BeeThOven Festival

antares86 wrote:

Schnabel Schnabel Schnabel!!!!!!!

Schroeder Schroeder Schroeder !!!!!

Tiger wrote:

This seems like an important point to me, in the sense that I am not sure this is the definition of myth. Myth is not a memory; it is something that almost pre-exists... perhaps it is how a people, through the deeds of gods and heroes, has explained a mystery.

There are no gods, maybe there are heroes... but who are these heroes... yesterday and today?

I was thinking about this question from Tiger!

For me, the eternal heroes are those who, to put it in the words of Luigi Tenco — who also, more than Vasco, would have deserved to be considered a myth — "struggle in vain with the world of tomorrow."

Open content (youtube)

I let a series of things fall, including the continuous clash between me and Daniele :-) because there is no way out of it :-)

I am setting aside the discussion about myth for a second and broadening it to the discussion on points of access: I think that in the second fifty-year period there were some grandiose points of access to less well-known music. The first that comes to mind is Kubrick's cinema, which made Ligeti's music a worldwide success. This is the type of point of access that I like most, precisely because it does not flow into myth, into mythography (which is different from historiography).

On Kubrick :wub: :wub: I completely agree with you!

danielescarpetti wrote:

Once again I wonder - an absolutely rhetorical question - why Beethoven. Why him, time and time again?

:wub: :wub:

I remember reading several years ago that in the entire world, out of ten compositions performed in concert, one was by Beethoven. Everywhere, from Venezuela to China, from Germany to Australia. Figures, as we know, are subject to interpretation; yet that datum was impressive in its conciseness, and it raised many questions. What do we continue to find in Beethoven's music? Why has this man become the symbol of Western art, and even of a united Europe?

Try listening to the first four notes of the Fifth Symphony: the reaction is immediate, almost always one of recognition, but nonetheless one of curiosity, stimulation, and anticipation. Those four notes still sound today like a question, one of the most powerful, urgent, and universal questions an artist has ever posed to a human being. Musicians and enthusiasts know that throughout the symphony, Beethoven will arrive at giving us the answer to that question. His answer, of course. But the Fifth continues to live, to be loved - and performed - like few other compositions, precisely because every musician and every listener has the opportunity to find their own answer within it: an answer that changes and continues to change over the years, but which always has to do with the musical substance of the work, with the sense of transformation and regeneration of conflict and catharsis that it communicates through the notes.

Throughout his life, Beethoven continues to pose questions to the listener, and to himself, and to find answers. Every one of his compositions in a certain sense answers a question: to a specific compositional "problem," to the inner need to change, to research, to innovate. Beethoven's last composition, the sublime Quartet op. 135, ends precisely with a "question and answer," explicitly indicated in the score: Must it be so? Yes, it must be so!

A musical piece, in fact, must not be an object. It does not pass through the ages unchanged and immutable. It changes in its sonic substance, in its function, in the interpretation of the performer, and in the consciousness of the listener. This impalpable aspect is certainly a weakness of music, but at the same time it is its great strength. Nothing like a musical piece is able, traversing the centuries, to always prove itself "current"... Beethoven's music, among all, is perhaps that which has most strongly shown the ability to traverse time, to remain in memory, to build its own perceptive space that the years cannot erode. And it has demonstrated at the same time to be truly universal, knowing how to interpret the spirit and the needs of various eras, being able to offer answers that are always new and always valid. (...)

Giovanni Bietti: introduction to his book just released by Laterza "Listening to Beethoven" with attached CD!

The dedication that stands prominently in Bietti's book reads in part as follows:

to my father who taught me
to love the music of Beethoven

I make this dedication my own as well!