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Friday, November 16, 2012

Beethoven Strings Me Along

Once again, I will be attending WQXR's "Beethoven Marathon" in NYC on Sunday, this year the complete string quartets in ten hours (last year, we got all 32 piano sonatas) via several different quartets.  Here's one of the greatest and most profound of the movements, from opus 59, no. 2.   And see my Beethoven book (with Kerry Candaele) over on the right rail with my other books.

1 comment:

Laurence Glavin said...

Many of your Beethoven excerpts consist of slow movements from the string quartets. Music before Beethoven's time was influenced by singing and dancing, thus slow music was of short duration, even instrumental music. Example: the arias from Bach's "St. Matthew Passion". Shortly before LvB began his career, Mozart was introducing new depth and feeling into adagios and andantes; remember the craze for the slow movement in the so-called "Elvira Madigan" Concerto? But within even a few of Beethoven's early piano sonatas, and certainly the "Eroica" Symphony, LvB explored how fully-developed and extended slow music could be the vehicle for demonstrating the fullest measure (almost a pun!) of emotion the art of musical composition could occasion. BTW, for all the grief the later Austrian composer Bruckner received for his fealty to Wagner, he was perhaps the most successful composer of adagios following Beethoven.