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Music open thread: Beethoven [1]
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Date: 2022-12-16
A motivational speaker once wrote in a now-deleted Medium post that Beethoven wrote five of the fifty greatest pieces of music ever created. “But in order to create those,” Beethoven wrote 650 “songs” that are apparently not worth bothering with.
And if we’re only to listen to Beethoven’s five pieces that are deemed to be among the fifty greatest pieces of music ever created, and ignore everything else Beethoven wrote, then there’s no point in listening to women composers, nor to black and Latino composers, nor to any composers besides those few dead white guys admitted into that exclusive pantheon of the greatest composers.
To that way of thinking, I say, paraphrasing Beethoven, “nicht diese.” I want to give everything Beethoven wrote a chance. I’ll like some of his pieces better than others, but that’ll be based on my taste, not someone else deciding that this one work by Beethoven must be played to death while this other piece of his is completely ignored.
Beethoven’s contemporaries would be surprised at how popular Beethoven’s Bagatelle in A minor, “Für Elise,” WoO 59, is today. The “WoO” tells us it wasn’t even published during his lifetime. Compare that to the six bagatelles that were published in 1825 as his Opus 126 by B. Schotts Söhne.
The Bagatelle in B minor from that half dozen immediately grabbed my attention when I first listened to the set. I discovered it through the Big Beethoven Piano Box you can get on Amazon, more than ten hours of music for just 99¢.
That “box” includes almost all of Beethoven’s piano sonatas played by Bruce Hungerford. But it also includes quite a few other Beethoven solo piano pieces, including the Opus 126 Bagatelles played by Denis Matthews.
I like Matthews’s interpretation, but I decided I also wanted a different interpretation in my collection. So I bought Eleanor Perrone’s Diabelli Variations album even though I already have those variations played by Maurizio Pollini on Deutsche Grammophon and also Peter Serkin from the Big Beethoven Piano Box.
Here’s Hilda Huang playing just No. 4 in B minor:
If you know anything about 19th Century music publishers, you probably know they didn’t like to publish anything they didn’t think would be profitable. That’s kind of why Leopold Mozart’s son didn’t write a third piano quartet (and not, as you might have assumed, because Leopold gave up on pushing to actually write the damn thing).
Bernhard Schott must’ve thought the Opus 126 Bagatelles would sell well. And apparently he also thought the same of Beethoven’s String Quartet in E-flat major, which he published as Opus 127. Classical music radio stations play it once in a blue moon, so I sure didn’t discover it by listening to the radio.
The eleventh and last bagatelle from Beethoven’s Opus 119 set didn’t particularly stand out to me when I first heard it. Here’s Anna Shelest with a nice interpretation:
But this bagatelle made a much greater impression on Max Reger, who wrote eleven variations on it and a fugue, for two pianos. It was published as his Opus 86.
I personally prefer the orchestral version. Dennis Burkh with the Janáček Philharmonic Orchestra on the Caprice label is one good choice.
The open thread question: what’s your favorite Beethoven piece that isn’t heard all that often these days?
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