Arts Copying Beethoven Better
posted by November 10 at 11:13 AM
onThe marvelous Greg Sandow makes another one of his forehead-smackingly simple and powerful suggestions about how to represent classical music genuinely in the movies, which is so rarely done (in many places, it’s not done onstage in concert halls, either, so what can you expect from Hollywood?):
The most fascinating historical point is surely that the performance — by our standards today — must have been a mess. The music was new and difficult. It wouldn’t have been rehearsed enough. Performances back then (again by our standards) almost never were. And the performance took place on a monster concert, on which not just the Ninth was heard, but also movements from Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis, just as new, even more gigantic, and at least as difficult to play and sing. The solo singers (getting back to the Ninth) weren’t happy with their parts, and asked Beethoven to rewrite them. He refused, of course. But he must have been an impossible conductor, as he was when, years earlier, he’d tried to conduct Fidelio. On that occasion, he caused such confusion that a friend finally spoke to him in private, and led him away. Why would the Ninth have been much different? Beethoven’s conducting motions were, by all accounts, confusing. And he couldn’t hear the music! So surely the first performance was full of errors. But it also was a triumph, so the essence of the music must have come through. Could a movie show us this? Could anyone stage a performance full of mistakes , and not quite sure of itself, but still triumphant? That would require lots of imagination, and, maybe above all, musicians who, in their performance, would in effect be actors, pretending that they didn’t know the music as well as they really do. This would be very hard to pull off. But wouldn’t it be wonderful?
Comments
"Could a movie show us this? Could anyone stage a performance full of mistakes , and not quite sure of itself, but still triumphant?"
See Cameron Diaz's karaoke performance in My Best Friend's Wedding...
There was a minute in my life when I wanted to be one of those people in Hollywood who coach actors on how to mime playing an instrument or lip-synch to a song in order to pass it off as the actor's own performance.
Has anyone ever seen Farinelli?!? The way they have that dude mouthing the words to, like, "Son qual nave" and "Ombra mai fu" is super tragic because that nasty-nast digital combination of awful countertenor with mediocre soprano results in a sound that could never be made by the actor's bright buccal gesticulations.
I need more Realness!!!
That would indeed be a fun job. People onscreen pretending to play string instruments always, always look terrible. (Usually, they move their whole bow arm as a unit, rather than keeping the elbow and wrist loose and flexible.) 20 minutes of close attention and instruction from a real violinist or cellist could solve the problem.
Don't high school bands do it all the time?
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