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Full-Text Articles in Musicology
Joyful, Joyful! The Musical Significance Of Beethoven's Ninth, Allison N. Zieg
Joyful, Joyful! The Musical Significance Of Beethoven's Ninth, Allison N. Zieg
Musical Offerings
Almost everyone is familiar with Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony and the famous four note motif that represents fate knocking at the door. His Third Symphony, or “The Heroic Symphony” that was originally written for Napoleon Bonaparte, enjoyed great success and helped shape the future of classical music. However, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony which contains the well-known tune “Ode to Joy” most drastically impacted classical music’s future. Beethoven was a master at taking simple ideas and combining them with past musical traditions to create something extravagant and new. This is most evident in his Ninth Symphony. In this work, Beethoven did something that …
From “Radical Blunders” To Compositional Solutions: A Form-Functional Perspective On Beethoven’S Early Eroica Continuity-Sketches, Thomas Posen
Ira F. Brilliant Center for Beethoven Studies
Beethoven’s sketches to his third symphony, the Eroica, have fascinated scholars since Nottebohm’s pioneering study of the Eroica Sketchbook in the late nineteenth century. More recently, Alan Gosman and Lewis Lockwood finished a complete transcription of the sketchbook, which has led to a resurgent interest in these sketches. In this article, I re-evaluate Beethoven’s approaches to composing the first movement of the Eroica symphony by reappraising two supposed problems with the first two exposition continuity-sketches. Contrary to prior studies, which have interpreted these reputed compositional problems as “failed experiments” or “radical blunders” (Tovey 1941, 80), I interpret them …