Відео

Excellent analysis.

Beautiful, epic music!😮

Your videos are amazing I hope you keep making more!!

Thank You for ghis informative Video.

Thanks for sharing this wonderful and intimate version of which I had no idea just minutes ago.

The second movement is perhaps my favorite piece of classical music. It was used in the Columbo episode featuring Richard Basehart and Honor Blackman.

I thought the horn chorale section sounded like the christian hymn ‘it is well with my soul’ which was composed a few decades before

My point, for what it's worth, is that Beethoven's practice in Op. 37 is not a generic 'error' as Tovey claimed, because modulating first ritornelli are overwhelmingly common in the post-classical concerto repertoire. This is why I placed 'error' in inverted commas in the sentence you highlight. The argument that Beethoven's first three concerti knowingly depart from a norm, as Hepokoski and Darcy argue (Elements, p. 490, where they call this a 'non-tonic feint'), is also problematic, because very few composers after Mozart predominantly composed monotonal first ritornelli: the monotonal ritornello is only really 'normal' for Mozart. Beethoven doesn't purposely violate a norm in Op. 37, but exemplifies a practice that can be found in dozens of concerti composed in the period between 1790 and 1850, as I've demonstrated exhaustively in a recent article (Music Analysis, Vol. 40/3, 2021). I'm also keen to know why I'm 'mind-numbingly specific'. Would it help if I was vague and generalised?

thank you so much, finally an analysis of full Mahler movement! the horn in measure 32, 1st movement reminds me of Brahms horn trio Op. 40, scherzo middle section theme, though Brahms's is in A flat minor, if you switch it to major I feel it is close

Thank you for all of your videos ❤

i saw this at Carnegie earlier this year! one of my favorites!

I'm sorry, but I will contest the analysis of the second movement. The second theme does not exist as it is a variation of the first theme in the dominant. I believe the exposition lasts until measure 32. Measure 33 marks the beginning of the development section. The recapitulation starts at measure 72, and the coda at measure 91. Wouldn't this be the structure of a monothematic sonata?

Das Mädchen Vorüber! Ach, vorüber! Geh wilder Knochenmann! Ich bin noch jung, geh Lieber! Und rühre mich nicht an. Der Tod Gib deine Hand, Du schön und zart Gebild! Bin Freund, und komme nicht, zu strafen. Sey gutes Muts! ich bin nicht wild, Sollst sanft in meinen Armen schlafen!

Great work (on a great work!) Thanks!

"Self-borrowing is style," said Alfred Hitchcock.

You really can feel this guy’s weariness 😢

He didn’t make mistakes. He made music.

This material is ever so slightly above my head, musically, but oh so interesting! I can just follow it...very interesting. I always liked Beethoven's key changes.

There are no "rules". Only what sounds right

Out of things that could be a mistake, this ain’t even close 😂

Hmmm... The concerto could be obvious from the huge, great piano on stage. If you're waiting for the exposition NOT to modulate to find out if it's a concerto, you may be missing that! The explanation you give, that the piano is responsible for developing modulation, and that it's deliberate, is made even more likely by the structural antics of the 4th and 5th concerti. Thanks for an enjoyable lecture!

Semantic drift is a common feature of criticism and censorship. The same think happens in law, and Science. Any departure from the fixed mind of the critic is not his/her error, but that of the original. It was a great mistake to replace a horse with a steam engine, it was a great mistake of Verdi to locate his Masked ball in Sweden rather than Boston, Beethoven. did not obey the rules for a piano sonata in his final sonata one of the most beautiful ad complex. The failures are the critic, not the composer. For a classic criticism which is so absurd, is George Moore of Anne Bronte's 'Tenant of Wildfell Hall'. It probably maimed criticism of the book and her work for a full century, Anne Bronte, according to Moore should not have had Helen Graham write of her marriage to Huntingdon in a journal, she should have e pleaded her case with Markham. The fact that this is not only male chauvinism at its silliest it is also a sign that he did not understand the book , her preface. The criticism of Robert louis Stevenson's 'Treasure Island' was that the only character to tell the Truth was Silver's Parrot. I am not against revisionism, it is important to challenge orthodox, but when a departure from the ideological template is described as an error, we have ceased to engage in Criticism we are engaged in debunking, for the sake of attention. Next, if we follow Tovey Vivaldi's violin technique was excruciating. I think of my father's advice to my brother taking a girl to see her first opera. 'Don't spoil her joy by knowing too much' and I would add don't spoil our pleasure by not knowing enough. I think the first performance of the work was by Beethoven himself. I thik he might have known if he was making a mistake. 'Dear oh Dear, I must not upset Tovey'. Critics are supposed to mediate understanding not invent fraud. leave that to Trump and Vance

Since when is 'doing something different' an 'error'??

I respect Tovey's insights. Not familiar with the other gentleman. For me personally the master was far ahead of most composers and therefore without blemish.

Beethoven worst works are still better than everyone's else best works

If Beethoven made a mistake, it was on purpose.

This site is the only one on UA-cam to use the modern bible (Hepokoski) to explain sonata form by using clear examples. All music listeners or students should visit this site often to refresh or replenish their musical arsenals to further enhance the understanding of classical music.

I think it’s disingenuous to assume that Beethoven didn’t understand form and modulation - he would have learned all of that in his lessons with Haydn or absorption while performing others’ compositions. What some might call mistakes others would call trailblazing.

He also made a mistake when he thought he could give opera advice to Rossini.

Beethoven's first concerto is actually his second one written and the second one published was his first.

Beethoven's biggest mistake was not tweeting about why he did what he did.

Try composing as he did....and be known 200 yrs later!!! O and suffer from extreme otosclerosis

My favorite composition teacher in college loved Bach, and she used to say "Bach created the rules of 18th century counterpoint, and then broke his own rules." What if Beethoven is just being clever in his modulations to other keys by breaking late 18th/early 19th century expectations/rules for sonata allegro form? Or, as Bob Ross said about painting, "There are no mistakes, just happy accidents." Beethoven wrote down the music he heard in his head, so if it was TRULY a mistake, it was a mistake by the muses/angels who inspired his compositions.

Tovey's first book was titled: Case Study of Compositional Incompetence Displayed by Amateur Hacks: J. S. Bach, W. A. Mozart, and L. van Beethoven.

This wasn't a mistake. Maybe there are occasions where Beethoven's forms can be criticized but this isn't one. Tovey was overly pedantic and sometimes failed to see when forms were adapted to.suit content, also in other composers.

As a long-time professional orchestra musician, I find Tovey's line of analysis quite irritating. Does it seem that the greater the artist, the more some folks have a need to find any possible weakness? What is the positive value of such inquiry?

I see most comments prefigure my own reflexive impulse--to defend Ludvig and diss Donald. However, these discussions are useful to enrich our understanding of what pressures and expectations compsers often faced, just like novelists and painters. Like Manet, Goya, Hardy, Melviller, Flaubert, Whitman, Cezanne and Berlioz, Beethoven could only make such "mistakes" because he was so confident in his powers of generating ideas that stepping on formalistic toes was easy and almost required to move forward.

Fantastic video -- and great catch re: the resonance between Elements and Tovey in saying "No! I am not a symphony!" Presumably Hepokoski/Darcy read the Tovey at some point and had this kicking around in the back of their heads. What fascinates me is that this kind of discourse ("Am I a Type 2? No, I'm a Type 3!") is prevalent all over the place in Sonata Theory, and it wasn't on my radar that Tovey had ever adopted a similar way of narrativizing formal choices, even if for him it's about some kind of compositional mistake.

Tovey was a pedantic scholar, overly concerned with formal rules and trivial points of learning. It wasn’t a mistake. It was Beethoven’s genius transitioning from the classical to the romantic periods. I’ve seen similar criticisms. For example, some, like Tovey, claim Beethoven made errors in the fugues he wrote in his last piano sonatas because he didn’t adhere to the accepted Baroque voice entries of I- V- I -V or something similar, but always restricting the entries to I and V. Look at the fugue Beethoven wrote in opus 101. The voice entries are I-III-IV-I. Was this a mistake? - of course not. It was Beethoven at his finest.

Tovey was a great composer imo, lovely symphony and piano concerto in particular

Beethoven didn't make mistakes.

Great video - point well made. I grew up with Tovey (I have all his books) and he is a bit of a prig in the sense of he defines good music by his own analysis technique and makes proclamations from this 'high point' - thereby generally worshipping Beethoven and pooh-poohing those that do not adhere to Tovey's own ascribed standards. That doesn't take away from the fact that I never less found Tovey useful and instructive in many cases. I do think Tovey was trying to find a way to describe and trace ultimately why Mendelssohn would 'slip' from Concerti form which would then be piggy backed by every subsequent composer up to Brahms. The thing is - as you have rightly identified - (i) the idea that Beethoven errored is only really by the standards of Tovey's own limited definition, (ii) what Mendelssohn, Schumann etc did is wonderful, musical and advancing of the form - and that analysis makes it look inferior is the failure of the analysis and the analyst not the music. Of course the other reading of the situation is that Beethoven may have decided post Piano Concerto 3 that there was benefit to tightening his ritornello and limiting it further to improve further the contrast of the soloist - we can never really know this - I do think the ritornellos are a the weakest part of the first two piano concertos - but I love them anyway. Do I think that because of Tovey? I can never be really sure. But as to the third piano concerto I think the ritornello is perfectly judged and the feint really works in a glorious way.

For me wasn't a mistake, instead a deliberate and adventurous choice. Going to the flattened mediant in both numbers 1 and 2 is an expansion of the "tonic", of course it is a new key but it doesn't have the character of a "dominant key", rather the effect is like going to a "sedondary tonic key". Young Beethoven was trying to make an inpression trying to be as much original as he could be. He definitly change the choice for the later concertos, as he would continue the most traditional practice. But the same did in his sonatas. For instance take the sonata no.2, no. 3 or no. 7, there is a long way in some secondary keys until you reach the dominant in the exposition. Later,he abandoned that practice, in his latest sonatas he goes much more straight foward to the dominant area. Interesting video. Keep doing thing like this.

I've never understood why someone would say that the unconventional move was a mistake. For anybody, let alone one of the great composers like Beethoven. Like if it works, it works, conventionally or not, like why all the fuss about it. I mean, if composers could only do the conventional stuff, we wouldn't even have Mozart as we know him or the Classical Era as we know it. We wouldn't have concertos or sonatas or operas. We would be stuck in the Medieval Era. Unconventional moves for the time push music forward towards new eras and define new conventions for said new eras.

I do not think this is a music theory question anymore. Instead, it concerns whether Beethoven made an uninformed mistake for a short period of time. If this case were presented in a courtroom based on the available evidence, it would be highly likely to conclude that he made a mistake; otherwise, why would he have corrected subsequent concertos. There can be a difference between an action in one's mind and an action in appearance. In this case, we never knew what was on Beethoven's mind, but based on the available evidence, he most likely made a mistake that was not a compositional error but merely a stylistic one. I would like to point out that, in Beethoven's time, there was no music theory book circulating to regulate composers' compositional processes, like a grammar book. So, in defense of Beethoven, perhaps we can describe those three concertos as compositions that were out of style unintentionally to better fit the situation.

Absolute W video for my theory homework much appreciated

Great work! Please keep doing this kind of videos on classical forms, they are informative and engaging.

And yet... and yet... is this not the most exquisitely beautiful music?