What is the difference between Mozart and Beethoven

Welcome to LivingPianos .com, Robert Estrin here with a really interesting listening test.

Can you hear the difference between Mozart and Beethoven? I have a video, the difference between Mozart and Beethoven, that you can check out in the description and if you like you can watch that video first to give you some pointers as to how you might be able to tell the difference between Mozart and Beethoven. Now many of you might think, oh my gosh, of course I can tell the difference between Mozart and Beethoven. Well can you? Well if you are already familiar with the works that I've chosen, you'll understand the significance of this question and the interesting listening test that I'm presenting for you. These two sonata movements, I have excerpts from each of them, are both in the key of C minor to kind of make the test kind of fair, having two sonata movement excerpts in the same key. I'm going to play for you in a moment the excerpt one followed then by the excerpt two and then you can decide before I reveal which one is Mozart and which one is Beethoven and in the comments below I'd like you to all comment if you are not familiar with either of these pieces and see if you chose correctly or not. This will be a very interesting test and you can leave comments here at LivingPianos.com as well as YouTube. So here we go, this is the sample number one for you.

[music]

So that was sample one and now we're going to have example number two for you.

[music]

So they're both very dramatic pieces of music, aren't they? Well, I hope all of you have decided which one you think is Mozart number one and which one you think is Beethoven number one or number two for Mozart or Beethoven. If you haven't decided yet, stop playing the video so you can make the decision before I reveal it, all right? And then be honest in the comments, which one you chose. I'm very interested in this. Now, first of all, I'm going to tell you why I chose these two works, because they are both in the minor key.

And Mozart in the minor key has a lot of fire that is typical of what you think of as Beethoven. If I had chosen one of his sonatas in the major key, it might have been easier to tell, like for example, his C major, K 330. This is Mozart here.

I would not be mistaken for Beethoven, would it? And of course, Beethoven, there's any number of sonatas that really are very dramatic and would not be confused with Mozart.

So many of them are so famous, though, like the Appassionata, the Pathétique, are very robust emotional works. So getting back to these two sonatas, first of all, what they are, the Mozart sonata I played is K 457 in C minor, of course. And by the way, it's got a companion fantasy that is really a gorgeous piece that's very experimental with its harmonies and such, that is a companion in the same opus.

And the Beethoven sonata is opus 10, number one, also in C minor. And I chose excerpts that highlight things to try to trick you as much as I possibly could with this. So the reveal, the first excerpt was indeed Mozart. That's right, that is the Mozart sonata, K 457 in C minor. And the second one indeed was the Beethoven opus 10, number one.

I played the Mozart, the recapitulation of the first movement, because it goes into the minor key for the second subject, which I thought was more dramatic and more Beethoven -esque. Whereas in the Beethoven, I did exactly the opposite. I took the exposition of the Beethoven because it goes into the major in the second subject. So that I was really trying to trick you in this, all right? I was not taking typical examples. So if you got it wrong, don't feel badly and go watch the difference between Mozart and Beethoven. So you get some clues as to some of the differences in their composition, both great composers with a wide range of music as you can hear today. I hope this is interesting for you. If you like videos like this, let me know. Shoot it in the comments here at livingpianos.com, your online piano resource. Thanks again for all you subscribers. We'll see you next time.

Automatic video-to-text transcription by DaDaScribe.com

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