a week of Beethoven

Even Choral Evensong had to make way for this! Radio 3 has just come to the end of its week of Beethoven, which broadcast the composer’s entire works and nothing else. Turning on in the middle of the night, as we did, you would still hear only LvB.

Many works came round more than once, and not just the well-known ones. (What was it with the overture to The Consecration of the House? This was broadcast at least four times!) It was possible to hear various versions (I heard the Grosse Fuge four times, in different contexts or arrangements) or works which use the same theme, such as the one from the Eroica finale. (I consider the piano variations on this theme to be the equal of all but the greatest of the sonatas). And that brings me to one of the things you learn from this exercise – just how many sets of variations Beethoven wrote, not to mention folksong arrangements, which are a bit out of favour these days. I never found out what the curious song with the almost endlessly repeated vocal arpeggios (broadcast on Friday afternoon) actually was!

One way and another we heard a high proportion of the week’s output and thought it was a very worthwhile exercise in broadcasting. We couldn’t think of another composer for which it would work as well – Bach, for example, would come out as too churchy if you put out his complete surviving works (and what do you do about dubious attributions, of which there are quite a few?). And it would probably take over a week – the organ music alone lasts 24 hours. With Mozart you would get a lot of juvenile works and maybe not enough variety.

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