Беethoven: Классика мен Романтизмдің Көпірі

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Ludwig van Beethoven is one of the most influential figures in the history of classical music. Since his lifetime, when he was "universally accepted as the greatest living composer", Beethoven's music has remained among the most performed, discussed and reviewed in the Western world. Scholarly journals are devoted to analysis of his life and work. He has been the subject of numerous biographies and monographs, and his music was the driving force behind the development of Schenkerian analysis. He is widely considered among the most important composers, and along with Bach and Mozart, his music is the most frequently recorded. Beethoven expanded the formal and emotional scope – not to mention length – of nearly every genre in which he wrote. While he is most famous for his heightening of the symphonic form, Beethoven also had a dramatic influence on the piano sonata, violin sonata, string quartet and piano concerto, among several others. Only in the realm of vocal composition – opera and the mass – was his effect on later generations muted. Beethoven's stylistic innovations bridge the Classical and Romantic periods. The works of his early period brought the Classical form to its highest expressive level, expanding in formal, structural, and harmonic terms the musical idiom developed by predecessors such as Mozart and Haydn. The works of his middle period were more forward looking, contributing to the musical language and thinking of the Romantic era, inspiring composers such as Franz Schubert, Felix Mendelssohn, Robert Schumann, Franz Liszt, Richard Wagner, and Johannes Brahms. His late period works were characterized by formal, harmonic, and structural experimentation at the highest level, often pointing toward contrapuntal tendencies and microscopic textures, as well as an increasingly introverted compositional outlook. Though rightly credited as a major harbinger of the Romantic era in music that followed, Beethoven never abandoned fundamental aesthetical paradigms and a generally objective artistic philosophy characterizing musical Classicism to the same extent that later composers such as Berlioz or even Schubert did.

After 1814, Beethoven's output dropped considerably due to turmoil in his personal life, creative exhaustion after 10 years of near constant musical activity, and the challenge of sustaining the Classical style while other composers like Rossini and Weber were moving towards the Romantic style. This resulted in a stylistic change in Beethoven's work, but his continued adherence to the Classical forms he loved meant that the influence of these late works only became apparent after the time of his own younger contemporaries.</blockquote>Beethoven became more concerned with lyricism in this period. Although his melodic skills have been criticised, Beethoven previously utilised immensely lyrical melodies, and during his middle period, developed a hymn like melodic style in his slow movements. This was intensified in his late period and was combined with a newfound "intimacy and delicacy" which was already apparent in works like the Piano Sonata in A major, Op. 101. Another aspect of this is frequent use of recitative and arioso in instrumental works like the Piano Sonata in A flat major, Op. 110, and the 'beklemmt' passage in the Cavatina of the String Quartet in B flat major, Op. 130.

In his book The Joy of Music, Leonard Bernstein, who, in his television documentary Bernstein on Beethoven admitted that he considered Beethoven the greatest composer who ever lived, nevertheless criticized his orchestration as sometimes being "downright bad", with "unimportant" orchestral parts being given too much prominence. Bernstein attributed this to Beethoven's ever increasing deafness, which presumably rendered him incapable of judging how much louder than another a given instrument might be playing at certain moments. He repeated some of this criticism in the 1982 miniseries Bernstein/Beethoven, a PBS miniseries containing performances of all nine symphonies, several overtures, one of the string quartets, and the Missa solemnis. But at the same time, Bernstein added that what makes Beethoven great is his perfect sense of form – his ability to realize what the next note always had to be.