Beethoven's 250th Birthday: His Greatness Is in the Details
Brahms, Wagner, even Sondheim: All have followed the great master in building their works from small bits of music.
'The classical music industry had planned to go all out commemorating Beethoven’s 250th anniversary this year, culminating in his birthday this week. As it happens, the precise date of his birth is uncertain. Records indicate that he was baptized in Bonn, Germany, on Dec. 17, 1770. Since it was customary then to carry out that ritual within 24 hours of a birth, it’s been assumed he was born on Dec. 16 — but we don’t know for sure.
Performances were scheduled throughout the year and around the world. The Boston Symphony Orchestra planned to open its season this fall with a cycle of the nine symphonies. The Barbican Center in London was presenting a yearlong festival. Carnegie Hall said it would devote roughly a fifth of its 2019-20 season to his music.
But when the pandemic hit, Beethoven’s birthday party was largely canceled, along with the rest of the global performing arts calendar.
Have no fear, though: He’s doing just fine. As Carnegie’s promotional materials put it, Beethoven “rouses our spirits, moves us to tears, and inspires our most profound thoughts”; he is “without challenge the face of Western classical music.” Whew. Indeed, I was impressed that the New York Philharmonic chose mostly to ignore the anniversary. Instead, this February the orchestra began Project 19, commemorating the centennial of the 19th Amendment by commissioning works by 19 female composers. Here was an important venture that would honor the heritage that Beethoven epitomizes by bringing it into the present and empowering fresh voices.
Beethoven’s dominance of classical programming is a little crazy. Yet he was indisputably amazing. He cultivated the mystique of the composer as colossus, as a seer and hero striding the earth, channeling messages from on high and revealing them to us mere mortals.
In person, he may not have advanced this image. Unkempt and ornery, he had delusions about having royal blood, kept falling for women of the upper ranks in Vienna who were unattainable matches, and, in a pathetic attempt at having a family, spent years in court fighting to gain custody of his nephew from the boy’s widowed mother, whom he considered morally unfit. (He succeeded, with predictably fraught results.)
Yet perhaps his odd appearance and manner, as well as his valiant struggle with deafness, actually contributed to the spell he cast. And whatever his personality, his music does seem to define grandeur and heroism.
What do we hear in the film “The King’s Speech” when George VI of England addresses his subjects at the start of World War II? The slow movement of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony — music that sounds like a solemn, steadily determined march.'>>>
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/14/arts/music/beethoven-250-birthday-classical.html?
Stay tuned @: 2:02 pm
Symphony #9 "Choral": II
Ludwig van Beethoven
London Classical Players | Roger Norrington (conductor) https://weta.org/listen-live
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It's my (and my brother's) birthday and my one claim to fame 
AND, on Dec. 16, 'my' radio station will have an all/most Beethoven day, so we'll all celebrate with you!
I sometimes have to get the calculator out to figure out how old I am cuz my memory will be 68 and it's showing 
