Composition: Study of the Revision Process

HOW A GREAT SYMPHONY WAS WRITTEN Leonard Bernstein Three G's and an E-flat. Nothing more. Baby simple. Anyone might have thought of them. Maybe. But out of them has grown the first movement of a great symphony. A movement so economical and consistent that almost every bar of it is a direct development of these opening four notes. People have wondered for years what it is that endows this musical figure with such potency. All kinds of fanciful music appreciation theories have been advanced. That it is based on the song of a bird Beethoven heard in the Vienna woods. That it is Fate knocking at the door. That it is a friend of his knocking at the door. And more of the same. But none of these interpretations tells us anything. The truth is that the real meaning lies in the notes that follow it. All the notes of all the five hundred measures that follow it. And Beethoven more than any other composer before or after him, I think, had the ability to find these exactly right notes. But even he who had that ability to such a remarkable degree had a gigantic struggle to achieve this rightness: not only the right notes, but the right rhythms, the right climaxes, the right harmonies, the right instrumentation. We are going to try to trace that struggle for you. Now all of us are familiar with the composer's struggle to find the right melodies and the right thematic material. We have all been privileged to watch Schumann and Brahms and other greats of the silver screen agonizing over the keyboard as they search for the right tune. We have all seen Jimmy Cagney as George M. Cohan dramatically alone on a bare stage with a solitary work light picking out the immortal notes of "Over There." Or Cornell Wilde as Chopin eking out the nocturne in E-flat. But spurious or not the struggle is real. Beethoven too shared in that struggle. We know from his notebooks that he wrote down fourteen versions of the melody that opens the second movement of this symphony. Fourteen versions over a period of eight years. This is the way we know it today. Now the original sketch for this goes this way. Another sketch for the same melody is quite different. After eight years of experimenting with eleven others, he ultimately combined the most interesting and graceful elements of all versions and finally arrived at the tune which is familiar to us now. But now that he has his theme, the real work begins. Now comes the job of giving symphonic meaning to the theme. And this meaning becomes clear only after we have arrived at the very last note of the entire movement. Thus the famous four notes are not in themselves susceptible of meaning in the music appreciation sense. They are really only a springboard for the symphonic continuity to come. That is the real function of what is called form: to take us on a varied and complicated half hour journey of continuous symphonic progress. In order to do this, the composer must have his own inner road map. He must have the ability to know what the next note has to be. To convey a sense of rightness, a sense that whatever note succeeds the last is the only possible note that could happen at that precise instant. As we have said, Beethoven could do this better than anyone. But he also struggled with all his force in the doing. Let's try to follow this struggle graphically. To begin with, Beethoven chose seven different instruments with which to begin his first movment: the flute, clarinet, first violin, second violin, viola, cello, and bass. These seven instruments appear on the first page of his manuscript score. But there is something crossed out: the part of the flute. So we know that Beethoven for one second was going to include the flute. So why did he cross it out? Well let's hear how it would have sounded with the flute left in. The high piping notes of the flute don't seem to fit in with the generally rude and brusque atmosphere of the opening bars. Beethoven clearly wanted these notes to be a strong masculine utterance. And he therefore orchestrated entirely with instruments that play normally in the register of the male singing voice. The flute being the instrumental equivalent of the soprano would be intruding here like a delicate lady at a club smoker. So out came the flute. And now let's hear how masculine it sounds without it. You see, a lot of us assume when we hear the symphony today that it must have spilled out of Beethoven in one steady gush, clear and right from the beginning. But not at all. Beethoven left pages and pages of discarded material in his own writing, enough to fill a whole book. The man rejected and rewrote, scratched out, tore up, and sometimes altered a passage as many as twenty times. Beethoven's manuscript looks like a bloody record of a tremendous inner battle. But before he began to write this wild looking score, Beethoven had for three years been filling notebooks with sketches, some that he ultimately discarded as not right. I have been trying to figure out what his first movement would have sounded like if he had left some of them in. I have been experimenting with the music, speculating on where these sketchkes might have been intended for use, and putting them back into those places, to see what the piece might have been had he used them. And I have come up with some curious and interesting results. Let's see what they are. We already know almost too well the opening bars of this symphony. Now once Beethoven had made this strong initial statement, what then? How does he go on to develop it? He does it like this. But here is a discarded sketch which is also a direct and immediate development of the theme. Not very good and not very bad taken all by itself. But it is a good logical development of the opening figure. But what would the music sound like if Beethoven had used this sketch as the immediate development of his theme? We can find out by simply putting the sketch back into the symphony and it will sound like this. It does make a difference, doesn't it? Not only because it sounds wrong to our ears, which are used to the version we know. But also because of the nature of the music itself. It is so symmetrical that it seems static. It doesn't seem to want to go anywhere. And that is fatal at the outset of a symphonic journey. It doesn't seem to have the mystery about it that the right version has, of that whispering promise of things to come. The sketch music on the other hand gets stuck in its own repetition. It just doesn't build. And Beethoven was first and foremost a builder. Let us look at another rejected sketch. Here is one that sounds like this. Again it is based as all of them are on that same opening figure. Now my guess is that he would have used it somewhere in this passage. Now let's hear the same passage with the discarded sketch included. Terrible, isn't it? This sketch just intrudes itself into the living flow of the music and stands there repeating, grounded, until such time as the music can again take off in its flight. No wonder Beethoven rejected it. For he of all people had a sense of drive to his music that was second to none. This sketch just doesn't drive. It is again like the first one, static and stuck. Now this sketch is different. It has real excitement and build. I suspect it was intended for a spot a little later on in the movement. Here. This is certainly one of the most climactic and thrilling moments in the movement. It is the beginning of the coda, of the last big push before the end. Let's see how it would have sounded, using the sketch I just played you. Not at all bad. It has logic and it builds. But what Beethoven finally did use has so much more logic and builds with so much more ferocity and shock that there is no comparison. The other, although good, seems pale beside it. Now here is a sketch that I really like because it sounds like the essential Beethoven style. This has pain in it and mystery and a sense of eruption. It would have fitted very neatly into the coda, harmonically, rhythmically and every other way, except emotionally. Here is the spot in the coda I mean. Now let us add the sketch to it. Do you hear the difference? What has happened? We had to come down from a high point to a low point in order to build up again dramatically to a still higher point. This is in itself good and acceptable dramatic structure. It happens all the time in plays and in novels as well as in music. But this is no moment for it. Beethoven has already reached his high point. He is already in the last lap and he wants to smash forward on that high level right to the end. And he does with astonishing brilliance. It is this genius for going forward, always forward, that in every case guides his hand in the struggle with his material. Why even the very ending was written three different ways on this orchestral score. Here is the first ending he wrote: an abrupt typically Beethovenian ending. Why did he reject it? It seems perfectly all right and satisfying. But no he apparently felt that it was too abrupt. And so he went right on and wrote a second ending that was more extended, more like a finale, more noble, romantic, majestic. It went like this. But in the manuscript this ending is also buried beneath the crossing out. Now he felt it was too long, too pretentious. Perhaps too majestic. It didn't seem to fit into the scheme of the whole movement, where the main quality is bare economical direct statement of the greatest possible force. And so he tried still a third ending and this one worked. But the odd thing is that, as it turns out, the third ending is even more abrupt than the first. So you see he had to struggle and agonize before he realized so apparently simple a thing: that the trouble with the first ending was not that it was too short but that it was not short enough. Thus he arrived at the third ending, which is as right as rain. This is how we hear it today. And so Beethoven came to the end of his symphonic journey: for one movement, that is. Imagine a whole lifetime of this struggle. Movement after movement, symphony and symphony, sonata after quartet after concerto. Always probing and rejecting in his dedication to perfection for the principle of inevitabilty. This somehow is the key to the mystery of a great artist. That for reasons unknown to him or to anyone else, that he will give away his life and his energies, just to make sure that one note follows another inevitably. But in doing so, he makes us feel at the finish that something checks throughout. Something that follows its own laws consistently. Something we can trust: that will never let us down.