rap术语大全Beethoven's Centenary
A hundred years ago a crusty old bachelor of fifty-ven, so deaf that he could not hear his own music played by a full orchestra, yet still able to hear thunder, shook his fist at the roaring heavens for the last time, and died as he had lived, challenging God and defying the univer. He was Defiance Incarnate: he could not even meet a Grand Duke and his court in the street without jamming his hat tight down on his head and striding through the very middle of them. He had the manners of a disobliging steamroller (most steamrollers are abjectly obliging and conciliatory); and he was rather less particular about his dress than a scarecrow: in fact he was once arrested as a tramp becau the police refud to believe that such a tatterdemalion could be a famous compor, much less a temple of the most turbulent spirit that ever found expression in pure sound. It was indeed a mighty spirit; bit if I had written the mightiest, which would mean mightier than the spirit of Handel, Beethoven himlf would have rebuked me; and what mortal man could pretend to a spirit mightier than Bach's? But that Beethoven's spirit was the most turbulent is beyond all question. The impetuous fury of his strength, which he could quite easily contain and contro
l, but often would not, and the uproariousness of his fun, go beyond anything of the kind to be found in the works of other compors. Greenhorns write of syncopation now as if it were a new way of giving the utmost impetus to a musical measure; but the rowdiest jazz sounds like the Maiden's Prayer after Beethoven's third Leonora overture; and certainly no negro corobbery that I ever heard could inspire the blackest dancer with such diable au corps as the last movement of the Seventh Symphony. And no other compor has ever melted his hearers into complete ntimentality by the tender beauty of his music, and then suddenly turned on them and mocked them with derisive trumpet blasts for being such fools. Nobody but Beethoven could govern Beethoven; and when, as happened when the fit ws on him, he deliberately refud to govern himlf, he was ungovernable.
It was this turbulence, this deliberate disorder, this mockery, this reckless and triumphant disregard of conventional manners, that t Beethoven apart from the musical genius of the ceremonious venteenth and eighteenth centuries. He was a giant wave in that storm of the human spirit which produced the French Revolution. He called no man mast
er. Mozart, his greatest predecessor in his own department, had from his childhood been washed, combed, splendidly dresd, and beautifully behaved in the prence of royal personages and peers. His childish outburst at the Pompadour, "Who is this woman who does not kiss me? The Queen kiss me," would be incredible of Beethoven, who was still an unlicked cub even when he had grown into a very grizzly bear. Mozart had the refinement of convention and society as well as the refinement of nature and of the solitudes of the soul. Mozart and Gluck are refined as the court of Louis XIV was refined: Haydn is refined as the most cultivated country gentlemen of his day were refined: compared to them socially Beethoven was an obstreperous Bohemian: a man of the people. Haydn, so superior to envy that he declared his junior, Mozart, to be the greatest compor that ever lived, could not stand Beethoven: Mozart, more fareing, listened to his playing, and said "You will hear of him some day"; but the two would never have hit it off together had Mozart lived long enough to try. Beethoven had a moral horror of Mozart, who in Don Giovanni had thrown a halo of enchantment round an aristocratic blackguard, and the, wither the unscrupulous moral versatility of a born dramatist, turned round to cas
t a halo of divinity round Sarastro, tting his words to the only music yet written that would not sound out of place in the mouth of God.
胖姓Beethoven was no dramatist: moral versatility was to him revolting cynicism. Mozart was still to him the master of masters (this is not an empty eulogistic superlative: it means literally that Mozart is a compor's compor much more than he has ever been a really popular compor); but he was a court flunkey in breeches whilst Beethoven was a Sansculotte; and Haydn also was a flunkey in the old livery: the Revolution stood between them as it stood between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. But to Beethoven Mozart was wor than Haydn becau he trifled with morality by tting vice to music as magically as virtue. The Puritan who is in every tru Sansculotte ro up against him in Beethoven, though Mozart had shewn him all the possibilities of nineteenth-century music. So Beethoven cast back for a hero to Handel, another crusty old bachelor of his own kidney, who despid Mozart's hero Gluck, though the pastoral symphony in The Messiah is the nearest thing in music to the scenes in which Gluck, in his Orfeo, opened to us the plains of Heaven.
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Thanks to broadcasting, millions of musical novices will hear the music of Beethoven this anniversary year for the first time with their expectations raid to an extraordinary pitch by hundreds of newspaper articles piling up all the conventional eulogies that are applied indiscriminately to all the great compors. And like his contemporaries they will be puzzled by getting from him not merely a music that they did not expect, but often an orchestral hurlyburly that they may not recognize as what they call music at all, though they can appreciate Gluck and Haydn and Mozart quite well. The explanation is simple enough. The music of the eighteenth century is all dance music. A dance is a symmetrical pattern of steps that are pleasant to move to; and its music is a symmetrical pattern of sound that is pleasant to listen to even when you are not dancing to it. Conquently the sound patterns, though they begin by being as simple as chessboards, get lengthened and elaborated and enriched with harmonies until they are more like Persian carpets; and the compors who design the patterns no longer expect people to dance to them. Only a whirling Dervish could dance a Mozart symphony: indeed, I have reduced two young and practid dancers to exhaustion by making them dance a Mozart overture. Th
ey very names of the dances are dropped: instead of suites consisting of sarabands, pavanes, gavottes, and jigs, the designs are prented as sonatas and symphonies consisting of ctions called simply movements, and labelled according to their speed (in Italian) as allegros, adagios, scherzos, and prestos. But all the time, from Bach's preludes to Mozart's Jupiter Symphony, the music makes a symmetrical sound pattern, and gives us the dancer's pleasure always as the form and foundation of the piece. 网红图片头像
miss148Music, however, can do more than make beautiful sounds patterns. It can express emotions. You can look at a Persian carpet and listen to a Bach prelude with a delicious admiration that goes no further than itlf; but you cannot listen to the overture to Don Giovanni without being thrown into a complicated mood which prepares you for a tragedy of some terrible doom overshadowing an exquisite but Satanic gaiety. If you listen to the last movement of Mozart's Jupiter Symphony, you hear that it is as much a riotous corobbery as the last movement of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony: it is an orgy of ranting drumming tow-row-row, made poignant by an opening strain of strange and painful beauty which is woven through the pattern all through. And yet the movement is a 抱犊崮
masterpiece of pattern designing all the time.
