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Monday, February 24, 2014

Beethoven A Punk Rocker?

Should they have named the NYC club CBLvB?  Fun piece her at The Atlantic marks 200th anniversary today (which even I missed) of Beethoven's most overlooked,  but still swell, symphony, number eight.  I've proposed plenty of other moments of Ludwig "inventing" rock 'n roll, from the final movement of his Symphony No. 7 to the "boogie-woogie" section of his piano sonata no. 32.   But this Atlantic writer finds the eighth symphony an "occasion when Beethoven, in the midst of a personal—and odd—life crisis, opted to create a work to please madcaps, jesters, and wiseasses alike."  Enjoy:

1 comment:

Laurence Glavin said...

During the transition from the second movement to the third movement of LvB's Cello Sonata #5 (Opus 102, #2), he composed the theme that Max Steiner would "borrow" as the Love Theme from the movie "Gone With the Wind".