The best way to honor Beethoven’s 250th? Listen to every note he ever wrote
I cannot imagine what a celestial-level bummer it must be to spend more than two centuries hovering around the ether, waiting for your big sestercentennial bash to pop off and take over the planet, only to have the whole thing called off at the last minute.
So before we go any further, on behalf of Earth, its people and all of our germs, I’d like to extend a sincere apology heavenward to one Ludwig van Beethoven for what has to be (I didn’t double-check this) the worst birthday ever. Also, happy belated 250th.
All through 2020, as coronavirus case numbers soared and hopes plummeted, I watched and whimpered as one monumental Beethoven tribute after another crumbled. I did this less out of despair over the events themselves than what their collapse represented: Leonard Bernstein once observed that Beethoven’s music was propelled from note to note (and indeed fromage to age) by a sense of inevitability. If Beethoven could be shut down, what chance did the rest of us stand?
Thankfully, Bernstein wasn’t kidding around. One does not simply “cancel” Beethoven’s birthday.
Most large-scale, dropletheavy celebrations were forced to defer to the higher hopes of next year (such as the National Symphony Orchestra’s intended run and recording of all nine symphonies over 18 days), or pivot to video (as did the Cathedral Choral Society and the National Philharmonic).
A handful of proper celebrations did make it to real life right at the buzzer, just shy of the pandemic scattering every orchestra ever assembled from their pits. Sir John Eliot Gardiner led a period-instrument symphony cycle with members of the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique at Carnegie Hall in February, and the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra’s late-February
re-creation of Beethoven’s legendary 1808 Akademie concert was made a truer reproduction by its own roaring success.
But most of the Beethoven bashes planned by the world’s biggest orchestras to fill the better part of a busy birthday year - more numerous than I could list here if I tried — were reduced to two measly dimensions and the stubbornly iffy connections of virtuality.
When Beethoven’s actual (read: estimated) birthday came and went in mid-December, the global classical community tried its hardest to make it up to the birthday boy. Social media erupted into effusive tributes, threaded biographies (Anton Prince’s was quite good!), Beethoven memes, YouTube shares and heated debates over whether the Ninth Symphony was “a banger” when it “dropped.” (It was and is.)
Here’s something odd: It was this ceaseless, formless birthday deluge of assorted and unsorted Beethoven bits and pieces flooding my timeline — an overturned junk drawer of vintage footage, scratchy transfers from old 78s, scenes from “Die Hard,” incorrect trivia, passages of Kundera, rampant hijackings of “Fur Elise” (that damn McDonald’s ad still holds some real estate inmymemory) — that felt most aligned with my own absorption of Beethoven.
From boomers to babies, our culture is so saturated with his music that listening to it sometimes feels like carefully extracting it. It can be hard to hear a heartbeat through the mythos that the centuries have wrapped around him.
Beethoven, in and out of scare quotes, has become a godlike abstraction of himself, complete with one-word moniker - his music less a product of culture than a feature of nature.
2020 had plenty of answers to the question of how best to listen to Beethoven. Butmine is simple: completely.
By “completely” I mean a few things. Completely as in “with everything you’ve got” — full body, full attention, phone-off, door-closed listening.
But I also mean “completely” in the more magical sense that any great recording affords, where themusic seems suspended between three distinct points in time — e.g. Beethoven writes his Piano Concerto No. 1 in 1795; Martha Argerich performs it (at the age of 8) in 1949; you listen to it while doing lunges in the park in 2020. Listening requires a kind of triangulation.
And lastly, I mean “completely” as in comprehensively - end to end, as much as you can, preferably everything. Really. It’ll take about 112 hours and roughly eight days.
I know this because I just experienced it, thanks to the “Beethoven Orgy.”
At WHRB, Harvard University’s student-run radio station, and for the communities within reach of its signal, “Orgy Season” has been an exam period tradition since 1943, when lore says a weary student played all nine of Beethoven’s symphonies (on 78s) on air.
In the years that followed - and largely under the stewardship of David Elliott, the longtime host, multigenerational mentor and “spiritual leader” of the station who died in November at 78 - the “Orgies” have matured into comprehensive ouevre-hoovering broadcasts from every imaginable genre.
Elliott even hosted the station’s last “Beethoven Orgy” back in 1989 — “Beethoven rolls over for no one,” he growls in a promo spot. (Elliott himself is also the subject of a dedicated “Orgy” of his own favorite recordings, first broadcast in May 2019 and re-aired Thursday.)
This year’s eight-day revival of the Beethoven Orgy, which concluded Dec. 18, experienced a marked uptick of online listeners from all over, but especially in Boston, where fresh lockdowns and not-so-fresh weather has had thousands seeking comfort between their headphones - and setting their alarms to wake up to Beethoven.