A Friend of Beethoven, Now Rediscovered in His Own Right | Hacker News Reader

A Friend of Beethoven, Now Rediscovered in His Own Right

nytimes.com

Glad that he's finally getting some of recognition that he has been unfairly denied for centuries. There is extraordinary intelligence and personality behind his music. It's almost inexplicable that he doesn't get more attention. By far the most "underrated" composer that I am aware of.

Reicha's work proves that the style pioneered by Haydn was not only fundamentally sound, but capable of change and development far beyond what music scholars would typically have thought to have been possible. Music history, and perhaps world history would be very different if subsequent composers had continued along the path broken by Reicha rather than that taken by "The Romantic Generation".

My experience with Reicha is mostly through his wind quintets, which are all competent, but not especially memorable IMHO. Which is very close to how I feel about Haydn. Reicha is actually more famous among woodwind players for popularizing (maybe originating?) the ensemble than for any of his individual works. Even a lesser work of Beethoven like his wind octet seems like a much higher standard to me. (To be fair, I've made the same criticism in the past of the following 50 years of Romantic-era music.)

There are sadly many composers who might've been more obscure if they hadn't had someone like Bernstein to popularize their works. Nielsen, Martinu, and William Grant Still are three of my favorites whose symphonies deserve to be much more widely played.

> Which is very close to how I feel about Haydn.

Well, the melody from one of his string quartets was used as a national anthem.

In terms of inventiveness, he did things like writing a menuet where the first half is a mirror of the second half. Also, his "The Joke" string quartet screws around with the audience with multiple false endings, then a final ending that makes it sounds like the music will continue.

Also, listen to the last movement of the "Lark" quartet. It's a extremely fast rondo that chugs along, unexpectedly turns into a 4-part fugue for about 45 seconds then switches back into the rondo themes as quickly as it began.

> Which is very close to how I feel about Haydn.

Glossed over that part when I first read the comment! It was Haydn who essentially created "The Classical Style", which is perhaps the most perfect mode of musical discourse that humanity has yet encountered. His importance is under-stated in the statement that he is "the Shakespeare of Music". That is all quite apart from the innumerable volumes of individual masterpieces that he created!

Don't forget that an AI codenamed "Mozart" output some string quartets trained on Haydn's Opus 33, and Haydn then wrote his Op. 76 string quartets which equaled/exceeded the quality of the AI's output.

A real John Henry, that one. :)

“I tell you before God, and as an honest man, your son is the greatest composer known to me by person and repute, he has taste and what is more the greatest skill in composition." (said to Leopold Mozart, Mozart's father) ― Joseph Haydn

Also: ". . . scarcely any man can brook comparison with the great Mozart. . . If I could only impress on the soul of every friend of music, and on high personages in particular, how inimitable are Mozart's works, how profound, how musically intelligent, how extraordinarily sensitive! (for this is how I understand them, how I feel them) - why then the nations would vie with each other to possess such a jewel within their frontiers." ― Joseph Haydn

Also, a letter from Mozart to Haydn: "A father, having resolved to send his sons into the great world, finds it advisable to entrust them to the protection and guidance of a highly celebrated man, the more so since this man, by a stroke of luck, is his best friend. - Here, then, celebrated man and my dearest friend, are my six sons. - Truly, they are the fruit of a long and laborious effort, but the hope, strengthened by several of my friends, that this effort would, at least in some small measure, be rewarded, encourages and comforts me that one day, these children may be a source of consolation to me. - You yourself, dearest friend, during your last sojourn in this capital, expressed to me your satisfaction with these works. - This, your approval, encourages me more than anything else, and thus I entrust them to your care, and hope that they are not wholly unworthy of your favor. - Do but receive them kindly, and be their father, guide, and friend! From this moment on I cede to you all my rights over them: I pray you to be indulgent to their mistakes, which a father's partial eye may have overlooked, and despite this, to cloak them in the mantle of your generosity which they value so highly. From the bottom of my heart I am, dearest friend, Your most sincere friend, W. A. Mozart

Many of the things we take for granted as Beethovenian inventions (obsessive motivic development, sonata form in symphonies and quartets, abrupt harmonic disruption, fugues in final movmeents) were pioneered by Haydn. I remember being well-versed in Beethoven and being astonished when I played through Haydn's piano works for the first time, how many things Louis had ripped off.

The wind quintets were written on commission, for public consumption, rather than being "written for the drawer", as many of the works in this recording series were. Nonetheless, they are still first rate compositions and full to the brim with truly unusual features.

The fact that those innovations are able to go by without being perceived while listening to or even performing them is a testament to Reicha's skill in making unusual ideas "work" musically, despite their strangeness.

Mr. Ilić is, in my view, 100% correct in his assessments regarding the undeservedness of Reicha's relative obscurity.

The 2nd paragraph is really the crux of the matter. Whereas Beethoven's music draws attention to its unusual features, Reicha in his memoirs states unequivocally that Haydn and Mozart are the pinnacles of instrumental music, and that it is because of their grace and good taste. So we have opposite positions on what is beautiful, hard to reconcile with our view of music history which is seen through our "Beethoven filter".

The wind quintets are extraordinarily well-written for their instruments, something easy to take for granted today as so many composers followed Reicha's lead.

He was not the very first to write for that ensemble, but the instant popularity of the 24 (actually 25) wind quintets led a lot more people to write for that instrumentation (flute, oboe, clarinet, French or English horn, bassoon).

The blanket statement that Beethoven's octet is a higher standard than anything Reicha wrote for quintet is a little dicey. There's a reason all wind players play Reicha. The works are sophisticated, comfortable and formally pretty quirky, with plenty of memorable moments. That said, if you don't find Haydn memorable then there's not much I can do to argue in his favor, except urge you to listen more of it.

The important point here is that the wind quintets make up a tiny proportion of Reicha's music, and that dozens of hours of music have never been recorded. Much of the music is only available in (messy) original manuscripts in France's National Library in Paris (BnF). Implication: it is hard to make generalizations about Reicha's music because we just don't know it well enough yet. Keep in mind that he composed just as much experimental music as conventional music, drawing conclusions and extrapolating from one opus to the whole output isn't a good idea.

Obviously my statement was extremely subjective - although I am far from the only person holding this opinion. However in my experience the reason all wind players play Reicha is that there's very little competition in the Romantic era. A handful of Danzi quintets (they're okay), a few gems from Klughardt, Foerster, and Taffanel (all of which I think are superior to the Reicha quintets, but they're also at least 50 years newer), and I haven't found much else worth playing so far. If you're a student or amateur, or playing for a relatively unsophisticated audience, of course you're going to end up playing Reicha at some point.

> which are all competent, but not especially memorable IMHO. Which is very close to how I feel about Haydn.

Interesting, I was just reading Sviatoslav Richter's "notebooks and conversations" in which he says of the classical composers, he liked Haydn the best.

As to memorability, clearly the great string quartets are memorable as well as some of the London symphonies. His sonatas for solo piano (see Richter comment) and his luminous trios for cello, piano, and flute are all greatly memorable pieces too in my opinion. That's a fairly large body of works to have labled as "competent but not especially memorable" IMHO.

p.s. Richter's book is an easy and worthy read--mostly biographical with lots of opinions on many topics, especially modern composers and musicians he played with.

I second the recommendation for Richter's book, which is a fascinating look into the mind of a pianist who musicians pretty much unanimously consider to be the greatest of the 20th century:

https://www.amazon.com/Sviatoslav-Richter-Conversations-Brun...

(not an affiliate link)

Haydn's output is huge and varied. It can take time to find the right recordings and pieces to convince you, as sometimes interpretations can be a bit pedestrian. French pianist Jean-Efflam Bavouzet is in the process of recording all of Haydn's Piano Sonatas for British label Chandos Records, and the latest Volume (no. 7) is superb.

https://www.chandos.net/products/reviews/CHAN_10998

It is indeed intriguing to imagine music history if composers had followed Reicha's lead rather than Beethoven's. There would have been a lot more metrically interesting music earlier, that's for sure.

The experimentation Reicha loved so much became popular in post World War II Europe and America. Many would argue that this led composers into a modernist dead end. But I guess if Beethoven had never happened Schoenberg wouldn't have either. But then we forfeit Wagner too...

I've been pondering a related question which I've found difficult to answer: if Beethoven's music had been lost or misplaced, would we immediately recognize it as "genius" if someone made a first recording in 2018? I'm not so sure.

By "The Romantic Generation", I was thinking more of Schumann, Chopin, Liszt, and Mendelssohn, all of whom were nearly exact contemporaries (b.1809-1811), and who consciously broke with with the past (including Beethoven), by largely eschewing Sonata Form. Interesting that a century after Reicha, Busoni picked up on some of the same approaches to composition that Reicha had taken once Romanticism had reached an impasse, becoming the de rigueur approach for the succeeding century.

Loved the documentaries. How about Episode 5 'Paris'?

To what extent the composers you mentioned broke completely with Beethoven (and/or the past) is arguable. All of them wrote works in sonata form, all of them wrote fugues, all of them studied counterpoint carefully. Liszt idolized Beethoven, and many of the key works of all four are unthinkable without Beethoven's example. Not to diminish the originality of their respective contributions. But the Beethoven myth was already in place when they were growing up and the legacy can be traced in all of their works.

Received wisdom dictates that every century or so, composers break with the past and do something completely new. The reality is a lot messier.

Beethoven himself is a good example. He is held up as the paragon of artistic fearlessness, not catering to audience's whims, pursuing a vision of the future, etc. In fact he was very well versed in the music of the past, including JS Bach, Handel, Mozart, Haydn, and others whose names have been forgotten. He also did everything he could to ingratiate himself with the aristocracy who commissioned his works: i.e. his market. He followed the Y-Combinator motto: "Make things people want" in the sense that he made things his customers wanted. He forged an idiosyncratic personal style but many of its constituent elements are stolen from older styles (counterpoint, abrupt changes of texture, the unification of movements over a larger form).

I like your analogy about Romanticism reaching an impasse and Busoni picking things up from there. The path I drew above leading from Beethoven directly to the 4 Romantic composers is meant to illustrate that the historical line, now that we are reestablishing Reicha's place in history, might be drawn from him straight to the 20th century (Bartok, Stravinsky, Martinu) in his treatment of meter and the way he is comfortable with abstraction.

As for "Episode 5 Paris", believe me, it's very much on my mind. The current idea is to do a whole second series of videos, only in Paris, or perhaps one in Prague (where he was born) and the other three in Paris. After all, Reich spent 30 years of his life in Paris (1799-1802, 1808-1836) and there is tons of material, including his teaching work (his students included Liszt, Franck, Berlioz, Gounod, and many other big names). I'm hoping we can film in the vaults of the French National Library (BnF) where the manuscripts are, to show people what it's like to dig up old forgotten scores.

For the moment, it's just a daydream, until we secure funding (unlikely).

> if Beethoven's music had been lost or misplaced, would we immediately recognize it as "genius" if someone made a first recording in 2018

I'm not qualified to comment on the genius of any composer, but knowing my background, I would say he would have become immensely popular. Growing up, people around me knew nothing about western classical music, not even enough to name a few famous composers. I found cassette tapes in Bangalore's music shops and tried them out randomly. Beethoven quickly became one of my favorites and the factors could not have been either that I was over-exposed to his music through general culture while growing up or that his name was famous around here, biasing me in his favour.

I like to think of good composers as one of two kinds: (1) those who impress novices to the tradition of this kind of music (western classical, in this case) and (2) those who impress long-term aficionados. Based on my own tastes, examples of the first kind would be Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Chopin, Mozart, etc. and examples of the second kind would be Bach, Mahler, Schoenberg, etc. Of course, these categories are fuzzy, and I'm sure there are composers who would qualify for both categories. However, I think a valid approach to answering your question would be to survey what sort of an impression a composer makes on novices to the genre.

Thank you for making recordings of Reicha's works! I'm not a novice to the genre anymore, but it's nice to have new compositions from the classical period to listen to.

This is an interesting comment, on multiple levels.

If there is one factor on which Beethoven's reputation rests, it is his claim to being the "universal" composer, whose music speaks to all men and women. Your story seems to confirm this assertion.

From reading music history we know that different music from the past makes an impact depending on current taste and fashions. As an example, the whole paradigm of "historically informed performance practice" was, as musicologist Richard Taruskin devastatingly argued [1], not a return to "authenticity" at all but a completely modern(ist) phenomenon, based on contemporary tastes and opinions.

As I live in France, I can tell you that Beethoven is nowhere near as popular or appreciated here as, say, Mozart or Chopin. Not even close. I'm speaking about both seasoned concert attendees and novices. His music's frequent accents, forcefulness, and occasional brutality is looked poorly upon. So maybe extrapolating your experience to others is dangerous. After all, it's a small sample size :)

I agree that there seem to be composers (or, more accurately, certain works) that appeal to novices, and others which appeal to more experienced listeners or practitioners. Reicha's works seem to often fit into the second category, as his works are generally "learned" and sophisticated. Therefore the subtlety is not always picked up upon by listeners who don't have the experience and/or knowledge to realize what expectations he is thwarting. To put it more bluntly, they don't really hear what's going on, and therefore underestimate the music's complexity. It's like a musical Dunning-Kruger Effect.

The larger point, perhaps, is that your idea of a typical "novice" who would serve as a litmus test for universal music is in fact an intellectual construct which has no corresponding reality in the real world. Because we are all born into a world, and a culture, and therefore our preferences are immediately influenced.

Caveat: I don't want to make the specious claim that if we all grew up listening to Schönberg we would hum his music on the way to school, that's BS. But with experience I've come to believe that assuming Beethoven's place is in our culture is immutable is probably unrealistic. In 100 years it might be someone else...

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Text-Act-Essays-Music-Performance/dp/...

It's neat that Hacklily is right next to an article about Reicha. Very musical day on HN.

Anyway, here's a piece by Reicha in Hacklily: https://www.hacklily.org/#?edit=jnetterf/sheet-music/Fantais...

Your tempo is a little slow. It's in cut time (2/2) not 4/4. OK, I'm being churlish. I recorded this piece for Chandos Records last year, so I have an opinion. Excerpt here: https://www.chandos.net/products/catalogue/CHAN%2010950

It is indeed cool that Hackily is near Reicha; he would have loved it (and Hacker News, for that matter). Music notation software has been ripe for disruption for a while. The problem is that for what most people want to do the interfaces are too complex and slow to learn.

The problem seems to be getting worse because of the desire to make possible the notation of as many far-fetched extreme cases, rather than making the core use as simple as possible.

Imagine if you were to use Finale or Sibelius (two of the best known) as a novice. Imagine you were JS Bach trying to write his first Prelude from Book one of the WTC with the software. The patterns should be faster to notate.

A tough problem, admittedly, but an important one to solve for future generations of young musicians learning the craft. Writing music by hand is still easier for simple pieces, for solo instruments.

Some of Beethoven’s later piano sonatas get in pretty deep, too. I wonder who influenced whom. Also the article reminds us that when younger, Beethoven was a proficient violist. Bach, too, tripled on piano and multiple string instruments as long as he was alive.

I read at some point that LVB was a deist and a copy of the Enneads of Plotinus was found in his library after he died.

Just listened to some of this Reicha dude's stuff on Spotify and it is so similar to Beethoven thematically.

I wonder if they were both going for the same themes of ideal oneness vs. multiplicity, if they had shared approaches to exploring the space of musical theory in a neoplatonic way. Given LVB's love of wine I can only imagine they got pretty nerdy and unhinged.

Definitely the influence worked in both directions. Some comments by Ilić on that topic can be found in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z2xC3UDeTYo

There goes my afternoon :)

Didn't mention explicitly Beethoven's influence on Reicha, but I'd say the sonata movement he played at the end of the video (Grande Sonata in C Major) is inhabiting the same sonic world created in the third movement of the Waldstein sonata. IMO, influence was stronger in the Reicha --> Beethoven direction, since he simply adopted many of the same lifelong concerns of Reicha's into his own work around the same time Reicha left Vienna, and becoming even more pronounced in his "3rd period", while Reicha continued steadfastly on his own path.

Could it be that the Hammerklavier fugue, marked "con alcune licenze" is a kind of rejoinder to Reicha's Op. 36, about which he is said to have remarked, "daß die Fuge keine Fuge mehr ist"? What about the fugue in the D Major cello sonata, with its displaced accents and unusual structure? Could it be a riff on the compound and irregular metres seen the same Op. 36? What about the overall structure of the Diabelli Variations (a long series of different perspectives on one idea, which could potentially go on forever--not counting the penultimate section and coda)? Essentially the same fundamental structure as L'art de varier (which deserves a similar stature in the piano repertoire). Possibly the final variation, no. 33, a minuet is a reference to no. 39 in Reicha's set: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ks1jAMN7XTw&index=40&list=OL...

Thanks for posting this, made a quick Reicha playlist on Apple Music and am beginning to work through it. Sounds interesting.

Reicha's musical ideas and experimentations were simply genius. He delved into advanced music theory like no other classic composer I know. While his music may sound a bit odd to people, it is theoretically sound and shows how vast and exciting music can really be.

I agree that there are pieces which sound pretty quirky, which can put people off a bit. But I have yet to find someone who doesn't like this one (which I can assure you has nothing to do with the playing):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QSHm3ZphFlk

Pareto also operates in the context of posthumous fame.

Funny to see this on HN, Ivan is a member here.

Ivan Ilic? I thought he was dead. (SCNR)

I received an email from him last Saturday so I highly doubt that. If that's your idea of having a sense of humor I suggest you get it checked.

SCNR: Sorry, could not resist.

Charitably, I suspect it's an inside joke?

probably just a joke referring to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_Ivan_Ilyich

Ah, that explains it. Thank you for digging that up.

I've worn my best a couple of times in the last few months, it's been enough with the Grim Reaper for a while for me, so I'm not too easily amused by the subject.

I'm still alive!

Actually it's a brilliant novella and I recommend everyone read it. Biting social critique of bourgeois values:

http://www.classicallibrary.org/tolstoy/ivan/1.htm

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