Quote:
Originally Posted by
Sherman90 
Mozart's music is certainly more "natural" than Beethoven's, but to seek to elevate the former on that basis is to miss the point entirely. Beethoven was the first composer to humanize music - that is, to render it PSYCHOLOGICAL. It is this very "strain", as you correctly call it, which makes him the grand-master of musical composition still to this day. In fact, it is on this very basis that I sympathize with the many dozens of my peers who can scarcely listen to Mozart for this very reason: his music is TOO natural, seldom human. I don't prescribe to this view entirely, but I certainly view his Requiem as an exception to the rule.
I don't disagree with you at all, and my comments were not meant to be qualitative. But the "strain" I referred to is not just an aesthetic choice; Beethoven would agonize over a piece of music for months and years, whereas Mozart would write out all symphonic parts in first drafts without even having to go through the intermediary process of having to compose on a grand staff, which is what most composers do.
The last movement of the 9th might be my favorite piece of music ever, but even there I don't think the Mozartian standard of "change one note and the enitre thing fall apart" holds. In fact, there are many notes I probably
would change (I'd actually like to excise the entire fugal section in strings,) but the seemingly slapdash nature of the composition actually underlines the sense of revelry in the text.
Of course, had Mozart lived to be older, it's probable that he would have attempted to write music that was more ambitious in form.
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Connemara WTF does that even mean? Sounds like pseudo-academic mental masturbation.
Actually, he's entirely right. Mozart's music is rooted in an aesthetic of classicism that basically comes from Hellenistic/Apollonian ideals of form and proportion. Beethoven's music had fractured forms that underlined the emotional content of the music, where mental states are described experientially rather than as a kind of static abstraction alluded to through Classical tropes. It's a straight line from Beethoven to Symphonie Fantastique and Erwartung.
Of course, that's a simplification to some degree. It's very possible to hear a real-time description of mental states in Mozart, and even as late a Beethoven piece as the Alla danza tedesca from the SQ in Bb Op 130 is as charming and "classical" a piece as Mozart's ever written, where the unexpected turns come off more as delightful surprises rather than attempts at being purposefully jarring (which Beethoven certainly did much of the time.)
P.S. Mozart is certainly a Master - and the Requiem is certainly a masterpiece - but he remains Beethoven's pupil.
...even if W.A.M. didn't write it.
