Peter Goldstein <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>With all the talk about popular musicians' borrowing from the classics,
>I wonder if anyone's interested in a thread on classical composers'
>borrowings from each other. Back in the early 70s I did a couple of
>Classical Music Plagiarism Orgies on WHRB, and, as the saying goes, I got
>a million of 'em.
In an article on Brahms in the NYR a few years back, Charles Rosen does
a fine debunking of these "borrowing" myths:
"As for Brahms's reminiscences of other composers' melodies, it should
be noted that although there are twelve notes of the chromatic scale,
and one might think that the permutation of twelve elements will give
a large variety of forms, nevertheless almost all tonal melodies
outline in some way the three notes of the tonic triad (CEG in C
major, for example), and the permutation of three elements provides
only a very small number of basic forms. Each tonal melody is therefore
structurally identical with thousands of others. Most of the
resemblances that one finds are consequently trivial: the second
theme of the slow movement of Haydn's "Drumroll" Symphony is remarkably
like the folk song that opens the last of Bach's "Goldberg" Variations,
and the coda to the first movement of Beethoven's Sonata in D Major,
opus 10, no. 3, is exactly the same as the beginning of the song "How
Dry I Am," and is also the exact inversion of the opening of the F
major second theme in the finale of Brahms's Sonata for Piano, opus 5.
Nevertheless, Haydn did not know the Bach variations, and the passage
in Brahms is not an upside-down souvenir of Beethoven's opus 10, no.
3 (or a forecasting of a later popular tune), but an adaptation of
Beethoven's use of a chorale tune in the rondo of the Sonata in C
Major, opus 2, no. 3. The pitches of these two hymnlike melodies,
however, are entirely different, but the rhythm and the texture are
the same, and the function of the tune is also identical: Brahms
learned from Beethoven that a lyrical chorale placed at this point
of a brilliant and agitated finale was a good idea. He studied
Beethoven not to steal tunes, but to learn how to compose. Borrowed
melodies are mostly inadvertent and rarely important: the first two
bars of the main theme of Mozart's overture to The Magic Flute are
the same as the beginning of a sonata by Clementi, but this was
interesting largely to Clementi, who pointed it out to everyone for
years ("Mozart heard me play this piece")."
Ulvi
[log in to unmask]
|