The Creative Process in Beethoven and Picasso

[David]

To take the example of the most supreme of all artists: You can now buy on CD the Denis Matthews lectures on Beethoven's sketchbooks, in which the tone poet's lifelong jottings of thousands of musical ideas were preserved in order that he could return to them over & over, painstakingly crafting them into artifacts of uncanny compositional inevitability. See www.discourses.co.uk/beethoven.php4.

Also see the "Sketches for Piano Sonata in E, Op. 109, 2nd Movement" Web site at: https://netfiles.uiuc.edu/bdecker/ww...emo/begin.html (based on the Artaria 195 sketchbook). The page begins with a conceptual
sketch, followed by what scholars believe to have been the order of sketches leading to the finished manuscript of Op. 109. Each step of the sketch is accompanied by a MIDI audio file, enabling you to hear the evolution of each idea presented.

(Stupid Firefox doesn't properly render the pages, so you may have to use Internet Explorer.)

Finally, see THE BEETHOVEN SKETCHBOOKS: HISTORY, RECONSTRUCTION, INVENTORY" (1985) by Johnson, Tyson & Winter; & ARTARIA 195: BEETHOVEN'S SKETCHBOOK FOR THE MISSA SOLEMNIS & THE PIANO SONATA IN E MAJOR, OP. 109 (2003), edited by William Kinderman:
http://www.press.uillinois.edu/books...252027499.html.

It's an area (close examination of the work in progress of an artist of the first, or even the second, rank) somewhat neglected by film, unfortunately. Clouzot made that amazing movie, THE MYSTERY OF PICASSO, which is an example of this. And Clouzot uses a lot of filmic techniques & creative ideas to film Picasso at his canvas: reverse footage, intercutting, closeups, a translucent medium which creates a unique point of view.

It's a vastly different kettle of fish from the usual artist's biopic that the studios churned out (Chopin, van Gogh) or even the phantasmagoric psychobios by psycho moviemaker Ken Russell (& his movies don't closely examine the creative process anyway).