sleeping with the radio on.
i woke up today to the music of beethoven, für elise.
no one else in the house was awake,
so i lay still under the blankets, listening.
the notes from the piano were rich and slow,
rolling over me the way waves roll over a beach.
the ocean water was cold,
and the sand was cold on my bare feet.
a gray sky, the sound of gulls.
and in the distance, a freighter moves out into the sea.
a lovely three minutes indeed, and then i rose,
and went to the kitchen to make the coffee,
black and strong.
Beethoven, The Sound of Silence -- Justin Ghita
Ludwig van Beethoven was a German composer and pianist, a crucial figure in the transition between the Classical and Romantic eras in Western music. At 21 he left his home in Bonn to live in Wien (Vienna) to study composition under Joseph Haydn, who had been a friend and mentor of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. By his late 20s his hearing began to deteriorate, and by the last decade of his life he was almost completely deaf. In 1811 he gave up conducting and performing in public but continued to compose; many of his most admired works come from the last 15 years of his life. Nearly 40 years after his death, in 1865 Babette Bredl loaned a copy of a lost Beethoven composition, Bagatelle No. 25 in A minor, to musicologist Ludwig Nohl, which he published in his “Neue Briefe Beethovens” (New Beethoven Letters) two years later. The manuscript was dated 27 April 1810 and the piano piece is usually called "Für Elise" (For Elise). (In 2002 a later version was transcribed from a later manuscript by Beethoven scholar Barry Cooper, who also completed Beethoven's fragmentary Symphony No. 10 by identifying and arranging the sketches for the individual movements. The most notable difference is in the first theme, in which the left-hand arpeggios are delayed by a 16th note beat; the transitional section into the B section has a few extra bars; and the rising A minor arpeggio figure is moved later into the piece.) Organ scholar Johannes Quack has noted that the letters that spell Elise can be decoded as the first three notes of the piece.
ReplyDeleteBut Elise’s identity has been disputed. Max Unger, one of the 20th-century’s leading Beethoven scholars, suggested that Nohl transcribed the title incorrectly, and that original work may have been named "Für Therese," a reference to Therese Malfatti von Rohrenbach zu Dezza, one of Beethoven’s students. Her younger sister married Beethoven's friend Ignaz von Gleichenstein in 1811, and Beethoven may have sought to marry Therese in 1810 but was thwarted due to his status as a commoner; she married the Austrian nobleman and state official Wilhelm von Droßdik in 1816; Rudolf Schachner was Bredl’s illegitimate son who inherited Therese von Droßdik's musical scores in 1851. Klaus Martin Kopitz suggested in 2010 that another of the composer’s love interests, Elisabeth Röckel, was the real Elise. She was a close friend of Anna Milder, who in 1805 sang the title role in the first performance of Beethoven's only opera “Leonore” and again in the second and third versions in 1806 and 1814, when in the final revision its title was permanently changed to "Fidelio;" she was supposed to sing his concert aria “Ah! perfido” at his 4-hour Akademie concert in 1808 (when the Fifth and Sixth Symphonies, Fourth Piano Concerto and Choral Fantasia were all heard for the first time under the composer's direction), but she declined after a quarrel between Beethoven and Peter Hauptmann, whom she soon married. Röckel was listed as “Elis Rökel" in a register of residents at the Theater an der Wien, and her fellow resident Milder called her “Elise.” Roeckel was the sister of the opera singer Joseph August Röckel, who played the Florestan in the second version of “Fidelio.” In April 1810, the same month that Beethoven wrote the bagatelle, she left Wien to accept a singing position in Bamberg. In 1813 she married Johann Nepomuk Hummel, who had been taught and housed by Mozart for two years free of charge; he made his first concert appearance at the age of 9 at one of Mozart's concerts; in 1791Haydn composed a sonata for him, and later he became a friend of Beethoven when they both studied under Haydn. At Beethoven’s request he improvised at his Akademie concert (where he made friends with Franz Schubert, who dedicated his last three piano sonatas to Hummel). From 1801-1804 Carl Czerny studied under Beethoven but then switched to Hummel; later, when Liszt's father refused to pay Hummel’s high tuition fee, Liszt studied under Czerny instead); Hummel was also briefly Felix Mendelssohn’s instructor. In the days before Beethoven's death the Hummels often visited the composer and cut and saved a lock of his hair as a memento. In 2014 Rita Steblin proposed Elisabet Barensfeld (who used "Elise" as a variant first name) as the dedicatee. Another child prodigy, she lived in Wien with Johann Nepomuk Maelzel, opposite Malfatti’s residence, and may have taken piano lessons from her. Steblin argued that Beethoven dedicated his piece to the 13-year-old Elise Barensfeld as a favor to Malfatti. In 1813 Beethoven collaborated on “Wellingtons Sieg oder die Schlacht bei Vittoria” (Wellington's Victory, or, the Battle of Vitoria) in 1813, to be played on Maelzel’s new invention, the panharmonicon, an automaton powered by bellows and directed by revolving cylinders storing the notes and able to play the musical instruments of a military band; Beethoven conducted its premier (which also featured the premiere of his Symphony No. 7 as well as a work performed by Maelzel's mechanical trumpeter). It was one of Beethoven’s biggest moneymakers.
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