Beethoven in 1813. (Source)
Monday was Beethoven's birthday and Eric Wagner wished me a "happy Beethoven's birthday." I didn't blog about him Monday as I try to follow the schedule for online reading groups, but I can write about him today.
I have been a Beethoven fan for much of my life, and as I've written before, Robert Anton Wilson had a particular love of Beethoven. The essay about Beethoven in The Illuminati Papers, "Beethoven As Information," is my favorite short piece about Beethoven written by anyone, anywhere.
Sunday I went to see a local community orchestra, the CityMusic Cleveland Chamber Orchestra, give a concert at a local Catholic church. The orchestra played Mozart's Violin Concerto No. 3 and Beethoven's Symphony No. 7, along with a piece by composer Leó Weiner that I wasn't familiar with, the Serenade for Small Orchestra.
The Beethoven and the Mozart made the concert an ideal bill for me. Although I've listened to a lot of Mozart, I am not particularly familiar with that work. Here is an article about the soloist, Sibbi Bernhardssohn, talking about how "it’s probably the most perfect out of all the perfect violin concertos that Mozart wrote."
It certainly won me over. Later Sunday after I got home, I listened to a recording of it. My wife thought I was crazy to listen to a recording of something I had just heard. I thought it was crazy she would not want to hear it again.
The Seventh is perhaps the Beethoven symphony I have listened to the most. The second movement is particularly famous; when the symphony was first performed in 1813, it caused such a sensation that it was played twice. The movement is used to good effect in Zardoz, a 1974 science fiction movie that starred Sean Connery. I saw it in high school, and it was an early example of a Beethoven piece making an impression on me.
Late at night before I go to sleep, I often listen to the late night classical music program hosted by Peter Van de Graaff (it's very good). When I tuned in, the radio was playing a solo piano piece. To my amazement, I realized that the piece used the melody from the second movement of the Seventh. It turned out to be an obscure but interesting piece by Robert Schumann, WoO 31, "Studies in the Form of Free Variations on a Theme by Beethoven (1831–32)," played by Peter Frankl. Van de Graaff of course plays many famous pieces, but he's also good at discovering obscure but interesting ones.
2 comments:
Because of a RAW recommendation, Beethoven's 9th became my go-to trip music. My personal favorite recording was CSO conducted by Solti, but I am a Chicago boy, so maybe it was home team advantage. ;-)
Interesting post. I remember my roommate looking for me one night in college after a faculty recital. He found me in the listening room at the music library. He said he knew he'd find me there, "listening to how it was supposed to sound."
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