Healing, strengthening and hope are recurring words when people talk about their experiences with the music of Ludwig van Beethoven.

In the series "Begegnungen mit Beethoven" in the FAZ, baritone Matthias Goerne reported how Beethoven's music fundamentally helped him in his childhood days: "When I was ill at home, my passion for this composer gripped me the deepest.

Such music helps to heal.

There is always something in life that you have to heal from.

And I believe that this music contributes a lot to inner stabilization and healing".

Jan Brachmann

Editor in the Feuilleton.

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The composer Jake Heggie, who now lives in San Francisco, reports something very similar in an interview with the FAZ: "I grew up in a small town in Ohio, and Beethoven was simply my childhood hero.

When I was ten years old, my father took his own life.

The world collapsed.

Everything in me and around me was chaos.

But in Beethoven I found support, refuge and strength.

My mother, who is now very old, is still amazed at how I stabilized myself by immersing myself in music.

Just the fact that this music existed – that gave me hope at the time.”

Heggie is currently a guest composer at the Beethoven Week in Bonn's Beethoven-Haus, the first chamber music festival in this series, which can again take place in front of an audience in the Hermann-Josef-Abs-Saal after a Corona break of more than two years.

It is also the first public festival under the new President of the Beethoven House, Daniel Hope.

The violinist succeeded violist Tabea Zimmermann in March 2020.

When asked what he sees as his task in the new office, Hope first has to take a deep breath.

Then he says: "Well, Beethoven doesn't need my help.

Neither does his music.

But I may have to rephrase and explain who Beethoven was, what impact his music had and still has, for our time.

You have to bring that to every generation anew, otherwise there would be an outline of knowledge that would be devastating.” One of Hope’s first programmatic acts was the memory of the violinist Joseph Joachim, the first president of the Beethoven-Haus, who, at the age of thirteen, was under the direction of Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy had played Beethoven's Violin Concerto in London and thereby vehemently helped the work to establish itself in the repertoire.

Joachim, who was a close friend of Johannes Brahms and Clara Schumann and at the same time founding rector of the Royal Prussian Academy of Music in Berlin, established the tradition of chamber music festivals at Beethoven's birthplace.

"He was even the first to set up a chamber music festival in this region," says Malte Boecker, director of the Beethoven House.

Hope adds: "As far as I know, it was here, during Joachim's concert activities as part of his Bonn presidency, that the first cyclical performance of all sixteen Beethoven string quartets in a concert series ever took place." Hope had recreated some of Joachim's concert programs during the lockdown and had it recorded for WDR 3 radio without an audience.

With a string quartet by Beethoven, the "Quartetto serioso" in F minor op. 95, the first Beethoven week in two years began, to which the public is again admitted.

The four young men from the Quatuor Arod threw themselves into the music so that their bow hairs snapped and flew through the air.

For her, passion is obviously a question of tempo, of gestures and noises, and less of thoughts.

But it is amazing how the ensemble held together in this storm and conveyed the message of foaming displeasure with one voice.

Lise de la Salle as a graceful, brilliant hard worker on the piano and Daniel Hope on the solo violin with an initially hoarse, then passionately singing tone joined Ernest Chausson's Concert op. 21.

On June 4th, the premiere of Jake Heggie's "Fantasy Suite 1803" for violin and piano can be experienced.

"Slow and withdrawn, free," she begins.

Heggie thinks of Beethoven, who wanted to communicate with other people, but was prevented from doing so by increasing deafness and the tense concentration on his own art: Portrait of a sensitive and torn man.