Yalecourses-Listening to Music-Lecture 9. Sonata-Allegro Form: Mozart and Beethoven Follow
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《 Listening to Music 》 In this lecture, Professor Wright discusses the nature of a critical concert review, in preparation for the students' assignment to review the Saybrook Orchestra's upcoming concert. The students are also introduced to Bradley Naylor, one of Saybrook Orchestra's conductors, who talks about what it takes to rehearse and lead an orchestra; Katie Dryden, the principal violist, who demonstrates some of the most interesting viola passages from the pieces on the program; and Elana Kagan, the principal flutist, who performs an excerpt from Beethoven's Sixth Symphony, which will close the concert. 00:00 - Chapter 1. Introduction 03:53 - Chapter 2. Writing a Concert Review 13:45 - Chapter 3. Rehearsing and Leading an Orchestra 32:27 - Chapter 4. Viola Excerpts from the Concert Program 42:40 - Chapter 5. Balancing Solos in the Performance and Conclusion Vedio Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lecture_9._Sonata-Allegro_Form-_Mozart_and_Beethoven.webm Author: YaleCourses License: CC BY 3.0 Unported ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/)
Comments Transcript
Okay.
Let us start, ladies and gentlemen.
We're going to pursue the issue of musical form today.
It's an important thing to talk about because it allows us to
follow a particular piece of music and we'll be using this
metaphor of a musical journey and wanting to know where we
are in music throughout today.
Form is particularly important in all types of music,
popular music as well as classical music,
and we have this complex of material coming at us,
this sonic material, and we try to make sense of it.
And we say that it has a particular form and we say it
could have a particular structure even,
so we tend to use metaphors having to do with architecture
and things such as this.
What we are really doing here is taking all of this sonic
information that's coming into our brain and getting sorted and
makes us want to dance around or clap or be sad or happy and
make sense of it.
And musicians like to have forms because oftentimes it sort
of tells them what they ought to do next and where am I here,
I'm here, but what ought to happen next?
Well, if you've got a tried and true musical form that other
musicians have used over the years,
you might be inclined to use it too because you know your
listener will be able to follow you.
Now the other day I asked early on in the course about the form
in popular music, and I threw this out not really
knowing what the answer would be.
What's the most common form that one encounters when dealing
with pop songs?
And for the most part there was silence across the room,
but one student, I've tracked him down,
Frederick Evans, gave a very good answer,
really a better answer than I could have given.
So clearly Frederick knew something about this idea of
what he, I think, referred to as verse and
chorus structure.
I might call it strophe and refrain, but it's the same
thing whether you have it in a lead of Franz Schubert or in a
piece that I know nothing about.
And Frederick is going to show us, introduce us to a piece that
I know nothing about.
I sent him an e-mail last night saying,
Frederick, you gave a really good answer.
Why don't you pick a piece, come up and demonstrate this?
So this is Frederick Evans.
We're going to, excuse me, yeah,
Frederick Evans, he's going to come up here.
I'm told we have to give him a microphone and he is going to
introduce us to this particular piece.
Now you probably all know what this piece is.
How many of you heard the piece we were just listening to?
Everybody knows it.
Who's the one person in the room that's never heard this
piece before, has no clue what's happening?
Moi.
Okay?
So Frederick, tell me about this piece please.
All right.
This is a piece by In Sync, back when I was in fifth grade.
And it's bye-bye-bye.
And the pattern that it follows is really like the archetype of
a lot of popular songs.
It's half of the verse, half of the chorus or so when it
starts, and then there's verse, chorus, verse, chorus, and then
what I call the bridge, which is like an emotional climax,
and then the last one is a really powerful chorus, verse,
bring it home, and then you go all the way.
Okay.
So it's this idea of changing text, then coming back to
familiar text and familiar music, then changing,
going back to the unfamiliar new text, and then coming back to
the familiar in terms of the chorus.
Is that a fair shake?
Okay.
So shall we play?
What are we going to hear first?
Student's voice.
So first you'll hear from seconds twenty-four to forty.
This is an example of the verse where they have the beginning of
the plot and then you have the chorus at seconds,
so it's about fifty-six, and that's where you get the
repeating idea, which is like what the piece is based on,
and then last but not least, you have the emotional build-up
where the background and the chorus progression changes a
little more solemnly, and then there's the last chorus,
which brings it home.
Okay, great.
Let's listen to the, yeah.
Okay.
Student's voice.
What really interests me here is what they're using is a
Baroque, ostinato, lament base, but that's,
we'll get on to that in another week or so.
So that's, okay, now we'll go to the bridge,
Frederick?
Student's voice.
Okay, that's wonderful.
Thank you, Frederick, that's exactly what I wanted.
Okay.
How many want Craig to continue teaching this course and how
many want Frederick?
Let's hear it for Craig.
Let's hear it for Frederick.
I knew it.
Okay.
But that's a good way of getting introduced to the idea
of musical form.
Let's talk about form now in classical music.
The forms are a little more difficult in classical music
because the music is more complex,
and before we launch into a discussion of these musical
forms, I want to talk about the
distinction between genre in music and form in music.
So we're going to go over to the board over here and you can
see that I've listed the standard classical genres.
What do we mean by genre in music?
Well, simply musical type.
So we've got this type called a symphony, this type of music
called a string quartet and concerto and so on.
We could add other types, ballet, opera,
things such as that.
In the pop realm, we've got genres too.
We've got classical New Orleans jazz would be a genre.
Blues would be a genre.
Grunge rock would be another sort of genre.
A genre presupposes a particular performing force,
a particular length of pieces, and even dress and mode of
behavior of the auditors, the listeners.
If we were going to listen to the genre of a symphony,
we would dress up one particular way,
go to Woolsey Hall and expect to be there from eight o'clock
till ten o'clock.
If you were going to hear the Rolling Stones play at Toads,
where they do play occasionally, obviously one would
not come at eight o'clock.
One would come later, one would dress in a particular
sort of way and one would behave presumably in a different sort
of way.
So that's what we mean by genre, a kind of general type of
music.
Now today we'll start to talk about form in music,
and what I need to say here is that each of these genres is
made up of movements, and each of the movements is
informed by a particular form.
So with the symphony we have four movements there,
fast, slow, then either a minuet or a
scherzo, and a final fast movement.
And each of these movements can be in one of a number of
different forms.
And we'll talk about what they are in just a moment.
So when we come to the string quartet, same sort of thing,
fast, slow, minuet, scherzo, fast.
Any one of those can be in a particular form.
Concerto generally, as mentioned before,
has just three movements, and sonata,
a piano sonata, something played on a piano,
or a violin sonata with violin and piano accompaniment.
They generally have just three movements, fast,
slow, fast.
Okay.
Let's talk about our forms now.
In classical music, things go by very quickly and
it's difficult to kind of get a handle on it,
and we generally in life don't like to be lost.
We like to know where we are, we like to know what is
happening, and this is what form allows
us to do so that if we're hearing a piece of music and all
this stuff is coming at us, we want to make sense of it by
knowing approximately where we are.
Am I still toward the beginning?
Am I in the middle of this thing?
Am I getting anywhere near the end of it?
How should I respond at this particular point?
Well, if we have in mind what I've identified here,
and we will be referring to as our six formal types,
and we can think of these as templates that when we're
hearing a piece of music we make an educated decision about which
formal type is in play and then we drop down the model of this
formal type or the template of this formal type and we sort of
filter our listening experience through this template or through
this model.
So here are our six models.
Ternary form, sonata-allegro form,
theme and variations, rondo, fugue and ostinato.
And they developed at various times in the history of music.
Theme and variations is very old.
Sonata-allegro is a lot more recent.
Now of these, the ones that we'll be
working with today are ternary form and sonata-allegro form.
And sonata-allegro is the hardest, the most complex,
the most difficult of all of these forms.
It's so called because it usually shows up in the first
movement of a sonata, concerto, string quartet,
symphony.
So and the first movements are fast so that's why we have
allegro out there.
And it most is associated with this idea of the sonata.
It didn't necessarily originate there.
It originated there and in the symphony, but for historical
reasons we call this sonata because of its association with
the sonata and the fact that it goes fast.
So that in a symphony usually your very first movement will be
in sonata-allegro form.
Your slow movement, well, that could be in theme
and variations.
It could be in rondo, it could be in ternary form.
Your minuet and scherzo is almost always in ternary form.
And your last fast movement could be in sonata-allegro form.
It could also be in theme and variations, it could be in
rondo, it could be in fugue.
Sometimes it's even in ostinato form.
So you can see that these forms can show up and sort of
control, regulate what happens inside of each of these
movements.
Okay.
Are there questions about that?
Does that seem straightforward enough?
We have a big picture of genre here, movements within genre,
and then forms informing each of the movements.
Yes.
No.
I said it's possible that it could be used for the second
movement.
The ternary form is one of the forms that could be used with
the slow second movement.
We could also have theme and variations.
We're going to hear one of those later in our course.
It could also be a sort of slow rondo.
So it's just one of really three possibilities there.
Okay.
If not, let's talk then about ternary form because ternary
form has much in common with what we experience in sonata
allegro form.
Let me take a very straightforward example of
ternary form.
It's from Beethoven's Four Elises, the piano piece that
Beethoven wrote for one of his paramours at one time or
another.
Whoops.
I knew this would happen.
Here.
I'm going to tell you a story about this.
My cell phone broke the other day.
Go away.
My cell phone broke the other day so I had to buy a new one.
I was really happy about this.
I hated to lose my old Mozart theme, but I then had to find a
new Mozart theme.
And nowadays my selections are more limited.
So when you go on to these things, and in truth I actually
had my youngest son do this because I'm hopelessly
incompetent with this kind of thing.
You go on to these things and now they only have one option,
one option for classical music, but it's called Mozart.
So good choice.
Mozart has become the icon of classical music and I think it's
the individual that should be the icon for classical music.
All classical music now has been reduced down to just
Mozart.
Okay.
I had no idea what that was about but who's calling me?
All right.
So we have this piece in ternary form by Beethoven,
and ternary form is conveyed to us simply the idea of
presentation, diversion,
representation or statement, digression, restatement,
anything like this.
We like to diagram these in terms of alphabetical letters.
You can think just A, B, A.
Right.
I'm going to pause here.
We started out here.
We are in this key, major or minor.
What do you think?
Minor.
All right.
So we were coming to the end of this A section.
Here the A section is very short but then we major or minor.
Major.
Okay.
So what happened there?
What do we call this?
It's a very quick modulation, very quick modulation.
We've changed keys.
And I'm going to digress here just for a moment to talk about
this, which is this concept of
relative major and minor.
You may have noticed in music, and it's discussed briefly in
the textbook, that there are pairs of keys,
pairs of keys that have something in common.
The members of the pairs have the same key signature.
We could take any key signature, three flats or two
sharps, whatever, but there's going to be one
major key with three flats and one minor key with three flats.
And I think we have up on the board here an example of just
that.
So you can see written in here the three flats,
and this is a minor scale with three flats.
Now we could also have three flats over here,
but we encounter three flats when we have the major scale.
This happens to work out so that it's pitched on C.
If we come up three half-steps in the keyboard,
we come up to E-flat.
So the relative major, the major key in this pair,
is always three half-steps, one, two, three,
three half-steps up above its paired minor.
Here's another one down at the bottom, happens to have one
sharp in it.
We have the key of G major here with one sharp,
but if we come down three half-steps,
we get its relative minor down here.
And the reason I mention this is not because we actually hear
this very much.
I'm not sure that I hear modulations to relative major
because I don't have absolute pitch and I'm not tracking keys
when I listen to pieces.
My guess is you're not either.
So for the average listener, we may not hear the actual pitch
relationship, but we may hear that we've had
a modulation and you can kind of make an educated guess that
about fifty percent of the time, if it's going minor to major,
it's coming in this relative arrangement,
or major down to minor, it's going in this relative
arrangement.
So this happens a lot.
So here we are in the midsection of our ternary form,
A, B, A.
Here's the B part and then back to the minor A.
Now that's just the opening section of this piece.
It goes on to do other things, but it is a very succinct
example of ternary form.
And ternary form is a useful way of introducing a larger
concept, which is sonata-allegro form.
So let me flip the board here and here we go onto this rather
complex diagram.
As I say, it's the most complex one of all the six forms that
we'll be working with.
It consists of three essential parts, exposition,
development and recapitulation.
So you could think you're coming out of ternary form.
You've got an A here, you've got a B idea here,
and then you've got an A return back here.
But this is a lot more complicated.
There are things, lots of things going on.
And I should say also in terms of fairness in
advertising that this is a model.
This is also something of an abstraction or an ideal.
Not every piece written in sonata-allegro form conforms to
this diagram in all particulars.
Composers wouldn't want to do that.
They'd have to assert their independence or originality in
one way or another.
But it's a useful sort of model.
It tells us what the norm is, what we can generally expect.
So we've got these three sort of sine qua non here,
and then we've got two optional parts of this that we'll talk
about as we proceed.
So this is the layout then for sonata-allegro form,
exposition, development, recapitulation.
So we start out with a first theme in the tonic key,
of course.
It might even have subsets to it so that we could have one A
and one B and one C up here.
I won't put them up there but it can happen.
Then we have a transition in which we have a change of key
moving to the dominant key.
Transitions tend to be rather unsettled.
It gives you the sense of moving somewhere, going somewhere.
That's why it's called a transition.
It could also, musicians quickly like to call
it a bridge.
It's sort of leading you somewhere else.
Maybe in that way it is similar to the type of bridge that
Frederick was talking about earlier.
So we have a transition or bridge that takes us to a second
theme in now in the dominant key.
If, however, our symphony happened to begin
in a minor key, then the second theme would
come in in the relative major.
So if we had C minor, as Beethoven does in his fifth
symphony, so there we are there in C minor,
but the second theme is in the relative major of E-flat.
Both have three flats in it.
So if you happen to start in minor, then composers
traditionally modulate not to the dominant but to the
relative major, which is up on the third degree
of the scale.
That's why there's a big three there.
So then the second theme comes in.
It's usually contrasting, lyrical, sweeter.
You heard the difference there, more song-like in the
Beethoven, not so much in that musical
punch in the nose, as I like to refer to it,
but a more relaxed sort of second theme.
And there's oftentimes some filler or what we might call an
interstice, and we come to a closing theme.
That's abbreviated up here, just C-T.
Closing theme of the exposition, closes the
exposition.
Closing themes tend to be rather simple in which they
rock back and forth between dominant and tonic so that you
can end on the tonic, and that gives you a sense of
conclusion of the exposition.
Now what happens?
Well, you see these dots up on the board.
Anybody know what these dots mean?
I think we actually talk about this if you read ahead in the
textbook.
Somebody tell me what the dots mean.
Jerry?
Okay, repeat.
Okay, so that's what dots in music.
We have these double bars and dots.
That means repeat.
So we've got to repeat the whole exposition.
Didn't like it the first time?
We get a second pass at it in the repeat.
Then we go on to the development, and as the term
development suggests, we're going to develop the
theme here, but it is oftentimes more than that.
It could be something other than just a development and an
expansion.
It could actually be a contraction.
Beethoven likes to strip away things and sort of play with
particular subsets of themes or play with parts of motives.
Generally speaking, your development is
characterized by tonal instability,
moves around a lot.
You can't tell what key you're in, tonal instability,
and it also tends to be, in terms of texture,
the most polyphonic of any section in the piece.
There's a lot of counterpoint usually to be found in the
development section.
Then towards the end of the development section,
we want to get back here to the return and we want to get back
to our first theme and our tonic key.
So composers oftentimes will sit on one chord.
What they will sit on will happen to be the dominant.
So I could put that up here.
We could put a five up here because we want a long period of
dominant preparation.
Bum, bum is where we're going, back over here,
but we're going to set this up with preparation in terms of the
dominant that wants to push us into the tonic.
So there we are back in the tonic now and all the first
themes come back as they did before.
We also have a bridge but this time it does not modulate.
It stays in the tonic key.
We don't want it to modulate because we've got to finish in
the tonic here.
So I was thinking just a moment ago it's kind of the bridge to
nowhere.
It really is a bridge to nowhere.
You stay right back where you are.
You stay in that tonic key and the second theme material comes
in, your closing theme comes in.
And you could end the composition here.
Sometimes Mozart, as we will see in our course,
will end a piece right at this point, the end right there,
but more often than not composers will throw on a coda.
What's a coda do?
Well, it really says to the listener that,
hey, the piece is sort of at an end here.
Codas generally are very static harmonically.
There's not a lot of movement.
It's, and I keep, maybe I should have got to
come up with a different metaphor here,
the idea of throwing an anchor over, slowing the whole thing
down, simplifying it to say we're at the end.
So you get a lot of the
kind of things in a coda just to tell the listener it's time to
think about clapping at this point or reaching for your coat.
And the other optional coda, what's that come from?
The Latin cauda, I guess, cauda,
Italian coda, means tail, and these can be,
like all tails, long or short.
Mozart happened to like short codas.
Beethoven liked longer codas.
And the other optional component here is the
introduction.
My guess is, Jacob, what would you guess?
How many, what portion of classical symphonies,
you're an orchestral player, what portion of classical
symphonies would begin with an introduction,
would you say?
Most of them?
Well, we'll consider that.
Let's go for fifty percent at the moment.
We'll consider fifty percent at the moment.
So we'll see.
We'll see.
Now let's jump into a classical composition that begins with a
movement in sonata-allegro form.
We're going to close, we're going to open here with
Mozart's Eine kleine Nachtmusik, a little night music.
This is sort of serenade stuff that he wrote for Vienna,
sort of night music, evening music.
Let's listen to a little of it.
Linda, just start out here.
We're going to start with the first theme idea,
and before she does, let me play this.
What about that?
Conjunct or disjunct melody?
Disjunct.
Yeah.
It's a lot of jumping around here kind of thing.
Notice it's mostly just a major triad with underneath.
So if we were at a concert and we wanted to remember this,
we'd probably have a lot of skippy Xs here.
We don't have time to get into the particulars of this,
but that's why we're doing all of this diagramming stuff.
We've got a lot of these skippy Xs.
All right.
So let's listen to the first theme of Mozart's
Eine kleine Nachtmusik.
A little syncopation there.
A little sort of counterpoint to this.
So maybe we've got a couple of little ideas in here,
A, B and C.
Ah, agitation, movement.
Here comes the bass.
Pause.
So we had a cadence there.
That would be the end of the musical phrase,
a cadence, and the music actually stopped.
I used to like to think of this in terms of almost a drama.
We've got a change of scene here.
Some characters have gone off, the stage is now clear,
and other characters are going to come on.
So what character is going to come on?
Well, a more lyrical second theme.
I'm going to play just a bit of it for you.
What about this?
Is this a conjunct melody?
Obviously, it's descending.
Conjunct or disjunct?
Very conjunct.
Actually, it's just running down the scale.
Now, we don't have time because this music is going by so fast.
We've got our skippy opening theme going around like that.
We don't have time to sort of write down all those Xs,
so maybe just, yeah, maybe something like that.
So this is our first skippy theme.
Our second theme has a nice sort of fall to it.
Okay.
Here's the second theme.
Repeat.
Now, closing theme already.
Okay.
Let's just pause it here for a second.
What's the most noteworthy aspect of that theme?
What do you think?
What would you remember about that?
How would you graph that?
Yeah.
Okay.
Yeah.
It starts out.
And then it's really conjunct, right?
Because nothing.
It's just staying on one pitch level, sort of the ultimate
conjunct joined to the point that it's a unison pitch,
da-ti-ti-ti-ti-ti.
So I'd remember that just like this idea.
So our closing theme, da-di-da-da-da-da,
turn and da-da-da-da-da, almost the woodpecker idea.
Sorry.
But think of that kind of da-da-da-da-da-da,
or maybe even machine gun, whatever sort of silly analogy
you want to construct to help you remember that.
Okay.
So here we are almost at the end of the exposition.
Let's listen now to the end of exposition and then we'll stop.
Okay.
So we're going to stop there.
Now, on this recording, what do you think?
Well, I think reasons for time.
And let's go ahead and we'll advance it up to the beginning
of the development section.
So now we should listen to this whole complex once again,
but we're not going to do that.
We're going to proceed here and we're going to go into the
development section, and it's kind of fun the way
Mozart starts the development section here.
Let me ask you this.
We started here.
The development begins higher or lower?
Yeah?
Lower.
So he's dropped down to the dominant.
He's now in the dominant.
And if he continued as he had, that's what he would have done.
That's not what he does, however.
He's sitting here and he ends up there.
So we get this sort of dissonant shift and it's a signal.
It's like the composer holding up a sign.
Development.
Time for the development now.
Okay?
So something we've shifted.
We are sort of slapping the face, telling us we're at a new
point in our form, a new section in our form,
the development section.
So as we listen to this, we'll hear Mozart move quickly
through some lots of different keys.
I wouldn't be able to tell you what keys they are.
I really wouldn't, but I do know that he moves
through different keys.
Then we will hear a re-transition start,
but here's my challenge to you and why I started putting all
these things up here.
Which theme does he choose to develop here?
Kind of interesting.
Does he go with the first theme,
or the
So which one?
Okay.
Stop it right there.
Now he's all the way.
First of all, what's the answer to the question?
Which theme did he use here?
We're now at the re-transition.
We're almost finished this short development.
Which one did he use?
Who thinks they know?
Raise your hand.
Elizabeth?
Use just the closing theme.
So nothing but the closing theme in this short development
section.
Now we are at the re-transition and you're going to hear the
violins come down.
But if I could sing a harmony, maybe we should all sing it
together.
We'll be seeing
that's the implied bass line.
I'm just going to go back to the tonic and we're going to go
then that first theme is going to come back in here.
So let's listen to Mozart write a re-transition and I'm going to
sing the implied or then sounded dominant that's going to lead to
the tonic.
All the first theme material coming back, nothing new.
Here goes our bridge now, movement, and he just cut it
short.
The first time he went to
________________.
That's what the bass did.
This time he just stops the thing and stays in the tonic key
and then the rest of the material will come back in,
in the proper order, in the tonic key.
All right.
We need not hear that.
Let's go on now to the coda and we're just going to listen
generally to what happens in a coda here, typical coda with
Mozart.
________________.
It's almost stereotypical, right?
________________.
You could have written that.
Even I could have written that.
Not so hard, but as I say, it's just a load of bricks to
bring this thing to a conclusion, but it's a beautiful
example of sonata-allegro form.
It does what our model requires in all particulars in an
unusually rapid rate here, about six minutes for this
particular movement.
Let's go on to a rather, another famous example of
sonata-allegro form, and that's the beginning of
your own Beethoven's Fifth Symphony,
Symphony Number Five.
We of course worked with this before and you know the
beginning, but let's listen to a bit of
this and we're going to follow it through now all the way to
the, into the exposition and
development in terms of form, not some of the issues we were
working with before, but in terms of form.
So no introduction, just starts off with his first
motive there, our four-note motive.
And now the bridge is going to start.
You get a sense of moving from point A to point B or from
first theme to second theme.
Okay.
So I'll pause it there and the horn sort of says,
Yes, this is B, and then the bridge,
something like that.
This is the end of that and then a new lyrical theme will
come in.
What interests, always interested me here,
sort of like the Jaws movie.
You never know when it's safe to go back in the water.
You've got this nice melody of
da-dee-da-da-dee-da-da-da, but underneath you have
ba-ba-ba-boom, do-do-do-do,
sort of lurking under there is this pernicious four-note
motive.
All right.
So let's listen to the second theme as it starts in the
violins and then we'll build up with Beethoven here.
Building up dynamics and pitch.
A little bit of interstice here, our closing theme.
And let's stop it right there, a couple of points.
Note again, sort of breathe the air of this particular
performance.
Okay.
It's because we're going to change to a different recording
now, so Linda, you go ahead and change
to that, and while you're changing,
let me comment on the closing theme.
Notice how in this symphony Beethoven, once again,
is obsessed with this four-note motive.
We heard it underneath.
And at the end, how does he create a closing
theme?
Well, just coming down an arpeggio, just taking that
triad.
Is this a major triad or a minor triad?
What is it in relationship to the opening tonality?
It's the relative major, okay?
So he just goes from up to short, short,
short, long, so everything's sort of short,
short, long.
All right.
So that's how he constructs the closing theme,
just a different configuration of that short,
short, short, long motive.
Let's go back now and hear a different recording and tell me
what you think about this recording.
How does it differ from the preceding one that we were
listening to?
Let's start with the second, the repeat of the beginning,
if you can get there, repeat of the exposition.
Perfect.
Okay.
Any thoughts about that?
Just on one playing, I know it's hard.
I should sit the two up here and play this one four times and
this one four times back and forth.
What about this one though?
Yeah.
The second one sounds faster.
Yeah.
I mean, it's the same music.
They have the same score.
One conductor thinks this, you go,
ya-thee-thee-thee, da-thee-thee-thee.
That's how Leonard Bernstein would do it and did do it.
Another conductor, still living,
conducting frequently in New York also,
Bernard Haitink, ya-thee-thee-thee,
dee-thee-thee-thee, da-thee-thee-thee,
da-thee-thee-thee, da-thee-thee-thee.
It gets through this about thirty,
this exposition, about thirty seconds faster
than Leonard Bernstein did, just a difference in
interpretation.
So let's listen now quickly, because it does go quickly,
to Bernard Haitink's interpretation of the
exposition of this first movement.
Okay.
That's probably enough of that.
Let's go on to the development now.
Development.
Well, how does the development of this symphony start?
Which theme is he using?
Well, you can imagine.
Oops.
I've got to get the right pages up here.
It's the same thing Mozart did in Eine Kleine Nachtmusik.
He throws in a highly dissonant chord to announce the beginning
of the development section.
Then rather quickly he modulates through different keys.
Every time you hear the strings sweep,
moving to a new key and then
modulating to a higher key there.
Then he begins to build up.
Oops.
I lost my piece of paper here.
He begins to build up in terms of
taking it up higher and higher and higher and then we get
Well, first of all, let's talk about this chord.
What do you think about that chord?
Full of tension?
Dissonance?
Yeah.
It's called a diminished triad and we'll put this up here.
Remember we've had major triads with a major third in the
bottom, a minor third on the top,
and then we had minor triads, but what would happen if you
constructed a triad with just a minor third on the bottom and
then another minor third, two minor thirds,
where you get this sort of more dissonant sound,
more biting sound.
So that's what Beethoven is using here,
this dissonant triad.
There's another thing that's quite interesting and that is
that this idea of just pounding away on one particular chord.
This sound.
That sort of thing.
Beethoven started doing this.
You ever have your CD player get
driven crazy, right?
Why is he doing this?
And think about how the audience of that time would have
perceived this.
What did the Germans of 1808 think?
Ludwig, Ludwig, what's Sinzi doing?
This is an unique music.
Sinzi Bach, wait.
Here is the music.
And so on.
So this is a kind of thing.
It's almost like they used to use old silent movies and then
they tied her up and then they lit the fuse and then building
up tension.
If you take this diminished triad and keep placing it at
successively higher degrees of scale,
you get this extreme of tension.
And what's he done in terms of note values here?
Well, we have this.
It's almost as if he stripped it down to just one note,
sort of reduced it to its most elemental.
And I say, well, I could give you metaphors
about taking matter and reduce them down to some sort of their
densest potential and atomic explosions and things like that.
But it's kind of what he's done here.
He hasn't expanded in the development section.
He's contracted.
He's contracted sort of to maximize the rhythmic energy,
the almost electrical energy inherent in this particular
concept.
Well, all right.
So then he backs off of this, gets sweeter,
and then he starts playing around with just two notes.
Why two notes?
Well, his original theme had just two notes in it,
and then he breaks it down to just one note,
once again reaching for the essence here.
Now this might not sound like one note,
but here's what he's got.
That sounds like high-low, high-low,
but if you stop and think about it,
they're just coming down an octave.
So he's really just working with one note here,
and then he changes it, and then the theme,
but the diminished chord won't let it in.
He just sort of keeps repeating that one-note idea,
high-low, high-low, high-low.
And finally, this sort of insistent motive
almost breaks down the door and then the recapitulation can
begin.
And so the recapitulation begins at that point.
So that's the development section of the Fifth Symphony
here, the first movement of the Fifth Symphony,
where he puts this electrical moment right in the smack in the
middle of the development section,
in the middle of the movement, and then we get to the
recapitulation.
So we've heard some music of Leonard Bernstein's
interpretation of this.
We've heard Bernard Haitink's interpretation of this.
Now let's go on to, as you go out,
you can use this as kind of exit music,
a bit of silliness here, the Bee Gees' interpretation of
Beethoven's Fifth Symphony.
© transcript Emily Beynon