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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   2124 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 30, 2025

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This is Beethoven 3 erasure.

“I’ve been working on a symphony to celebrate Napoleon doing away with monarchy and the influence of Rome!”

“Have you heard? He’s proclaimed himself emperor and cut a deal with the Pope.”

“As I was saying, I’ve been working on a symphony about heroism, just in general.”

A perfectly fine symphony that will adorn the Hall-of-Very-Good for eternity to come.

It's his second best symphony, and it quite literally inaugurated the romantic era.

There are not many composers who have ever written a piece better than Beethoven 3.

Symphony 1 is in the hall of very good. #3 is epoch-defining.

3 is not even better than 7, which only has one really good movement.

There are not many composers who have ever written a piece better than Beethoven 3.

Not many worth talking about. Any composer worth remembering 100 years later has at least one piece better than Beethoven 3.

it quite literally inaugurated the romantic era

Okay, I’ll bite. I don’t like the C# in measure 7. It’s not set-up, and it doesn’t go anywhere. I know people always talk about how it “changed classical music forever”, but really that just means that everyone else used it as a jumping-off point for ideas that work much better.

Have you heard Bernstein's analysis of the first movement?

Great video and cool website!

I mean, it goes to D, but it's also a diminished chord that doesn't resolve hardly at all, and that's the point of it. You don't have to resolve everything, you don't have to be like Mozart forever. Someone had to be first, and it happened to be Beethoven, who was probably the greatest ever, and cast a shadow as long as anyone.

I also quite like the third movement.

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