University of Houston goes all in on Beethoven with new festival
Lately the University of Houston’s main campus has been buzzing with the prospect of wall-to-wall Beethoven.
“It’s great excitement,” says Andrew Davis, dean of UH’s Katherine G. McGovern College of the Arts. “This is a focus of attention for many people around here right now.”
The approaching 250th anniversary of the great composer’s birth — it’s December 27 — created an inevitability for Davis and his colleagues. As they began discussing their 2020 programming, they couldn’t help but notice the abundance of Beethoven tributes all year long, from Vienna to College Station.
“We looked around and said, ‘Wow, we should make something like this happen in Houston,’ ” Davis says.
So was born UH’s Beethoven Symposium, a two-week marathon of concerts, open rehearsals, master classes and lectures that runs Feb. 17-29 and includes weeklong guest-artist residencies by the Formosa Quartet and violinist Kristóf Baráti.
Additionally, a half-dozen leading Beethoven scholars will headline next weekend’s joint annual conference of the Texas Society for Music Theory, which Davis serves as treasurer, and the American Musicological Society Southwestern Chapter. Overall, Davis estimates that nearly two dozen faculty members and potentially hundreds of students will participate.
“As a university administrator at a major research university, there’s really nothing better than that,” he says. “That’s what the research university is all about — people from all over the world interacting with your own star faculty, and allowing your faculty and students to develop beyond the way they normally get to develop every day.”
During Formosa’s residency week, the quartet will give concerts at Asia Society Texas Center (Feb. 20) and UH’s Dudley Recital Hall (Feb. 22); each one pairs Beethoven with Formosa-commissioned works by Taiwaneseborn composer Wei-Chieh Lin. The second week include the UH Wind Ensemble performing Michael Markowski’s “Joyride,” inspired by Beethoven’s ninth symphony, on Feb. 25; faculty members playing Beethoven chamber music Feb. 27 and 28; and the Feb. 29 finale, featuring Beethoven’s ‘Eroica’ symphony and Baráti performing the Violin Concerto in D Major.
According to Davis, Baráti also proposed conducting the violin concerto — news he had to deliver to UH’s director of orchestras, Franz Krager.
“To Krager’s credit, he said, ‘That sounds so exciting, count me in — I’ll step aside for Baráti any day,’ ” Davis recounts.
The inner voice
If this symposium has a unifying thread, it may well be why Beethoven remains so intriguing and formidable all these years later.
“It is hard to overstate the importance of Beethoven,” says Davis, who joined the Moores School in 2003.
“This is not just because I’m a musician — it’s hard to overstate it for anyone, not just (among) musicians,” he adds. “This is one of the great towering figures in the history of the Western world.”
Davis likens Beethoven’s intellectual achievements to Rousseau and Goethe, writers who helped radically redefine the relationship between creative artists and European society. Musically, compared with the structurally brilliant but relatively aloof work of his Enlightenment-era predecessors, Beethoven represents “a turn inward,” he says.
“He’s looking at what’s going on inside the mind, inside the soul: what’s happening inside a human being that is untouchable, or unknowable, or unexplainable, or irrational,” Davis explains. “What is it about the way we live and the way we behave that cannot be explained, and how do you work through that in a piece of art?
“It happened in other of the arts,” he continues, “but in Beethoven it happened in music, and he was really the first one to do this in a really systematic way.”
Davis will expand on that notion in the symposium’s opening lecture, “Beethoven’s Inner Voices,” which he will share with UH professor of art history Rex Koontz.
“Professor Koontz will talk about how some of the same kinds of techniques that you see in Beethoven show up in the visual arts, and how they can be interpreted in similar ways,”
Davis says. “We’ll get a sense of the reach of Beethoven across the arts.”
Beethoven as a political figure
Similarly, the TSMT/AMSSC conference will explore Beethoven’s impact from almost every imaginable angle, from the tonality of the ‘Hammerklavier’ sonata to East Germany’s cultural appropriation of Beethoven’s image and music through two films made more than 20 years apart. Among the lecturers are UCLA professor William Kinderman, whose book “Beethoven: A Political Artist in Revolutionary Times” is due in the fall.
“Kinderman is talking about Beethoven as an overtly political figure making political statements in the wake of the French Revolution in Europe, and (how) Beethoven played a role in the political developments of the time,” Davis says.
Another scholar, Michael Spitzer of the University of Liverpool, will present a lecture called “Beethoven as Sentimentalist: the Glory of War in the Finale of the ‘Eroica.’ ” A few hours later, the Moores School Symphony Orchestra will close out the symposium with the same symphony.
One of Beethoven’s greatest works, ‘Eroica’ dates to 1803 and ’04, during which time his fascination with Napoleon Bonaparte turned to disgust after Napoleon proclaimed himself emperor — trampling, in Beethoven’s mind, on the revolutionary ideals the French leader once claimed to embody. Before the symphony’s premiere in April 1805, Beethoven famously crossed out Bonaparte’s name on its dedication page and replaced it with “to the memory of a great man.”
Conveniently, the ‘Eroica’ makes an early and acute example of the themes that, to Davis, help explain Beethoven’s long-lasting resonance — “this struggle against tyranny, this struggle against autocracy, this quest for individual expression and individual freedom; and the understanding of one’s self and trying to figure out what is not immediately apparent and understandable in one’s soul,” he says.
“This is a really timeless message that Beethoven brings, and it resonates across the centuries. Just look at today’s political climate,” he adds. “These are some of the same themes that we deal with today, so this message has not gone away — nor will it, I would imagine.”