OT: Happy Beethoven's Birthday!

[Roland Flessner]

For those so inclined, celebrate by spinning up some old favorites. I know I will be, starting with the piano trios op. 1 numbers 2 and 3.

With your indulgence, I'll share two favorite quotes:



The capacity for melody is a gift. This means that it is not within our power to develop it by study. [In Beethoven] we have one of the great creators of music who spent his whole life imploring the aid of this gift which he lacked. So that this admirable deaf man developed his extraordinary faculties in direct proportion to the resistance offered him by the one he lacked, just the way a blind man in his eternal night develops the sharpness of his audible sense.

--Igor Stravinsky, quoted by violist Peter Yarbrough of the Alexander Quartet



What the New Testament is for Christians, Beethoven could be--and even is to a large extent--for those who strive after the humanitarian ethos. Is it perhaps that the human being is the subject of all he has to say?
 
The human being who in Bach lived, believed, suffered, and died sheltered but also confined within the strictly defined bounds of Protestant Christian existence, humble, bound to God in an objective order. The human being who in Mozart already enjoyed full freedom in the seraphic beauty of a perfect harmony, almost innocent, in spite of every refinement touching only in Don Giovanni the dark substratum of the world, hubris, and destruction, but in the confrontation of forces returning to the law.
 
But what is the human being in Beethoven? He is the entity entirely filled with consciousness of himself, the hazards of his existence, his suffering, his nobility, and his greatness. This man Beethoven, who was he?
 
Certainly no hero in the sense of the martial victor, no Achilles, radiant even in downfall, but a man pursued by the demons of his inmost being, searching for freedom, greatness, and above all love. And all wrung under the most adverse circumstances from humiliation and misery, and in the unimaginable loneliness to which deafness condemned him, without ever the sound of a loving voice to break through this barrier.
 
As “God gave him the power to say what he suffered,” he could only put all that white hot emotion, mute suffering, humiliation, and intimations of an ineffable sublimity into musical form. And so he transmuted in the forge of suffering the human means of expression into musical form, the strictest most crystalline form, relentlessly wrought into the most exact design. And then the miracle happens, that in this most pure, virile music all that stirs the heart of a human being is turned to speech: suffering, grief, loneliness, but also, and above all, the indescribable sweetness of consolation, happiness, dance, ecstasy carried to the bounds of mystical transport; from the Virgilian secular piety of the “Pastoral” Symphony and the ”Convalescent's hymn of thanks to the Godhead,” of the String Quartet, op. 132, to the visionary perception of a Father beyond the stars and the devotion of the Missa Solemnis. The entire span of the human heart and spirit is in that work, perceptible, communicable. There is appeal and reassurance, the courage to shoulder one's own destiny in the faith of the indestructible, invincible dignity which makes human beings what they are.
 
That is Beethoven for me.

--Eugen Jochem, in a note accompanying his RCO recording of the Missa Solemnis

[barryguerrero]

I love the "Pastoral" Symphony, as well as most of the late string quartets from Beethoven. However, I've never really warmed-up to the "Missa Solemnis". It's interesting that Mahler never conducted that. I know other people who think it's the cat's meow. For big choral works, I guess I like Mahler 8 and the B. Britten "War" Requiem the most. Janacek's "Glogolitic" Mass too! Faure's Requiem is really nice. I guess for more traditional Austro/German types of masses, I like those from Haydn the most. The problem with big choral works is that they generally have long and dull vocal solos as well. At least Mahler knew to keep his vocal solos short   .   .    .   .  Frankly, I was never so bored in a concert than why I tried to sit through the whole of J.S. Bach's "St. Matthew" Passion at St. Paul's Cathedral in London in 1981. Never again!

[Roland Flessner]

It took me a long time to warm to Missa Solemnis but I finally did a few years ago. I do prefer the HIP-style performances, such as Gardiner, Rilling, Zinman, Herreweghe, etc.

There is very little Beethoven that I don't like but I do have a special regard for the humor in the Eighth Symphony (perhaps the least frequently performed). No Beethoven symphony could be called neglected but I love the Fourth. (Antiphonally placed violin sections are urgently needed.) Those not familiar with the op. 1 piano trios might make their acquaintance. The finale of op.1 #2 is great fun, kind of like the Lone Ranger for three musicians.

Quite a few of the violin sonatas will reward the listener as well.

I love the St. Matthew Passion but I don't think I've ever listened to it in a single evening even at home. Hearing it whole while planted in a wooden pew would present orthopedic challenges if nothing else.

[barryguerrero]

I generally prefer the more Haydn like Beethoven symphonies - 1,2,4 and 8 - to the more illustrious ones, with the exception of the "Pastoral". I don't ever need to hear B7 ever again - they play every single bloody day on the local classical music radio station. I have to be in the mood for B9, which is not all that often. And I agree with David Hurwitz's assessment of the "Erocia":  the orchestration is too small and too basic for such an 'epic' symphony. However, I always love it when Beethoven employs the horns in a trio section of his scherzo movements.

[waderice]

As a "retired" member of a few symphonic choruses (I can no longer stand for long periods of time in a choral concert), I had to get through 12 performances of Beethoven's 9th in 1976 (and a 13th a few years later).  I never had the opportunity to perform Beethoven's Missa Solemnis, nor Bach's St. Matthew Passion or the Mass in B Minor.  The first and the third works are generally two major choral works that are generally on a long list of a chorister's list of "must perform" works.  I saw/heard Robert Shaw conduct the Choral Arts Society of Washington in a performance of the Missa Solemnis years ago, and I recall that between movements, he had to step off the podium to collect himself, as this wasn't very long before he passed on.

Oh, and before I forget - I did have the opportunity to perform Beethoven's Choral Fantasy, which was sort of a hybrid study between a piano concerto and a prototype for the last movement of the Ninth Symphony.  And I cannot forget having done performances of Mahler's Second and Eighth Symphonies.

[barryguerrero]

The "Choral Fantasy" is actually my single favorite work by Beethoven. It has everything great about Beethoven in one, handy-dandy work that's relatively succinct.

To me, Bach's Mass in B-minor is a much better work than the never ending St. Matthew Passion. That's just me. I think some of Bach's best works are in B-minor. Bach's fault is just too many notes. That said, I love the "Brandenburg" Concerti, and view them as the first truly great orchestral works. They amount to something.

[Roland Flessner]

Worthwhile Beethoven, aside from the big hits: The op. 30 violin sonatas, all three showing the composer at his best. And the op. 74 "Harp" quartet, with a first movement both irreverent and sincere, a heartfelt slow movement, a demented scherzo with an explosively crazy trio section, and a finale comprised of imaginative variations. It bears comparison with the late quartets as it points to them.

Another wonderful quote, this from Joseph Kerman's "The Beethoven Quartets":

"A mature Beethoven piece, I think, I should be inclined to say, is a person; one meets and reacts to it with the same sort of particularity, intimacy, and concern as one does to another human being. . . Beethoven seems to have struggled to project in art the quality of human contact that he saw himself cut off from by deafness and by the daemon of creation. That, for him personally, was perhaps the essence of the heroic vision."

[sbugala]

Thank you for sharing the Jochum quote. Sometimes, some excellent thoughts from a conductor in liner notes show why physical media is still a treasure. I'll probably have to share some of that essay.

Years ago, there was an essay from Bruno Walter translated and posted on Andante's website. I wish I could find that again.

As for the Missa Solemnis...I warmed to it when I finally tried it...and now I wonder if it's his greatest work. It moves me as much as Mahler's Second. My only problem now is, contrary to Roland's feelings; I can't tolerate HIP influenced versions of it. Donald Runnicles led a performance in St. Louis I loved...but some years later, David Robertson did on that I had to turn off from the radio because it sounded thin and scrawny.

[Roland Flessner]

>> Years ago, there was an essay from Bruno Walter translated and posted on Andante's website. I wish I could find that again.

I have two books by Bruno Walter. One is his reminiscences of Mahler and the other is an autobiography, "Theme and Variations." I wonder if the essay you mentioned was excerpted from one of those.

[sbugala]

>> Years ago, there was an essay from Bruno Walter translated and posted on Andante's website. I wish I could find that again.

I have two books by Bruno Walter. One is his reminiscences of Mahler and the other is an autobiography, "Theme and Variations." I wonder if the essay you mentioned was excerpted from one of those.

That would be great if that was the case. I could be misremembering, but I want to say it was written in the 30s. I went looking for it some time ago, hoping it was still cached somewhere.