Beethoven's musical style and innovations

Ludwig van Beethoven is viewed as a pivotal figure in the history of European classical music, and important both as an important figure in the Classical and for his influence on the Romantic eras of musical history that followed it. This article covers some of Beethoven's contributions to musical style.

Beethoven and music architecture

Above all, his works distinguish themselves from those of any prior composer through his creation of large, extended architectonic structures characterized by the extensive development of musical material, themes, and motifs, usually by means of "modulation", that is, a change in the feeling of the home key, through a variety of keys or harmonic regions. Although Haydn's later works often showed a greater fluidity between distant keys, Beethoven's innovation was the ability to rapidly establish a solidity in juxtaposing different keys and unexpected notes to join them. This expanded 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 unfolding drama in this space.

In this way Beethoven's music parallels the simultaneous development of the novel in literature, a literary form focused on the life drama and development of one or more individuals through complex life circumstances, and of contemporaneous German idealism's philosophical notion of self, mind, or spirit that unfolds through a complex process of contradictions and tensions between the subjective and objective until a resolution or synthesis occurs in which all of these contradictions and developmental phases have been resolved or encompassed in a higher unity.

Development sections

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 Beethoven's major immediate predecessors and influences, he looked to their harmonic and formal models for his own works. However, while both Mozart and Haydn placed the great weight of a musical movement in the statement of ideas called the exposition, for Beethoven the development section of a sonata form became the heart of the work. Beethoven was able to do this by making the development section not merely longer, but also more structured. The very long development section of the Eroica Symphony, for example, is divided into four roughly equal sections, making it, in effect, a sonata form within a sonata form. The first movement alone of this symphony is as long as an entire typical Italian-style Mozart symphony from the 1770s. His focus on the development would, like others of his innovations, set a trend that later composers would follow.

Rhythm

Although Beethoven wrote many beautiful and lyrical melodies, another radical innovation of his music, compared especially to that of Mozart and Haydn, is his extensive use of forceful, marked, and even stark rhythmic patterns throughout his compositions and, in particular, in his themes and motifs, some of which are primarily rhythmic rather than melodic. Some of his most famous themes, such as those of the first 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 Seventh 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 Beethoven's 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).

Size of the orchestra

He also continued another trend - towards larger orchestras - that went on until the first decade of the 20th century, and moved the center of the sound downwards in the orchestra, to the violas and the lower register of the violins and cellos, giving his music a heavier and darker feel than Haydn or Mozart. Gustav Mahler modified the orchestration of some of Beethoven's music -- most notably the 3d and 9th symphonies -- with the idea of more accurately expressing Beethoven's intent in an orchestra that had grown so much larger than the one Beethoven used: for example, doubling woodwind parts to compensate for the fact that a modern orchestra has so many more strings than Beethoven's orchestra did. Needless to say, these efforts remain controversial.

The germ motive

Beethoven helped to further unify the different movements in multi-movement works with the invention of the 'germ motive', as Schauffler terms it in his biography on Beethoven. The germ motive, or 'germinal motif,' as it is sometimes called, is a motive that is used to create motives and themes throughout a whole work, without making it obvious that such a thing is being done. Thus, all the themes in a piece can be tied back to a single motive in the work. An early and famous example of this is his sonata 'Pathetique', where all of the subjects used in the first movement originate from a germinal idea derived from its opening bar. Similarly, the opening bars of his Eighth Symphony are used to derive motives to be used throughout the whole symphony. This device lends unity to a work or even a group of works (as some motives Beethoven used not only in one work, but in many works) without repeating material exactly or turning to canonic devices.

In his Fifth Symphony Beethoven used the four-note motif (drawn from a late Haydn symphony) throughout the whole movement in different juxtapositions, marking the first important occurrence of cyclic form and giving a sense of a totally internal conflict to the piece.

Beethoven and the voice

His Ninth Symphony included a chorus 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 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 symphonic instrument - even though his conversation books note his desire to make his music singable and include references that indicate that he had remembered his father's singing lessons.

Beethoven's 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 "heroic"; and a late period, in which he wrote works of a highly evolved, individuated, sometimes fragmented and unorthodox style sometimes characterized as "transcendent" 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".

Beethoven's mode of composition

In contrast to Mozart, he labored heavily over his work, leaving intermediate drafts that provide 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 sketch 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.

Beethoven and Romanticism

Beethoven's place as a transitional figure between the neo-classical period in the arts, called the "classical" period in music, and the Romantic period was a conscious intention of the many 19th century writers and composers, who pointed to his work as the radical departure from the past. As a result, a great deal of literature, including writing by ETA Hoffman, Robert Schumann, Richard Wagner and Gustav Mahler, placed his work at the pinnacle of what they were trying to achieve in music.

Because of his central importance, methods of conducting and playing, as well as music theory, were centered around his most important works, particularly his symphonies, concerti, string quartets, piano trios and sonatas for piano or piano and other instrument. Beginning from his pupil Carl Czerny and moving forward, basic terms such as tonality, sonata form and Allegro were defined or redefined in reference to his musical practice.

As importantly Beethoven's life was seen as the model for the "heroic artist", who cast his personal experiences, perceptions and biography into works, which would then be experienced by the audience members who would be transported to the emotional state of the artist, and thus participate in a "sublime" experience. That Beethoven had great difficulties in his life was joined to the sense of struggle and difficulty in his music, and used as the basis for an entire mythology of the role of the artist in society, and the difficulties of artistic creation. A biography by Anton Schindler was in accordance with this sense of Beethoven as Romantic, constantly putting direct emotional symbols into his work, such as saying "Thus Fate Knocks at the Door!" for the opening of the C Minor Symphony, number 5. Beethoven as icon can be seen in the efforts to erect a monument to him, led by Franz Liszt, and in the arguments over whether Johannes Brahms or Richard Wagner better represented the tradition of music that Beethoven was thought to have created.

With the 20th century a reaction against this "cult of the Romantic artist" began to be seen. In a sense it was a continuation of the Romantic cult in a different form: a new generation of artists wanted to claim Beethoven as their own, and place him in the context as the pinnacle figure of musical enlightenment and rationality. The emphasis on harmonic practice lead to arguments that Beethoven was not "really" a romantic because of his general rejection of chromaticism in melodies, and his structural practices in preparing modulations. By the 1950's it was common to deny that Beethoven was a Romantic at all.

In the late 20th century, the pendulum began to swing back in the other direction, in some measure because of a revival of interest in Romanticism, and in part because of a change in the status of musical technique. With the falling out of favor of the idea that music was about "progress", the need to see Beethoven in technical terms diminished. The differences between his work and Mozart's became accentuated, in part because of the rise of neo-classical styles of playing or Historically Informed Performance . Beethoven came to many to be seen in relation to contemporaries such as Goethe and Jacque Louis David - having both neo-classical and Romantic elements to their work.