Word: beethoven
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There was a welcome for Conductor Josef Willem Mengelberg, red-faced, genial, like a country doctor, and the concert .was on. There was the gay, graceful symphony of Johann Christian Bach, eleventh son of the mighty Johann Sebastian Bach; there was Beethoven's Eighth, droll, delightful, made side-splitting here and there by the heavy hand of Mynherr Mengelberg, there were excerpts from Berlioz's Damnation of Faust, "Minuet of Will-o'-the-Wisps," "Dance of the Sylphs" and the "Rakoczy March," and sandwiched in between, featured, a U. S. work, given its first Manhattan performance...
...Detroit's Orchestra Hall, the Detroit Symphony Orchestra gave the first concert of its 13th season before a friendly, congenial audience that radiated enthusiasm over the orchestra, the program and Conductor Ossip Gabrilowitsch. Beethoven and Brahms wrote the important music for the evening-the Lenore Overture No. 3, and Brahms' First Symphony in C Minor with its tender upward sweep of strings, the sombre throbbing of basses and tympanums, bravely building, mellow, wise. Debussy and Liszt furnished the spice- Nuages and Fêtes, vague, lovely, and the Second Hungarian Rhapsody, vigorous, breathless. Conductor Gabrilowitsch did his work...
...over the dusky hall-the orchestral season had begun. Mozart came first, an early overture long buried away in the library of the Paris Conservatoire, charming, tuneful, immature; "Pan," a rhapsody by U. S. composer William Schroeder, difficult, cleverly constructed, tedious; Dukas' "Sorcerer's Apprentice," brilliant, biting; Beethoven's "Seventh Symphony," great feat of the afternoon, magnificently played...
...Beethoven, living in Vienna, was a profound admirer of the republican principles of the French Revolution, and in 1804 he wrote in honor of Napoleon the majestic symphony known as the "Eroica". The work was completed just at the time of Napoleon's coronation...
Sadly, indeed, was Beethoven to be disappointed. "When the phrase 'your subjects' was publicly assigned to the Corps Legislative . . ." says J. H. Rose, the historian, "there was a flutter of wrath among those who had hoped that the new Empire was to be Republican. But it quickly passed away; and no French man, except perhaps Carnot, made so manly a protest as the man of genius at Vienna who had composed the 'Sinfonia Eroica' and, with a grand republican simplicity inscribed it, 'Beethoven a Bonaparte'. When the master heard that his former hero had taken the imperial crown, he tore...