The fugue in the 2nd movement of Symphony 3 is one of the most earth-shattering moments in all of music

The fugue in Eroica 2nd mvmt is one of the supreme human achievements imo

Beethoven is one of those few reasons life on planet earth is worthwhile.

To me, Beethoven saved the best for last. All of these fugues are brilliant and display such a mastery of the style, but the final double fugue in the 4th movement of the 9th Symphony is just otherworldly. Not only is it a mastery of fugue style and pushes forward the harmonic concepts of the era, it also captures the lyrics so perfectly. It gives me goosebumps each and every time I listen to it.

I forget how good the Eroica is.

The fact that videos like this exist only serves to further my belief that Beethoven is the be-all, end-all composer when it comes to classical music.

The passage from the second movement of Eroica is unspeakably epic

In Japan there is a habit of listening to the 9th at the end of the year. The Double Fugue at 33:33 is wonderful. If possible, please make a video with a more detailed explanation of just this part.

Before anyone else beats me to the punch, yes, I did notice the almost cartoonishly late entry of one of the bassoons at 9:19 (the beginning of the funeral march fugue). It was almost enough to make me choose a different recording, but the interpretation is so amazing I couldn't let a wayward bassoonist bother me.

29:06 - 30:35 My favourite passage from any piece of music I've heard... Simply amazing.

How much poorer would our lives be without these treasures of music. Thanks for this video, great work.

Now I know why the odd #’d symphonies are my favorite

The figure at 12:30 is known as Mannheimer Rakete, Beethoven himself used it for example in the first movement of his first piano sonata

Oh Beethoven, your sky-storming spirit, he knows no bounds and leads us into eternity today.

also many fugue in op123 are fantastic especially the last fugue part in credo,oh god that sound definitely comes from haven!

'Here's something that we can all learn from! ..." ~ Mozart on J.S. Bach

The most beautiful passage of all the symphonies for me is the fugue in the Ninth finale with the "Freude" and "Seid unschlungen" themes, the shimmering violins accompanying. Then the trumpet comes in at "der ganzen velt!" with the sopranos and stays on the note as the rest of the orchestra goes on, and with that all misery and doubt is lifted, the walls that enclose us broken down and good permanently reaffirmed. So absolutely beautiful, only Beethoven could give us this.

I find free counterpoint to be much more immersive and impressive than explicitly fugal designs with successive entries.

Darn it, I knew you'd feature the two sections of the two symphonies (3rd & 9th) that are always guaranteed to make me cry 😥. Had to really fight that here at work.

Thanks for sharing this, Richard. I fell in love with Beethoven many years ago as a boy, listening to the early string quartets Opus 18 and the most beautiful Sonata No. 15 in D-major, day for day. In these days I owned an inexpensive cassette tape recorder with low audio quality. First thing, what i did at home, when coming back from school was to listen to Beethoven. Together with a friend, we listend to the Symphonies conducted by Lenny Bernstein. It was in ca 1974/75, the kids got crazy with Suzi Quatro. Funny times!

I knew many of these, but I struggled to pick out many of these before I found this video. Over 1/2 of them I never realized were fugues. Also, thank you for confirming that what I thought was the Double Fugue of teh 4th Movement of Beethoven's 9th is in fact the Double Fugue.

I love how you keep it intelligent and deep while still making it accessible to music theory ignorami like me. Looking forward to the next.

OK, I'll watch the rest of the video in an upcoming video

I always loved the fugatos from the Eroica finale the most! They are otherworldly 😮

I appreciate you choosing a recording with a quick tempo in the double fugue from Symphony 9. So often conductors approach it at a snail’s pace which I feel robs the fugue of its power and emotional rapture.

You know you've found a good piece when you wish you had written it. You know you've found a good music theory channel when you wish you could make videos like this. I came here for 9-4, but left with a lot more. Bravo.

Yay! I guess I'll be watching this one a lot while I wait for "most badass passages". The funeral march fugue and the ode to joy fugues are my favorite.

I've been dying to see an analysis of the fugue in ode to joy! Happy birthday to me! thank you thank you!!

Thank you for the great review of fugal passages in Beethoven's symphonies. I am particularly fond of the second movement of the 7th.

Man, I wish that he had expanded on the fugue in the 7th. It's way too short.

What I love about the passage at 12:46 is the rhythmical shift produced by accenting the third beat in the woodwinds, and phrasing of the melody. It makes the ending of the passage seem like containing a measure in common time (13:36).

These vidoes are truly a gift for music appreciation and analysis, Thank you so much.

Although Herr Bach was the original master of the fugue, Herr Beethoven's fugal work is much more emotional and human to me. Herr Bach's fugal writing, though full of genius, always seemed more mathamatical to me, while Herr Beethoven's fugal passages exhibited the melodies, harmonies, and movements of nature, life, and emotion in all their glory....Peace!

Jeez, the march and double fugue from Beethoven 9 are so fast in that recording

I saw the Eroica live once. I was completely bowled over by it’s greatness.

Dear friend, you need to excuse me that I only write into english this brief frase, but I need to express my self into my native language, spanish, so I hope you excuse me for that. Acompañar tu exposición de los pasajes fugados de las sinfonías de Beethoven es uno de mis sueños vueltos realidad. Tu lucidez e inteligencia, tu atención al detalle es deslumbrante, y no puedo sino expresarte mi profundo agradecimiento por todo el tiempo que dedicas a hacer estos videos. Eres uno de mis héroes, y tu amistad y las palabras que sueles dedicar a mis comentarios muestran tu calidad y calidez humana. Cada video que haces me deja temblando, desde aquel de que llamaste Brahms Badass passages, al que vuelvo una y otra vez, y comparto con mis amigos cada vez que puedo. Tu amistad, aunque sea por estos rumbos virtuales, es una de las joyas que atesoro con mayor agradecimiento, y sólo puedo decirte desde lo más hondo del alma: ¡MIL GRACIAS! Te mando un fuerte abrazo y mi sincera amistad desde la Ciudad de México.

OK @Richard Atkinson, you are talented, gifted, and a totally amazing musician!!! I loved this video!!! It reminded me of why I do what I do, that is, a student who’s working on his Bachelor in Music Education. It also brought to my head so many memories of when as a young child, I used to listen to cassette recordings of Beethoven, Mozart, and Tchaikovsky. I’m definitely sharing this, your brilliantly crafted video, with my professor of my Form and Analysis of Tonal Music class. Keep up your amazing work!!! God bless you.

Once again, thank you for doing this. I will be sharing this with my students.

Amazing, thank you !

Great Mr. Atkinson

You’re awesome . Thank you 🙏🏻

As always this is brilliantly documented work. Your channel is the best musicology course ever.

You should really upload more videos. I jump up with excitement whenever you upload! Great content!

Thank you for this. I do think the big fugal passage of the Funeral March is the most expressive while being brilliant on all counts. It helps me examine myself. Keep up the good work!

Thank you sooo much. Your visual presentation is so helpful to someone like me - a neophyte in the world of classical music.

Great work

33:34 breathtaking fugue in 2 subjects

Finally you did it. I'm very happy with this video meanwhile I make the final revision on my future book on Vienna cultural and musical life. Thanks a lot for your effort and dedication. It's interesting to find some sharing thoughts on this subject, so I have to write about it in the near future, just to enlight this dialogue and to honour and acknowledge your effort and what we can call this virtual intellectual friendship.

29:06 is the part I was looking for. Thanks a lot for the analysis !

Thank you very much! This is the best video on KZfaq, congratulations!

Excellent as always. You're now my favorite KZfaqr. Hope to watch the most beautiful passages of the Bruckner symphonies in the future!

Coincidences: The 1st symphony and op 18 no.4 string quartet have 2nd movements starting with something played by the 2nd violins.

A suggestion: most badass passages of each mahler symphony

Western music is a castle. Bach figured out the math, drew the blueprints, and quarried the stones. Mozart and Beethoven fleshed out the blueprints and completed construction. Everything since then is basically landscaping and interior design. Behind the modern drywall is a structure of ancient stones.

9:45 just to replay whenever I feel like listening to it (anyways, I especially love 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 and 9)

Sometimes your channel and your knowledge about music amazes me!

great video !

25:05 I never realized this passage could be so good. I'm not in love with the whole recording or movement 4 in general but Jarvi really brought out the best of this moment.

I wish you had been my counterpoint teacher! Keep up the good work!

Thank you for all your great musical videos. Is there a reason why the recordings you use are not identified? I am particularly interested in these Beethoven symphonies, love the tempi! Thanks again!

5:13 fur elise

I LOVE your analyses of these pieces. I am only an amateur musician and did not study music in college, so your videos really pique my interest!! Could you please analyze Beethoven's 5th piano concerto Emporer?? I hear so many patterns in it but just can't figure it out

Bravissimo!❤

A fantastic analysis as always. You used some really interesting recordings for these ones. I had to double check on multiple occasions to make sure I wasn't accidentally playing back the video at 1.5x times. It's a lot faster than I'm used to hearing Beethoven's symphonies. Were these versions using Beethoven's own metronome markings, perhaps? (The ones that cause some people to think Beethoven's metronome may have been broken?) They're offputting at first, but I may have to try and track down full recordings so I can listen to them some more and get a fuller opinion.

Bravo!

12:32 This kind of theme called 'Mannheim theme' or 'rocket them' . Lots of famous pieces use this kind of theme......like Beethoven's first piano sonata in f minor, the first movement's theme.

This is great! I always find the fugal passages in symphonies to be some of the most memorable moments in them. Do you plan to make videos for other Fugatos in classical music in the future?

Thanks

Please, do “Best moments from each piece of Bach’s WTC I & II”

Oh, that acoustic low D at 10:57 is so nice! Because of the interfaces with both sinuses there will be created a subcontra D :)

People say Beethoven bad at fugue writing. Me: DiD YoU KnOw.................?\

I always hear the running 8th note subject in Ode to Joy fugato (28:18) as another variation on the Ode to Joy motif (at first).

I love Beethoven's 5th. It is my favorite of Beethoven's works and that says a lot because Beethoven is my favorite composer. I had no idea that the third movement of his fifth symphony had a fugato, even after listening to it a ton of times, both the original orchestral version composed by Beethoven and the piano solo transcription by Franz Liszt. However I will say this. I view the beginning of Beethoven's 5th as a period within a sentence that itself is within a theme. Let me explain. The period part is the initial 2 statements of the Fate Motif, which outlines a clear tonic -> Dominant relationship. The sentence, I consider to be the section before the fortissimo with the emphasis on G because it is still outlining Tonic -> Dominant and all with the Fate motif being repeated over and over. The theme includes the F emphasis and ends right before the second theme that starts with its Bb emphasis. After the sentence is over but while the first theme still occurs, there is more subdominant function going on starting with an F minor harmony. This eventually leads to the second theme starting by emphasizing Bb as the dominant of Eb before the real chaos of the first movement ensues with C minor, Eb major, F minor, C major, and Bb major harmonies all being there in the development section.

I love this. Would you consider the development of the Eroica 1st movement starting around measure 190 fugal? This is where the galloping theme, as you referred to it, is played by the violins while the cellos, basses, and violas play the opening theme.

28:19 The red subject is *also* derived from the ode to joy theme. There are canons at the beginning of the coda that cements this, this is rather hard to notice in such a fast rendition (this is my favorite recording though)

Can you cover Brahms music too, I heard some affecionatos of his music still find hidden melodies in his work.

thanks :)

OMG I KNOW WHAT PART YOU ARE REFERI>NG ON THE EROICA! ITS ALSO ONE OF MY FAVOURITE MOMENTS OF MUSIC

Great video as always! I would really like to see a video about Schumann, Berlioz or Franck from you. Like Schumann's Fugues about the name BACH for organ op. 60 or the finale or the Piano Quintet in E flat major.

Thanks for this (again) amazing video! Would you consider an analysis of the fugues of Beethoven's Missa Solemnis?

Excellent video, mr Atkinson, as usual. I would just like to comment about Thomas Mann's novel "Doctor Faustus". Have you ever read it? It has much to do with music and there is in it a chapter in which a music teacher provides lectures about many subjects (about Beethoven, most of all - for a narrative reason, of course), and among them, there is the discussion of an allegation that Beethoven could not do fugues. That discussion in the book should come together with a link to this video of yours.

i dont find that bassoon entry late, it's starting soft and leaning into the hairpin cresc/dim. having said that, gimmee klemp and karajan for this fugue, no others need apply. Also, I believe Mr. Atkinson deserves a lot of admiration for these videos, they are on par with Lenny's Harvard lectures... really. As enjoyable as they are informative.

Massive work, thanks a lot !! If you try to do all the fugato passages in Mozart's Symphonys.. Good luck Sir (and I hope it will be !) ! :D

Superb! Excellent, really impressive video! Only one minor observation: in the version you use of the 9th symphony the Turkish March is, in my opinion, way too fast. Thanks a lot, I learned a bunch.

Awesome video, fugal passages are some of my favorites in all of the Western canon. I wonder if this could be done with 20th century symphonists like Shostakovich, Sibelius and Prokofiev? Or would we run into copyright/fair use issues with showing the scores? I'm a composer/theorist and have wanted to do these types of videos too...thank you for the awesome content!

Wonderful! I know this repertoire extremely well, and I learned so much by your approach. Thank you! Have you tackled the Grosse Fuge??

25:06: You should've started at the beginning when the low strings begin and more and more instruments join the theme.

Thanks, Richard! Would you like to make video about fugal passages in Missa Solemnis?

don't know if you're taking suggestions, but I'd love to see your analysis of Bernstein's Prelude, Fugue and Riffs!

The contrabassoon part in the final fugue is probably one of the most ridiculous parts I have ever played.

Thank you so much for the video. Just one question, are you still finding time to compose? Would love to hear more of your music.

33:37 Incredible

Hello! I picked up the book Gradus Ad Parnassum which i believe Beethoven had made a condensed version of for easy access if he needed refresh on some specifics of counterpoint. I don't have any teachers in my life who study classical music the way I do so I don't know who to go to and thought you might be able to help me. I'm not understanding the concept of hexachords that is quite instrumental to understanding the book, so I was wondering if you could explain it or redirect me to a source you know that could. Also do you have any recommendations for books I should get (despite of course Fux's because I already have it). If you could answer these I'd be so thankful because I have no one to go to! Thanks and keep up the great videos✌

Mr. Atkinson, you should analyze Schubert's Fantasie Impromptu at some point in the future

Great video. Not the most fugal, but I thought there's moments in the first movement of the 8th to deserve a mention (mostly the development)

28:19 the beginning of the blue subject, if you include the first note in the bar, resembles the dotted octave motif from the scherzo.

You mentioned the revolutionary introduction to the first movement of Beethoven's 9th Symphony. I would love to read your thoughts about it since it has always fascinated me as it consists of 17 consecutive bars of undefined tonality... right at the beginning of a symphony!! Since only the notes D and A are played during those 17 bars the listener isleft wondering whether the movement is written in D minor or D major (though you can't rule out that this might be the dominant of G major or G minor either). When the note F contained in the principal theme is finally played after that long delay the solution to the harmonic ambiguity makes the entrance of that theme all the more effective. A true stroke of genius!

The military music of the 9th symphony is a veritable miracle of orchestration; the sound of the ensemble approaching from a distance is not only present dynamically but is imitated by the irregularly thickening orchestration itself, demonstrating the long-range dynamic control unique to Beethoven, and almost unprecedented. This effect would later be used by Berlioz, Mahler, Debussy, and Stravinsky. Of course, this particular effect harkens back to a no less masterful example from Mozart - the “Ecco la marcia” from Figaro. A similar effect occurs in Idomeneo (composed six years before), with an approaching march beneath a monologue, though here, the effect is less inventive as the crescendo is made by the entire orchestra. However, in Figaro he actually renders the crescendo with the orchestration, though unlike Beethoven his orchestration thickens by regular increments. He also enhances the element of distance by beginning the march in the middle. Mozart’s references to outside music (the march and the ensuing fandango) are at odds with the troubled monologues they support (unlike Beethoven, where it unequivocally expresses the words), yet ingeniously enough, Mozart still manages to subtly express the text by incorporating eccentric details under the innocuous surface. In any case, despite Beethoven’s apparent misgivings about Mozart’s operas, he was surely indebted to them.

28:17 the red subject is also based on the main theme.

Thank you for this video, I was pretty well brought up on Beethoven, being the son of a leading expert after all. Could you talk about Beethoven's unfinished 10th symphony at some point please?