Beethoven's Compositional Choices

Beethoven's Compositional Choices ("Studies in the Criticism and Theory of Music" Series). By Janet M. Levy. Pp. x + 101. (University of Pennsylvania Press.) 1982. £18.75.

We have here an example, of an entirely different kind of analysis, one that is not concerned with interpretation or evaluation, nor even with understanding, but purely with matters of technique. Though the title is obscure, and somewhat meaningless, this study is actually a close comparison of the revised version of the first movement of the Quartet in F, op. l8 no. i with that of the version Beethoven presented to Kari Amenda two years earlier. There is an extremely detailed examination of each revision, with full quotations from the two versions, and the reasons for revision are discussed, such as improvements in articulation, texture and contrast. This discussion is largely sensible, and useful for students of composition, though far too much taken up with the dissection of minutiae for any other kind of reader. It would make a very good study for students to do themselves, perhaps for a thesis.

One could say more about the short preface by Leonard B. Meyer, general editor of the series, who does not believe in debate about first principles or "fundamentals" but in building "a corpus of coherent theoretical concepts" while disregarding these. One gathers that he is responsible for the clumsy title of the monograph. As an illustration of the relevance of first principles to coherent theoretical concepts we can remark that, though this study is valid enough in its limited context, it still adheres to the incomprehensible point of view, seemingly universal among musical "peepers and botanisers", that, if a theme or a motif (Leitmotiv) — here a "turn motive" — is repeated on a different degree of the scale and, therefore, in a different "key", it is simply for the sake of changing key. Does this apply to a Wagnerian Leitmotiv^ In a fugue, it is to bring in another voice, higher or lower in range. One would think, just from common sense, that it is rather because this alone makes "motivic saturation" possible, since repeating it in the same key would be intolerably monotonous. Naturally, motivic saturation can still be monotonous if overdone, and Beethoven removed 20 per cent of the occurrences in the second version, as his judgment matured. Form (to a composer) is "melody writ large", not a perpetual obsession with the mechanics of equal temperament; but the latter makes large-scale forms possible without monotony. It is for lack of understanding of fundamentals that the means are for ever being confused with the end.
M.McM.