How hard is it to move 5 legless pianos 39 times? Beethoven owned five legless pianos and composed great works on the floor. His first apartment was in the center of Vienna's theater district... but he forgot to pay rent, so he had to move. (And it's very hard to move a piano. Even harder to move five). Beethoven's next apartment was in a dangerous part of town... so he moved, and the pianos followed on a series of pulleys. Then came an apartment with a view of the Danube (but he made too much noise and the neighbors complained), followed by an attic apartment (where he made even MORE of a rukus), and so Beethoven moved again and again. Each time, pianos were bought, left behind, transported on pulleys, slides, and by movers, all so that gifted Beethoven could compose great works of music for the world.
These rollicking, easy-to-play ragtime favorites include "Maple Leaf Rag," "The Entertainer," "Tiger Rag," and other melodies by such favorites as Scott Joplin, James Scott, Joseph Lamb, and Eubie Blake. All songs available as downloadable MP3s.
Wallace demystifies the narratives of Beethoven’s approach to his hearing loss and instead explores how Beethoven did not "conquer" his deafness; he adapted to life with it. We’re all familiar with the image of a fierce and scowling Beethoven, struggling doggedly to overcome his rapidly progressing deafness. That Beethoven continued to play and compose for more than a decade after he lost his hearing is often seen as an act of superhuman heroism. But the truth is that Beethoven’s response to his deafness was entirely human. And by demystifying what he did, we can learn a great deal about Beethoven’s music. Perhaps no one is better positioned to help us do so than Robin Wallace, who not only has dedicated his life to the music of Beethoven but also has close personal experience with deafness. One day, Wallace’s late wife, Barbara, found she couldn’t hear out of her right ear—the result of radiation administered to treat a brain tumor early in life. Three years later, she lost hearing in her left ear as well. Over the eight and a half years that remained of her life, despite receiving a cochlear implant, Barbara didn’t overcome her deafness or ever function again like a hearing person. Wallace shows here that Beethoven didn’t do those things, either. Rather than heroically overcoming his deafness, Beethoven accomplished something even more challenging: he adapted to his hearing loss and changed the way he interacted with music, revealing important aspects of its very nature in the process. Wallace tells the story of Beethoven’s creative life, interweaving it with his and Barbara’s experience to reveal aspects that only living with deafness could open up. The resulting insights make Beethoven and his music more accessible and help us see how a disability can enhance human wholeness and flourishing.
(Piano). 22 intermediate and early advanced-level selections, including Fur Elise, Six Ecossaises, various German Dances, Bagatelles, Sonatines, and more. Contents: Ecossaise in E-flat Major, WoO86 * German Dance in C Major, WoO8 * German Dance in F Major, WoO8 * German Dance in G Major, WoO8 * Landler Dance in D Major, WoO 11/1 * Landler Dance in D Major, WoO 11/3 * Landler Dance in D Major, WoO 11/5 * Landler Dance in D Major, WoO 11/6 * Landler Dance in D Major, WoO 15/2 * German Dance in A Major WoO 42/4 * Allemande, WoO 81 * Minuet in F Major * Happy-Sad WoO 54 * Fur Elise, WoO 59 * Sonatina in G Major - Moderato, Romance * Sonatina in G Major - Allegro Assai, Rondo * Easy Sonata in G Major, Op. 59, No. 2 - Allegro ma non troppo, Tempo di Minuetto * Six Ecossaises, WoO 83 * Bagatelle in D Major, Op. 33, No. 6 * Bagatelle in G minor, Op. 119/1 * Six Variations in G Major, WoO 70 * Moonlight Sonata, Op. 27, No. 2
A fascinating and in-depth exploration of how the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, and Napoleon shaped Beethoven’s political ideals and inspired his groundbreaking compositions. Beethoven imbibed Enlightenment and revolutionary ideas in his hometown of Bonn, where they were fervently discussed in cafés and at the university. Moving to Vienna at the age of twenty-one to study with Haydn, he gained renown as a brilliant pianist and innovative composer. In that conservative city, capital of the Hapsburg empire, authorities were ever watchful to curtail and punish overt displays of radical political views. Nevertheless, Beethoven avidly followed the meteoric rise of Napoleon. As Napoleon had made strides to liberate Europe from aristocratic oppression, so Beethoven desired to liberate humankind through music. He went beyond the musical forms of Haydn and Mozart, notably in the Eroica Symphony and his opera Fidelio, both inspired by the French Revolution and Napoleon. John Clubbe illuminates Beethoven as a lifelong revolutionary through his compositions, portraits, and writings, and by setting him alongside major cultural figures of the time—among them Schiller, Goethe, Byron, Chateaubriand, and Goya.
Bringing together reception history, music analysis and criticism, the history of music theory, and the philosophy of music, Beethoven Hero explores the nature and persistence of Beethoven's heroic style. What have we come to value in this music, asks Scott Burnham, and why do generations of critics and analysts hear it in much the same way? Specifically, what is it that fosters the intensity of listener engagement with the heroic style, the often overwhelming sense of identification with its musical process? Starting with the story of heroic quest heard time and again in the first movement of the Eroica Symphony, Burnham suggests that Beethoven's music matters profoundly to its listeners because it projects an empowering sense of self, destiny, and freedom, while modeling ironic self-consciousness. In addition to thus identifying Beethoven's music as an overarching expression of values central to the age of Goethe and Hegel, the author describes and then critiques the process by which the musical values of the heroic style quickly became the controlling model of compositional logic in Western music criticism and analysis. Apart from its importance for students of Beethoven, this book will appeal to those interested in canon formation in the arts and in music as a cultural, ethical, and emotional force--and to anyone concerned with what we want from music and what music does for us.
Shortlisted for the 2020 Goldsmiths Prize Based on the German composer's own correspondence, this inventive, counterfactual work of historical fiction imagines Beethoven traveling to America to write an oratorio based on the Book of Job. It is a matter of historical record that in 1823 the Handel and Haydn Society of Boston (active to this day) sought to commission Beethoven to write an oratorio. The premise of Paul Griffiths’s ingenious novel is that Beethoven accepted the commission and traveled to the United States to oversee its first performance. Griffiths grants the composer a few extra years of life and, starting with his voyage across the Atlantic and entry into Boston Harbor, chronicles his adventures and misadventures in a new world in which, great man though he is, he finds himself a new man. Relying entirely on historically attested possibilities to develop the plot, Griffiths shows Beethoven learning a form of sign language, struggling to rein in the uncertain inspiration of Reverend Ballou (his designated librettist), and finding a kindred spirit in the widowed Mrs. Hill, all the while keeping his hosts guessing as to whether he will come through with his promised composition. (And just what, the reader also wonders, will this new piece by Beethoven turn out to be?) The book that emerges is an improvisation, as virtuosic as it is delicate, on a historical theme.
Beethoven's string quartets form one of the most intimate and revealing sections of his output, giving a full and varied picture of his musical personality. This study of the quartets by Philip Radcliffe, first published by Hutchinson University in 1965, was reissued by Cambridge University Press in 1978. Each work is examined in detail describing the development of Beethoven's style - a method that highlights the very strong individuality that remained unimpaired throughout the composition of these quartets. They are compared with Beethoven's other music and with the string quartets of composers before and since. This is a book which has proved itself to be of continuing value to the student of music at school and university level and to the general reader.
This extended study of the compositional origins of Beethoven's Diabelli Variations explores the piece in the context of his other late period works and demonstrates how the composer transforms, parodies, and transcends Diabelli's waltz. Providing insight into his working method, this discussion illuminates the structure of the finished work, and the nature of Beethoven's creative process.