Musical Style and Innovations of Beethoven Essay

Musical Style and Innovationsvan van Beethoven is viewed as a transitional ascertain between the Classical and Romantic eras of practice of medicineal history. Above all, his whole kit and boodle sort themselves from those of any prior composer through and through his creation of large, extended architectonic structures characterized by the all-embracing developing of musical material, themes, and motifs, usually by means of inflection, that is, a change in the feeling of the home key, through a variety of keys or harmonic regions.Although Haydns later works a great deal showed a greater fluidity between distant keys, Beethovens innovation was the ability to rapidly establish a solidity in juxtaposing different keys and unexpected notes to join them. This exserted harmonic realm creates a sense of a vast musical and experiential space through which the music moves, and the development of musical material creates a sense of anthesis drama in this space. In this way Beethovens music parallels the simultaneous development of the novel in literature, a literary shape foc economic consumptiond on the life drama and development of one or more individuals through complex life circumstances, and of contemporaneous German idealisms philosophical notion of self, mind, or spirit that unfolds through a complex process of contradictions and tensions between the subjective and objective until a steadiness or synthesis occurs in which all of these contradictions and developmental phases have been firm or encompassed in a higher unity.Beethoven continued to expand the development section of works, extending a trend in the works of Haydn and Mozart, who had dramatically expanded both the length and substance of instrumental music. As Beethovens major immediate predecessors and influences, he looked to their harmonic and manakinal models for his aver works. However, both Mozart and Haydn valued the great weight of a musical impetus in the statement of ideas call ed the exposition, for Beethoven the development section of a sonata form became the heart of the work. Beethoven was able to do this by make the development section not merely longer, but in like manner more structured. The actually long development section of the Eroica Symphony, for example, is divided into four roughly liken sections, making it, in effect, a sonata form within a sonata form. The depression movement alone of this symphony is as long as an inherent typical Italian-style Mozart symphony from the 1770s. His focus on the developmentwould, like others of his innovations, passel a trend that later composers would follow.Although Beethoven wrote many graceful and lyric melodies, another radical innovation of his music, compargond especially to that of Mozart and Haydn, is his extensive use of forceful, marked, and regular stark rhythmic patterns throughout his compositions and, in specific, in his themes and motifs, some of which ar primarily rhythmic rather than melodic. Some of his most famous themes, much(prenominal) as those of the source movements of the Third, Fifth, and Ninth symphonies, are primarily non-melodic rhythmic figures consisting of notes of a single chord, and the themes of the last movements of the Third and S nonethelessth symphonies could more accurately be described as rhythms rather than as melodies.This use of rhythm was particularly well suited to the primacy of development in Beethovens music, since a single rhythmic pattern can more easily than a melody be taken through a succession of different, even remote, keys and harmonic regions while retaining and conveying an underlying unity. This allowed him to combine different features of his themes in a wide variety of ways, extending the techniques of Haydn in development (see Sonata Form).He also continued another trend towards larger orchestras that went on until the first decennium of the 20th century, and moved the center of the sound downwards in the o rchestra, to the violas and the trim down register of the violins and cellos, giving his music a heavier and darker feel than Haydn or Mozart. Gustav Mahler special the orchestration of some of Beethovens music most notably the 3d and 9th symphonies with the idea of more accurately expressing Beethovens purpose in an orchestra that had grown so much larger than the one Beethoven utilise for example, doubling woodwind parts to compensate for the fact that a modern orchestra has so many more strings than Beethovens orchestra did. Needless to say, these efforts remain controversial. In his Fifth Symphony Beethoven introduced a striking motif, drawn from a late Haydn symphony, in the very break bar, which he echoed in various forms in all four movements of the symphony.This is the first important occurrence of cyclic form. He was also fond of making usual what had foregoingly been unusual in the Fifth Symphony, instead of using a stately minuet, as had been the norm for the danc e movement of a four-movement work, he created a dark march, which he used as the terzetto movement and ran into the fourth without interruption. While one can point to previous works which had one or more of these individual features, his music, combined with the use of operatic scoring that he learned from Mehul and Cherubini, created a work which was birthday suit novel in effect too novel, in fact, for some critics of the time. On the other hand, his contemporary Spohr found the finale too baroque, though he praised the second movement as being in effective Romantic style.His Ninth Symphony included a chorus line and solo voices in the 4th movement for the first time, and made extensive use of fugues, which were generally considered to be a different form of music, and over again unusual in symphonies.He wrote one opera, Fidelio. It has been said that he wrote beautiful vocal music without regard for the limitations of human singers, treating the voice as if it were a symph onic instrument even though his conversation books note his impulse to make his music singable and include references that indicate that he had remembered his bugger offs singing lessons.Beethovens development and works are typically divided into three periods an early period in which his works show especially the influence of Mozart and Haydn a middle, mature period in which he developed his distinctive individual style, sometimes characterized as idealistic and a late period, in which he wrote works of a highly evolved, individuated, sometimes fragmented and unorthodox style sometimes characterized as transcendental and sublime, where he tried to combine the baroque ideas of Handel and Bach with his icons Mozart and Haydn. In his late years he called Handel my grand master.In demarcation to Mozart, he labored heavily over his work, leaving intermediate drafts that let considerable insight into his creative process. Early drafts of his Ninth Symphony used rough vertical marks on the score in place of actual notes, to indicate the structure he had in mind for the melody. Studies of his discipline books show the working out of dozens of variations on a particular theme, changing themes to fit with an overall structure that evolved over time, and extensive sketching of counter-melodies.