Beethoven: Writing Music and Improvisation

[Peter]

Some people say that Beethoven did with his music all that was humanly possible, while Mozart divined his gifts from the gods.

Yes perhaps Albert Einstein put it best when he said "while Beethoven created his music, Mozart's was so pure that it seemed to have been ever-present in the universe, waiting to be discovered by the master."

I'm not sure I agree with that, but the point is that Einstein found Mozart pretty thought provoking!

[al1432]

the point is that Einstein found Mozart pretty thought provoking!

Or pretty relaxing, and there IS a difference

[DavidO]

Exactly so, to my thinking. I mean, (solo) McCartney has been rattling off tunes for the past 30+ years, most of which (sadly) I can't stand to listen to, but he sure is prolific. Not that I'm comparing McCartney to Mozart but you get the idea. Also, after watching Barenboim's analyses of the Beethoven sonatas, I came away with a new appreciation of the complexity therein. I think it's one thing to improvise, and another to organize a highly complex structure. And also, keep in mind that Beethoven's compositions had a complexity well beyond that of many of Mozart's.

I was busybodying around on the Web the other day, & found a chapter in a book called "The Physical Basis of Music" by E.T. Jaynes (professor of physics at Washington University in St. Louis). The chapters are posted online as PDF files. One of them, Chapter 7, is titled "Mozart & Beethoven Compared."

You can read it here:
http://bayes.wustl.edu/etj/music/

Double-click the m7h.pdf file.

Jaynes has this to say:

With Mozart you do not know where you are in a movement because there is no coherent plan; only the calling forth of one short theme after another, at random. In Mozart there is almost no sense of "development" of a theme; the closest he comes to it is to add a little ornamentation. Usually, when a theme remains for some time it is merely repeated unaltered, sometimes to the point of boredom. Indeed, he composed so rapidly that there was no time to work out a development even if he had thought in those terms. Beethoven used fewer and simpler themes because he gave them elaborate developments (that often required long series of revisions in his notebooks); and just for that reason, you know "where you are" in a Beethoven movement, from the stage of the development.

[Peter]

Jaynes has this to say:

With Mozart you do not know where you are in a movement because there is no coherent plan; only the calling forth of one short theme after another, at random. In Mozart there is almost no sense of "development" of a theme; the closest he comes to it is to add a little ornamentation. Usually, when a theme remains for some time it is merely repeated unaltered, sometimes to the point of boredom. Indeed, he composed so rapidly that there was no time to work out a development even if he had thought in those terms. Beethoven used fewer and simpler themes because he gave them elaborate developments (that often required long series of revisions in his notebooks); and just for that reason, you know "where you are" in a Beethoven movement, from the stage of the development.

I think this is nonsense. Just look at the first movement of the Prague symphony where Mozart provides a most elaborate development section. He was a classical composer for goodness sake and the structure is quite clear even if Jaynes gets lost. To quote Einstein again "It is impossible for me to say whether Bach or Mozart means more to me. In music I do not look for logic. I am quite intuitive on the whole and know no theories. I never like a work if I cannot intuitively grasp its inner unity (architecture)."

[Roehre]

First, why did it take longer for Beethoven to write a piece while Mozart just wrote it quickly?

I don't understand how he could improvise perfectly for hours on end but then take around 2 years to write a piece?

Neither is true. The quintet movement in b-minor which was discovered some ten years ago shows that Beethoven was perfectly capable of writing and composing a piece at the same time, without even have to change one single note. The piece, literally written in the presence of the dedicatee, is not based on sketches whatsoever, and is in a handwriting which for Beethoven standards is extremely well legible.

But if we take a look at a beethovenian score, e.g. the ninth symphony (http://http://beethoven.staatsbiblio...n/9/4/6/1.html), or at sketches (see the last pages of the manuscript of that work) we see a lot of dottings, crossing outs and other changes, even in a score which was meant for a copyist as work copy, and therefore legible and intelligible.

Looking at his sketches, we hardly can decipher anything at first sight.

There are some loose bars, then fragments of melodies, the same melodies changed and amended over and over and over again, the melodies put together to longer fragments, e.g. an exposition, again this fragment is amended etc etc etc, another part of the overall structure is added and slowly the piece gets its preliminary shape.

This is then written out as a kind of continuity draft, which -you guess it- will be changed, amended etc, and if the composer is happy with the result, he starts a score, sometimes writing down in pencil a continuity draft at the bottom stave (the violin concerto gives a brilliant example of this) and begins the process of instrumentation and/or orchestration.

but if he is in a hurry he sometimes directly tried to compose in a score format - for a Tripleconcerto in D, as well as a Symphony in C with rather disastrous consequences - the material was not developed enough to survive such a direct treat, and the projects were abandonded.

For the late quartets Beethoven started to make rough score sketches, of some passages some dozen of different draft scores are extent.

Contrary to what Schindler seems to have noted, the sketches confirm that Beethoven most of the time was working on one project at a time, and generally speaking starting with a first movement and eventually progressing to the final bars of the last movement.

He did consider his sketches as essential for his composing, as he always took extreme care to take his big pile of sketches and sketchbooks with him as he moved house -and that happened very regularly. A finished score had lost its importance, and that explains why we don't posses many original scores, but do have such a large amount of sketches.
It is known that B sometimes browsed his sketchbooks for ideas he had dotted down in earlier years.

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Mozart did sketch more than usually is acknowledged. And he thought that with e.g. writing the exposition (i.e. to the double bar) the difficult part of composing was done, the rest was a matter of more or less autopilot (in his terms that is). Most of the sketches were thrown away - but fortunately some have survived.

That explains why we have got literally hundreds of unfinished pieces by Mozart, and quite a lot of pieces which -as paper mark research confirms- were begun sometimes literally years before the were finished.

Some of the piano concertos show that the exposition of the first mvt was composed two or three years before they were completed (KV595 e.g.)The same applies to the clarinet concert, of which the first movement was nearly completely composed as bassetthorn concerto in G major in 1788, three years before the transposition to clarinet concerto in A major, with a slow mvt and a proper finale.

What we have in terms of unfinished works hardly shows any alterations, crossing outs or other changes. There are a few exceptions, and one is the 1st mvt of the Prague Symphony (no.38, D-major, KV504), IMO the greatest symphonic mvt of Mozart's. It did cost him considerable trouble to get it right, and he even crossed out bars to restart composing a development.

Generally we have the following types of Mozart "sketches" and fragments:

-complete scores up to the double bar of the development section, mostly meant to be used later, e.g. a piano concerto, when an opportunity for a performance came up (KV595), or quickly a new piece was needed (The Haffner symphony [no.35, KV385] was composed within three days).

-scores in which one or two parts have been filled in, quite often from the beginning to the final bar, and then laid aside, e.g. when Mozart thought it not fitting into the mold of the piece for which it was meant. A movement which originally was meant as finale mvt for the "Hunt" quartet (KV458) is such an example.

-pieces which were conceived and begun, but for some reason a performance seemed unlikely, e.g. the great Mass KV427.

-pieces which he started, but wasn't content with, of which many chamber music fragments testify. In stead of throwing away the score he simply turned a page and started a new work - which many times makes dating the fragment easy, provided we know the date of completing the than other score, if it was mentionedin Mozart's own catalogue of (important!) works (less important works, e.g. the 12 duos for two [bassett]horns were not noted ).

Some of these working methods become clear looking at the state of the material/score which was written by Mozart himself for his Requiem. And a couple of compositional solutions "found" by Süssmayer and others suggest that some small notes with sketches must have existed but have not survived.

Beethoven and Mozart were more or less prototypes of the struggling and the straightforwardly composing composers, Brahms, Chausson, Webern e.g. another example of the former, Haydn, Milhaud, Hindemith and Martinu from the latter "type".