Shiho Fukada for The New York Times
Posted on 10/13/2005 4:11:50 AM PDT by Pharmboy
Shiho Fukada for The New York Times
The recently discovered manuscript for Beethoven's "Grosse Fuge."
Heather Carbo, a matter-of-fact librarian at an evangelical seminary outside Philadelphia, was cleaning out an archival cabinet one hot afternoon in July. It was a dirty and routine job. But there, on the bottom shelf, she stumbled across what may be one of the most important musicological finds in years.
It was a working manuscript score for a piano version of Beethoven's "Grosse Fuge," a monument of classical music. And it was in the composer's own hand, according to Sotheby's auction house. The 80-page manuscript in mainly brown ink - a furious scattering of notes across the page, with many changes and cross-outs, some so deep that the paper is punctured - dates from the final months of Beethoven's life.
The score had effectively disappeared from view for 115 years, apparently never examined by scholars. It goes on display today, just for the afternoon, at the school, the Palmer Theological Seminary in Wynnewood, Pa.
"It was just sitting on that shelf," Ms. Carbo said. "I was just in a state of shock."
Like Ms. Carbo, musicologists sounded stunned when read a description of the manuscript by Sotheby's, which will auction it on Dec. 1 in London. "Wow! Oh my God!" said Lewis Lockwood, a musicology professor at Harvard University and a Beethoven biographer. "This is big. This is very big."
Indeed it is.
Any manuscript showing a composer's self-editing gives invaluable insight into his working methods, and this is a particularly rich example. Such second thoughts are particularly revealing in the case of Beethoven, who, never satisfied, honed his ideas brutally - unlike, say, Mozart, who was typically able to spill out a large score in nearly finished form.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Only if you're a Brit and have a genetic inability to pronounce the letter H at the beginning of a word.
Nope--stone deaf. He died in 1827, and all indications are that although he began to lose his hearing in the late 1790s, he could hear nothing by 1812 or so.
I just downloaded Noteworthy Pomposer and will try to make a MID that all can link to to hear what it sounds like. Check back in a couple days.
Thanx for the ping!
lol! Makes me feel as if I have a huge factor in common with him--we both love Cheetos!
Please let us know if you do post a MIDI file that we can listen to.
Ping me when you do, please. Thanks.
Dear Sensei Ern,
If you ping me when you accomplish this, I'll ping the list.
Thanks,
sitetest
fyi
The deafness bit has been overstated in terms of its ultimate importance on his work. Any great composer would have had no trouble composing while deaf. Mozart or Bach for examples and many lesser lights. For people with absolute pitch it's the inner ear that matters not the outer ear. The most significant thing about his deafness is that it deprived us of more piano concertos which at the time were only written for the composer to perform and which he obviously could no longer do.
I think the Beethoven references were in the novel.
Ruling out shoes, ships, cabbages and kings?
Dover Publications used to have (maybe still) Mies book on Beethoven's sketches.
It's hard to tell how much composers sketched. Beethoven left his notebooks. Brahms destroyed everything he didn't want public. Mozart left sketches as he got older (Requiem, for example.)
Hey...haven't seen you in a while. How've you been?
LOL! I weep for you; I deeply sympathize....
As you know, Beethoven always carried a little notebook with him as he walked around Vienna and the countryside, traveled to spas or visited people. The "Ode to Joy" theme was first seen in a notebook from the 1790s as was the opening theme from the C sharp minor quartet (the Opus 131).
Holding a pocket-handkerchief before your streaming eyes . . .
"I'm sorry to say that A Clockwork Orange has forever tainted my enjoyment of Ludwig Van."
Have you googled around to read the interviews with Anthony Burgess, various commentary, and, above all, the missing last chapter?
The last chapter was excised from the American edition of the book because it didn't fit the culture of death agenda, and that's the version Kubrick worked from.
Could change your whole outlook on the work. It mellowed mine considerably.
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