Lecture Report

Today, I participated a lecture which causes me to benefit greatly. The lecture approximate content is Beethoven Symphony No.9 is an iconic work performed by iconic performers but the speaker proposed some different views. For example, chart the rise of the symphony and the impact of Wagner's performance style on subsequent generation of conductors.

Richard Wagner, who in word and deed was passionately at pains through out his whole life to rescue the execution of Beethoven's works from what had gradually become an unbearable negligence, has in his essay" On the performance of Beethoven's 9th Symphony" directed one to that way of executing this symphony which corresponds as much as possible with the intentions of it's creator, and to which more modern conductors have conformed. He proposed:(1)"The whole duty of a conductor is comprised in his ability always to indicate the right tempo, the right tempo[was found because the conductor] persistently fix[ed] the attention of his orchestra upon the melos is the sole guide to the right tempo. conductors so frequently fail to find the true tempo because they are ignorant singing...(2)Things which formerly existed in separate and opposite forms, each complete in itself, are now placed in juxtaposition, and further developed, one from the other, so as to from a whole.We may consider it established that in classical music written in the later style."

Since Beethoven there has been a very considerable change in the treatment and the execution of instrumental music. The speaker took the Beethoven 9th symphony as an example. In work Beethoven, for can express own thought profoundly explicitly, to speak to the universe, has broken the symphony traditional form boldly, has joined the sounds of people chorus, therefore the work calls it "The chorus symphony" Is also in music history first joins the chorus the symphony.

Conclusion: Wagner laid it down that the two fundamental principles underlying the art were:(1)Giving the true tempo to the orchestra;(2)Finding the "melos" by which he means the unifying thread of line which gives a work its from and shape. Given these two qualities, of course, we have the conductor in excelsis and most of our lives must be spent in the pursuance of these qualities, more especially the first.