Beethoven's Birthday

Today's the 233rd anniversary of Beethoven's birth. Our local classical station is playing all Beethoven, all day long. It's great to have this classical channel--in fact, I count it as yet another one of the reasons that I love living in Madison, Wisconsin--but I have not listened to it very much in the last six months. The reason: I have been playing John O'Conor's performance of the complete Beethoven piano sonatas almost as a continuous tape loop. I love this recording. O'Conor's playing captures Beethoven's delicate romanticism as well as the hotheaded passion with which Beethoven is more typically associated. His playing merges seemingly contradictory aspects of some of the pieces; one of my favorites is a movement (Sonata No. 22, opus 54, second movement, F major Allegretto) with Bach-like contrapuntal finger exercises, which O'Conor performs in dazzling technicality without being cerebral or arid. He finds ways to use tempo and rhythm to (no other way to put this; pardon the split infinitive) jam.

My allegiance to favorite artists makes me a willing sucker for plants that are evocatively named. Hence I'm determined to snap up, if I can ever find a source for it, Bergenia 'Beethoven', bred by the tantalizing mystery man (well, at least to me) Eric Smith, of whom Jamaica Kincaid writes, in My Garden (Book): (publication information at the end of this prior post):

...with the simple question of What is the Tardiana of Eric Smith? I stepped into a sort of family controversy. Mr. Ruh told me that Eric Smith was a gardener and hosta hybridizer who eventually bred some of the bluest of the blue-leaf hostas. He, Eric Smith, was the gardener (that is, the working hand) to a famous gardener (that is, the person who owned the garden), but instead of doing his work (gardening) he kept breeding hostas. The person for whom he worked hated hostas, and was fed up with his neglectfulness, in any case, and so fired him. Smith in a fit (of anger perhaps) threw all his experiments into the compost and went home. Shortly after that, he died, and some time after that, his experiments were found in the compost.

Along these same lines, I'll be expanding the phlox population in my perennial border with lots of Phlox paniculata 'Franz Schubert' (fortunately, readily available); my occasional breaks from the Beethoven sonatas have recently been devoted to Schubert's Winterreise song cycle.

Happy birthday, Ludwig!

Comments

[Lillia]

I'm doing a project on Beethoven and i didn't know that he did soooo much work, i mean I found out that he wrote 676 symphonis!!!!! Wow thats A lot!!!!

[Robert Toth, Artist]

See site > www.RobertToth.com

Go to Men of Music and The Masters to see Beethoven and others.

Thank you for any feedback
Robert

[santisha]

yo g sup wats going on
i luv the stuff why are you like that thoogh
you must get alot of lietters a day
huh

byes

An astonishing site. I came upon it not long ago and I've just printed out the page on music (65 pages of it) so that I can read it more carefully than is possible on screen. I've a Web site myself, at www.linkagenet.com but for some reason it hardly reflects at all my passion for music, and in particular classical music. I play the cello, violin and viola, all equally badly, but I'm basically a listener. It was wonderful to read your comments, so full of insight, and so well written, on matters of such interest to me, such as the Hungarian Quartet's interpretation of Beethoven's Quartet Opus 131. Poetry is discussed more thoroughly on my site, although in a fairly austere way which would be off-putting to some people. I refer to Rilke, there's a long article on 'modulation in the poetry of Jared Carter,' and information about new ideas in poetics. There's also an extensive gardening section, with pages on composting, raised beds and other things. If you do look at the site, you'll find that the site map gives access to these things.

Thank you again for your very lively and interesting site, which I'll return to repeatedly.

By the way, I envy you for the winters in Wisconsin - to have snow in such dependable quantities would suit me completely, based as I am in Sheffield, England.

Best Wishes,
Paul Hurt

An astonishing site. I came upon it not long ago and I've just printed out the page on music (65 pages of it) so that I can read it more carefully than is possible on screen. I've a Web site myself, at www.linkagenet.com but for some reason it hardly reflects at all my passion for music, and in particular classical music. I play the cello, violin and viola, all equally badly, but I'm basically a listener. It was wonderful to read your comments, so full of insight, and so well written, on matters of such interest to me, such as the Hungarian Quartet's interpretation of Beethoven's Quartet Opus 131. Poetry is discussed more thoroughly on my site, although in a fairly austere way which would be off-putting to some people. I refer to Rilke, there's a long article on 'modulation in the poetry of Jared Carter,' and information about new ideas in poetics. There's also an extensive gardening section, with pages on composting, raised beds and other things. If you do look at the site, you'll find that the site map gives access to these things.

Thank you again for your very lively and interesting site, which I'll return to repeatedly.

By the way, I envy you for the winters in Wisconsin - to have snow in such dependable quantities would suit me completely, based as I am in Sheffield, England.

Best Wishes,
Paul Hurt