Beethoven and C minor
The compositions of Ludwig van Beethoven in the key of C minor carry special significance for many listeners. His works in this key have been said to be powerful and emotive, evoking dark and stormy sentiments.[1] BackgroundDuring the Classical era, C minor was used infrequently and often for works of a particularly turbulent cast.[citation needed] Mozart, for instance, wrote only very few works in this key, but they are among his most dramatic ones (the twenty-fourth piano concerto, the fourteenth piano sonata, the Masonic Funeral Music, the Adagio and Fugue in C minor and the Great Mass in C minor, for instance). Beethoven chose to write a much larger proportion of his works in this key, especially traditionally "salon" (i.e. light and diverting) genres such as sonatas and trios, as a sort of conscious rejection of older aesthetics, valuing the "sublime" and "difficult" above music that is "merely" pleasing to the ear.[2] Paul Schiavo wrote that C minor is a key "that Beethoven associated with pathos, struggle, and expressive urgency."[3] The key is said to represent for Beethoven a "stormy, heroic tonality";[4] he uses it for "works of unusual intensity";[5] and it is "reserved for his most dramatic music".[6] Pianist and scholar Charles Rosen writes:[7]
A characteristic 19th-century view is that of the musicologist George Grove, writing in 1898:[8]
Grove's view could be said[citation needed] to reflect the view of many participants in the Romantic age of music, who valued Beethoven's music above all for its emotional force. Not all critics have taken a positive view of Beethoven's habitual return to the tonality of C minor. Musicologist Joseph Kerman faults Beethoven's reliance upon the key, particularly in his early works, as a hollow mannerism:
Of the works said to embody the Beethovenian "C minor mood", probably the canonical example is the Fifth Symphony. Beethoven's multi-movement works in C minor tended to have a slow movement in a contrasting major key, nearly always the subdominant of C minor's relative key (E♭ major): A♭ major, providing "a comfortingly cool shadow or short-lived respite",[10] but also the relative key (E♭ major, Op. 1/3), the tonic major (C major, Opp. 9/3, 18/4, 111) and the sharpened mediant major (E major, Op. 37), the last setting a precedent for Brahms' third Piano Quartet, Grieg's Piano Concerto and Rachmaninoff's second Piano Concerto. In his essay "Beethoven's Minority",[11] Kerman observes that Beethoven associated C minor with both its relative (E♭) and parallel (C) majors, and was continually haunted by a vision of C minor moving to C major. While many of Beethoven's sonata-form movements in other minor keys, particularly finales, used the minor dominant (v) as the second key area – predicting a recapitulation of this material in the minor mode[10] – his use of the relative major, E♭ (III) as the second key area for all but two of his C minor sonata-form movements, in many cases, facilitated a restatement of part or all of the second theme in C major in the recapitulation. One exception, the first movement of the Piano Sonata No. 32, uses A♭ major (VI) as its second key area, also allowing a major-mode restatement in the recapitulation – and the other exception, the Coriolan Overture, is only loosely in sonata form and still passes through III in the exposition and major-mode I in the recapitulation. Furthermore, of the final movements of Beethoven's multi-movement works in C minor, three are in C major throughout (Opp. 67, 80, 111), one finishes in C major (Op. 37), and a further four (along with one first movement) end with a Picardy third (Opp. 1/3, 9/3, 10/1, 18/4, 111 i). List of worksHere is a list of works by Beethoven in C minor that were felt by George Grove to be characteristic of how Beethoven used this key:[8]
See alsoReferences
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