In Alta Gracia, Ernesto meets Calica Ferre. The boys and girls would gather around to dance, but Ernesto was a really bad dancer. He had a bad ear. We'd be playing one style of music and he'd be dancing to another. The adolescent Ernesto was known fo...
A hero to some, a monster to others. He hoped to start a Third World War. The CIA and the American Special Forces conspired to bring him down. His death enshrouded in mystery, his body secretly buried in an unmarked grave, but the man may have hoped...
Beethoven died in Vienna on March 26th , 1827, at the age of 56,in this room in the house of the Black-Robed Spaniards. The very end of his life, his health got even worse than it normally was . His intestines started to swell, the condition was drop...
Money was also the motivation for writing the late string quartets. Prince Gelatin Commission Wattznard regarded it as the greatest music Beethoven ever wrote. To many contemporaries, this strange music was a definite proof that the composer had lost...
The first sketches for the opening movement of the Ninth Symphony date from 1816. But the intensive work was done in this house in Baden 17 years later. Over 600 pages of sketches survive. Beethoven had asked whether the Philharmonic Society of Londo...
This sonata Hammerklavier Op 106 is widely accepted as one of the greatest works by Beethoven. Its, it always presented in my mind that this perhaps signified his graduation from telling us about his material experience and going into the world of to...
Married Love is the subtitle of the opera Fidelio. A woman disguises herself as a man in order to rescue her husband from prison. It's perhaps not too fantastic or surrealistic to think that his obsession with the Fidelio theme which after all he wen...
On July 5th, 1812, Beethoven arrived in Teplitz from Prague, and over three days wrote a passionate love letter. My angel, my all, my very self, only a few words todayCan our love endure except through sacrifices? Through not demanding everything? Ca...
Immediately after the concert with Napoleon once again threatening to invade Vienna, Beethoven began another colossal work with military themes. For the first time, Beethoven did not play at the premiere, he was too deaf. He never finished another pi...
The Fifth Symphony is really something absolutely new. The symphony starts with da da da dathats no music, it is political agitation, so it is like a manifestation of ideas. Erits not good the way we live, its not good, and, then you, umat one moment...
The interior Beethoven, the private space Beethoven is a different Beethoven and the public space Beethoven, the concert hall Beethoven. And one of Beethoven's string quartets is said that this should never be played in public. These were pieces that...
The great composer's romantic life was much less successful. He gave piano lessons to many women of noble birth. In 1801, he dedicated the Moonlight Sonata to one of these aristocratic pupils whom he loved. Her name was Countess Giulietta Guicciardi....
It's in the Eroica that for the first time everyone is convinced this really is Beethoven's voice. The extraordinary thing about the premiere of Beethoven 3rd was that it was done of course in a very small room, in the Lobkowitz's palace, but I think...
In 1796 or 97, Beethoven had suffered a serious illness, possibly meningitis. My ears continue to hum and buzz day and night, He wrote, I can hear sounds, it's true, but can not make out the words. He first noticed that his hearing was going, when he...
Beethoven's music was controversial; it could be interpreted in two quite extreme ways as, as very bad or very good, therefore perhaps much more so than other music, it was in need of framing, it needed a kind of protective envelope, that could intro...
