Burana, there’s a bit in the “Court of Love” part called Amor Volat Undique, where a soprano sings, backed by a mens’/boys’ choir. It sounds like the soprano is coming to a sexual climax, brought on by the choir. If that isn’t a strong/violent emotion being conveyed, I don’t know what is.
You can read the Latin lyrics and English translation here.
In fact, the entirety of Carmina Burana is pretty mind-blowingly powerful.
When I saw the title of this thread I wondered if Susan’s name was going to pop up.
My wife is a professor of music history and a colleague of Professor McClary’s. Susan hasn’t been at Minnesota for years. She and her husband Rob Walser (a leading rock and roll historian) now head the music history department at UCLA.
My wife’s putting the kids to bed right now, but she says she’ll log on in a little while to better explain Susan’s position on Beethoven. It’s not as simple or as nutty as that isolated quote makes it seem.
Hi, this isn’t Pochacco – I’m his wife (the musicologist) using his account. For what it’s worth, the first version (quoted above) of Susan McClary’s article on Beethoven’s 9th symphony was published in a local Minnesota music newsletter with a small circulation in the late 70’s/early 80’s. When the article was reprinted in her book Feminine Endings (1987), she took out the line about the frustrated rapist. Even so, the original lines still circulate, out of context, quoted by people who have never seen the original version (or even, most often, read the entire article, which is heavily analytical) with the objective of making feminist scholarship/leftist/liberal university professors (take your pick) look ridiculous. It got quoted in the mainstream (i.e. not academic) press, for political reasons, and now won’t die.
I heard another musicologist, Bob Fink, give a paper at a conference in the early 90s in which he surveyed many published analyses of this part of Beethoven’s symphony. Everyone wrote that this was a moment of unprecedented violence, even if Susan’s original article had the most extremely vivid language. If anyone wants to read the published version of Bob’s paper, comment here and I’ll track down the citation for you.
Feminine Endings is still worth reading, if nowhere near as radical as it once seemed. Musicology is an extremely conservative field, and in the late 80s many musicologists still weren’t used to the idea of women scholars, let alone feminist scholarship. <-- only a slight exaggeration. The book is a collection of essays, in part about how the use of gendered terms in musicology can unconsciously bias the analysis of musical pieces. For example, how referring to different parts of a sonata as “masculine” or “feminine” can lead to errors in interpretation of what is a non-gendered artform. In the context of a discussion of gender in music, it’s not surprising that she would use a metaphor of sexual violence for what virtually everyone agrees is a violent moment.
Susan’s most recent book, Conventional Wisdom, is also wonderful and, unusually for academic writing, particularly in musicology, very readable. This book is about musical conventions – the ways composers and musicians (from Vivaldi through the blues) make use of standard harmonies, practices and forms – and why they’re successful.
I don’t recognize the citation of Strauss and Mahler – I could ask Susan but she’ll probably roll her eyes at me…
Taking the lines out for reprint introduces a wee bit of difficulty in determining the original context and makes it easy to raise the “out of context” argument. And I’ll say that that particular statement of hers doesn’t need anybody’s help to look ridiculous.
I’ll stipulate that moment is violent (leaving aside the possibility that we may be using different senses of the word). The issue is McClary’s language. Why no offer of her original unedited article? If I was quoted out of context and I thought the context would change the impact, I’d do everything I could to see that whatever context was needed was widely available, almost certainly on the Web. But that’s just me.
No, 17 years later this sort of thing is not surprising. If it seems reasonable in context, maybe the context is the problem.
In Googling unsuccessfully for McClary’s unedited article, I found a web site that claims she also used the phrases “phallic violence” and “pelvic pounding”. Is this correct, and if so, what were these phrases in reference to?
Pochacco here. I’m repeating what I know from my wife who is more familiar with Susan’s writings.
As I understand it, Susan removed the rape metaphor because it was a minor rhetorical point, not the central thrust of her argument, and because the heat it was generating among people who hadn’t even read the original paper (and thus had no way of judging whether it was appropriate or not) was totally out of proportion to its importance.
As my wife has pointed out, virtually no one has actually read the original paper because it was only published in a minor local newsletter with a tiny circulation many years before Susan’s book appeared.
From what I understand, she’s just not that interested in continuing to fight over a tangential remark made in a paper written over 20 years ago. Other scholars complained that her language was over the top. Her response was basically “Well, I don’t agree, but since it isn’t really important to the main thrust of the paper, I’ll take it out anyway.”
It’s doubtful that distributing the original article would do much good . From my wife’s description of it, it’s a highly technical piece of scholarship that would be difficult to follow for anyone not well-versed in music theory. Anyone who’s interested in what she actually has to say about Beethoven can read the revised article in Feminine Endings and determine if she was right to cut the rape metaphor or not.
Goodness, just go to your local university library and check out Feminine Endings, read it, and decide for yourself if you agree with her arguments or not. Then maybe you can argue based upon the substance of her work instead of just insinuating things because you’ve found some naughty words.
Ask yourself, why is this so important to you? It’s not like Susan is getting up in front of her class every quarter and announcing “Beethoven was a rapist!” She has lots of nice things to say about him elsewhere in the article in question. It was an over-the-top metaphor in an obscure paper from over 20 years ago that she removed in later revisions. The only reason that anybody continues to talk about it is that provides a convenient club for conservatives to bash them damn librul femnists.
What’s your agenda?
I’m glad to hear it. Thank you for that information.
(emphasis added) Thanks for that information as well.
As I said above, the issue is that passage, not her arguments. I’m really not interested in reading the work of someone who has used such over-the-top language. Perhaps you feel the same way about other authors?
(emphasis added) That’s pretty much my point, so it looks like we basically agree. I propose we leave it at that.
One I haven’t seen mentioned is “The Erl King” or “The Elf King” or whatever you want to call it, the lied by Schubert where a young boy and his father are galloping through the woods at night when the boy claims he feels someone trying to grab him away. The father tries to get home in time, but it’s too late. That song is great at portraying fear and sadness to a lesser degree.
-Lil