In the year of Ludwig van Beethoven's 250th birthday, the English poet Ruth Padel published a cycle of “Beethoven Variations”, poems that trace Beethoven's life stages and fantasies about the changing state of mind of the suffering hero with memories of the author's own music lessons as well as travel impressions from Bonn and Connect Vienna.
Patrick Bahners
Features correspondent in Cologne and responsible for “humanities”.
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One of the first poems tells that little Ludwig was called the Spaniard by his playmates ("the Spagnol") because he was dark and sometimes went out on the street dirty. The poem describes the school dropout who hired as a violist in the electoral court orchestra: "He wears a sea-green coat, a wig, a little sword." With the size of the weapon, the poet indicates that the court musician remained a child because he played under the eyes of his father and because, in retrospect, feudal society presents itself as a system of bondage. The next verse shows the composer in domestic secrecy: he hurls miracles of modulation at his father's blows. In this biographical reading, Beethoven's music makes a conflict productive:the contrast between the color changes of harmony and the violent monotony of rhythm.
The opposite of a street boy
A Spaniard has come to Bonn to perform the most famous work that has gone down in music history as the cipher of the ultimate, the Ninth Symphony, at the beginning of this year's Beethoven Festival, with which the city of birth is catching up on the birthday party. In age and habit, Jordi Savall, who celebrated his eightieth birthday three weeks ago and conducts the Le Concert des Nations orchestra he founded in 1989 in the World Conference Center Bonn, is of course the opposite of a street boy. But Nike Wagner invited him because she would like to do the rehearsal at the end of her seven-year directorship,Whether a festival with a given repertoire focus on classical music in the double sense of the epoch and the conventional public taste can be instilled by musicians from the school of historical performance practice.
The nine symphonies were distributed among five orchestras: three special ensembles for older music compete with two classical symphony orchestras. The name of the Belgian ensemble, which, under the direction of Alessandro De Marchi, illustrates that in the classical music business, paradoxically, the association of the dirty is linked to the purist project of regaining older playing styles, the idea of global street credibility in the sense of familiarity with the rough and vital the second and the fifth play: B'Rock Orchestra.
To the extent that court officials' children in the reform Catholic atmosphere of the royal seat of the Elector-Archbishop of Cologne should have picked up the black legend that the Spaniards are culturally hopelessly backward, a considerable part of Jordi Savall's learned life's work is devoted to refuting such prejudices. His research into Spanish and Romanesque musical traditions has also opened up their multicultural elements such as Moorish influences.