Micro Music Laboratories - Symphonic Music, Peter Huebner comments on his Symphonic Creation 05

Until now, no musical form has proven more suitable for educating our inner human abilities in the process of music creation and music recognition than the classical symphony - and particularly the sonata movement form, which provides a kind of external schedule for the systematic musical evolution of our inner liberated human strengths.

Thus – as far as the optimal musical presentation of the evolution of the liberated inner human strengths was concerned – in the symphony our great classical composers concentrated primarily on this first movement, contained in the form of a sonata movement, and then usually attached to this self-contained work, more for general musical edification, three further movements with different tempi. Generally though, these movements were not thematically related to the first movement.

In his ninth symphony, Beethoven wanted to span a bridge over the different movements and so reintroduced into the fourth movement musical elements from the first three movements.

His success with this integration was, however, limited, because the themes of the first three movements and the new theme of the fourth movement were not originally contrapuntally related to one another.

Thus, Beethoven had to line up the themes of the first three movements like momentos in the manner of a potpourri.

Nevertheless, Beethoven's determined desire for the integral structuring of the symphony as such, is clearly evident in his ninth symphony and in this respect points unequivocally into the future of the symphony as an integral musical unit.

That Beethoven did not and could not succeed with the musical integration of his ninth symphony is down to the fact that this symphony did not originate in his consciousness as a single unit from the very beginning. Instead he created the four movements historically, one after the other and relatively independent of one another.

One should not conclude from this apparently critical view of Beethoven's endeavour that he was essentially incapable of realising this, his last great symphonic aim, the unity of the symphony. As the well-known symphonist least prepared to compromise, Beethoven did, in the fourth movement of his ninth symphony, at least formulate for the first time the demand for the musical integration of the entire symphony as a single unit – that is, all four movements of the symphony –, and one can assume from this, that he would have achieved this in his tenth symphony.

<< >>