Here is Beethoven's arrangement:
Adding a staccato to downbeats for both the cello and viola is to be expected by now. Beethoven has been making changes like this all along to ensure a crisp downbeat. What is perhaps not expected is his having the viola repeat the C--with a sforzando no less--on beat two of each measure. This is the change we hear most readily when listening to the two versions. The transcription, with its sforzando only on beat three, sounds almost march-like. In Beethoven's arrangment, the round robin of sforzandi on beats two, three, and four and half, keeps the passage from sounding square.
This is a shorter passage than usual for one of these posts. So I'll take this opportunity to make a few general comments about this blog.
Two of the earliest influences in my education as a composer were, strange as it may seem, Edgar Allen Poe and Benjamin Franklin. Poe will have to wait for another time. Franklin's influence comes from this excerpt from his autobiography where he discusses how he taught himself to write prose:
"About this time I met with an odd volume of the Spectator.... I bought it, read it over and over, and was much delighted with it. I thought the writing excellent, and wished, if possible, to imitate it. With this view I took some of the papers, and, making short hints of the sentiment in each sentence, laid them by a few days, and then, without looking at the book, try’d to compleat the papers again, by expressing each hinted sentiment at length, and as fully as it had been expressed before, in any suitable words that should come to hand. Then I compared my Spectator with the original, discovered some of my faults, and corrected them."
I ran across this passage when I was in college. It seemed Franklin's technique should work in the field of music composition as well, so I decided to give it a try. I began with the Bach chorales. I would take a chorale melody, harmonize it, then look at how Bach had harmonized it. Then I would slap my forehead and say, "Why didn't I think of that?" I improved as the project progressed. By the time I finished, I was "thinking of that" more often than not.
Much later, when DAWs and good orchestral samples became available, I tried the same technique with orchestration. I took a piano score of The Magic Flute and orchestrated sections of it. Then I listened to my realizations and compared them to Mozart's.
This method of learning was clearly better than simply analyzing a score. It's only when you try to do something yourself that you get a perspective on what the problems are. If you look at a score without first tackling the problems yourself, all the choices the composer made seem pretty obvious.
As you might have guessed, this project is another of that type. Each week, I try my own hand at a musically satisfying arrangement of the passage I analyze. So, while I show you only two SoundCloud files, I am actually producing three: a literal transcription, my arrangement, and Beethoven's. At first, I thought I might include my arrangements in the blog. But I decided against it, since they are probably be of no interest to anyone but me.
I recommend that you give this technique a try yourself. Dig out your copy of the Beethoven sonatas and try your own arrangement of the next passage (after transposing it to F major). Next week, you can see whether Beethoven agrees with your choices or not. If for some reason you don't have a copy of the Beethoven sonatas, you can use this one. I predict that, as the weeks go on, you'll become progressively happier with your decisions, even if you don't make the same ones Beethoven did.
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