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I agree. I hate to be brief, but the key question with Beethoven is what did he want to do? Beethoven was as much a master of the craft as Bach -- he just lived
by DanielBMarkham 9y ago
I agree. I hate to be brief, but the key question with Beethoven is what did he want to do? Beethoven was as much a master of the craft as Bach -- he just lived in transitional times (which he helped bring on.) That makes comparisons a bit superfluous.
The problem with comparing great composers is that if they were truly great, they were also iconoclastic, so it's always apples and oranges. The only way I can around that, and it is tremendously imperfect, is to look at how great composers move across genres.
- TheOtherHobbes 9y agoBeethoven makes me feel like someone yelling "Look at me working so hard to do these amazing things with notes!" Bach feels more like someone saying "Listen to this amazing thing I found inside the music!" They may - arguably - have equal technical skill, but the motivations and musical motivation feel very different.
- DanielBMarkham 9y agoI don't mean this to be diminutive of Bach, but Bach was a technician, a craftsman. He mastered the art form of his time and was amazing at it. Beethoven was an _artist_ in much more the modern sense, with all that entails. Bach was the guy in the cathedral who just wrote his twentieth amazing piece. Beethoven was the unwashed guy in his apartment with a spittoon by his side tweaking away on the piano. They just don't compare. But if I had to choose, it'd be Beethoven. His early symphony works illustrated that he certainly knew the current form. He just didn't like it much. And his later string works are some of the best written music ever (from what the pros tell me.) I sure would have loved to have been a fly on the wall when young Beethoven was being taught by "Papa" Haydn. What a pair that must have been.