Being sidelined by a bad cold, I'm reaching back to classical music insofar as I don't have the energy to do the research that Rockumentray requires. Here are some pieces I heard over the past two weekends.
Franz Schubert had found it difficult to engage with the music of Beethoven. His teacher at the Vienna Choirboys School, Antonio Salieri, believed that everything Beethoven had written after the Second Symphony was a waste of music paper. Tony's death in 1825 permitted Frannie to dive into the music of Beethoven without guilt and with a sense that encountering Beethoven's music was critical to his own development as a composer.
Beethoven's death in 1827 turned out to be major break for Frannie. The presidency of the Music Guild was a rotating affair, and Frannie as a board member had rotated into that job just in time for him to arrange the guild's participation in Beethoven's funeral. At the same time, Beethoven's factotum, Anton Schindler, had absconded with a multi-volume set of The Collected Works of George Frederick Handel, published by Salomon of London, from Beethoven's library and handed it to Frannie. Just as he had hoped for history to remember Beethoven as "Schindler's Beethoven," he had seen what so many of the Viennese music community had perceived, that Schubert was next in line. By passing these very expensive books to Schubert, he hoped to stake his historical claim as "Schindler's Schubert." After Schubert's death, had Schindler been smart, he would have gone to Weimar to introduce himself to an up-and-coming pianist and composer who might have been known to history as "Schindler's Liszt."
Frannie was too young to have heard Handel in the opera house. His only exposure to that composer was Mozart's arrangement of "Messiah" in German. The books were a revelation and ignited a interest in counterpoint that held to the day of Schubert's death at age 31 a year later.
I've posted two of the four movements of this trio in the past, and tonight I want to post the third movement, a scherzo, that is based on the counterpoint learned from the Handel books.