 The Clarinet BBoard
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Author: vjoet
Date: 2009-10-05 16:28
The following from wiki leaves me just flabbergast (though I agree with the Mendelssohn estimation). I don't know if I should laugh or cry!
[Ferruccio Busoni (April 1, 1866 – July 27, 1924)] had definite views on some composers. Franz Schubert he considered "a gifted amateur". He felt Beethoven did not have the technique to express his emotions. He ridiculed Robert Schumann's Carnaval. But he considered Felix Mendelssohn "a master of undisputed greatness" and "an heir of Mozart". He was planning to play some of Mendelssohn's Songs without Words in a series of recitals in London in the year of his death.[3]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferruccio_Busoni
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Author: brycon
Date: 2009-10-05 17:11
Plenty of famous composers severely criticized others; it's just a matter of opinion.
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Author: mrn
Date: 2009-10-05 19:53
Actually, to call Schubert a "gifted amateur" isn't too far off the mark.
Schubert did much, if not most of his composing on an amateur basis (i.e., for no pay). And he certainly was gifted!
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Author: GBK
Date: 2009-10-05 20:02
It is the opinion of many music historians that the greatest child (composer) prodigy was Mendelssohn.
...GBK
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Author: mrn
Date: 2009-10-05 20:14
GBK wrote:
> It is the opinion of many music historians that the greatest
> child (composer) prodigy was Mendelssohn.
I can believe that. I heard a program a few years ago on the radio (I think it was Karl Haas's program, but I'm not positive) where they played a number of different childhood-composed pieces of great composers.
They played a piece or two by Mozart, and they were OK, but kind of musically immature and not that interesting. But then they played one of Mendelssohn's childhood pieces, and it seemed much more sophisticated and musically mature to me. Mendelssohn's piece was the best on the program, by far.
They played some childhood pieces by other composers, too, but I can't remember who they were. I just remember how impressed I was with Mendelssohn and how comparatively unimpressed I was with the other composers on the program, including (to my surprise) Mozart, whom I thought of as the archetypal child prodigy.
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Author: LarryBocaner ★2017
Date: 2009-10-05 20:50
Mendelssohn wrote "Midsummer Night's Dream" overture when he was only 17 -- a true masterpiece!
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Author: Ed Palanker
Date: 2009-10-05 21:43
It took Brahms forever to allow his symphonies and string quartets to be made public because he felt he was in the shadow of the great composer of those mediums. He didn't premiere either of those until he was already in his 40s. He considered Beethoven as one of the greatest, if not the greatest of all, composers. So much for Busoni. Compared to Beethoven, well, there is no comparison is there? ESP http://eddiesclarinet.com
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Author: Chris P
Date: 2009-10-06 11:10
The thing with critics is that they can talk the talk, but they can't walk the walk.
Former oboe finisher
Howarth of London
1998 - 2010
The opinions I express are my own.
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Author: Chris Card
Date: 2009-10-06 11:21
Take a look at the "Lexicon of Musical Invective" for more colourful opinions :
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Lexicon-Musical-Invective-Composers-Beethovens/dp/039332009X
Chris
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Author: skygardener
Date: 2009-10-06 11:56
If anyone can get their hands on some of the commentaries of Berlioz, they are great. Possibly some of the funniest reading you have set eyes on. One of my particular favorites was an article where he was complaining of the changes in the orchestra from an ensemble that produced a range of varied colors to a big machine that was just designed to produce more volume than before. One particular sentence-
"And then came the big instruments of A.Sax, which are to the orchestra what a canon is to a hand pistol."
Post Edited (2009-10-06 11:56)
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Author: LesterV
Date: 2009-10-06 16:25
Regarding shocking criticism of composers by another composer, It is hard to top Mozart's criticism of the Stamitz brothers, Carl and Anton. In a letter to his father, Leopold, Wolfgang described the pair as:
"They are indeed two wretched scribblers, gamblers, swillers and adulterers - not the kind of people for me."
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Author: Lelia Loban ★2017
Date: 2009-10-06 19:00
>>If anyone can get their hands on some of the commentaries of Berlioz, they are great. Possibly some of the funniest reading you have set eyes on. One of my particular favorites was an article where he was complaining of the changes in the orchestra from an ensemble that produced a range of varied colors to a big machine that was just designed to produce more volume than before. One particular sentence-
"And then came the big instruments of A.Sax, which are to the orchestra what a canon is to a hand pistol."
>>
I haven't read the whole context of that comment, bu is it completely clear that Berlioz meant what he wrote about saxophones pejoratively? -- because Berlioz was one of the few and earliest composers to include saxophones (good parts, too!) in some of his orchestral pieces. Maybe he *liked* cannons. But snippy commentary seems to have been a popular indoor sport among French musicians of Berlioz's lifetime. He dished it, but he had to take it, too, as the victim of some silly dismissals by French Academy composers.
Lelia
http://www.scoreexchange.com/profiles/Lelia_Loban
To hear the audio, click on the "Scorch Plug-In" box above the score.
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Author: mrn
Date: 2009-10-06 19:15
skygardener wrote:
<<One of my particular favorites was an article where he was complaining of the changes in the orchestra from an ensemble that produced a range of varied colors to a big machine that was just designed to produce more volume than before.>>
That's really funny coming from Berlioz.
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Author: skygardener
Date: 2009-10-06 20:35
That statement was part of an article that talked about the recent enlargement of the concert hall. He also said that singers have essentially gone from singing to yelling to try and fill the new bigger halls with sound.
--
"I haven't read the whole context of that comment, bu is it completely clear that Berlioz meant what he wrote about saxophones pejoratively?"
The statement was about Sax's instruments in general, I assume that he was referring to the Saxhorns and Saxtrombas etc.
One of the particular patterns that one notices about Sax's instruments is that they were all designed and produced in families, from high to low.
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Author: Dileep Gangolli
Date: 2009-10-07 00:33
I don't know about you but when I go to concerts, I hear a lot more Schubert, Beethoven, and Schumann than I do Busoni.
Case closed.
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Author: chris moffatt
Date: 2009-10-07 16:23
In a letter Tchaikowsky referred to "that scoundrel Brahms..". I always thought that said more about Tchaikowsky than about Brahms
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Author: spartanclarinet
Date: 2009-10-07 19:30
Oscar Wilde on Richard Wagner: "Wagner's music is better than it sounds."
Justin O'Dell
http://web.mac.com/clarinetquintet/iWeb/MSUClarinetStudio/MSU.html
http://www.music.msu.edu/people/detail.php?id=83
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Author: Dileep Gangolli
Date: 2009-10-07 23:57
Justin,
Sorry I cannot make your workshop this next weekend but have work. Would have made the trip from Chicago.
I enjoyed some of your MP3 clips that were linked to the MSU site. Very nice playing.
DRG
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Author: mrn
Date: 2009-10-08 02:25
I think this Wikipedia article may have taken Busoni's statements of opinion out of context. I was just flipping through some selected letters of Busoni on Google Books, and most of the comments Busoni makes about Beethoven, for instance, seem to be positive. For example, Busoni writes in a letter dated October 12, 1910 to Hans Huber, "In Beethoven I hear great humanity, freedom, and originality..."
It's entirely possible that Busoni's statement about Beethoven "lacking technique" was not intended to say anything negative about Beethoven at all. Beethoven's palette of dynamic and harmonic colors, built upon the musical traditions of the classical era, was indeed small compared to those of later composers (even though Beethoven was obviously a great innovator in his own time), and so his ability to express his deeply-felt emotions through music was limited in that sense. Beethoven simply didn't have the same kind of sophisticated musical vocabulary of later composers because such vocabulary did not exist at the time (it took time for that vocabulary to develop--Beethoven's music being an important early step in that development).
While it's true that you don't hear Busoni played that often, I think Busoni was probably more important as a teacher and musical thinker than as a composer himself--sort of like Nadia Boulanger.
Post Edited (2009-10-08 03:42)
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Author: vjoet
Date: 2009-10-08 14:26
Hi Michael (mrn),
Well, that adds some balance. I'm glad you clarified the picture.
Now, I'm not a Mozart expert, as quite a few on this board are. I'm just an amateur with long exposure and appreciation of Mozart. From this standpoint, I see him as the one who codified / solidified the classical school, and not as an innovator who pushed the envelope, as Beethoven did. Where Mozart is at his best, he is sublime, but like Beethoven (eg Wellington's Victory) Mozart produced his share of hack work. Perhaps hack work is too strong a term, perhaps "elevator music" is a better term. But in fairness, we have to take his patrons' requirements into account, for they did need background table music.
My impression is that Haydn is equal in stature to Mozart, and opened the way for Beethoven in his more daring harmonies in some of his later works, and in his use of non-uniform phrase lengths (2-bar, 3-bar, 4-bar, 5-bar).
Yeah, I'm rather rambling. Just trying to understand for myself how it all fits together.
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Author: lrooff
Date: 2009-10-10 14:02
Both composers and critics have a long-standing tradition of sniping at one another. My entire library is packed away while we remodel the house (80+ boxes of books), but in one called "Instruments of the Orchestra and Their Uses" from 1980, there are an amazing number of comments by musicians and composers that are quite critical of each other. I particularly remember a discussion of pieces by Berlioz and his use of large orchestras which refers to "...Berlioz, with his usual inordinate demands...". One can only imagine what would have been said about the orchestration of Mahler's 2nd.
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Author: awm34
Date: 2009-10-10 15:13
It's my (uninformed) opinion that Beethoven's high regard for Haydn was based on what I'd call the "muscularity" of Haydn's music -- routinely part of Beethoven's works and lacking in Mozart's.
Alan Messer
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Author: Tony Pay ★2017
Date: 2009-10-10 18:55
Oh, enough of all this.
You can understand it all on the following model:
Nondescript person A quotes eminent person X's negative opinion of Y, who is almost universally regarded as great.
X's value is labile, because few people have knowledge of his music, never mind its quality. (In fact, Busoni's music is unjustly neglected. I was greatly taken with his opera Arlecchino when I happened to hear it in Montepulciano a few years ago. And there is much else, including other operas.)
So then, nondescript person A, denigrating person X on the basis of X's opinion of Y, and gaining support from people who have never heard anything of X, but who admire well-known Y, thereby becomes LESS nondescript.
Returning to the real world, I have encountered nondescript person A previously.
What I can say of him is that he is nondescript.
Actually, none of us -- including me -- is fit musically to LICK BUSONI'S BOOTS.
Tony
Post Edited (2009-10-11 07:56)
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Author: stevensfo
Date: 2009-10-10 19:54
-- "My impression is that Haydn is equal in stature to Mozart, and opened the way for Beethoven in his more daring harmonies in some of his later works, and in his use of non-uniform phrase lengths (2-bar, 3-bar, 4-bar, 5-bar).
Yeah, I'm rather rambling. Just trying to understand for myself how it all fits together." --
I don't agree with you at all that Haydn is equal in stature to Mozart, but I do agree with the last sentence.
We are and have all been rambling for many centuries. But it is in this way that new ideas are discovered. Give me interesting rambling over boring reiterated conservative statements any day. There's nothing worse than having a conversation stopped in its tracks.
Steve
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Author: mrn
Date: 2009-10-10 20:42
Tony Pay wrote:
> You can understand it all on the following model:
>
> Nondescript person A quotes eminent person X's negative opinion
> of Y, who is almost universally regarded as great.
Leaving aside person A for the moment, I'd say that if X has a negative opinion of Y, there is something to be learned from that, either from X about Y (or about music in general) or from X about himself or the musical style/movement he belongs to.
I'd prefer to understand where X is coming from than simply to discredit X just because he has something negative to say about Y. Chances are good X knows or understands or can hear something I don't--this is especially true if what X says seems contrary to conventional wisdom.
In fact, one need not agree with X to learn something from their opinion. This is especially true if X is a highly eminent musician. A lot of times, it's valuable just to be able to understand the mindset of X.
For example, Weber's statement that the chromatic bassline near the end of mvt. 1 of Beethoven's 7th Symphony was evidence that Beethoven was "ripe for the madhouse" underscores how radically innovative this feature of the work was for the time. Most people today probably wouldn't think twice about a bassline like that--it's pretty "tame" compared to what most of us are used to from popular music, for instance. So we can chuckle a little about Weber's comment, but on a serious note, it can help up put the music in a historical context.
If nothing else, if I ever happen to play a piece written by X, I would want to know something of X's opinions about musical aesthetics.
Incidentally, on the topic of Busoni himself, I recently heard for the first time his Concertino for clarinet, which is a really neat work and sounds like it would be a blast to play. You can sense from the work Busoni had a great admiration for Mozart (as also indicated in Busoni's comment comparing Mendelssohn to Mozart), because parts of the piece sound very Mozart-like, even down to the harmony and orchestration. He even quotes a line from Mozart's Kegelstatt trio about 3/4 of the way through the piece.
Post Edited (2009-10-10 21:46)
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Author: Tony Pay ★2017
Date: 2009-10-11 12:07
Mike wrote:
>> In fact, one need not agree with X to learn something from their opinion. This is especially true if X is a highly eminent musician. A lot of times, it's valuable just to be able to understand the mindset of X. >>
It's pretty obvious that someone who works creatively has to REJECT some other people's solutions to the problems of the medium in order to find their own way. Hence Stravinsky's rejection of Puccini, Tchaikovsky's rejection of Brahms, Britten's rejection of Brahms, and so on.
I don't think WE learn anything much -- especially when we have to come upon it filtered through person A.
Tony
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Author: mrn
Date: 2009-10-11 15:29
Tony Pay wrote:
> I don't think WE learn anything much -- especially when we have
> to come upon it filtered through person A.
Or when all we have is the negative remark without the context in which it was made. It's one thing to know that X didn't like Y--it's quite another thing to know that there is something specific about Y's music that X didn't like or rejected and why.
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