Classical Convert

Who Wants to Buy A Piece of Beethoven?

The Telegraph is reporting on a diamond, made from bits of Beethoven, which is going to be stuck up for sale on eBay.

Apparently there’s this chap called John Reznikoff who collects celebrity hair. Well, he donated a lock of Beethoven’s to LifeGem, who make dead people into bits of jewelery using magic and/or huge weights. In total there will be three gems, one of which will be auctioned on eBay. So, if you really fancy owning some carbon atoms which were once in Beethoven, and have around $1,000,000 burning a hole in your pocket, now is your lucky day.

Or you could just breath for a bit.

“Copying Beethoven” - This looks like it’s going to suck

Copying Beethoven (official site) is the name of a movie  supposedly portraying the last few years of his life. Well that sounds promising - except that it’s been “jazzed up” by completely fabricating a “heartwarming” story involving Beethoven slowly gaining trust in an inspirational female copyist. Doesn’t that make you feel nauseated already?

It’s received some glowing reviews, e.g.

“If you love the music of Ludwig van Beethoven, avoid this film” - Louise Keller, Urban Cinefile

And:

“Copying Beethoven aspires to the sublime, but it stalls at the merely ridiculous” - Nathan Rabin, Onion A.V. Club

Or even better:

“Watching Ed Harris clomp around in “Copying Beethoven” is like lighting a roman candle and swallowing the discharge.” - Brian Orndorf, FilmJerk.com

There’s a tonne more over at Rotten Tomatoes.

My Latest Listening Material

In the last week or so I’ve been particularly listening to/discovering:

• Beethoven, Piano Sonata No. 30, Op. 109 - The next installment in my apparently accidental quest to work backwards through Beethoven’s solo piano repertoire. It’s similar to number 32, sorta. There are two relatively quick and dramatic initial movements followed by a paced, more gentle set of variations for the finale. I love the contrast between the end of the flowing, watery first and start of the Baroque-ish second.
• Shostakovich, Symphony No. 14, Op. 135 - I keep wanting to get into this, since (as regular readers know) in general I love Dimitri’s late stuff, especially the Alexander Blok and Marina Tsvetaeva songs. This has so far seemed more, errr, impenetrable. More strident. An additional barrier is that I have the Haitink version, in which the texts are sung in their original languages (or German) and I can’t stand the Herz/Schmerz rhyme in “Loreley”. It reminds me of insipid pop rhymes like: ‘my heart wants to fly/so high in the sky‘. Yeah yeah, I know I’m being ridiculous, but I can’t help myself. I think I’ll listen to Rostropovich or Jansons instead.
• Beethoven, Missa Solemnis, Op. 123 - My first impression of this is: Wow, this is gonna take freakin’ ages to understand. It somehow doesn’t sound very… Beethoveny? Maybe that’s just because it’s full of people singing, which up to this point I completely didn’t associate with Ludwig. The “Kyrie” has been in my head all day.
• Shostakovich, Symphony No. 4, Op. 43 - Ahhh… the classic abandoned at the last minute fourth. It’s probably a good thing he came out with the 5th instead of this, or Stalin would have been royally pissed off. It wanders all over the place, jumping from one mood to another (Mahleresque, I think is how it gets described) and has loads of sonic weirdness and dissonance, and the first example of his tick-tocking percussion finish (used again in the 2nd Cello Concerto and 15th Symphony). I love the grating dissonances in the horns, which sound like bizarre trills, and the flitting between playful melodies and dramatic climaxes in the humongous final movement (27 minutes for Rostropovich, who I prefer to Haitink for this one).

I wonder which of these will morph into favorites…

Britney can’t touch Beethoven after all

Not that we really seriously considered that she could, but, well, okay let me start at somewhere which is more of a beginning. Recently, since coming back from Baltimore (as I previously complained about) I’ve felt like music has been escaping my clutches a bit. It’s kind of like… well it’s sort of… it’s hard to describe. Sometimes - usually - listening to a piece is enveloping, it transports a piece of my head (or heart, or whatever the appropriate pseudosensory organ is) away.

Now is not that time.

Now is (or was) a tricky, fiddly event in which music seems a distant beast, something that has to be reached for instead of gliding at me with arms all open. The music which was so fulfilling and spoke to me in firm, direct tones is off in another room carousing with the neighbors. Or something.

This time, it’s taken a couple of weeks to ease back into it (and the frequency of Blog postings has taken a bit of a corresponding hit) via my non-classical listening selection. I’ll do another post detailing what that consists of soon I think, because it’s all really very meaningful still, even after mostly converting to classical. What I realized, after rereaching my island full of notes and staves and clefs and stuff, was that most of my non-classical stuff really can’t hold a candle to the real meat, the Shostakovich, the Beethoven, all my classical pieces.

Ya see, sometimes I worry that the only reason I like classical so much is that I listen to the pieces over and over and get to know them so well that my brain is forced into liking them. What I worry is that if I did the same with any other piece of music, the same thing would happen. It’s a worry because if true, I would feel dishonest to myself, like maybe I”m just listening to feel sophisticated.

My recent listening time has reinforced my suspicion that no, this ain’t the case. Popular music is good, but disconnected. It’s similar to the bitchings I had about ballets - each individual five minute segment can be great, but it’s lacking a cohesive whole. And with popular it’s worse. The songs sound so much thinner than they did before. They have often have a catchy, cute musical idea, but it doesn’t go anywhere. Nothing happens. It’s oddly shallow.

That’s not to say it isn’t enjoyable to listen to, it’s just that so many things used to seem so much more important before I discovered the depth of good classical music.

Three (or more…) Kreutzer Sonata’s

Well, you see, it got to to thinking, it did. It being the subtitle, the alternative name, to Janacek’s string quartet number one. It’s called “The Kreutzer Sonata”, which initially seems more than just a little weird, as it’s not a sonata at all. Now, the other piece of information I gleaned from somewhere in my limited musical past and experience is that Beethoven’s violin sonata number 9 is also named this. Far more appropriately.

The really interesting thing is that the Janacek isn’t named after the Beethoven piece. Not directly anyway. It snakes through Tolstoy first. You see, apparently the T-dog (yeah, I’m calling Tolstoy the T-dog, you got a problem with that, fool?) wrote a book - also called The Kreutzer Sonata - referring to the emotional intensity of the Beethoven piece. Janacek’s version is based on that book. Confusing huh?

Even more confusing, but somewhat unifying, is that Sasha Chorny wrote a poem called The Kreutzer Sonata, referring to T-dog’s version, which Shostakovich set to music in op. 109, Satires (Pictures of the Past). In that song he uses a musical reference to Beethoven’s version. The Kreutzer Sonata really gets around.

Anyway, I now feel like I should go listen to the Beethoven and read the Tolstoy book.