15.5 - The "Moonlight" Sonata

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Del curso dictado por Yale University

Introduction to Classical Music

1258 calificaciones

Yale University

Introduction to Classical Music

1258 calificaciones

Using a simple and enjoyable teaching style, this course introduces the novice listener to the wonders of classical music, from Bach fugues to Mozart symphonies to Puccini operas.

De la lección

The Bridge From Classical to Romantic

If you could put a soundtrack to the French Revolution, it would surely contain music from Beethoven's "Heroic" period, during which, he “brought sound to symphonies.” We’ll see how Beethoven’s incorporation of new instruments, as well as, his creation of a large orchestra, made his symphonies much louder and "sonically vivid" than those of his predecessors. The point of focus here will be a comparison of the music of Beethoven's "Heroic" period, represented by his Symphony No. 5, with that of his "Late" period, epitomized by his famous Ode to Joy. We'll also consider Beethoven the man, as revealed through primary source accounts of his life at that time. They paint a picture of a disheveled, wild-looking Beethoven, who lived among filth and clutter and was consumed by his work. The ultimate question: in what ways might his life of isolation and his hearing disability affected the nature (style) of the great music he created?As we bid aufwiedersehen to Beethoven, we move on to full-blown musical Romanticism. Romantic music, and indeed all romantic art, was known for its idealistic views on love and nature. Occurring roughly from 1820 to 1900, musical Romanticism saw an evolution of musical style as well as a change of venue (place) for musical performance. In addition to the aristocracy and their royal palaces, a strong middle class arose in Europe during this period. With the music of the ever-lyrical Franz Schubert, we'll step into the parlor of an upper-middle class home, to experience his domestic chamber music and songs. We’ll finish off the module by asking the question: How do we use musical sound to communicate? A look at program music (instrumental music that uses musical gestures to tell a story) will help us figure this out. After a quick auditory review of the workings of program music (we'll follow Vivaldi on a spring day), we'll watch Hector Berlioz go to hell. More accurately, we’ll follow the sequence of musical gestures he employs to re-create a fantastical tale of pursuit, destruction, damnation. Having learned our lesson, we’ll end with a little fun as we try to match themes extracted from various symphonies to the mental images that the composer had in mind. Do you speak the language of program music fluently? Join us and find out!

15.1 - Mozart and Beethoven Compared8:51

15.2 - Beethoven and the Romantic Genius6:38

15.3 - Beethoven's Early Years7:30

15.4 - Growing Deafness and Disability6:17

15.5 - The "Moonlight" Sonata22:51

Conoce a los instructores

Craig Wright
Henry L & Lucy G Moses Professor of Music
Department of Music

[MUSIC]

Despite and possibly in some ways because of his hearing difficulties, Beethoven

created some remarkable music during the first decade of the 19th Century.

Let's take a look at one well-known example,

the Moonlight Sonata, a sonata written in 1801 and published in 1802,

one of Beethoven's 32 sonatas for piano.

Here's Beethoven working on the first movement in 1801.

It's a pretty clean score by Beethoven standards.

But compositionally or creatively, it may be that in some ways,

this is not all that difficult a piece.

It's more like a song as opposed, say, to dense counterpoint.

More like a song, a song without words.

So this is the slide of the autographed of one page of the sketch and

you can see we're about on into first ten or so

bars of the first movement here.

And here is the title page for

the sonata when it was ultimately published the next year.

As you can see at the top of this slide,

we have the title there [FOREIGN].

Well that's interesting.

So they were still selling and people were still playing the harpsichord.

In a mode of a fantasy for the harpsichord or the piano forte.

So people had started access to harpsichords in Beethoven's day.

What else it say here?

[FOREIGN].

Well that's the person whom,

the young lady to whom this sonata was piano sonata was dedicated.

It was the daughter of one of his doctors.

Da, or by, Luigi Van Beethoven.

Luigi Van Beethoven, Italian is still the dominate language, so

this is all published in Italian.

Opus 27 number two.

But notice that nowhere on this title page is to be found the word moonlight.

Beethoven didn't give it this name.

A German Romantic poet did later after he had heard the music and

thought that it reminded him of night with moonlight shining across a lake.

Anyway, here's the score of the first page.

Okay, so here we are now at the keyboard.

Let me play the first movement of The Moonlight Sonata.

At least, the beginning.

>> [MUSIC]

We'll stop there.

Okay, what's happened here?

Well, we had almost

[MUSIC]

little intro, almost like a pop piece.

A little intro setting the tempo, setting the mood, and then the melody comes in.

All of this is built of course on triplet triads.

And finally the melody comes in, beautiful melody up on top.

[MUSIC]

And notice we started here, but up above that first star in blue.

We've already modulated to major.

We started with the first star in C minor.

We modulated by the second star to the relative major, E major.

So that's of interest.

What else of interest here.

Right there, that first blue star and the first red arrow.

Here we're sitting here.

[MUSIC]

Suddenly turns that to minor.

It's almost as if a cloud came over the face of a moon.

And that's what Beethoven is doing in this movement, playing off the light and

dark, the major against minor, constantly.

This is essentially a beautiful melody built over top of

some very straightforward supporting triads.

Now, are we hearing those triumphs.

Are you hearing those triumphs?

Well, let's see, let's turn now to a quiz.

So, we're going to go on, we'll set up our quiz sheet here.

I'm going to strip this down to 8 triads that support the melody here.

And I'll call them out as we go.

And it's your job, and I'm gonna strip them down to their essence, it's your job

to tell me whether they are a minor triad or a major triad.

Minor, major.

May be a little harder then you think.

So let's start out here.

I'll play them.

Just the triads.

And here we go.

Chord one.

[SOUND] Two.

[MUSIC]

3.

[MUSIC]

4.

[MUSIC]

5.

[MUSIC]

6.

[MUSIC]

7.

[MUSIC]

8.

[MUSIC]

Okay, now the second set.

1.

[MUSIC]

2.

[MUSIC]

3.

[MUSIC]

4.

[MUSIC]

5.

1.

[MUSIC].

6.

7.

[MUSIC].

Again, 6.

[MUSIC]

Okay, well, how did you do?

Let's see by the next slide.

One is minor.

I'll just play along here.

Minor, minor, major, major.

Better check these myself.

[MUSIC]

Major, minor, major, minor.

All right, let's go on to the next.

We're gonna check those.

Now here comes major,

minor 2 is minor, 3 is minor.

4 is major.

5 is major.

6 is major.

And 7 is minor.

[MUSIC]

Okay.

All right, now let's go on to the next page.

We're gonna move on here in our Moonlight Sonata.

Pick it up oh, any old where.

[MUSIC]

And now across to the next page.

[MUSIC]

And we're just about at the.

[MUSIC]

Blue star.

[MUSIC]

Melody comes back in.

Yet another key.

[MUSIC]

And at this point, this is interesting, he could have gone right back there.

Beethoven could have gone right back to his tonic, he's sitting on it,

on that dominant and he could have brought his, could

have brought his melody in.

But he didn't there.

This is the third system.

He continues to hold that dominant note underneath,

dominant pedal point that we've experience before.

Builds up tension, but it builds up tension over a very long span.

[MUSIC]

Down an octave.

[MUSIC]

Up an octave.

[MUSIC]

Down an octave.

Now arpeggio.

[MUSIC]

First with a diminished triad, minor triad, diminished,

more diminished, all the way up to the top,

then it starts to come down in unit sub two.

[MUSIC]

He's back.

[MUSIC]

He's got this little counterpoint.

Hear that in the inner voice?

[MUSIC]

But then.

[MUSIC]

He changes it.

Just one note.

[MUSIC]

We expect him to go, but he doesn't.

[MUSIC]

He goes here.

It's a beautiful surprise chord.

And then that forces him to extend.

[MUSIC]

And finally, plays back at his tonic.

[MUSIC]

And the melody comes in at that point.

Well it's a very beautiful piece.

It's one that I've been playing for more years than I care to admit,

but centuries of people have been playing this, and that's one of the things that

makes this a classic and makes classical music art, the staying power of art.

Okay, well that was the first movement of the Moonlight Sonata.

Hope you did well on that quiz.

Hope you got at least 50% [LAUGH].

But, this first movement by Beethoven is a bit unusual here,

because it's written more like a second movement, a sort of slow, dreamy

second movement, as we would expect the second movement to be in a piano sonata.

This is one of Beethoven's noble elegiac slow movements.

The kind of thing that Beethoven loved to write and

the kind of thing that he was famous for.

But this first movement of the Moonlight Sonata is not fast and

not in sonata allegro form as we might expect.

For a fast sonata allegro form movement in this sonata, we have to wait for

the exciting third and last movement, the finale.

And it too is something special.

Here's the music for it.

There we go.

We're over to the Finale here.

[MUSIC]

And off it goes, and you can see basically it's taking this triadic idea,

groups of that we've encountered in the first movement, this triadic idea and

arpeggios, and extending them upwards, but now at a lightning pace.

Breakneck pace.

So let's listen to a snippet of this in a performance by

the pianist Vladimir Ashkenazy.

[MUSIC]

Okay, let's phase this down.

It was at that moment that I knew, when I was 18 years old,

that I was never gonna be a concert pianist.

I could never play this really up to tempo the way it should go.

As we've heard here with Vladimir Ashkenazy, the playing was very fast and

very clean.

But notice at once point,

he put in a little bit of retard to help give the music a sense of definition and

form in his performance and not all pianists do this.

They worry about the technical aspect of this.

They have to wrestle so hard with the technical and not the expressive.

Here's a very mechanical, sort of unexpressive performance that you can find

on YouTube, but it's fun to watch because of the animation.

[MUSIC]

So again here, the tempo is hugely fast, but it's almost machine like.

And actually,

this movement's a good one to focus on to discuss the issue of expression and

a performer's interpretation on the music the composer has created.

Let's watch the beginning of another performance of the same piece,

this one by Valentina Zitza.

The performance you'll about to see has been viewed,

enjoyed by more than 7 million people worldwide.

Anyway, as you watch her performance, what is she fore-grounding here?

Is it technique or expression, or both?

[MUSIC]

Syncopation.

[MUSIC]

Repeated

[MUSIC]

>> And the closing theme.

>> [MUSIC]

>> Lower.

Higher.

>> [MUSIC]

>> And this leads us back to the repeat of exposition.

So, we're going to stop it there.

So, what'd you think of that?

Sure is fast.

Is this technique or expression and how do we recognize expression?

How does a performer create expression.

Well, by louds and softs and by diminuendo and crescendos and

especially by variation in tempo, retards and accelerandos.

So again technique, just in a sense how fast it goes, versus expression.

Expression being personal interpretation, constantly tweaking the music,

if you will.

How does a performer play with our expectations of the musical score?

That's a lot that's involved here.

How can our expectations be brought into this and then be

extended in an exciting sort of way to make the interpretation very personal.

Well, here's another performer, American pianist Mark Solman,

what do you think here, technique or expression?

[MUSIC]

>> There's a lot of pedal at this point, [INAUDIBLE] perhaps

[MUSIC]

>> Nice, bringing out that second theme.

Tempo may have slowed down just a bit, though.

>> [MUSIC]

>> Nice fast tempo here.

>> [MUSIC]

>> Syncopation.

>> [MUSIC]

>> Wow, really slowed it down there.

Much slower here.

[MUSIC]

>> He'll probably bring it back.

A lot of fortissimo there.

Hesitation there.

>> [MUSIC]

>> Here's our closing theme.

>> [MUSIC]

>> Very slow and very quiet.

>> [MUSIC]

>> And now we go back to the beginning of the piece,

to the return exposition yet again.

Well, which did you like better?

They were very different.

I'll give you a moment to think about it and tell me.

Now, it's my turn.

[INAUDIBLE] is playing with technically dazzling and she kept the tempo right now

beat She gets through this exposition in exactly one minute and thirty seconds.

But didn't allow for, that speed perhaps, didn't allow for much opportunity for

interpretive freedom.

[INAUDIBLE] playing, on the other hand, well maybe had a little bit too much pedal

at the beginning, at least for my taste, a little bit muddy.

But you can't say that it wasn't creative.

He buried the tempos.

He actually takes 14 seconds longer to get through the same music than did and

the dynamic's very abnormal, so as to tell the listener what

he thought this piece was all about, what he wanted us to feel about this piece.

His performance was a bit more romantic, more freedom for the interpreter.

Well, how would Beethoven have played his own creation?

Course we'll never know.

He'd might actually, however, have been perhaps closer to Zelman's interpretation.

Given all that was said by Beethoven's contemporaries about his

wild swings of emotion and his crashing and thrashing at the piano.

But does it matter how Beethoven played this movement?

Isn't the important thing how we hear it in our mind?

How we want to hear it?

Which is more important, the creator or you or

I, the listener is creativity and art.

Is it not about change and changing our understanding of the human experience.

Maybe you, the listener, are the most important thing here.

you can make of this whatever you wish.

That's one of the wonderful things about art.

So now, to give us a chance to unwind here at the end of our session,

after this exciting performance, let me play on a good Stanley,

another example of the elegiac sound.

Much like the first movement in the Moonlight Sonata,

the elegiac sound of Beethoven, the sort of hymn-like sound of Beethoven.

This is from the beginning of the slow movement of the Arch Duke Trio.

Which takes us into the music of Beethoven's heroic period.

So, here's a little encore, the slow movement of Beethoven's Archduke Trio.

We'll hear the beginning and then fade out.

[MUSIC]

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