Beethoven's Masterly Melodies

Alex Ross is hosting a faux-commercial featuring the Masters of 12-Tone Music on his blog. It was a collaberation between long-time Cleveland radio host Robert Conrad and the Clevland Orchestra conductor Matthias Bamert. It's worth a listen, although I didn't find it particularly funny. I realize that it's just a parody, and I shouldn't take it so personally, but sometimes that's easier said than done.

It made me think about a similar commercial one could make for Beethoven's greatest hits, featuring the monotone melody of the second movement of the seventh, the four-note melody of the violin concerto, the kitchiness of Wellington's Victory, the minute of emphatic C-major chords that closes the fifth, the "gloriously arching melody" of the finale of the ninth, and so on. It's all about context. If you take snippets of Second Viennese School music out of context, it sounds ridiculous, but so does Beethoven.

Which brings me to one of my biggest frustrations. There's a sentiment I hear all the time, expressed rather succinctly as a reader posting in Artsjournal's Critical Conversations series back in the summer of '04:

In answer to ArtsJournal.Com's apparently serious, and thus pretentious question "[W]hether or not it is still possible for a Big Idea to animate classical music" may I offer the following as a possibilty: Melody.........singable, danceable, hummable, organ-grindable, uplifting, happiness-making, inspiring, lasting and eternal Melody.

I'll never understand why John McBaine and others are so hard on Beethoven. His melodies were across the board terrible. Most of his symphonies only have one decent melody the whole time. These aren't miniatures; in the entire thirty-five minutes of the fifth symphony, for example, or the fifty minutes of the third, there's just one good melody each. Quite the opposite of "lasting and eternal Melody." What about his greatest accomplishment, the ninth? The first movement has no discernible melody (going by the organ-grinder test); the second's melody is too hurried and disjointed to hum; the third movement eventually settles in to a nice melody, but it takes a couple of variations to finally get there; and the fourth features a melody that would embarrass someone writing songs for the beer hall. If one were to apply a red marker to clean up the bad melodies in Beethoven's ninth, the result would last about six minutes. I for one am very happy, knowing that Beethoven cared little enough about melody to write his entire opera the way he did.








I hadn't been planning to go to Schoenberg's 1st Chamber symphony/Beethoven's 9th this week at the BSO, but now I'm all fired up and ready to get my tickets.