The first citywide San Antonio Symphony Beethoven Festival is approaching. Why are we celebrating a classical composer who has been dead for 184 years?
The Beethoven festival is important because it promotes the music as a living expression of what music itself should always aspire to become: boundless and without limitation. That is the story of Ludwig van Beethoven.
Attending a music festival is the perfect way to truly get a perspective of the genius of a composer. Interpreting what a composer’s music was meant to express is one of the great individual privileges of listening. Because most classical composers of greatness wrote music in many varied forms such as opera, concerto, symphony and song, attending a festival of a composer can really deliver insight into the music you may have never experienced.
Author Robert Haven Schauffler wrote a book in the 1950s titled “Beethoven: The Man Who Freed Music.” This book should be required reading for any student trying to understand the mind of a genius. Fraught with deafness and a misunderstood, horrible and angry disposition, Beethoven gave the world a legacy of music that is filled with beauty and passion.
Before Beethoven, music had many guidelines and rules when being commissioned for royalty. After Beethoven, music began to evolve as an art form, full of individual expression and without limitations. I tend to think Beethoven would have really enjoyed the legendary rock group Queen, or maybe some of the classic ballads of Mr. Ozzy Osbourne.
Beethoven was thought by many to be a sort of demigod – a man of unworldly genius. The truth is, as evidenced in his letters and memoirs, he displayed as much humanity in his life as in his immortalized music. Popular with the women, he never married and spent most of his life alone and evidentially in silence. Like so many introverted geniuses, he was depressed and often harbored thoughts of suicide.
The miracle is that through all of this, Beethoven’s devotion to his art not only kept him alive, but enabled him to express his heroic determination and belief in humanity in music that still speaks of those qualities to people today, nearly two centuries after his death.
“I will seize fate by the throat; it shall certainly not bend and crush me completely,” he told a friend. A subject of paradoxical consideration, his inspiration and will to live was, in the end, as powerful as his desire to complete his life as he lived. No wonder that one eyewitness account of Beethoven’s death attributes to him the grimly ironic last words, “Plaudite, amici; comedia finita est” – “Applaud, my friends; the comedy is over.”
A contemporary of Franz Joseph Haydn and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, it is hard to imagine three of history’s greatest musical minds alive at the same time. They not only knew one another, but actually heard each other’s music firsthand. An equivalent in the art world would be the association of Picasso, Lautrec and Cocteau in early 1900s Paris, who also recreated the standards of their art form.
In his lifetime, Beethoven wrote nine symphonies, nine concertos, 16 string quartets and 12 piano trios, in addition to 32 celebrated sonatas, many one-movement pieces for solo piano and notably more than 20 largely unpublished sets of variations and over 30 bagatelles.
While he completed only one opera, Beethoven wrote vocal music throughout his life, including two mass settings, other works for chorus and orchestra (in addition to the Ninth Symphony), arias, duets, art songs (lieder) and true song cycles.
The brainchild of the San Antonio Symphony’s newly appointed conductor Sebastian Lang-Lessing and its executive director, Jack Fishman, the festival offers an opportunity to explore these masterpieces, as well as other classics by Beethoven. In addition to the monumental nine symphonies, festival partners will offer all 32 piano sonatas, his complete chamber works for solo cello, all 10 violin sonatas and much more.
Many say now, as they did some 200 years ago, that they are born again when they experience Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, his great choral masterpiece. For me, the fateful fifth stirs early memories of my introduction to classical music. The ominous four-note beginning to his Fifth Symphony – bom bom bom bommmmm – is one of the most famous moments in all of music.
Festival partners include Camerata San Antonio, KLRN, Musical Bridges Around the World, Musical Offerings, Olmos Ensemble, San Antonio Chamber Music Society, San Antonio Symphony Mastersingers, San Antonio International Piano Competition, SOLI Chamber Ensemble, Tuesday Musical Club Artist Series, Youth Orchestras of San Antonio and others. Many thanks to KCI for sponsoring the festival.
Concerts will take place in various locations around town in January and February 2012. For more information about times and places, please log on to the websites of any of the partnering organizations, or visit www.sasymphony.org.
