Just as Monroe did not Invent sultry curvaceousness, when Ludwig van Beethoven premiered his first symphony in 1800, he, too, was simply taking up where his predecessors had left off.
The originality of Beethoven's symphonies, like that of Hitchcock's movies, lies in their overall effect. Hitchcock came up with only one new technique in his whole career (the dizzying zoom in/dolly out in ``Vertigo''); otherwise, he mainly combined existing camera tricks and plot devices in a new, tinglingly tense way.
Similarly, most of the symphony's details were already in place by Beethoven's time, thanks to the work of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Franz Josef Haydn and many lesser late-18th-century composers.
The symphony had come to be a 20- to 30- minute work in tour separate, substantial movements following a common pattern.
The first movement was the most complicated and was usually in sonata form, a three-part structure adhering to a specific key scheme.
In the movement's exposition section, two or more themes were presented whole. The first melody established the movements tonality, and the subsequent melodies were played in a different but closely related key.
Then the themes were yanked apart and wrapped around each other in the development section, which could venture into odd tonalities - rather like the plot twists in a Hitchcock film.
Finally came the recapitulation, in which all the themes were restated in their original torn, except that they turned up exclusively in the first theme's key. The movement was usually topped off with a little flourish, called a coda.
That was just the first movement, but don't be alarmed by the complexity of it all; the other three were simpler. In the Mozart-Haydn pattern, the second was generally slow and rather hymnlike. The third was quicker, usually a stylized version of the dance called the minuet. It had a contrasting middle section called a trio; despite its name, this was played by most of the orchestra, but decades earlier it had been scored for only three instrumental parts. The finale was often quite fast and brilliant.
This was the setup Beethoven appropriated as the Age of Enlightenment flickered out and was replaced by shadowy, brooding romanticism in art and literature.
Beethoven's first two symphonies, and, to a lesser extent, his fourth and eighth, follow Haydn's pattern. The real break came in 1803-04 with his third symphony, called the ``Eroica.''
The musical ``War and Peace'' of its time, it is indeed a work of heroic dimensions, twice as long as the average Haydn symphony. The ``Eroica'' opened up the bag of tricks Beethoven would rely on in most of his remaining symphonies.
Yes, tricks. All these years we've heard effusive tributes to Beethoven's genius, his tortured soul and the revolutionary character of his music. Yet the symphonies are really just a series of flashes and flourishes that would make little impression individually, but are overwhelming when taken as a whole.
In fact, by the standards of Beethoven's time, all the details seem to be wrong. The contrasts between the strings, winds and brass are glaring and rude. The music veers into distant tonalities, as if Beethoven can't decide what his home key should be.
Slow movements are no longer pretty trifles; they are sometimes unbearably intense. The polite minuet has become a raucous scherzo - the Italian word for ``joke'' or ``game.''
Rhythm often rivals melody for importance, most infamously in the beginning of the fifth symphony. In fact, Beethoven's melodies sometimes are no more than note patterns in search of a tune. Consider the finale of the fourth symphony, or the storm sequence in the sixth with its highly effective sound effects devoid of traditional musical content, or the whole of the seventh, the rhythmic nature of which inspired Richard Wagner to dub it ``the apotheosis of the dance.''
All these ``mistakes'' build up to an unprecedented musical force. There is more contrast between loud and soft, bright and dark, fast and slow - and, therefore, more drama, more emotional impact than even Mozart and Haydn produced at their most daring.
Beethoven's most popular symphonies are the third, fifth, sixth, seventh and ninth. The third, the revolutionary ``Eroica,'' was originally dedicated to Napoleon. The fifth opens with that famous four-note motif that has been likened to fate knocking at the door. (One competing theory holds that Beethoven was evoking the call of the goldfinch.)
The sixth symphony is the ``Pastoral,'' a musical depiction of a day in the countryside. The seventh Is impulsive and dancelike. The gargantuan ninth, culminating in a choral setting of Schiller's ``Ode to Joy,'' intimidated would-be symphonists for half a century. Johannes Brahms, for example, could not bring himself to complete a symphony until 1876, when he was 43.
Beethoven listening suggestions
Among currently available recordings of the Beethoven symphonies, the best complete boxed sets are by Herbert von Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic on Deutsche Grammophon (the five-compact disc version taped in 1963, not the six-disc set from the early 1980s), Gunter Wand and the North German Radio Symphony Orchestra on RCA, and Nikolaus Harnoncourt and the Chamber Orchestra of Europe on Teldec.
Those who prefer to pick and choose among single discs may confidently sample recordings by Bruno Waiter, George Szell and insightful speed demon René Leibowitz, as well as the incomparable performances of the fifth and seventh symphonies by Carlos Kleiber and the Vienna Philharmonic.
Unfortunately, most recent recordings - including period instrument sets by Christopher Hogwood, Roy Goodman and Roger Norrington - are far less interestingly conducted than these timeless analog stereo readings from the 1950s,'60s and '70s.
Once you've gotten into the symphonies, spend some time with Beethoven's other major works - five magnificent piano concertos; a dramatic violin concerto; a clutch of delightful trios for piano, violin and cello; a series of string quartets, the last few being of unsurpassed profundity; and 31 piano sonatas, showing Beethoven's evolution from Haydnesque classicism to high romanticism.