Ode to joys recovered?
This was supposed to be Ludwig van Beethoven’s year. Music organizations around theworld had queued up stupendous programs to commemorate the 250th anniversary of thegreat composer’s birth.
The exact date is unknown, but he was baptized on Dec. 17, 1770, and concerts this week would have crowned a yearlong celebration. A pandemic upended those plans. Beethoven himself would not be surprised by this calamity.
You could argue that every year is Beethoven’s year. His music has thoroughly infiltrated pop culture. Modern stars, from Billy Joel to Nas to the Beatles, have borrowed his melodies. Looney Toons and the Pink Panther have riffed on his symphonies.
Movies as different as “Die Hard” and “A Clockwork Orange” feature the Ninth Symphony and its choral “Ode to Joy.” In “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,” Hermione tries to teach Ron to play “Für Elise.”
The title characters in “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure” even time-travel with a wild-haired “Dave Beeth-Oven” who rocks the mall’s massive synthesizer display, but they depict him helping with chores to the frantic strains of Rossini’s “William Tell”overture. Oh the snub!
But my favorite Beethoven tributes come from “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood,” especially the theme song’s opening piano flourish, taken directly from the last movement of the Sonata in C Major, Opus 2. Generations of children grew up hearing excellent jazz melded with works of the greatest composer who has yet lived.
Last December, in an op-ed for the Chicago Tribune, a music professor proposed that we stop holding global anniversaries for the composers — Bach, Beethoven, Mozart — whose music already dominates concert programs everywhere, and instead commission new works that build on their legacies.
“Letting Beethoven’s music fall silent,” wrote Andrea Moore, of Massachusetts’ Smith College, “might give us a new way into hearing it live again.”
Her contrarian suggestion was made, obviously, before the coronavirus began to spread. Concert halls have fallen silent; neither the warhorses nor new pieces can be heard, but Ms. Moore’s visionary hope — that from silence we might be able to hear greatness anew — may yet come true.
COVID-19 has stolen many things. From their absence we learn what matters. One thing this terrible year has taught me is that life without live music is wretched. “Virtual” is better than nothing, but it’s not enough.
Despite the 2020 pandemic, some utterly new creations have been able to move forward, mercifully, without much change. In Bonn, Germany, Beethoven’s birthplace, fabulous light installations — glowing sculptures ranging from large to enormous, commissioned to capture what organizers described as his “young and stormy spirit” — now transform the night sky. The installation circuit is walkable, each site marked with the memorable BTHVN logo, but we non-Europeans can walk it only virtually.
Masterminds of the celebrations in Bonn and Vienna have had to downsize most of their public offerings and move online, just like other arts organizations worldwide. Homages such as “250 Piano Pieces for Beethoven,” a challenge for composers to create new works in his honor, have unfolded on Facebook.
Beethoven would not be shocked by any of today’s upheavals. He was raised in poverty, started going deaf in his 20s and survived the Napoleonic wars. Through calamity his genius emerged, his spirit — “young and stormy” — never dimmed. Like Bach, he was not just a bridge between stylistic eras; he fundamentally shifted the direction of Western music.
There’s a timpani solo of falling octaves that heralds the magnificent finale of the Beethoven Ninth. It says, “Listen up!”
Antonin Dvorák, the great Czech composer, quoted these measures 70 years later in his “New World Symphony,” written while he was in New York, but he leaped from those iconic timpani strokes into brash, insistent dissonance. “From the New World,” indeed.
In our new world, post-COVID and post-distancing, perhaps we’ll be listening with ears refreshed by silence, ready to hear again as if for the first time. That would be a fitting commemoration.