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To: Homer_J_Simpson
Beethoven would have interpreted it into music worse than the allegretto of the Seventh Symphony.

The following has absolutely nothing to do with the Civil War, but as a musicology instructor I have to comment, because in an odd way it relates to President Trump.

The allegretto is the second movement of the symphony. It is, among people who listen to classical music, generally considered one of the most beautiful symphonic pieces ever composed. (See more on this here.) But among the classical music intelligentsia, it is considered one of the most boorish symphonic pieces ever composed.

I remember reading the review of the first time the symphony was ever played in London (the review was in the magazine Atheneum, but I can't find it online), which I read when I was researching in music college. The reviewer disliked the symphony in general, but I distinctly remember how he sniffed that the allegretto was actually played twice "for the benefit of the dilettanti." The writer in the above quote evidently thought the same way.

This is the way Trump is experienced today: those who are fond of America consider him the best political leader of our era, while those who are political intelligentsia consider him the most boorish political leader of our era.

32 posted on 07/14/2017 1:19:32 PM PDT by chajin ("There is no other name under heaven given among people by which we must be saved." Acts 4:12)
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To: chajin

I always tried to liven things up when we played Beethoven.

When our section had several measures of rest, I would jump up and start singing Scat.

“Shing-a-slang lobby lobba wheelie wheelie sha boom!”

Livened things up.....and then the Conductor fired me.

Jazz hater.


33 posted on 07/14/2017 1:32:32 PM PDT by blueunicorn6 ("A crack shot and a good dancer")
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To: chajin
I remember well the day I first discovered the 7th Symphony. I was just sticking my toe into the classical music pond and on an impulse picked up a box set of Herbert von Karajan and the Berliners doing the Beethoven symphonies. I came to #7 without expectations and it really grabbed me. It became the piece I had to hear on a daily basis for a while. The 1st movement got my full attention but it was the 2nd that hooked me for good. It turns out I was in line with popular opinion. According to the liner notes of that recording (that I just dug up after 20 some years) "it was the second movement, the elegiac Allegretto, which struck the most responsive chord in the minds and imaginations of the audience. It was encored and demanded da capo wherever and whenever it was played. In Paris it was used to sustain the (then ailing) Second Symphony; andd it was even inserted into the Eighth, ousting the popular Allegretto scherzando."

Another interesting note on the Seventh Symphony: "When [Karl Maria von] Weber heard the chromatic bass line in the coda of the first movement [around 11:30 of the recording linked below], he declared the composer ripe for the madhouse." George Templeton Strong would probably agree. The Allegretto begins at 12:41.

Beethoven "Symphony No 7" Karajan

36 posted on 07/14/2017 3:56:37 PM PDT by Homer_J_Simpson ("Every nation has the government that it deserves." - Joseph de Maistre (1753-1821))
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