Lines from Schiiler’s poem, An die Freude, which Beethoven credited as the inspiration for his Ninth Symphony, have been running through my head off n on today…
See, I had this “real world” project that’s taken me away from the computer much of the day but at the same time kept me around the house. I was gonna just put the Eroica on and let it lift me up a bit, energize me (a lot), but then I thought about those nine mp3 downloads from last summer, the nine performances of Beethoven’s symphonies by the BBC orchestra.
Wonderful! Burned off a fresh mp3 CD with all nine and popped it in the DVD player in the living room (where much of my “real world” project was going on.
What a way to lighten the work! I always forget how much I love the first symphony until I hear it again. *heh* but then, despite folks’ saying for years that all the odd-numbered ones are so much better than Bethoven’s even-numbered symphonies, they’re all simply wonderful.
Yeh, the mp3s lack a little in sound reproduction as against decent DDD Cd performance reproductions, and I retired my venerable RCA three-ways with their wonderfully smoothe frequency responses, and my ears are older and sometimes rather full of the “tintinabulation of the bells, the bells, the bells…” but musical memory fills in the holes and gaps with years of remembered performances heqard (and a few participated in), so the play of the recordings was mostly an evocation of that musical memory base.
Another pleasant thing.
“Freude, schöner Götterfunken,” indeed!
Food for the soul. Thanks, Ludwig!
A set of Beethoven’s symphonies conducted by Boehm (Vienna Phil, I think) helped to get me through college — not the greatest recordings, but not too shabby. Vinyl, of course.
Beethoven still has to be my favorite composer — he was so crucial to the evolution of music beyond Mozart.
My almost 7 y.o. loves to pick out the opening Ode to Joy melody on the piano, indeed we’ve got to work on more of that (goes beyond what her music book has but I can pick out a few measures).