Power & Passion (Beethoven: Favourite Piano Sonatas)

Member Name: amygdala

Product:	Beethoven: Favourite Piano Sonatas
Date:	11/07/00 (42 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Some of the greatest music ever written.

Disadvantages: His early work is similar to Mozart.

It is very difficult -- impossible, maybe -- to analyse music in any worthwhile way. If we knew how Beethoven and Mozart wrote such good music, we could write more of the same, and we can't. The recipe seems to involve a lot of very hard work as a child, however: practice does indeed make perfect as far as classical music goes. Beethoven's perfection came with difficulty: he hewed and hammered out his music where Mozart just seems to have let it flow from his quill, which is maybe why for me Beethoven represents power and passion and Mozart represents beauty. There's a lot of anger in Beethoven's music, sometimes frightening, sometimes enthralling, and it seems to go well with the bullet-headed glowering portraits of him that are often used on album sleeves.

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