BEETHOVEN 200 YEARS AGO TODAY: Wednesday, June 30, 1824 (approximately)

The Foreign Musical Report in the July issue of The Harmonicon magazine (Nr.XIX) at 133 gives an account of music in Bremen in recent months. In addition to the usual operas of Mozart, Rossini and Weber, “Beethoven’s Egmont was also revived here, and, with the exception of certain liberties taken with the text, and the introduction of some new airs, which were far from breathing the spirit of this great composer, was received with great enthusiasm….M. Ochernal, the leader of the opera, gave a concert in the spacious Town-Hall of this place, which is admirably adapted for the purposes of music. On this occasion, as if to atone in some measure for the outrage offered at the opera to Beethoven’s Egmont, this composition was given strictly according to the text, while the words were declaimed, with great effect, by an amateur, of the name of Eggers.”

The report continues: “The society here, known by the name of Grabausche Gesang-verein, celebrated a musical festivity lately, on occasion of the singular coincidence of Beethoven’s birth-day and the day of Mozart’s death, when the Seven Words of Christ by Haydn, the Creation, Athalie, by Schulz, and the Requiem of Mozart, were performed by a full band and chorus.” [It was not much of a coincidence; Mozart died on December 5, 1791, while Beethoven was born on the 16th or possibly the 17th of December, 1770.]

This same issue of The Harmonicon of July, 1824, includes the following news item at 140: “Three new Sonatas for the piano-forte [op.109, 110 and 111] have recently made their appearance at Vienna. It is now above thirty years since the first dawn of the genius of this great composer was hailed by the musical world. Since that period he has attempted every species of composition, and has been equally successful in all. He has displayed all the requisities [sic] required from a true musician, invention, feeling, spirit, melody, harmony, and all the varieties of the rhythmic art. As is always the case, he, in the first instance, had to encounter much opposition, but the power and originality of his genius, surmounted every obstacle. The world was soon convinced of the superiority of his talents; and almost his first efforts were sufficient to establish his fame on an unshaken basis.—This original genius still towers above his contemporaries, having reached a height to which few will venture to aspire. Seldom has he turned aside in his onward course to the temple of fame, and even his deviations, the common lot of humanity, have been the errors of a genius. Critics have observed, that, with many of the higher beauties of this author, the present compositions abound also with his peculiarities.”