The Seventh Symphony (1812) Was, at The Time, Beethoven’s Last and Vibrant Word Gmat Reading Comprehension

Reading Passage Question:

The Seventh Symphony (1812) was, at the time, Beethoven’s last and vibrant word on the big style he had cultivated in the previous decade. In the Eighth Symphony (1814) he does something new by seeming to return to something old. He writes, that is, a symphony shorter than any since his First. It is almost as though he wanted to call his entire development throughout that decade into question. Indeed, over the remaining years of his life he would confidently explore in opposite directions, writing bigger pieces than before and ones more compressed, his most rhetorical music and his most inward, his most public and his most esoteric, compositions that plumb the inexhaustible possibilities of the sonata style and those that propose utterly new ways of organizing material, music reaching extremes of the centered and the bizarre.

If, however, we think of the Eight as a nostalgic return to the good old days, we misunderstand it. To say it is 1795 revisited from the vantage point of 1812 is not right either. What interests Beethoven is not so much brevity for its own sake — and certainly not something called “classicism” — as concentration. It is as though he were picking up where he had left off in the densely saturated first movement of the Fifth Symphony to produce another tour de force of tight packing. He had already done something like this two years earlier in one of his most uncompromising works, the F-minor String Quartet, Op. 95. But a symphony is not a “private” connoisseur’s music like a string quartet; by comparison, the Eighth Symphony is Opus 95’s friendly, open-featured cousin, even though its first and last movements bring us some of the most violent moments in Beethoven.

Reading Passage Question:
‘The Seventh Symphony (1812) was, at the time, Beethoven’s last and vibrant word’ is a GMAT reading comprehension passage with answers. Candidates need a strong knowledge of English GMAT reading comprehension.
This GMAT Reading Comprehension consists of 7 comprehension questions.
The GMAT Reading Comprehension questions are designed for the purpose of testing candidates’ abilities in understanding, analysing, and applying information or concepts. Candidates can actively prepare with the help of GMAT Reading Comprehension Practice Questions.

Questions and Solutions

1. The author implies which of the following is a characteristic of "classicism"?

1. nostalgia
2. lack of focus
3. compromising
4. dense saturation
5. works on a smaller scale

2. Which of the following does the author imply about Beethoven's Eighth Symphony?

1. It is compromising, and not vibrant like a piece typical of classicism
2. In it, for the first time, Beethoven explored concentration as an organizing principle for an entire symphony
3. It was more inwardly focused, less rhetorical than the F-minor String Quartet, Op. 95
4. It rejected the sonata style used in the Seventh Symphony, exploring completely new ways to organize music.
5. Compared to his other symphonies, it is a particularly esoteric public work, having both friendly and violent tendencies.

3. The passage provides support for which of the following?

1. Beethoven's Eighth Symphony would not be appreciated by connoisseurs.
2. The Fifth Symphony is the shortest symphony between the First and the Eighth.
3. In 1795, Beethoven composed works that contained less development than the majority of pieces over the next 15 years.
4. The F-minor String Quartet, Op. 95 is one of Beethoven's most esoteric works.
5. Later in life, Beethoven developed significant misgivings about the big development characteristic of Symphonies of his middle period.

4. Which of the following is the purpose of the first sentence of the second paragraph?

1. To introduce the differences between the Eighth Symphony and earlier works of similar scale
2. To indicate how Beethoven felt that nostalgia had no place in symphonic compositions
3. To explain what is so rough and uncompromising about a work such as the Eighth Symphony.
4. To emphasize that the Eighth Symphony had almost nothing in common with Beethoven's previous works, except in the most superficial assessment
5. To demonstrate why the Eighth Symphony was considerably more optimistic than were Beethoven's early works.

5. The author most likely mentioned the F-minor String Quartet, Op. 95 in order to

1. show, by contrast, how friendly and approachable the Eighth Symphony is
2. expand the list of Beethoven's works that could be called a tour de force.
3. provide an example of a work that is concentrated but not violent
4. cite another work similar in formal organization to the Eighth Symphony
5. elucidate the channel by which the Fifth Symphony influenced the Eighth.

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