You've Never Heard This Version of Für Elise

[Music] So today we're going to discuss one of the most famous piano pieces ever composed and that is a piece commonly known as Fur Elise by Beethoven and the funny thing about this piece is that it's probably now the most famous piece the Beethoven wrote although actually in his lifetime he had so little regard for it that he didn't even bother to have it published he seems to have written it quite spontaneously for a woman called Theresa malfati who had the manuscript for many years and it remained unpublished and Beethoven doesn't seem to have made any effort to have it published in the form that you've just heard I'll get back to this later because the topic of our discussion today is another version of Fur Elise that is almost completely unknown by which Beethoven did prepare for publication in 1822 some years after writing this sketch which we commonly know as Fur Elise and the history of this piece is quite surprising because first of all we don't really know who the dedicate was if it was someone called Elise it's probable that it was a lady called Elise wagenfeldt but we don't really know it seems more likely since the sketches were in her possession until the 1860s that it was dedicated to to raise a malfati who was a woman that Beethoven was in love with around the time when it was composed in 1810 so it's also possible the piece shouldn't be called Fair Elise at all it may be that the dedication in fact was furteres we don't know because the manuscript doesn't exist and hasn't existed since the 1860s when it seems to have been transcribed from sketches in Teresa malfati's collection which she then gave to to a guy called Ludovic Knoll and he transcribed it and had it published in the 1860s long after Beethoven's death you know 40 years after Beethoven's death and thereafter the pieces become famous and the reason why it's become famous is partly of course because it's an extremely memorable tune and it's very memorability and simplicity may have been the reason why Beethoven himself doesn't seem to have liked too much but the other reason why it's been a huge hit I think is because it's one of the few pieces in Beethoven's output that's kind of playable for people who aren't professional musicians so it's it's one of these pieces that is and fun to learn you know when you are learning the piano Fur Elise is a rather beautiful relatively straightforward piano piece that you can learn so these are some of the mysterious factors in the history of the work in the form that we know it it may not entirely be a piece by Beethoven it may be sort of adaptation other sketch that Beethoven made in 1810 by a later dude called Ludwig nol and that published version is the one that people know today and the fascinating thing is that in 1822 Beethoven made a second version for publication because he was publishing a set of maggotels that year and he created several New pieces but he also kind of rehashed some older pieces this was one of them and he made a new version where he changed things shuffled things around altered the sequence of notes did all sorts of fascinating things and then at the point where things were moving towards publication he rejected it again because he didn't think it was good enough to include in this set of Bagatelle so it didn't get published but the fascinating thing is that that later sketch from 1822 does exist and so the actual notes that we know Beethoven wrote down for a potential publication we've got it it's completely unknown uh very few people know that it exists I mean in scholarly circles it's known that it exists but but it isn't often played so let's discuss the piece and discuss the later version and then at the end of the video if you want to forward wind to the end of the video you can and you you can hear the the full later version of the piece so let's talk a little bit about the famous version that everyone knows this is a a sort of slow song-like piece another reason why it's very popular is the texture of the music is very simple it doesn't have the complex motivic fabric that you often get with Beethoven's music it doesn't have all that much Counterpoint either the left hand consists mainly of sort of harp like a compliment figures the right hand is very melodic and song like a sort of song without words before Mendelson who of course was heavily influenced by Beethoven before Mendelson invented the term song without words in the 1830s or was it Fannie mendelton actually his sister possibly came up with the idea before Felix did anyway one of the Mendelssohn siblings came up with that term song without word didn't really exist in Beethoven's time he would have called it and was going to call it a Bagatelle a trifle when he was thinking about publishing it in the 1820s so it starts off famously I mean is there anything Bowl famous except perhaps the theme tune of Jaws has the same motivic content the oscillating semitone figure and in Beethoven that oscillating semitone functions is what we call an anacrusis as a rhythmic preparation for the tune the real tune is this little falling figure and then you get a kind of Rising Three Rising notes almost like the reverse of Three Blind Mice and then the other cruises comes before each of these very simple credential patterns now the oscillating anacrisis is much harder to explain than to play this famous thing there is a theory and I think it's a perfectly plausible one that the name of the dedicated probably Theresa malfati but let's imagine it was Fur Elise it doesn't really matter Elise and Therese the musical letters in both names consist of E s I'll explain that in a minute and E so we've got e s in German is E flat and E again so the the alternation of the two notes in the published manuscript is e and D shark is D sharp on the keyboard is the same node is E4 you have in effect a sort of musical version of the obsession around the lady in question but that may explain the slightly obsessive repetitive element in the piece that is so characteristic of it and also the element that I think Beethoven may have been somewhat irritated by and explains why he never really was that interested in publishing it so here we go so we got the oscillating pattern and then these heart plague figures The Rising Three note Motif the second time coming back to a and the open fifth and then we go into a little middle bit where we have an equally simple falling four note tetrachord but in C [Music] the basic line is just just four descending notes but with these beautiful [Music] the the obsessive Rhythm of the piece I should say Beethoven's a highly rhythmic composer and the obsessive Rhythm of the piece well there are two elements one is that they aren't long antichrists of so many times but the main Motif is that Adam but at that thing that thing now I'll prove that to you because later on in the piece he takes that rhythmic figure that incidentally it's the same as the same as the First Symphony it's a motif that Beethoven's very keen on and here it is again in a very different way look at this in the middle [Music] so that there it is again he appears in the music in various guys is but that rhythmic formation is a sort of obsessive component in the music and it links the piece in quite an interesting way to another composition of Beethoven's from a few years earlier the great Tempest Sonata which he wrote around 1803 and the finale of The Tempest Sonata is very similar textually and rhythmically is this [Music] thank you foreign [Music] fabulous piece much more to be honest interesting then Fur Elise we'll talk about that some other time but that Rhythm very similar to it's it's a similar design isn't it and also the harp like accompaniment interestingly in the Tempest Sonata often pianists play it too fast and with too much pedal and it destroys the unique rhythmic structure of this music the left hand Beethoven not takes it very carefully with the emphasis on the second semi-cover what and two and three and one panty so you get this wonderful second semiquaver episode remember that because when we're looking at the second version of Fur Elise we'll discover the same device a rhythmic displacement onto the second semiquaver let me just finish by explaining very very quickly how baton structures the version of Fur Elise that's familiar to everybody we have the main theme and at the end of the tune we then go into a [Music] so this is a passage where Beethoven very explicitly I think goes into the style of a kind of Aria with a soprano melody in the right hand rather operatic left hand with this rolling semiquaver compliment that leads to a return of the tune then a second episode a darker episode in a minor uh I remember playing this as a kid and this was my favorite passage in some ways it still is it's Beethoven it is most brooding and it has This Magnificent shift I'll show you the shift in a minute here comes a repetition [Music] patient loves this kind of thing where you remove the bass note that moves from D Minor second inversion he just shifted on the semitone incidentally semitones are a topic of the piece it shifts are the semi-turn from A to B flat and suddenly for a moment a window opens on a different tonality where [Music] room B flat major and then he turns back to a minor in this original version we then go into a little triplet Cadenza [Music] with a chromatic descent [Music] then and then he returns to the tune in terms of the form of the whole piece it's a very elegant Rondo structure what we we call a Rondo in other words the theme returns three times and each time it appears it's separated from its previous appearance by what we call an episode another thing comes in interrupts the tune or takes over from the tune and then that leads back to a reappearance of the tune so we have a very simple Rondo form a b a c a so that's the original structure for at least a very elegant very short piano composition that Beethoven probably sketched out almost without thinking about it One Fine Day in 1810 as a sort of potential love gift to Theresa malfati and as with all the women who Beethoven proposed to or declared his interest towards she did not reciprocate one of the women that Beethoven approached incidentally was asked many many years later why she didn't accept his proposal of marriage after all he was one of the most famous people in European culture why would he reject Ludwig van Beethoven the great genius and she responded because he was ugly and half mad so I think that tells you all you need to know about why Beethoven was very sadly unhappy in love so now the really interesting part of this video hopefully is that I'm going to turn my attention to the later version the 1822 version the Beethoven prepared for publication this is the version that we actually have a manuscript copy of Beethoven's notoriously sketchy and weird handwriting so it's very hard to make out the notes unless you're an expert but we do have this second version and it's strikingly different from the first so when he came back to the piece in the 1820s he he did several things the most immediately noticeable thing is that he Alters the accompaniment do you remember when I was playing [Music] beautiful finale of The Tempest Sonata and I stressed but the second that the left hand has this emphasis on the second semiquaver so in the later version of Fur Elise Beethoven in this second version of early Space Heaven Alters the accomplishment so that every time it comes in on the second semiquaver uh isn't that amazing so it's it's never quite predictable it's slightly offsets the Simplicity of the tune with this strange dislocation and the accompaniment I'll show you how that works [Music] so isn't that fascinating you also had that on the repeat he avoided so he's slightly breaking up the melodic elements to to get rid of the over-impetitive nature of the original material and perhaps most interestingly with the offbeat left hand it's almost as if he's displaced the first beat of each bar so everything's sort of floating just off the beat it's a really interesting effect and he continues it into the second half of the tune [Music] do you notice there are an almost chopiness beautiful tumbling ornamented figure because he's bored with going breaks it up into triplets it's a much more fluent sort of uh Supple melodic line and then a second time even even more interestingly do you plus triplets so you get a little sort of retinol achellarando although that's slightly different isn't it and then the first episode comes in straight away but it's it's introduced by a little bit of music that none of us have ever heard before which is this so end of tune so that much more elegant little transition into the first episode isn't that better I think that's better than the original the original version just went straight and slightly clumsy edit I'd say so later version much more elegantly Beethoven writes out it's very expressive transition foreign [Music] and then in we go that's different so much more elaborate Melody [Music] we're going to the Danny semikova passage that's very similar to how it was originally back into the melody once again with the rhythmic displacements and then the the beautiful a minor episode the second episode of the piece is similar to the original version but I'll show you how it works he has slightly richer harmony with these parallel uh second aversion chords a beautiful shift is the same up to B flat now here he doesn't go into the do you remember in the original version you went into the semi-cliver thing that comes later he shifted that the position of the Cadenza so we come out of the second episode straight into the tune again repetition of the melody and we hear the melody again and then right at the end uh [Applause] we get the the Cadenza is now tapped on here right at the end of the piece [Music] and that leads I think more effectively really into the concluding three bar Coda um so it's all together a more professional piece in a sense it's more elegantly realized I think the details that Beethoven felt in the original version were a bit clumsy have been rendered more Supple more interesting the rhythmic elements are more surprising and the whole piece is rather beautiful I have to admit I think the second version is better but I'd be interested in what you guys think in the meantime here in our traditional manner is an animated realization with me playing it of the unknown but in some ways more authentic second version of Fur Elise as Beethoven intended it to be published in 1822 enjoy foreign [Music] foreign [Music] [Applause] [Music] thank you [Music] thank you [Music] [Applause] [Music] thank you [Music] foreign [Music]

Channel: The Music Professor

Views: 410,765

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Id: jblFQ1whX5s

Length: 23min 51sec (1431 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 14 2023