httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TauWURuddFI

Sonata no. 29 (“Hammerklavier”), Largo e Allegro Risoluto.  Alfred Brendel, piano.

On this date in 1827 Beethoven died.

Here’s the 19 year old Frye on Beethoven:

Beethoven’s attack on the sonata form is more subtle [than Wagner].  Broadly speaking, it centres around the pictorial approach, and, hence, the compression and economy of the Mozartian sonata disappears, and the sonata takes on a greatly enlarged aspect.  The speed no longer swings about a balance, but the various movements (Beethoven expanded the three‑movement form to a four‑movement one) are rhythmically contrasted.  The middle theme of Mozart is expanded to a tremendous development section*a purely pictorial idea which analyses every implication of the given themes and holds them up to the light, as it were.  A similar impulse leads Beethoven to develop the coda.  The egocentricity of his later forms is, if often exaggerated, nonetheless present, and it can hardly be altogether an accident that the greatest of romantic musicians became deaf in his later years, whereby the individual concentration power would be so much augmented.  There is in Beethoven, however, a good deal of the will‑to‑power spirit as well.  In his later works he is no longer content merely with a spatial attack on the sonata form; he must probe deeper and analyse the fundamental secrets of the time‑problems in his art form.  In consequence, the two works of his last period which are on perhaps the largest scale deal first of all with an exhaustive and distinctly pessimistic and despairing analysis of the sonata form, ending in a slow movement, and followed by a terrific burst of energy which tears to pieces, in the one case the fugue, in the other the oratorio.  The two works in question are Hammerclavier Sonata, op. 106, and the Choral Symphony. (Student Essays)

(Thanks to Bob Denham for the quote.)

Finale of the 9th Symphony after the jump.

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XMrdhgWR9Zk

On this date in 1918 Claude Debussy died.

From the first entry of Frye’s 1942 diary, July 12th;

The French have consistently ignored the great forms, the sonata and the fugue, and have stuck to dainty descriptive pieces not to be taken too seriously.  It seems to be an outlet for their crotch-bound paralytically caesured poetry. The pictorial tendency, often with a dance basis, is so persistent it should be worked out in some detail… The French are not a rhythmically moving race — a Celtic-Latin alloy… The highlights of a musical history would probably be Couperin–Rameau fanciful titles, with some of Landowska‘s notes (lunatic but interesting). The attack on opera centring on the Gluck and the Tannhauser fights the impossibility of producing music while pretending to be a Roman (Revolution: Cherubini & Napolean were both Italians): the 19th c. partition into the Provencal, and Belgian and a Pole (Frank is purely Teutonic and Chopin‘s music is entirely pictorial.  His non-committal titles are a pose: one doesn’t expect any other music to follow his Preludes. There’s a closer link between Chopin and Debussy than one would at first think): the opera bouffe parodies of the Faust type: revival of the Rameau tradition with Debussy & Ravel: Saint-Saen‘s last-war journal.  Do the French hate music? Why is there no lust of the flesh & pride of the eyes in it? no Renoir or Boucher or Hugo even? I’m getting cultural dysentery again.  Hangnail is an incorrect form of angnail, a clear sense of false etymology. (CW, 8, 4-5)

There are actual recordings by Debussy, but I wasn’t able to find one I could post.  However, above is a piano roll made by Debussy of “Golliwog’s Cakewalk“.