Freude, schöner Götterfunken,Tochter aus Elysium
I found this pretty exhilarating. (Too exhilarating: I couldn’t sleep afterwards.) It’s streaming until December 2.
Tip Jar
I found this pretty exhilarating. (Too exhilarating: I couldn’t sleep afterwards.) It’s streaming until December 2.
“We’re sorry, but this video is unavailable.”
I guess it is only for people in the US. Bummer.
Oh, sorry. What happened to alle menschen?!
There’s a clip from the Ode to Joy, maybe they’ll let Ausländerin watch that.
https://www.pbs.org/wnet/gperf/ny-phil-plays-beethovens-ode-joy-t0n72a/14182/
V P N – I’m in Oz, listening now, PBS thinks I’m in Houston.
Thanks, Ophelia. Not a huge classics fan, but enjoying the brass opening.
Still not available, but I am obviously familiar with the composition. Mind-blowing stuff, and even more so considering that he was practically deaf when he wrote it! This story might be apocryphal, but I seem to remember reading that he conducted the premiere himself, and they turned the whole orchestra 180° with Beethoven facing the audience so at least he could see the roaring applause at the end.
I too read that somewhere yesterday, except that it said because of his deafness he went on conducting after it was over, and someone turned him around to face the audience.
That might have been it. It’s been years since I read it, and we all know how reliable memories like that are…
I think where I read it must have been the PBS site where the video is, because I don’t think I went looking around anywhere else.
Having missed that, I consoled myself with something much more modern: Maria Schneider. Different genre, but great music. Probably not to be found on youtube, though. She is busy suing them for streaming music without permission and compensation for the musicians.
I wanted to link to a clip of The Beatles’ famous movie Help! (1965) where they calmed Raja the famous Bengal man-eating tiger “reared on the classics” by whistling the famous Ode to Joy from the famous Beethoven’s famous 9th symphony, but the clips are blocked by Apple Corps Ltd on copyright grounds. Suffice to say “famous” was a running gag in the movie.
I am not particularly fond of Beethoven, but I do enjoy some of his music. The 7th symphony is a favorite. I like the 9th, but I’m not fond of the final movement; it’s very Romantic, and that’s where it loses me. The scherzo is wonderful.
Daniel Levitin, in his book on music and the brain, makes reference to the Ode to Joy. It is clear throughout the book that Levitin, who is a musician skilled in various popular genres, has little knowledge or appreciation of classical music. His attempt to show how Beethoven uses surprises in his compositions rests on a trivial and quite silly analysis of the melody of the Ode to Joy. Beethoven was not a great composer of melodies, and that one is very simple; there are many better examples among his melodies, and tons of better examples of surprise in his music.
Dave @ 9 – I’ve had that in my head too, along with the Clockwork Orange version by Walter “Wendy” Carlos.
I mostly don’t like The Very Romantic, but the finale of the 9th is an exception. On the other hand I keep shaming myself by thinking of Charlotte Rampling in “Georgy Girl” saying “It was Beethoven night, they were like animals.“