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Beethoven: Music
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Beethoven was a German composer and pianist. The vast output of Beethoven music includes nine symphonies such as the Eroica Symphony, the Pastoral Symphony and the great choral Ninth Symphony. Beethoven wrote much piano music such as the Pathetic, the Pastoral, the Moonlight, the Kreutzer, Waldstein, the Appassionata sonatas.
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At the threshold of his middle period Beethoven sought a variety of new approaches to musical form. In the Sonata in C-sharp minor (Moonlight, 1801), he begins with a slow movement, while typical sonatas of that time began with a fast movement. The movement’s placid motif (repeated phrase) of broken chords is reinterpreted in the final movement as forceful figuration reaching across the entire keyboard. The sonatas of op. 31, from 1802, each open in an original fashion. The G major, op. 31 no. 1, begins with striking shifts in key, in contrast to the usual practice of remaining in the same key to “ground” the listener. The D minor, op. 31 no. 2 (Tempest), on the other hand, breaks up the opening theme into contrasting segments in different tempi, whereas customary practice called for stating the theme in its entirety at the beginning of a movement.
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Beethoven completed nine symphonies, works that influenced the whole future of music by the expansion of the traditional classical form. The best known are the Third, "Eroica", originally intended to celebrate the initially republican achievements of Napoleon, the Fifth, the Sixth, "Pastoral", and the Ninth, "Choral". The less satisfactory Battle Symphony celebrates the earlier military victories of the Duke of Wellington. For the theatre and various other occasions Beethoven wrote a number of Overtures, including four for his only opera, Fidelio, one under that name and the others under the name of the heroine, Leonora. Other Overtures include Egmont, Coriolan, Prometheus, The Consecration of the House and The Ruins of Athens. Beethoven completed one violin concerto and five piano concertos, as well as a triple concerto for violin, cello and piano, and a curious Choral Fantasia,for solo piano, chorus and orchestra.
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Beethoven's method of working was to record ideas in numerous notebooks, which sometimes he would mull over for years, before eventually developing them into the building blocks of his compositions. So for example the seeds of the theme which eventually became the Ode to Joy, was originally conceived more than a decade earlier. This suggest a long gestation period and supreme attention to detail in order to depict in music the strength of his idealism. This creative process and the path he initiated was followed and extended by many other composers of the Romantic era, including composers as diverse as Brahms, Wagner and Mahler.
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T[H]e last 30 years of Beethoven's life were shaped by a series of personal crises, the first of which was the onset of deafness. The early symptoms, noticeable to the composer already before 1800, affected him socially more than musically. His reactions--despair, resignation, and defiance--are conveyed in letters to two friends in 1801 and in a document--half letter and half will--addressed to his brothers in late 1802 and now known as the "Heiligenstadt testament." Resolving finally to "seize fate by the throat," he emerged from the crisis with a series of triumphant works that mark the beginning of a new period in his stylistic development.
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Beethoven, an ardent democrat, scratched out a dedication to Napoléon on the Eroica Symphony (quoted throughout Carmine Coppola's brilliant score to Abel Gance's three-screen Napoléon and in Gance's Un grand amour de Beethoven, 1936). It is therefore particularly apt that Beethoven's music accompanies anti-fascist films, such as Tank Convoy (1943), Tom and Jerry's The Yankee Doodle Mouse (1943), Band of Brothers (TV, 2001, episode 9, String Quartet Op. 131, 6th movement), and TV's Heil Hitler! Confessions of a Hitler Youth. Schiller's moving poem to universal humanity, the Ode to Joy, set in the last movement of the Symphony No. 9, backs up a Sony Digital commercial, is jived up with hip-hop rhythms in the Whoopi Goldberg vehicle Sister Act 2, underscores a guy celebrating his first successful date in Two Ninas (1999), accompanies gratuitous violence in Die Hard (which, as an in-joke, names the head gangster "Hans Grüber," the composer of "Silent Night"), and serves as a horrifying psychological trigger in Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange. The second movement opened TV's The Huntley-Brinkley Report (1956), and other movements are heard in Sophie's Choice, Nostalghia, Raising Arizona, and Shakespeare-Wallah.
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