Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Preface
- Chronological Bibliography of Books, Articles, Book Chapters, and Musical Editions by Lewis Lockwood
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Part One A Creative Life
- 1 Of Deserters and Orphans: Beethoven's Early Exposure to the Opéras-Comiques of Monsigny
- 2 “A Really Excellent and Capable Man”: Beethoven and Johann Traeg
- 3 A Four-Leaf Clover: A Newly Discovered Cello, the Premiere of the Ninth Symphony, Beethoven's Circle of Friends in Bonn, and a Corrected Edition of the Song “Ruf vom Berge,” WoO 147
- 4 “Where Thought Touches the Blood”: Rhythmic Disturbance as Physical Realism in Beethoven's Creative Process
- 5 The Sanctification of Beethoven in 1827–28
- Part Two Prometheus / Eroica
- 6 The Prometheus Theme and Beethoven's Shift from Avoidance to Embrace of Possibilities
- 7 Beethoven at Heiligenstadt in 1802: Deconstruction, Integration, and Creativity
- 8 “Mit Verstärkung des Orchesters”: The Orchestra Personnel at the First Public Performance of Beethoven's Eroica
- Part Three Masses
- 9 “Aber lieber Beethoven, was haben Sie denn wieder da gemacht?” Observations on the Performing Parts for the Premiere of Beethoven's Mass in C, Opus 86
- 10 Heart to Heart: Beethoven, Archduke Rudolph, and the Missa solemnis
- 11 God and the Voice of Beethoven
- Part Four Quartets
- 12 “So Here I Am, in the Middle Way”: The Autograph of the “Harp” Quartet and the Expressive Domain of Beethoven’s Second Maturity
- 13 Meaningful Details: Expressive Markings in Beethoven Manuscripts, with a Focus on Opus 127
- 14 The Autograph Score of the Slow Movement of Beethoven’s Last Quartet, Opus 135
- 15 Early German-Language Reviews of Beethoven's Late String Quartets
- Part Five Explorations
- 16 Three Movements or Four? The Scherzo Movements in Beethoven's Early Sonatas
- 17 Utopia and Dystopia Revisited: Contrasted Domains in Beethoven's Middle-Period F-Major and F-Minor Works
- 18 Schooling the Quintjäger
- 19 Cue-Staff Annotations in Beethoven's Piano Works: Reflections and Examples from the Autograph of the Piano Sonata, Opus 101
- 20 Another Little Buck Out of Its Stable
- 21 Beethoven's Cavatina, Haydn's Seasons, and the Thickness of Inscription
- List of Contributors
- Index of Works by Beethoven
- General Index
21 - Beethoven's Cavatina, Haydn's Seasons, and the Thickness of Inscription
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 September 2020
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Preface
- Chronological Bibliography of Books, Articles, Book Chapters, and Musical Editions by Lewis Lockwood
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Part One A Creative Life
- 1 Of Deserters and Orphans: Beethoven's Early Exposure to the Opéras-Comiques of Monsigny
- 2 “A Really Excellent and Capable Man”: Beethoven and Johann Traeg
- 3 A Four-Leaf Clover: A Newly Discovered Cello, the Premiere of the Ninth Symphony, Beethoven's Circle of Friends in Bonn, and a Corrected Edition of the Song “Ruf vom Berge,” WoO 147
- 4 “Where Thought Touches the Blood”: Rhythmic Disturbance as Physical Realism in Beethoven's Creative Process
- 5 The Sanctification of Beethoven in 1827–28
- Part Two Prometheus / Eroica
- 6 The Prometheus Theme and Beethoven's Shift from Avoidance to Embrace of Possibilities
- 7 Beethoven at Heiligenstadt in 1802: Deconstruction, Integration, and Creativity
- 8 “Mit Verstärkung des Orchesters”: The Orchestra Personnel at the First Public Performance of Beethoven's Eroica
- Part Three Masses
- 9 “Aber lieber Beethoven, was haben Sie denn wieder da gemacht?” Observations on the Performing Parts for the Premiere of Beethoven's Mass in C, Opus 86
- 10 Heart to Heart: Beethoven, Archduke Rudolph, and the Missa solemnis
- 11 God and the Voice of Beethoven
- Part Four Quartets
- 12 “So Here I Am, in the Middle Way”: The Autograph of the “Harp” Quartet and the Expressive Domain of Beethoven’s Second Maturity
- 13 Meaningful Details: Expressive Markings in Beethoven Manuscripts, with a Focus on Opus 127
- 14 The Autograph Score of the Slow Movement of Beethoven’s Last Quartet, Opus 135
- 15 Early German-Language Reviews of Beethoven's Late String Quartets
- Part Five Explorations
- 16 Three Movements or Four? The Scherzo Movements in Beethoven's Early Sonatas
- 17 Utopia and Dystopia Revisited: Contrasted Domains in Beethoven's Middle-Period F-Major and F-Minor Works
- 18 Schooling the Quintjäger
- 19 Cue-Staff Annotations in Beethoven's Piano Works: Reflections and Examples from the Autograph of the Piano Sonata, Opus 101
- 20 Another Little Buck Out of Its Stable
- 21 Beethoven's Cavatina, Haydn's Seasons, and the Thickness of Inscription
- List of Contributors
- Index of Works by Beethoven
- General Index
Summary
On Titles and Inscriptions
The words that composers inscribed in scores of instrumental music, as title, genre, expressive marking, or label, carry a kind of talismanic force. Yet their meanings are passionately argued, and their endless ambiguities have led philosopher Arnold Berleant to insist that “instead of titles telling us what the music means, the music tells us what the titles mean.” Charles Burney is recorded as remarking, around 1791, that Haydn's Seven Last Words of Christ, sometimes known in London as an “instrumental Passion,” is “perhaps, the most sublime composition without words to point out its meaning that has ever been composed.” One asks: what other words are needed to point out the meaning of seven slow movements, each headed by one of Christ's last words or phrases, concluding with a titled earthquake? Within the first fifteen years after its composition, Haydn's Seven Last Words was called “characteristic,” a series of “character pieces or, if one prefers, musical paintings,” and even a “symphonie a programme,” in Koch's Musikalisches Lexikon (1802). One listener's program is another listener's question mark.
On the other hand, the presence of clarifying words, the inscriptions that may “produce all of the effects of the finest and most perfect imitation,” as Adam Smith put it, can also create mysteries, but perhaps of another kind. In the autograph manuscript of the “Pastoral” Symphony, Beethoven's note to his copyist demands that the words “nightingale,” “quail,” and “cuckoo” be printed over the wind solos that appear shortly before the conclusion of “Scene by the Brook,” the second movement. These and other musical figures associated with birds had appeared throughout the movement, yet only here did Beethoven require a verbal inscription. And these are the only inscriptions in the entire work outside the title of the symphony and the title for each movement. Written during the decade of greatest controversy over the representations of nature in Haydn's oratorios, The Creation (1798) and The Seasons (1801), the bird-labels seemed eerily to recall cutting remarks made by Diderot and Rousseau forty-odd years earlier. Pondering obscure subjects in a painting called “The Village Soothsayer” exhibited in the Salon of 1765, Diderot wrote, “They say that a well-meaning painter who’d put a bird in his picture and wanted that bird to be a cock, wrote below it: “‘this is a cock.’”
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- Information
- The New BeethovenEvolution, Analysis, Interpretation, pp. 483 - 528Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2020