Beethoven's note placement

[John Ruggero]

Another example of Beethoven's very logical placement of the notes on the staves. From Diabelli variation 20:

Diabelli 20.png (1.32 MiB) Viewed 6739 times

At A he keeps the lower right hand voices on the lower staff to isolate the imitative soprano voice on the upper staff, since the lower parts, the D and G, do not continue on in the upper staff. At B he doesn't do this because the lower right hand voices do continue on in the upper staff.

[Anders Hedelin]

Excuse me for being pedantic, but I can't see the defining difference between A and B. At A, one middle part IS actually moved to the upper staff (G-F). At B, I think Beethoven had more practical reasons for putting all the right-hand notes on the upper staff.

Here's another example (I couldn't find a copy of the manuscript, but of the first edition). Op. 4, second movement:

Beethoven stave distribution.JPG (20.63 KiB) Viewed 6685 times

If this is true to Beethoven's writing, it shows a rather pragmatic use of the staves. All the notes on the upper staff aren't more important, just some of them, and the rest put there for convenience.

[John Ruggero]

Post deleted

[John Ruggero]

Excuse me for being pedantic, but I can't see the defining difference between A and B. At A, one middle part IS actually moved to the upper staff (G-F).

I think of the G-F as a new voice branching off from the G in the upper staff since the middle G C# D melody should continue on G C# D (E F) like the outer melodies, but the E is left to our imagination. So I think that Beethoven wouldn't have placed the G-F on the lower staff because it would given the false impression that it continues the G-C#-D.

Example A.png (182.66 KiB) Viewed 6653 times

And the G would require three ledger lines, something he didn't want to do unless absolutely necessary (see comment below).

At B, I think Beethoven had more practical reasons for putting all the right-hand notes on the upper staff.
Here's another example (I couldn't find a copy of the manuscript, but of the first edition). Op. 4, second movement:
Beethoven stave distribution. If this is true to Beethoven's writing, it shows a rather pragmatic use of the staves. All the notes on the upper staff aren't more important, just some of them, and the rest put there for convenience.

We can't know for sure what Beethoven actually did in the case of op. 7 since the autograph is lost and the engravers, while generally faithful, didn't always follow his note distribution exactly. However, the style of note distribution shown in your example is typical of that time and, as you said, practical. It was aimed at avoiding ledger lines between the staves to conserve space on the page. The practice had the side benefit of making the voice leading clearer than the current practice of dividing the voices on the basis of which hand plays what, which is far more mechanical.

Sometimes the way in which Beethoven carried this out expresses something special. I think that A is such a special case because he could have placed the D along with the G on the upper staff and thus avoided using a ledger line and it would have shown that the D continues on to the F and E. But he doesn't do this because it would have broken up the middle G-C#-D imitation after the C# and created a false impression as explained in my first comment above. At B he could have placed the B-flat on the lower staff, but didn't do that either. But most engravers of that time wouldn't have done it either because it so obviously leads on to the next chord.

In your example from op. 7, I have always had the impression from the notation that the soprano should be highlighted against the rest as if this were a song. What follows the phrase seems to bear this out:

C.png (100.36 KiB) Viewed 6653 times

To show this, Beethoven could have completely isolated the melody on the upper staff. But perhaps he felt that the alto part interacts too much with the soprano to do this. For example, in m. 2 the G in the melody comes from the previous E-F, making the line E-F-G, but the D and E that follows the G in the melody actually come out of the alto voice C-D in m. 1 making the line C-D-E. So the upper part is actually a series of thirds EC-FD-GE. Note that in m. 4, the soprano stays on the upper staff despite the ledger lines. (This also avoids too much music on the lower staff, but Beethoven often doesn't let that bother him.) One also notices that throughout the phrase, middle C and its neighboring notes B and D are all kept consistently on the upper staff, even though the B might by convention have appeared on the lower staff to avoid ledger lines and the C could go either way.

B.png (289.84 KiB) Viewed 6653 times