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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 #447
Sonata for Piano & Violin in G major, Op. 96 (1812)
1/ The last of Beethoven's 10 violin sonatas is usually considered to be the last work of his middle period.
Sonata for Piano & Violin in G major, Op. 96 (1812)
1/ The last of Beethoven's 10 violin sonatas is usually considered to be the last work of his middle period.
2/ His last two sonatas, composed almost a decade apart, bookend Beethoven's Heroic Style. You can almost hear that style germinating in the Kreutzer's virtuosic display. The G major dissolves it away in a cloud of serene, ethereal lyricism.
3/ It took Beethoven several years to find his way fully onto the "New Path" that became his late style, but there are signposts towards it in the almost impressionistic inwardness of the earlier movements, and the spacious yet spirited variations that form the finale.
#TheCompleteBeethoven #443
Symphony No. 8 in F major, Op. 93 (1812)
1/ The first surprise about a symphony full of surprises is that it wasn't supposed to be a symphony at all.
Symphony No. 8 in F major, Op. 93 (1812)
1/ The first surprise about a symphony full of surprises is that it wasn't supposed to be a symphony at all.
2/ Beethoven at first intended it to be a piano concerto. The first draft contains the opening theme and music that's clearly related to later themes too, but it ends in a cadenza for solo piano, and passages in the sketches that follow are marked "solo" and "tutti". 
3/ He started the piece straight after No. 7. Following a new symphony with a new piano concerto would once have been no surprise at all. He played Concerto No. 4 between the premieres of Symphonies 6 & 5, and No. 3 was composed to go with a symphony too.
#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..."
#TheCompleteBeethoven #331
Symphony No. 4 in B-flat major, Op. 60 (1806)
1/ With the first great Romantic symphony under his belt, and the next two on the drawing board, Beethoven takes a break to compose the first neo-classical symphony.
Symphony No. 4 in B-flat major, Op. 60 (1806)
1/ With the first great Romantic symphony under his belt, and the next two on the drawing board, Beethoven takes a break to compose the first neo-classical symphony.
2/ Beethoven began sketches for a new symphony as he was finishing the Eroica. However, it wasn't the fourth that he was planning. The ideas written in his sketchbook in 1804 eventually blossomed into the first movement and scherzo of No. 5.
3/ Another entry marked "lustige Sinfonia" also isn't No. 4. An idea for "Murmurs of the Brooks" prefigures the slow movement of the Pastoral. Beethoven had planted two symphonic seeds two years before No. 4, but they wouldn't be fully grown until two years after it flowered.
#TheCompleteBeethoven #290
Symphony No. 2 in D major, Op. 36 (1800-02)
1/ Beethoven's response to the despair caused by his incurable deafness? The longest, most audicious, most joyful (*) symphony the world had ever heard.
Not all heroes wear capes.
Symphony No. 2 in D major, Op. 36 (1800-02)
1/ Beethoven's response to the despair caused by his incurable deafness? The longest, most audicious, most joyful (*) symphony the world had ever heard.
Not all heroes wear capes.
2/ "You shall receive Mozart's spirit from Haydn's hands." - Count Waldstein
Mozart, Beethoven's musical hero since childhood, is at the heart of his second symphony just as surely as Haydn, his teacher, was the wellspring for Symphony No. 1.
Mozart, Beethoven's musical hero since childhood, is at the heart of his second symphony just as surely as Haydn, his teacher, was the wellspring for Symphony No. 1.
3/ Beethoven began Symphony No. 2 in late 1800, eager to repeat the critical and commercial success of No. 1's premiere at his first benefit concert in April that year. However, any plans he had to finish No. 2 in time for a similar concert in 1801 were to be thwarted.
