Word: beethoven
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...study in Lyon is a jumble of dusty documents, old pipes, broken spectacles. In it there is also an old-fashioned upright piano, stacks of music which M. Herriot likes to play. Published for the first time in English last week was a Herriot book on Beethoven, the composer who appeals most to France's solid bourgeois statesman...
Herriot's Beethoven is not only eloquently written but shows a rich understanding of Beethoven's music and the environment in which he lived. Author Harriot visited Bonn, pictures the mean airless garret in which little Ludwig was born, the courageous mother who had been a servant girl, the drunken father who kept the boy practicing at the harpsichord for cruel lengths of time. When Beethoven went to Vienna he was an awkward, ill-kempt young man, flagrantly boorish at the fashionable soirées where he would sit down at the piano, pour out one improvisation after...
Deafness led to inner concentration but it made the man increasingly irascible, a pathetic groping figure when he ventured outside music. Biographer Herriot describes Beethoven quarreling with his cook, showering her with vermicelli, taking over the kitchen work himself. He liked to walk but he gesticulated so wildly that children often jeered him. For the first performance of Missa Solemnis he stood in the pit. supposedly to help conduct. He was oblivious to the fact that the singers skipped the passages which seemed to them too difficult...
...when he was most unruly and so poor that he had to economize on food. Beethoven still had the detachment to sit down and write the last great quartets. He died shaking his fist at a storm which was beating against his window. But Herriot. the preacher of peace, does not end his book there. He takes for a final text the choral ending to the Ninth Symphony, pleads, as did Beethoven, for a brotherhood...
With the first concert scheduled on November 14 in Sanders Theatre, the Commonwealth Symphony Orchestra will include in its program Minuets of Beethoven, and selections by Hayden, and Saint Saens. Ernst Hoffmann will direct the first concert and the one following on November...