Beethoven's Music

Paper Summary:

This paper looks at how Beethoven brought to the art of music new depths of expressiveness that were not known before his time and also brought new richness of speech to every instrument for which he wrote his symphonies and other musical pieces. In essence, it explains how Beethoven was highly influential in bringing modernity to the art of music and could definitely be seen as a heroic figure in Western music due to his bravery and desire to explore new musical domains.

From the Paper:

"Beethoven's artistic career seems to have greatly expanded during his second period of creativity. Between 1803 and 1804, a period accentuated by his deafness which seems to have affected his musical output very little, Beethoven produced sonatas for violin and piano and the famous Eroica Symphony, not to mention composing the Fourth, the Fifth and the Pastoral symphonies, the opera Fidelio, the Rasumovsky Quartets, the Fourth and Fifth piano concertos and the Violin concerto. With these works, the musical form was raised to its highest point of development, but more importantly, Beethoven had refined and enriched his own music to where it was now imbued with lyrical poetry, much like the heroic motifs in such poems as "Don Juan" and "Manfred" by Lord Byron. As George R. Marek notes, Beethoven's music during this second period "was marked by heroic elements that were sonorous, pure and simple, but also contained abstract ideas that made it possible for the further development of harmonic music" (58)."

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• Comparison Essay # 103565 : "Beethoven vs. J.S. Bach"
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