Discover and read the best of Twitter Threads about #beethovenscontemporaries
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#TheCompleteBeethoven #711
String Quartet in E-flat major, Op. 127 (1824-5)
1/ "They seem to me to stand ... on the extreme boundary of all that has hitherto been attained by human art and imagination." - Robert Schumann on the quartets Opp. 127 & 130
String Quartet in E-flat major, Op. 127 (1824-5)
1/ "They seem to me to stand ... on the extreme boundary of all that has hitherto been attained by human art and imagination." - Robert Schumann on the quartets Opp. 127 & 130
2/ Beethoven's late quartets are now revered as five (or six) of the supreme masterpieces in all music. Some of the praise is heaped on them in purple prose that I'm too tactful to quote, but which I often find as hard to digest as early audiences found the music to hear.
3/ Many of #BeethovensContemporaries were puzzled or actively hostile. Louis Spohr called them "indecipherable, uncorrected horrors". Yet the quartets, and particularly Op. 127, sprang from the same musical soil that nurtured his greatest public triumph.
#TheCompleteBeethoven #344
Symphony No. 6 in F major, Op. 68 "Pastoral" (1807-8)
1/ "No one can love the country as much as I do. For surely woods, trees, and rocks give back the echo which man desires to hear." - Ludwig van Beethoven, 1810
Symphony No. 6 in F major, Op. 68 "Pastoral" (1807-8)
1/ "No one can love the country as much as I do. For surely woods, trees, and rocks give back the echo which man desires to hear." - Ludwig van Beethoven, 1810
2/ As a boy Ludwig and his father Johann van Beethoven went for hikes along the River Rhine. "Everlastingly dear to me", these journeys sometimes lasted several days. They stand out like a beacon among many more unhappy memories of his strict, abusive, alcoholic father. 
3/ The adult Beethoven continued to took regular walks among the woods and fields around Vienna, and nature was a constant source of inspiration:
"You will ask me whence I take my ideas? I cannot say with any certainty: they come to me uninvited, directly or indirectly..."
"You will ask me whence I take my ideas? I cannot say with any certainty: they come to me uninvited, directly or indirectly..."
