From Beethovenian assholery to Romeo and Juliet basicness
Sharon's Weekly Head Dump
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Happy Barbie movie premiere day to all who celebrate! When I went to buy my movie tickets this morning all the reasonably timed showings in the area were more or less sold out (I say “more or less” because for the sake of my neck I am simply not going to sit in the farthest corner seat in the front row, so to me a showing where that’s the only seat available is, for all intents and purposes, sold out) so the hype appears very, very real.
I am taking all the rewards and treats where I can because this week I have been painstakingly relearning the original Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel G Minor piano sonata.
For those of you who haven’t been tracking my personal workload closely: I worked on Fanny’s piano sonata for three-ish years (thanks, pandemic), getting it embedded deeply in my muscle memory, before performing it a few times in 2022. Then I had to switch gears and learn an all-new concerto version that Patricia Wallinga arranged, which despite having the exact same melodies and harmonies uses completely different notes and textures, so I had to practice the concerto version really intensely this year to overwrite the muscle memory of the original solo version.
I am going into the recording studio next month (eek!) to record the original solo sonata that Fanny wrote, which means overwriting the overwriting I just did. Usually when I relearn old pieces it only takes a little bit of practice to resurface my brain’s physical memory of them, but in this case relearning the sonata is…a mess. I sight-read the sonata to start and there are entire passages that my fingers simply refuse to get a handle on, because my ear is so insistent that those are notes for the cellos or whatever to handle. The fourth movement in particular is just nonstop go-go-go without a break, and hilariously I keep finding my hands abruptly coming to a stop and refusing to play because in the concerto version, the piano has to hand the baton off to the orchestra there.
It’s doable work, but it’s also absurdly frustrating work. This is how I justify giving myself all the treats right now.
Also, fyi, I will be traveling next week, so there won’t be any more posts until August!
Beethoven, master of pettiness
By virtue of having started my music history sort-of-career with Beethoven and being mentored by a Beethoven scholar, I feel sometimes like I already know most of the Fun Beethoven Facts out there and that there isn’t that much surprise and delight left in Ludwig Land for me. So I was utterly stoked when Emily Hogstad shared a delicious petty morsel from Beethoven’s letters over on Bluesky, which I then reshared (with permission from Emily) over on Twitter:
I’m not rephrasing for comedic effect, btw; that’s literally verbatim what Wikipedia quotes from multiple sources. Beethoven, you are such a shitposter.
Because Ludwig van Beethoven was, by all accounts, kind of an asshole even in the most charitable and empathetic readings, I wondered if maybe this was a case of bitter broke energy directed towards a fiscally responsible sibling, and then I read more of Johann’s Wikipedia article and went, nope, Johann sounds like a piece of work! (I guess assholery just really ran in the family.)
First of all, look at this f**king guy:
How did the portrait artist (L. Gross) have the balls to make his subject look so damn smug? How did Nikolaus Johann van Beethoven himself look at that shit-eating grin on his own face and go “Yup, looks great, let’s go with it”??? This portrait literally has the exact same energy as the trollface meme:
Secondly, I was curious how Johann made the money to buy the estate that allowed him to peacock to his brother as a proud landowner, and it turns out, the answer was war profiteering! Specifically, when Napoleon invaded Austria, Johann made his money supplying the French army with medical supplies.
Famously, Napoleon was Beethoven’s original muse when he was writing his Eroica Symphony (that’s “Eroica” as in “Heroic,” not “Erotic”), but Beethoven disavowed his former hero, referring to him as a “tyrant,” when Napoleon crowned himself emperor. I can’t imagine that Beethoven was thrilled about his own brother making a fortune supplying Napoleon’s conquests.
I looked up Kaspar, Beethoven’s other brother (whose son, Karl, Beethoven disastrously adopted) to see if he was maybe less of a shithead, and it turns out he was going around selling Beethoven’s compositions without his knowledge when they had been promised to other publishers. Was there anyone in this family who wasn’t an asshole?
It is now headcanon to me that the famous “Ode to Joy” setting in his Ninth Symphony is Beethoven expressing his love and feeling of universal brotherhood to everyone except his actual brothers. This layer of screw-you pettiness significantly improves what is otherwise a cliche and culturally hackneyed piece, which pleases me greatly.
I am basic when it comes to musical depictions of Romeo and Juliet
Last night I went to see Dudamel conduct the LA Phil at the Hollywood Bowl in a Tchaikovsky-Prokofiev program. I am very basic in that I adore both those composers, and even more basic in that I love love love Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet.
To be quibbly and nitpicky, I actually didn’t love Dudamel’s rendition of the work this outing. I was more or less okay with the cuts (they played a selection, not the entire suite, and did things like open with the first few lines of “Montagues and Capulets” and then cut into “Dance of the Knights,” which is…a choice, but an understandable one since the Bowl draws more normie audiences) but took issue with the tempo relationships.
Many of the pieces follow classic ternary form where the A section is somewhat energetic, the B section is more lyrical/introspective, and then the A section circles back. Dudamel generally took the A sections a little faster than you’d typically hear, slowed way down for the B sections, then snapped back to fastfastfast for the return of A, which just felt really jarring. It also didn’t do the music many favors; one of my favorite themes from Romeo and Juliet is “Dance of the Knights,” which is dramatic as hell and features this striding dotted rhythm which provides a very menacing quality:
If you take that theme significantly faster than this—which Dudamel did last night—the long-short-long-short-long rhythm loses its swinging gait and starts to approach a straighter, more even rhythm, which takes a lot of the dramatic bite out of that glorious theme.
Anyway, the live performance only whetted my appetite for MOAR ROMEO AND JULIET and I now have to get my fix listening to all sorts of different versions. I will maintain that Romeo and Juliet isn’t really a love story, but damn, any musical depiction of those dumb children from opposing gangs is bound to be a banger.
Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet? BANGER.
(I love that dramatic moment where the drumbeat starts, ahhhh.)
Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet? BANGER.
(That bit that starts at 4:57 gets me every time.)
Bernstein’s West Side Story? BANGER.
You put some basic-ass musical rendition of Romeo and Juliet on a program, I am THERE and I will LOVE it.
Sometimes I get these horrible ideas for mono-thematic programs that I would be all over. For example, I fantasize about an entire program just of music based on the Dies Irae, which is objectively terrible curation, and I might be the only person in the world who would be into that. Similarly, I would be super into an all-Romeo and Juliet program, which now that I think about it, actually wouldn’t be that awful pacing-wise?
You start with the Tchaikovsky overture, then do a curated selection from the Prokofiev suite, then have intermission, then do the Bernstein symphonic dances…okay, someone program this NOW.
This week’s pop music on repeat
I have really been enjoying the new Misterwives album, Nosebleeds, which is solid no-skips listening all the way through, and kind of straddles that semi-pop, semi-rock zone that I feel like a lot of artists have been doing recently.
I’d previously wrung the hell out of the lead single, “Out of Your Mind,” which I still really love but has less of an impact after I’d repeatedly listened to it over almost four months. “Dagger” and “Trigger Pull” were also some initial favorites off the album, but this week I found myself really drawn to “End of My Rope.”
I just want to bop around and wave my arms every time that chorus kicks in.
Happy end of July (???????) everyone, and see you in August! 🎹