William Drabkin

The masterwork in music : a yearbook

1. Rameau or Beethoven? Creeping paralysis or spiritual potency in music? 2. Beethovens Third Symphony: its true content described for the first time 3. Miscellanea: thoughts on art and its relationships to the general scheme of things.

Towards an explanation of the dramatic structure of 'Il trovatore'

In no other of Verdis operas does one find even the slightest inclination toward humor. And now the old master writes a work that gives his whole past the lie, so to speak, an opera buffa raised to the nth power, the sublime example of its kind. Falstaff throws a light back over all of Verdis previous work. It changes the aspect of this work; there must be more to it than we believed; the master who could create such an opera did not write Trovatore as mere hand organ music. And, indeed, the brightest ones among us have already come to the conclusion that Verdis secret (I am not now speaking of the so-called secrets of form) lies as deep as Wagners, and is much less obvious than is that of the calculating Wagner-rationalizing sometimes to the point of excess.1

On Beethoven Scholars and Beethoven's Sketches

The special Beethoven issues and the congresses are the serum injected every fifty years to keep an aging discipline healthy.1 ... But the life-giving fluids produce some unexpected adverse side effects: skepticism and rejection. Sketch research, a patient now more than a hundred years old, lapses once again into its prior comatose condition after a brief period of artificially hyped-up activity. Events of the recent Beethoven anniver-

SCHUBERT, SCHENKER AND THE ART OF SETTING GERMAN POETRY

Nearly half a century after gaining a solid footing in the academic world, the achievements of Heinrich Schenker remain associated more with tonal structure and coherence than with musical expression. The focus of his published work, exemplified largely by instrumental music from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, supports this view. There are just five short writings about music for voices: two essays on Bach’s St Matthew Passion, one on the opening number from Haydn’s Creation, and two on Schubert songs. To be sure, romantic lieder appear as music examples for the larger theory books, but there they serve as illustrations of harmony, voice leading and form, rather than the relationship of word to tone.

Some recent Beethoven research

already touched the amateur Beethovenian profoundly. Consider, for instance, Maynard Solomons new biography (Beethoven, 1977). Though largely assembled from specialist articles of the late 1960s and 1970s, within a few years it has become a popular classic. Recent studies of the music have also attracted widespread attention. Of course, the great corpus of sketchbooks and other documentation of Beethovens compositional methods have long served to unite the interests of music-lovers; the number of recent facsimile editions of autograph scores is ample evidence of a continued popular interest. The current wave of sketchbook research has even