Seeing a mention on someone’s Substack post (I don’t now remember whose) of Stravinsky’s Harvard lectures, not having previously read them, I ordered a copy. The overall gist of the lecture series is that composing is the hard work of discovery within the boundaries of order, creating something sensible out of the endless possibilities of chaos, your tools being the basic elements of music.
He takes the elements of music and discusses them in turn. One quote which resonated with me was in his discussion about melody.
“The capacity for melody is a gift. This means that it is not within our power to develop it by study. But at least we can regulate its evolution by perspicacious self-criticism. The example of Beethoven would suffice to convince us that, of all the elements of music, melody is the most accessible to the ear and the least capable of acquisition. Here we have one of the greatest creators of music who spent his whole life imploring the aid of this gift which he lacked. So that this admiral deaf man developed his extraordinary faculties in direct proportion to the resistance offered him by the one he lacked, just the way a blind man in his eternal night develops the sharpness of his auditive sense.”
Just my opinion but I think he hit the nail on the head here. Beethoven’s music always struck me as a titanic struggle with the tools that he never quite mastered – melody and counterpoint. The results were extraordinary – but are rarely delivered with the ease, perfection and eloquence of those who naturally possessed those innate talents. Bach for one. The example Stravinsky gives as an opposite to Beethoven is Bellini, a man from whom melodies just poured out seemingly without effort. That’s not an example I would have chosen myself. After reading the paragraph I spend several hours listening to Schubert songs. Now there was a talent for melody.
Notwithstanding the above, while Beethoven is far from one of my personal favorites, his imagination was beyond compare and music (again just my opinion) such as the late string quartets, late piano sonatas, put him on the mountain top. But I always found much of his other music over reliant on scales, arpeggios and chords – without a gorgeous, heartbreaking melody to be found. In short, a great but uneven composer.
Off on a tangent, I was recently listening to the symphonies of Brahms and Gernsheim. The latter also wrote four symphonies, each one prior to Brahms writing his. If you were listening to one without knowing whose work it was, you might wonder to yourself “did Brahms write more than the four symphonies I know?” The sound fabric is so similar. Given that Gernsheim wrote each of his four symphonies first, perhaps calling his music Brahmsian is wrong. Rather, the reverse, Brahms’ symphonies are Gernsheimian!
It seems to me that of the two, Gernsheim was the better orchestrator and had a real mastery and control over form. But returning to the theme with which I started, Brahms had a greater natural gift of melody – and it is that which makes him the greater composer. His symphonies sing gloriously with unforgettable incomparable melodies.
