I want to congratulate momo17 on his splendid new site:
"LvB and More: A daily blog about Ludwig van Beethoven's life and works."
http://lvbandmore.blogspot.com/
Very interesting indeed. I love all the Multimedia Material. One of the entries was Leonard Bernstein's "Omnibus" TV Broadcast concerning the first movement of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j0wO7...x=0&playnext=1
After examining many autograph scores and scraps by Beethoven, Bernstein illustrates all the permutations the score went through before its final version. Bernstein then states something at the end of the broadcast that gave me a new and greater appreciation of the Master: "And so Beethoven came to the end of his symphonic journey, for one movement, that is. Imagine a whole lifetime of this struggle, movement after movement, symphony after symphony, sonata after quartet after concerto. Always probing and rejecting in his dedication to perfection, to the principles of inevitability. This somehow is the key to the mystery of a great artist: that for reasons unknown to him or to anyone else, he will give away his energies and his life just to make sure that one note follows another inevitably. It seems rather an odd way to spend one's life, but it isn't so odd when we think that the composer, by doing this, leaves us at the finish with the feeling that something is right in the world, that something checks throughout, something that follows its own laws consistently, something we can trust, that will never let us down."
"LvB and More: A daily blog about Ludwig van Beethoven's life and works."
http://lvbandmore.blogspot.com/
Very interesting indeed. I love all the Multimedia Material. One of the entries was Leonard Bernstein's "Omnibus" TV Broadcast concerning the first movement of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j0wO7...x=0&playnext=1
After examining many autograph scores and scraps by Beethoven, Bernstein illustrates all the permutations the score went through before its final version. Bernstein then states something at the end of the broadcast that gave me a new and greater appreciation of the Master: "And so Beethoven came to the end of his symphonic journey, for one movement, that is. Imagine a whole lifetime of this struggle, movement after movement, symphony after symphony, sonata after quartet after concerto. Always probing and rejecting in his dedication to perfection, to the principles of inevitability. This somehow is the key to the mystery of a great artist: that for reasons unknown to him or to anyone else, he will give away his energies and his life just to make sure that one note follows another inevitably. It seems rather an odd way to spend one's life, but it isn't so odd when we think that the composer, by doing this, leaves us at the finish with the feeling that something is right in the world, that something checks throughout, something that follows its own laws consistently, something we can trust, that will never let us down."
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