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作曲 : Ludwig van Beethoven
Three Gs and an E-flat.
Nothing more. Baby simple.
Anyone might have thought of them, maybe.
But out of them has grown the first movement of a great symphony,
a movement so economical that almost every bar of it
is a direct development of these opening four notes.
People have wondered for years
what it is that endows this musical figure with such potency.
All kinds of fanciful music appreciation theories have been advanced,
but none of these interpretations tells us anything.
The truth is that the real meaning
lies in the notes of all the 500 measures that follow it.
And Beethoven, more than any other composer,
had the ability to find these exactly right notes.
But even he had a gigantic struggle to achieve this rightness,
not only the right notes, but the right rhythms,
the right climaxes, the right harmonies, the right instrumentation.
We know from his notebooks that he wrote down 14 versions
of the melody that opens the second movement of this symphony:
14 versions over a period of 8 years.
You see, a lot of us assume when we hear the symphony today,
that it must have spilled out of Beethoven in one steady gush,
clear and right from the beginning.
But not at all.
Beethoven left pages and pages of discarded material in his own writing,
enough to fill a whole book.
The man rejected, rewrote, scratched out, tore up,
and sometimes altered a passage as many as 20 times.
Beethoven's manuscript looks like a bloody record of a tremendous inner battle.
But before he began to write this wild-looking score,
Beethoven had for 3 years been filling notebooks with sketches.
I have been trying to figure out what his first movement
would have sounded like if he had left some of them in.
I have been experimenting with the music,
speculating on where these sketches might have been intended for use,
and putting them back into those places
to see what the piece might have been had he used them.
And I've come up with some curious and interesting results.
Let's see what they are.
We already know almost too well the opening bars of this symphony.
Now, once Beethoven had made the strong initial statement.
What then? How does he go on to develop it?
He does it like this.
But here is a discarded sketch,
which is also a direct and immediate development of the theme.
Not very good and not very bad, taken all by itself.
But it is a good logical development of the opening figure.
What would the music sound like
if Beethoven had used this sketch as the immediate development of his theme?
We can find out by simply putting the sketch back into the symphony.
And it will sound like this.
It does make a difference, doesn't it?
Not only because it sounds wrong to our ears,
which are used to the version we know,
but also because of the nature of the music itself.
It is so symmetrical that it seems static.
It doesn't seem to want to go anywhere.
And that is fatal at the outset of a symphonic journey.
It doesn't seem to have the mystery about it that the right version has
or that whispering promise of things to come.
The sketch music, on the other hand, gets stuck in its own repetitions.
It just doesn't build.
And Beethoven was, first and foremost, a builder.
Let us look at another rejected sketch.
Again, it is based, as all of them are, on that same opening figure.
Now my guess is that he would have used it somewhere in this passage.
Now let's hear the same passage with the discarded sketch included.
Terrible, isn't it?
This sketch just intrudes itself into the living flow of the music
and stands there, repeating, grounded,
until such time as the music can again take off in its flight.
No wonder Beethoven rejected it.
He, of all people, had a sense of drive, second to none.
This sketch just doesn't drive.
It is again like the first one, static and stuck.
Now, this sketch is different.
It has real excitement and build.
I suspect it was intended for a spot a little later on in the movement.
Here.
This is certainly one of the most thrilling moments in the movement.
It is the beginning of the coda, of the last big push before the end.
Let's see how it would have sounded using the sketch I just played you.
Not at all bad.
It has logic and it builds.
But what Beethoven finally did use has so much more logic,
and builds with so much more ferocity and shock, that there is no comparison.
The other, although good, seems pale beside it.
Now, here is a sketch that I really like
because it sounds like the essential Beethoven style.
This has pain in it, and mystery, and a sense of eruption.
It would have fit very neatly into the coda,
harmonically, rhythmically, and every other way except emotionally.
Here is the spot in the coda I mean.
Now let us add the sketch to it.
Do you hear the difference?
What has happened?
We had to come down from a high point to a low point,
in order to build up again dramatically to a still higher point.
This is in itself good and acceptable dramatic structure.
It happens all the time in plays and novels as well as in music.
But this is no moment for it.
Beethoven has already reached his high point.
He is already in the last lap,
and he wants to smash forward on that high level right to the end.
And he does with astonishing brilliance.
It is this genius for going forward, always forward,
that in every case guides his hand in the struggle with his material,
why even the very ending was written three different ways on this orchestral score.
Here is the first ending he wrote, an abrupt, typically Beethovenian ending.
Why did he reject it?
It seems perfectly all right and satisfying.
But no, he apparently felt that it was too abrupt.
And so he went right on and wrote a second ending that was more extended,
more like a finale, more noble, romantic, majestic.
It went like this.
But as you can see in the manuscript,
this ending is also buried beneath the crossing out.
Now he felt it was too long, too pretentious, perhaps too majestic.
It didn't seem to fit into the scheme of the whole movement
where the main quality is bare, economical, direct statement of the greatest possible force.
And so he tried still a third ending.
And this one worked.
But the odd thing is that as it turned out,
the third ending is even more abrupt than the first.
So you see, he had to struggle and agonize
before he realized so apparently simple a thing,
that the trouble with his first ending was not that it was too short,
but that it was not short enough.
Thus he arrived at the third ending, which is as right as rain.
This is how we hear it today.
And so Beethoven came to the end of his symphonic journey,
for one movement, that is.
Imagine a whole lifetime of this struggle, movement after movement,
symphony after symphony, sonata after quartet, after concerto,
always probing and rejecting in his dedication to perfection,
to the principle of inevitability.
This somehow is the key to the mystery of a great artist,
that for reasons unknown to him or to anyone else,
he will give away his life and his energies
just to make sure that one note follows another inevitably.
But in doing so, he makes us feel at the finish that something checks throughout,
something that follows its own laws consistently,
something we can trust that will never let us down.
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