Category: Beethoven

  • Mountain Music

    The sound of the French horn provides one of the most emblematically Romantic timbres in nineteenth-century music. Why is that? The French horn derives its origin from the hunting horn (in German, waldhorn or forest horn) — a brass instrument played while hunting on horseback to call back the hounds from the hunt. Some horns,…

  • Heaven and Earth Will Tremble

    (The title page of Beethoven’s manuscript of his third symphony, with the dedication scratched out.) In October 1803, Beethoven’s friend, student, and acolyte Ferdinand Ries wrote to the music publisher Simrock: [Beethoven] wants to sell you [his new] Symphony for 100 gulden. In his own opinion it is the greatest work he has yet written. Beethoven…

  • He Who Knows Longing

    Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in a traveling robe on a trip to Italy. In 1795, Goethe published his novel Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship), a Bildungsroman (novel concerned with the growth of the individual human spirit) about a young merchant who, dissatisfied with his life in business, goes off to join a group of traveling street…

  • Time and Space from Beethoven to 1913

    (Variation V m. 30 from the second movement of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata no. 32 in C minor, op. 111.) In 1913, an art exhibit was mounted at the 69th Regiment Armory on Lexington Avenue in New York City (around the corner from where Hunter College is now located). This exhibit, which came to be known…