Comment by stochastic_monk | Hacker News Reader

Comment by stochastic_monk | Hacker News Reader

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stochastic_monk

A careful analysis of Beethoven's later works shows him to be a worthy contender.

In particular, the Große Fugue [0] and the Op. 106 Hammerklavier sonata [1] (ironically so nicknamed, because at Op. 101, Beethoven directed that all sonatas from that time on be named Große Sonate für das Hammerklavier, and the nickname only stuck to this) show a profoundly advanced sense of counterpoint and structure. In addition to applying all of the classical transformations to motifs (including augmentation, diminution, cancrizans, canons and sequences), he even performs note for note reversals in time. (A temporal cancrizan, if you will.) [Edit: it would be a crime to fail to mention the late string quartets, which show prescience of modernism and are considered to be the pinnacle of chamber music. Many of you will at least be familiar with the Op. 131 c# minor quartet, which Wagner called the "saddest music ever penned" and whose 6th movement was used in the Band of Brothers episode "Why We Fight".]

Similarly, Brahms' masterful applications of form and counterpoint put most other composers to shame. Rather than be as enormously prolific as Bach, the quality of his output is more consistently excellent. (No doubt partially due to his penchant for burning the manuscripts which he felt were subpar.)

I think it's a little unfair to put Bach on this pedestal. There's plenty of music by any composer mentioned to relax to or feel stimulated by. Additionally, Bach's musical temperaments are somewhat limited by his media and styles. He is the master of his craft, but his craft has limited scope.

Yes, Bach has his own, unique, immovable place. But Beethoven, Brahms, and many other composers have immutable, unchallenged championships in their own arenas.

[P.S. Please mark this with a [2014] tag to denote when it was published.]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gro%C3%9Fe_Fuge

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piano_Sonata_No._29_(Beethoven...

Agree on Hammerklavier. I have a pet theory that Große Fugue is an elaborate troll on Beethoven's part. I kind of think that it was constructed in such a way to be as analytically rich as possible while being horrible to listen to. I have to wonder if it wasn't deliberately constructed by Beethoven to con future generations into listening to awful music.

Where Brahms is concerned, very few composers matched his mastery of the craft. That being said, Bach is one of them.

I think Bach is so consistently regarded as the GOAT because (AFAIK) no one has matched his output while maintaining the high level of quality he did.

Also, he wrote St. Matthew's Passion which is arguably the greatest piece of music in the entire western canon. I can think of very few other reasonable contenders for that spot.

As far as composers being greater than Bach in any particular area, I 100% agree. Brahms was probably the best chamber composer, Chopin wrote the best music for piano etc...

>horrible to listen to

I have to say I rather like listening to the thing personally.

There's a quite interesting animated score video of it here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6s0Mp7LFI-k

Brahms and Bach were both in an unusual position: their profound mastery of compositional craft was partly made possible by their position at, even past, the end of the tradition of music they represent. By the time Bach was writing his intricate contrapuntal masterworks, the world had moved on to homophony, and while Brahms was crafting balanced, classically-proportioned works, Wagner and his followers had been boiling Romanticism into Expressionism.

(I have to take issue with your characterization of the late Beethoven quartets as "the pinnacle of chamber music". I prefer the term "dissolution". (And I always enjoy your comments on musical topics.))

I think Bach's scope is much, much larger than most listeners are aware. For instance, most are completely unaware of the Bach cantata repertoire, the guitar/lute repertoire, etc. I don't mean you personally, because I of course do not know what you're familiar with.

(personal bias: I sing professionally, and a fairly large part of what I sing is Bach.)

The lute suites are crazy. He didn't play the lute, modern guitars didn't exist when he wrote them, the pieces aren't playable on a guitar without some changes, they sound amazing, and they are brutal to even approximate. He wrote many-voiced ("polyphonic") music for an instrument played by beating two hands on six strings. Not content with that, he wrote fugues for the same instrument, which are polyphonic music that obeys a lot of rules.

Take the time to learn the rules of fugues, then try to understand one of Bach's.

Incidentally one of his lute suites is the same as the c minor cello suite. Except I think on lute it's in either a or e minor, I forget now. I don't know whether the cello suite came first or the lute suite though.

But as a violist I found this interesting. I like to play his violin sonatas and partitas but on viola but people have discouraged me from this because it means changing the key and everyone insists that Bach is very deliberate in his choice of key and it's almost blasphemy to think about playing his music in a different key. But the lute/cello suite is a direct contradiction to this.

The people telling you that Bach is specific about his key are talking about his work on temperament...none of which applies to the cello suites or sonatas and partitas for solo violin. The violin family isn't tempered, and wasn't played tempered unless it was playing with a keyboard.

On the violin family his choice of keys was driven by the technical requirements of the instrument, what open strings were available, what chords were natural.

Transpose them a fifth down and play them with no worries. I certainly transpose the cello suites up an octave and a fifth and play them on violin with no qualms.

>everyone insists that Bach is very deliberate in his choice of key

They’re being precious. He was a consummate pro who frequentlyrecycled his own themes and those of others, and his pieces often changed keys a dizzying number of times within just a few measures. Besides, that shit sounds beyond awesome on viola.

> Besides, that shit sounds beyond awesome on viola.

I agree. There's a fantastic recording of one of my favorite violists today, Antoine Tamestit, playing Bach's second partita. It's his appropriately named album "Chaconne", and it also includes the Ligeti viola sonata, which is probably one of the hardest things I've seen written for viola. Ugh, it's one piece that I just don't even know how to begin practicing. :)

G minor, I believe. I personally think it works better on the guitar, and can't imagine trying to do justice to polyphonic music on an instrument where it seems hard to play more than one string at a time. Sort of like the Paganini caprices -- I first heard them played by Eliot Fisk on the guitar, and even if he is sloppy sometimes, it sounds better than any violin recording I've heard.

The best guitar recordings of Bach are by Paul Galbraith. He really took it to the next level with a custom built 8string guitar and astonishing technique.

I found the one I'm talking about on Apple Music, John Williams playing them on guitar. It's BWV 995 for lute, and it is in a minor.

fwiw on cello it's BWV 1011.

I'll check it out, since Williams is a great guitarist. I have a couple of recordings of BWV 995 at hand, and they both claim to be in G minor.

Oh, interesting! Perhaps Bach wrote it for lute in g minor and Williams plays it in a minor on guitar? I didn't think of that.

Wikipedia seems to agree with you on the key: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suite_in_G_minor,_BWV_995

It's not uncommon to retune a guitar for some pieces, often making the lowest string D instead of E. I don't think that was true for this piece, but I don't have the sheet music, and it has been awhile. It's worth remembering that the guitar is a relatively young instrument.

I have studied quite a range of Bach, and have performed several cantatas (as a tenor), but as a pianist, I do tend to prefer the keyboard music.

The cello and violin suites are fantastic. In particular, it's worth commenting that when Bach writes for instruments which can only play one or two notes at a time, he still produces counterpoint by suggestion by switching between the lines.

I've seen some excellent guitar performances, but I'll need to listen to some of his lute repertoire.

By a wide margin the most interesting thing to me about what you just said is that in this world it is still possible to make a living singing Bach. Good on you!

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.

Beethoven 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.

I 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.

Beethoven string quartets are some of my favorite music ever written. Pretty much starting with Op.59.

The unbridled aggression in Op. 95 cuts right across the centuries: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KwxYhUO9Gq4

It almost feels like it could be written tomorrow.

The Beethoven late string quartets are a world of their own. 50 years from now I expect I will still be listening to them with the same awe that I did the first times, rediscovering, revealing new things still.

A nice video for String Quartet 14 (Op. 131) as you mentioned. Lovely piece!

https://youtu.be/WlFYC1U5viw

How do you feel about Rachmaninoff?

He’s great, his concerti for piano are remarkable, but I don’t think his output approaches that of Beethoven or Bach for volume, or sustained quality.

Very different style too, highly romantic, lyrical. I didn’t always care for it but I must say concerti 2&3 for piano are masterpieces.

In case anyone is interested, Kissin is doing Hammerklavier and the CSO will follow up with Rachminov May 13th - and it looks to be selling out. I grabbed my tickets already.

Beethoven is not at the level of Mozart in terms of the amount of lyricism and pathos infused into each work. Many of this piano sonatas are pretty plain and boring.

I sincerely hope this is a minority opinion

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