Happy Birthday Beethoven
It’s the 250th year since Beethoven was born and if you don’t know much about Beethoven, you surely know know his music from “Fur Elise” and “Ode to Joy” to “the “Moonlight Sonata” and thunderous “Fifth Symphony.” The Financial Times making the case not just for him as the “archetypal Romantic composer” who was “unkempt, unruly, born to struggle against fate and the injustices of the world.” but also as a composer and artist whose work still resounds fiercely today.
A cascade of new articles and books out about the famous composer are indexed here - both to walk you through the basics and provide a guide for further exploration for you or the Beethoven aficionado in your life.
25 SEPTEMBER 2020 Chris Wright writes in Dissent Magazine about “The Revolutionary Beethoven” pushing back on what you think you know - “ Familiarity, it seems, has bred not contempt but ignorance. We hear the famous melodies for the thousandth time, whether in movies, commercials, or concerts, from the third, fifth, sixth, or ninth symphonies or from piano concertos and sonatas or pieces of chamber music. But the cutting edge of this music has been dulled through overuse. That is, we have forgotten, and no longer seem to hear, the intensely political nature of Beethoven’s music—its subversive, revolutionary, passionately democratic, and freedom-exalting nature. In the year of the great composer’s 250th birthday, it would be fitting to recapture this essence, to retune our ears to pick up the music’s political and philosophical message…” The entire piece, which takes you through the greatest hits of the composer’s life as well as surveys his patrons and his politics is worth reading. Plus Wright introduces you to a piece the casual Beethoven listener might not have heard - “Cantata on the Death of Joseph II” - and the background behind it.
Wright also delves into Beethoven’s fascination with and later contempt for Napoleon and the composer’s disdain for aristocrats. In an insult for the ages, Wright shares “His contempt for aristocrats was such that, years later, he was able to write an insulting note to one of his most generous benefactors, Prince Lichnowsky: ‘Prince, what you are, you are by circumstance and birth; what I am, I am through myself. There are, and always will be, thousands of princes; but there is only one Beethoven.’”
Click through to read the entire piece here at Dissent.
25 SEPTEMBER 2020 Richard Fairman in the FT surveys Beethoven “the real-life artist and the Romantic myth” lamenting the lack of celebration of the composer’s work in this 250th anniversary year due to the pandemic. The casual listener is pointed to Simon Rattle and the London Symphony Orchestra’s performance of the rarely-performed “Christus am Olberge” (see more below for February’s interview with Rattle on this).
Fairman also looks at the two newest books out on the composer - “Beethoven, A Life” - written in Dutch in 2009 and just translated into English - calling this part of “the journey towards a more complex and nuanced picture of the great composer.” He also surveys Laura Tunbridge’s “Beethoven: A Life in Nine Pieces” - a shorter book that uses nine Beethoven works to explore is life. Fairman saying “Her choices are not always the most obvious, but a lot of information is packed into her musical portraits.” “Fidelio,” Beethoven’s sole opera getting special mention for it’s contemporary relevance to patriotism and tyranny.
2 FEBRUARY 2020 Simon Rattle on “Christus am Olberge” - mentioned earlier in the FT piece. Rattle lays out his thoughts on Beethoven, his motivation behind this "and the “matter of the dark night of the soul.” He characterizes it as an “unearthly, underground sensation of some of it.” Watch here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jX5BfCBiHos