[00:00.000] 作曲 : Ludwig van Beethoven
[00:03.97]Three Gs and an E-flat.
[00:06.10]Nothing more. Baby simple.
[00:08.62]Anyone might have thought of them, maybe.
[00:11.47]But out of them has grown the first movement of a great symphony,
[00:15.05]a movement so economical that almost every bar of it
[00:18.85]is a direct development of these opening four notes.
[00:25.25]People have wondered for years
[00:27.12]what it is that endows this musical figure with such potency.
[00:31.17]All kinds of fanciful music appreciation theories have been advanced,
[00:35.90]but none of these interpretations tells us anything.
[00:39.32]The truth is that the real meaning
[00:41.65]lies in the notes of all the 500 measures that follow it.
[00:45.55]And Beethoven, more than any other composer,
[00:48.57]had the ability to find these exactly right notes.
[00:52.92]But even he had a gigantic struggle to achieve this rightness,
[00:57.12]not only the right notes, but the right rhythms,
[01:00.82]the right climaxes, the right harmonies, the right instrumentation.
[01:05.07]We know from his notebooks that he wrote down 14 versions
[01:09.22]of the melody that opens the second movement of this symphony:
[01:13.17]14 versions over a period of 8 years.
[01:18.37]You see, a lot of us assume when we hear the symphony today,
[01:21.77]that it must have spilled out of Beethoven in one steady gush,
[01:25.32]clear and right from the beginning.
[01:27.20]But not at all.
[01:28.77]Beethoven left pages and pages of discarded material in his own writing,
[01:33.57]enough to fill a whole book.
[01:35.67]The man rejected, rewrote, scratched out, tore up,
[01:39.22]and sometimes altered a passage as many as 20 times.
[01:43.20]Beethoven's manuscript looks like a bloody record of a tremendous inner battle.
[01:48.90]But before he began to write this wild-looking score,
[01:51.57]Beethoven had for 3 years been filling notebooks with sketches.
[01:56.35]I have been trying to figure out what his first movement
[01:59.75]would have sounded like if he had left some of them in.
[02:02.80]I have been experimenting with the music,
[02:05.55]speculating on where these sketches might have been intended for use,
[02:09.12]and putting them back into those places
[02:11.82]to see what the piece might have been had he used them.
[02:14.77]And I've come up with some curious and interesting results.
[02:18.20]Let's see what they are.
[02:20.30]We already know almost too well the opening bars of this symphony.
[02:31.65]Now, once Beethoven had made the strong initial statement.
[02:35.47]What then? How does he go on to develop it?
[02:38.22]He does it like this.
[02:53.90]But here is a discarded sketch,
[02:56.12]which is also a direct and immediate development of the theme.
[03:09.25]Not very good and not very bad, taken all by itself.
[03:13.87]But it is a good logical development of the opening figure.
[03:18.35]What would the music sound like
[03:20.02]if Beethoven had used this sketch as the immediate development of his theme?
[03:24.22]We can find out by simply putting the sketch back into the symphony.
[03:28.32]And it will sound like this.
[03:51.50]It does make a difference, doesn't it?
[03:53.75]Not only because it sounds wrong to our ears,
[03:56.55]which are used to the version we know,
[03:58.97]but also because of the nature of the music itself.
[04:02.17]It is so symmetrical that it seems static.
[04:05.32]It doesn't seem to want to go anywhere.
[04:07.57]And that is fatal at the outset of a symphonic journey.
[04:11.37]It doesn't seem to have the mystery about it that the right version has
[04:16.22]or that whispering promise of things to come.
[04:24.97]The sketch music, on the other hand, gets stuck in its own repetitions.
[04:33.70]It just doesn't build.
[04:35.02]And Beethoven was, first and foremost, a builder.
[04:39.30]Let us look at another rejected sketch.
[04:42.05]Again, it is based, as all of them are, on that same opening figure.
[04:52.10]Now my guess is that he would have used it somewhere in this passage.
[05:07.55]Now let's hear the same passage with the discarded sketch included.
[05:28.97]Terrible, isn't it?
[05:30.87]This sketch just intrudes itself into the living flow of the music
[05:34.72]and stands there, repeating, grounded,
[05:37.75]until such time as the music can again take off in its flight.
[05:41.60]No wonder Beethoven rejected it.
[05:43.67]He, of all people, had a sense of drive, second to none.
[05:48.00]This sketch just doesn't drive.
[05:54.82]It is again like the first one, static and stuck.
[05:58.00]Now, this sketch is different.
[06:00.05]It has real excitement and build.
[06:09.00]I suspect it was intended for a spot a little later on in the movement.
[06:12.80]Here.
[06:26.97]This is certainly one of the most thrilling moments in the movement.
[06:30.65]It is the beginning of the coda, of the last big push before the end.
[06:35.25]Let's see how it would have sounded using the sketch I just played you.
[06:52.70]Not at all bad.
[06:54.22]It has logic and it builds.
[06:56.82]But what Beethoven finally did use has so much more logic,
[07:00.60]and builds with so much more ferocity and shock, that there is no comparison.
[07:14.62]The other, although good, seems pale beside it.
[07:24.27]Now, here is a sketch that I really like
[07:27.72]because it sounds like the essential Beethoven style.
[07:36.52]This has pain in it, and mystery, and a sense of eruption.
[07:46.70]It would have fit very neatly into the coda,
[07:49.22]harmonically, rhythmically, and every other way except emotionally.
[07:54.17]Here is the spot in the coda I mean.
[08:06.92]Now let us add the sketch to it.
[08:25.30]Do you hear the difference?
[08:27.17]What has happened?
[08:28.85]We had to come down from a high point to a low point,
[08:32.40]in order to build up again dramatically to a still higher point.
[08:36.45]This is in itself good and acceptable dramatic structure.
[08:40.00]It happens all the time in plays and novels as well as in music.
[08:44.37]But this is no moment for it.
[08:46.15]Beethoven has already reached his high point.
[08:48.77]He is already in the last lap,
[08:50.95]and he wants to smash forward on that high level right to the end.
[08:55.20]And he does with astonishing brilliance.
[08:58.00]It is this genius for going forward, always forward,
[09:01.50]that in every case guides his hand in the struggle with his material,
[09:05.92]why even the very ending was written three different ways on this orchestral score.
[09:11.27]Here is the first ending he wrote, an abrupt, typically Beethovenian ending.
[09:31.65]Why did he reject it?
[09:33.20]It seems perfectly all right and satisfying.
[09:36.25]But no, he apparently felt that it was too abrupt.
[09:39.65]And so he went right on and wrote a second ending that was more extended,
[09:43.22]more like a finale, more noble, romantic, majestic.
[09:48.02]It went like this.
[10:06.42]But as you can see in the manuscript,
[10:09.07]this ending is also buried beneath the crossing out.
[10:12.62]Now he felt it was too long, too pretentious, perhaps too majestic.
[10:17.90]It didn't seem to fit into the scheme of the whole movement
[10:21.00]where the main quality is bare, economical, direct statement of the greatest possible force.
[10:27.10]And so he tried still a third ending.
[10:29.75]And this one worked.
[10:31.55]But the odd thing is that as it turned out,
[10:33.85]the third ending is even more abrupt than the first.
[10:37.80]So you see, he had to struggle and agonize
[10:40.22]before he realized so apparently simple a thing,
[10:43.55]that the trouble with his first ending was not that it was too short,
[10:47.90]but that it was not short enough.
[10:50.50]Thus he arrived at the third ending, which is as right as rain.
[10:55.00]This is how we hear it today.
[11:07.67]And so Beethoven came to the end of his symphonic journey,
[11:11.40]for one movement, that is.
[11:13.75]Imagine a whole lifetime of this struggle, movement after movement,
[11:18.20] symphony after symphony, sonata after quartet, after concerto,
[11:22.87]always probing and rejecting in his dedication to perfection,
[11:27.77]to the principle of inevitability.
[11:30.47]This somehow is the key to the mystery of a great artist,
[11:34.80]that for reasons unknown to him or to anyone else,
[11:38.42]he will give away his life and his energies
[11:41.67]just to make sure that one note follows another inevitably.
[11:45.90]But in doing so, he makes us feel at the finish that something checks throughout,
[11:51.75]something that follows its own laws consistently,
[11:55.52]something we can trust that will never let us down.