Beethoven at 250

 Now here’s a very unusual work indeed: a single-movement piece, roughly 25 minutes long, that features orchestra, solo piano, vocal soloists, and a chorus. Why would Beethoven have written such an oddly structured piece? Most likely, I figured, he wrote this piece for a very specific musical performance event…and that turns out to have been exactly the case. Beethoven put on a benefit concert for himself in December of 1808, which I mentioned the other day in the post about the Fourth and Fifth Piano Concertos. It was quite the program, involving a full orchestra, a chorus, vocal soloists, andDown the rabbit hole….

 I was fortunate in my music-making days to get to actually play Beethoven on three different occasions. The first came via my piano teacher in high school, a lovely old woman named Margaret Hooker. She lived alone in a nice-sized house in Olean, NY, with a quite lovely backyard and a large music studio with two pianos in it, and she was well known as one of the area’s finest piano teachers. She had a lot of students, and her end-of-year recitals were always pretty big events. Thinking back on those recitals, I remember a lot of music, including one badDown the rabbit hole….

In a typical classical music concert today, you might hear a short work–an overture, perhaps–followed by a concerto, then an intermission, then a symphony. Or the concerto might be the featured work after the intermission, especially if your soloist is one of the greats. Generally you can count on the concert being over in 90 to 120 minutes. Not so the concerts of Ludwig van Beethoven’s day. On December 22, 1808, Beethoven gave a concert consisting of his Fifth and Sixth symphonies, three movements from his Mass in C, a Fantasia for solo piano, a concert aria, the Choral FantasiaDown the rabbit hole….

 Beethoven wrote five piano concertos, and only one of these is in a minor key. I don’t want to reduce these things to the easily-refuted notion that “major key equals happy music, minor key equals sad music”, but there does often seem to be a degree to which a minor key brings out Beethoven’s brooding side more than the major keys do. This concerto is certainly the most inward-looking, the most introspective, off the five. Where the previous two concertos opened with genial major themes, Beethoven’s Third opens with a generally low-key statement of the main march-like theme in theDown the rabbit hole….

Beethoven’s Symphony No 7 in A Major, op. 92, isn’t just one of Beethoven’s personal greatest works. It’s one of the greatest works of music ever composed, and its stature is such that it even rises beyond the history of music and into the history of art. Beethoven’s Seventh is in the same rarefied air as Michelengelo’s Sistine Chapel, Da Vinci’s The Last Supper, Wagner’s Ring Cycle, the Tale of Genji, the terra cotta warriors of China, Hamlet, and…you get the idea. When we engage with the Seventh Symphony, we’re engaging with one of the great works of human art.Down the rabbit hole….

 In the wonderful movie Mr. Holland’s Opus, Richard Dreyfuss plays Mr. Holland, a classically-trained composer who needs to make ends meet so he gets a job as a high school music teacher and band director. He figures this will be an easy gig leaving him plenty of time to write his masterworks, and yet, very quickly he is buried by the difficulties of a job he never saw himself doing. After a lot of teeth-gnashing and garment-rending over his complete inability to reach his students, he decides to change his approach. He sits down at the piano in front ofDown the rabbit hole….

Music is the one incorporeal entrance into the higher world of knowledge which comprehends mankind but which mankind cannot comprehend. –Ludwig van Beethoven Two hundred fifty years ago today, Ludwig van Beethoven was likely born. We don’t know if this is his actual birthdate. All we can surmise is that he was likely born on this date because he is known, by church records, to have been baptized on December 17, 1770, and it was common practice in his time for infants to be baptized the day after their birth. I’m not done with Beethoven yet, not by a longshot!Down the rabbit hole….

 On the eve of what is likely Beethoven’s two-hundred fiftieth birthday, one might ask, “Why do we still listen to him? Why is this music still potent? Why is it still relevant?” More tomorrow and for the rest of the month, but…this is why. All it takes is being willing to listen, and to go where the music takes you, and Beethoven does all the rest. Thanks to Sheila O’Malley, who shared this with me over on her blog. Share This PostDown the rabbit hole….

 There’s something about the work that results from a genius deciding to just…go on autopilot for a bit. Beethoven found himself in 1813 being requested by a friend to write a piece of music for an automated music device, basically a wind-up machine with wind instruments and such, not unlike a player piano but a bit more complicated. The gizmo was called a panharmonicon, and I wouldn’t mind hearing what one of these sounds like. Apparently Beethoven wrote a piece too large for the actual machine, so he expanded it further for full orchestra with a lot of extra percussionDown the rabbit hole….