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Biography Concerts
Ludwig Van Beethoven
composer
Biography
Beethoven is one of the greatest phenomena of world culture.
His work occupies a place on a par with the art of such titans of artistic thought as Tolstoy, Rembrandt, Shakespeare.
Beethoven has no equal in the musical art of Europe of the past centuries in terms of philosophical depth, democratic orientation, and the speed of innovation.
Beethoven's work captures the great awakening of the peoples, the heroism and drama of the revolutionary era.
Addressed to the entire advanced humanity, his music was a bold challenge to the aesthetics of the feudal aristocracy.
Beethoven's worldview was formed under the influence of the revolutionary movement that spread in the advanced circles of society at the turn of the XVIII and XIX centuries.
As its peculiar reflection on German soil, the bourgeois democratic Enlightenment has developed in Germany.
The protest against social oppression and despotism determined the leading directions of German philosophy, literature, poetry, theater and music.
Lessing raised the banner of the struggle for the ideals of humanism, reason and freedom.
The works of Schiller and the young Goethe were imbued with a civic sense.
The dramatists of the "storm and onslaught"movement rebelled against the petty morality of the feudal bourgeois society.
The challenge to the reactionary nobility is heard in Lessing's "Nathan the Wise", in Goethe's "Goetz von Berlichingen", in Schiller's" Robbers "and" Treachery and Love".
The ideas of the struggle for civil liberties permeate "Don Carlos" and "Wilhelm Tell" by Schiller.
The tension of social contradictions was also reflected in the image of Goethe's Werther, the" rebellious martyr", according to Pushkin.
The spirit of challenge is marked by every outstanding artistic work of that era created on German soil.
Beethoven's work was the most generalizing and artistically perfect expression in the art of the folk movements of Germany at the turn of the XVIII and XIX centuries.
The great social revolution in France had a direct and powerful impact on Beethoven.
This brilliant musician, a contemporary of the revolution, was born in an era that best corresponded to the warehouse of his talent, his titanic nature.
With rare creative power and emotional acuteness, Beth hoven sang the majesty and intensity of his time, its violent drama, the joys and sorrows of the giant masses of the people.
To this day, Beethoven's art remains unsurpassed as an artistic expression of feelings of civic heroism.
The revolutionary theme does not exhaust Beethoven's legacy in any way.
Undoubtedly, the most outstanding Beethoven's works belong to the art of the heroic and dramatic plan.
The main features of his aesthetics are most clearly embodied in the works reflecting the theme of struggle and victory, praising the universal democratic beginning of life, the desire for freedom.
"Heroic", the Fifth and Ninth Symphonies, the overtures "Coriolanus", "Egmont", "Leonora", "Pathetic Sonata" and "Appassio nata" – it was this circle of works that almost immediately won Beth hoven the widest international recognition.
And indeed, Beethoven's music differs from the structure of thought and the manner of expression of its predecessors primarily by its effectiveness, tragic power, and grandiose scale.
It is not surprising that his innovation in the heroic and tragic sphere attracted general attention earlier than in others; mainly on the basis of Beethoven's dramatic works, both contemporaries and the generations immediately following them made judgments about his work as a whole.
However, the world of Beethoven's music is stunningly diverse.
There are other fundamentally important aspects in his art, outside of which his perception will inevitably be one sided, narrow and therefore distorted.
And above all, this depth and complexity of the intellectual principle inherent in it.
The psychology of the new man, freed from feudal fetters, is revealed in Beethoven not only in the conflict tragic plan, but also through the sphere of high inspired thought.
His hero, possessing indomitable courage and passion, is endowed at the same time with a rich, finely developed intellect.
He is not only a fighter, but also a thinker; along with action, he is characterized by a tendency to concentrated reflection.
No secular commentator before Beethoven had reached such a philosophical depth and scale of thought.
In Beethoven, the glorification of real life in its multifaceted aspects was intertwined with the idea of the cosmic greatness of the universe.
Moments of inspired contemplation coexist in his music with heroic and tragic images, illuminating them in their own way.
Through the prism of a sublime and deep intelect, life in all its diversity is refracted in Beethoven's music – violent passions and detached dreaminess, theatrical dramatic pathos and lyrical confession, the pictures of nature and scenes of everyday life...
Finally, against the background of the work of his predecessors, Beethoven's music stands out for the individualization of the image, which is associated with the psychological beginning in art.
Not as a representative of the estate, but as a person with his own rich inner world, the man of the new, post revolutionary society realized himself.
It was in this spirit that Beethoven interpreted his hero.
He is always significant and unique, every page of his life is an independent spiritual value.
Even motifs that are related to each other by type acquire such a wealth of shades in the transmission of mood in Beethoven's music that each of them is perceived as unique.
With the unconditional generality of ideas that permeate all his work, with the deep imprint of a powerful creative individuality that lies on all Beethoven's works, each of his opus is an artistic surprise.
Perhaps it is this unquenchable desire to reveal the irreplaceable essence of each image that makes the problem of Beethoven's style so difficult.
Beethoven is usually spoken of as a composer who, on the one hand, completes the classical era in music, on the other – opens the way to the"romantic age".
In broad historical terms, such a formulation does not raise objections.
However, it gives little to understand the essence of the Betho Viennese style itself.
For, having come into contact with some aspects at certain stages of evolution with the work of the classicists of the XVIII century and the romantics of the next generation, Beethoven's music does not really coincide in some important, decisive features with the requirements of either style.
Moreover, it is generally difficult to characterize it with the help of stylistic concepts that have developed on the basis of studying the work of other artists.
Beethoven is inimitably individual.
At the same time, he is so many faced and multifaceted that no familiar stylistic categories cover all the diversity of his appearance.
With a greater or lesser degree of certainty, we can only talk about a certain sequence of stages in the composer's search.
Throughout his career, Beethoven continuously expanded the expressive boundaries of his art, constantly leaving behind not only his predecessors and contemporaries, but also his own achievements of an earlier period.
Nowadays, it is customary to marvel at the multi profile of Stravinsky or Picasso, seeing this as a sign of the special intensity of the evolution of artistic thought peculiar to the XX century.
But Beth Hoven in this sense is in no way inferior to the above mentioned luminaries of our modernity.
It is enough to compare almost any, randomly selected works of Beethoven to be convinced of the incredible versatility of his style.
Is it easy to believe that the elegant septet in the style of the Viennese divertimento, the monumental dramatic "Heroic Symphony" and the deeply philosophical quartets Op. 59 belong to the same pen?
Moreover, all of them were created within one, six year period.
None of Beethoven's sonatas can be singled out as the most characteristic of the composer's style in the field of piano music.
No work typifies his search in the symphonic sphere.
Sometimes, in the same year, Beethoven releases works that are so contrasting with each other that at first glance it is difficult to recognize the features of commonality between them.
Let us recall at least the well known Fifth and Sixth Symphonies.
Every detail of thematism, every technique of form formation in them are as sharply opposed to each other, as the general artistic concepts of these symphonies – the acutely tragic Fifth and the idyllic pastoral Sixth are incompatible.
If we compare the works created at different, relatively distant from each other stages of the creative path – for example, the First Symphony and the "Solemn Mass", the quartets op.
18 and the last quartets, the Sixth and Twenty ninth piano sonatas, etc., etc., then we will see works so strikingly different from each other that at the first impression they are unconditionally perceived as the product not only of different intelligences, but also of different artistic eras.
At the same time, each of the mentioned opuses is highly characteristic of Beethoven, each is a miracle of stylistic completeness.
It is possible to speak about a single artistic principle that characterizes Beethoven's performance only in the most general terms: throughout the entire creative path, the composer's style was formed as a result of the search for a truthful embodiment of life.
The powerful coverage of reality, the richness and dynamics in the transmission of thoughts and feelings, and finally a new understanding of beauty, compared to its predecessors, led to such versatile original and artistically unfading forms of expression, which can only be generalized by the concept of a unique "Beethoven style".
According to Serov's definition, Beethoven understood beauty as an expression of high idealism.
The hedonistic, elegantly divertimental side of musical expressiveness was consciously overcome in Beethoven's mature work.
Just as Lessing advocated precise and stingy speech against the artificial, decorative style of salon poetry, saturated with elegant allegories and mythological atributes, so Beethoven rejected everything decorative and conditionally idyllic.
In his music, not only the exquisite ornamentation, inseparable from the style of expression of the XVIII century, has disappeared.
The balance and symmetry of the musical language, the smoothness of the rhythm, the chamber transparency of the sound – these stylistic features, characteristic of all Beethoven's Viennese predecessors without exception, were also gradually replaced from his musical speech.
Beethoven's idea of the beautiful required an emphatic nakedness of the senses.
He was looking for other intonations dynamic and restless, sharp and persistent.
The sound of his music has become rich, dense, dramatically contrasting; his themes have acquired a hitherto unprecedented conciseness, severe simplicity.
To people brought up on the musical classicism of the XVIII century, Beethoven's manner of expression seemed so unusual, "uncomplicated", sometimes even ugly, that the composer was repeatedly reproached for trying to be original, they saw in his new expressive techniques the search for strange, deliberately dissonant sounds that cut the ear.
And, however, for all the originality, boldness and novelty of Beethoven's muse, it is inextricably linked with the previous culture and with the classicist system of thought.
The advanced schools of the XVIII century, covering several artistic generations, prepared Beethoven's work.
Some of them received a generalization and a final form in it; the influences of others are found in a new original phenomenon.
Beethoven's work is most closely connected with the art of Germany and Austria.
First of all, there is a noticeable continuity with the Viennese classicism of the XVIII century.
It is not by chance that Beethoven entered the history of Culture as the last representative of this school.
He began with the path laid out by his immediate predecessors Haydn and Mozart.
Beethoven also deeply perceived the system of heroic and tragic images of Gluck's musical drama, partly through Mozart's works, which in their own way refracted this figurative beginning, partly directly from Gluck's lyrical tragedies.
Beethoven is also clearly perceived as the spiritual heir of Handel.
The triumphant, lightly heroic images of Handel's oratorios began a new life on an instrumental basis in Beethoven's sonatas and symphonies.
Finally, clear preeminent threads connect Beethoven with that philosophically contemplative line in the art of music, which has long been developed in the choral and organ schools of Germany, becoming its typical national beginning and reaching its peak in the art of Bach.
The influence of Bach's philosophical lyrics on the entire structure of Beethoven's music is deep and indisputable and can be traced from the First Piano Sonata to the Ninth Symphony and the last quartets created shortly before his death.
Protestant chorale and traditional household German song, democratic singspiel and Viennese street serenades – these and many other types of national art are also embodied in Beethoven's work in their own way.
It recognizes both the historically formed forms of peasant songwriting, and the intonations of modern urban folklore.
In fact, everything organically national in the culture of Germany and Austria was reflected in Beethoven's sonata and symphonic work.
The art of other countries, especially France, also contributed to the formation of his multifaceted genius.
In the music of Beth hoven, echoes of Roussoist motifs can be heard, which were embodied in the French comic opera in the XVIII century, starting with Rousseau's" The Village Sorcerer " himself and ending with classical works in this genre by Gretry.
The poster like, severely tormented nature of the mass revolutionary genres of France left an indelible mark in it, marking a break with the chamber art of the XVIII century.
Cherubini's operas brought a sharp pathos, spontaneity and dynamics of passions, close to the emotional structure of the Beethoven style.
Just as the work of Bach absorbed and generalized at the highest artistic level all the significant schools of the previous era, so the horizon of the brilliant artist of the XIX century covered all the viable musical theories of the previous century.
But Beethoven's new understanding of the musically beautiful reworked these origins into such an original form that they are not always easily recognizable in the context of his works.
In the same way, the classical system of thought is refracted in the work of Beethoven in a new form, far from the style of expression of Gluck, Haydn, Mozart.
This is a special, purely Beethoven variety of classicism, which has no prototypes in any artist.
The composers of the XVIII century did not even think about the possibility of such grandiose constructions, which became typical for Beethoven, such freedom of development within the framework of sonata formation, about such diverse types of musical thematism, and the complexity and richness of the very texture of Beth Hoven music should have been perceived by them as an arbitrary step back to the rejected manner of the Bach generation.
Nevertheless, Beethoven's belonging to the classicist system of thought clearly emerges against the background of those new aesthetic principles that began to unconditionally dominate the music of the post Beethoven era.
From the first to the last works, Beethoven's music is immeasurably characterized by clarity and rationality of thinking, monumentality and harmony of form, a magnificent balance between the parts of the whole, which are characteristic signs of classicism in art in general, in music in particular.
In this sense, Beethoven can be called a direct successor not only to Gluck, Haydn and Mozart, but also to the very founder of the classical style in music – the Frenchman Lully, who created a hundred years before Beethoven was born.
Beethoven showed himself most fully within the framework of those sonata and symphonic genres that were developed by the composers of the Enlightenment century and reached the classical level in the works of Haydn and Mozart.
He is the last composer of the XIX century for whom the classical sonata was the most natural, organic form of thinking, the last one whose internal logic of musical thought dominates the external, sensually colorful beginning.
Perceived as a direct emotional outpouring, Beethoven's music actually rests on a virtuosically erected, firmly soldered logical foundation.
Finally, there is another fundamentally important point that connects Beethoven with the classicist system of thought.
This is the harmonious worldview reflected in his art.
Of course, the structure of feelings in Beethoven's music is different from that of the composers of the Enlightenment century.
Moments of spiritual equality, peace, and peace are far from dominating in it.
The huge charge of energy inherent in Beethoven's art, the high intensity of feelings, the intense dynamism push idyllic "pastoral" moments into the background.
And yet, as with the classical commentators of the XVIII century, a sense of harmony with the world is the most important feature of Beethoven's aesthetics.
But it is almost invariably born as a result of a titanic struggle, the utmost tension of spiritual forces overcoming gigantic obstacles.
As a heroic affirmation of life, as a triumph of a won victory, Beethoven has a sense of harmony with humanity and the universe.
His art is imbued with the faith, strength, and ecstasy of the joy of life that came to an end in music with the onset of the "romantic age".
Completing the era of musical classicism, Beethoven at the same time opened the way for the coming century.
His music rises above everything that was created by his contemporaries and the next generation after them, sometimes echoing the searches of a much later time.
Beethoven's insights into the future are amazing.
The ideas and musical images of Beethoven's brilliant art have not yet been exhausted.
V. Konen
Concerts
21
february, 2016
15:00
Bach, Boccherini, Beethoven
27
february, 2016
19:00
Mikhail Fomin Piano Evening
12
march, 2016
20:00
Andras Schiff (Hungary) Piano Evening
18
march, 2016
20:00
The Liverpool Symphony, a collection of Beatles songs for the Beethoven Symphony Orchestra.
Symphony No. 5
27
march, 2016
20:00
Beethoven.
Solemn Mass
12
april, 2016
20:00
Beethoven.
"Heroic" Symphony
19
june, 2016
20:00
Conductor Kent Nagano (USA) Berg, Beethoven
General Partner of the Philharmonic Society
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