"Some melody"

Leonard Bernstein wrote a book called 'The Joy of Music' which I took out from the Kitchener Public Library and read when I was maybe 16. I did most of my reading as a teenager. In fact, at 15 I underwent a similar project to this absurdity and sat in our backyard and read the Complete Works of William Shakespeare. A feat that only came in handy a couple of years later when I was talking to my first girlfriend on the phone and quoted Henry the Fifth to her, "You have witchcraft in your lips". As a grown man, I couldn't do that without giggling, so hat's off, 16 year old me.

There was no level of earnest intensity I wasn't capable of at 16. Or at 27.

Or, frankly, now, at 39.

I mean, I am listening to the complete works of Beethoven.

But back to the point: Beethoven and Bernstein.

I woke up this morning and loosely remembered a quote from Bernstein's book: "Beethoven was the greatest composer because of his ability to know what note should come next." Good stuff. Worth pursuing.

In my exhaustive Googling, I got this YouTube hit:

In order for the rest of this entry to make sense, maybe watch it now.

This video killed me on a few fronts.

First, it confirmed what I thought might happen writing this blog: one thing would lead to another in ways that tickled me.  In my previous entry, I told a little story about my grandfather Khosrow. Well, in the 'seventies and 'eighties, him and Leonard in this video could've been the same guy. It is un-fucking-canny. The sauvite, the craggy handsomeness (especially in profile), the mannerisms and gestures, the sheer unassailable confidence in what they know.

(Leonard Bernstein. Handsome!)

Second, Maximillian Schell's incredible hair and unironic decorative scarf.

Third, at 1:17 Bernstein suddenly has smoke in his left hand and Leonard wants to light that butt so bad for about a minute. It's in his other hand, it's in the middle of his mouth, it's in the corner of his mouth, that unlit smoke makes its rounds. Then I guess he remembers it's tough playing a symphonic score with a smoke in your hand and the smoke disappears. That is... until 7:08, when presto! The smoke is back! Like he pulled it from behind Maximillian's ear. But it's not just back - it's back in style: it's lit, in a long white cigarette holder.  And suddenly Schell is smoking too. But while Schell gets to puff away, we never actually see Lenny take a drag off his, which as an ex-smoker, almost made me punch my laptop in the camera hole.

Fourth, towards the end of the video, Leonard articulates the quote I was searching for. That's some serendipity. He speaks very beautifully of Beethoven's awful struggle and the perfect "inevitability" of his music.

Fifth, when Bernstein plays the 7th symphony and goes, "Some melody". Ha.

Sixth, back to my grandfather. My grandfather was never without a pack of Vantages in his shirt pocket. I can remember seeing the bulls-eye logo through the thin fabric of his dress shirts. At one point he told me he was smoking two packs a day. His voice was thoroughly smoked out. When he'd make his cassettes in our living room, he'd often sing along with the melody and sound exactly like Bernstein does at 4:30.

But, all of the above has nothing to do with the Beethoven I listened to most recently: the Romance in F, Op. 50. I listened to 2 versions: Jascha Heifetz and Itzhak Perlman. Not that I'm into doing classical music cage matches, but I preferred Heifetz's version: it was faster, sharper, less sentimental and therefore much more clear and moving.

Here's Heifetz. You can find Perlman your damn self.

However, because I'm intellectually 12, the main thing I enjoyed was that whenever the whole orchestra came in, the rhythm sounded like someone saying, "That's enough" and their friend going, "No. It's not." You'll know what I mean if you listen to it.

Is now a good time to restate that I'm not a musicologist?

Beethovorola

The earphone jack on my almost brand new Motorola (don't laugh) cellphone stopped working, so the only Beethoven I could listen to were my CDs, packed tight like face clothes into a big white drawer in our laundry room. After a quick look, I found an EMI recording of the Violin Concerto in D, Op. 61 and the two Romances for Violin (in G and F, in case ya care). No time for a whole concerto, we had guests coming. So a romance it was.

Ahhhh romance!

The romances must've been why EMI decided to put a strange highschool-level painting of a blond winged cherubim sitting atop either a golden LP or a sundial, not sure which, using an over-sized orange quill as a record stylus. The romance is also communicated by the ornately framed landscape painting over the left shoulder of the weird record angel (liner notes say it's "A Tranquil Mountainous Landscape", by George Engelhardt.)

Now, I'd already heard and loved the Romances in the 'nineties.

Before his hearing vanished along with his invincible will to party, my Iranian grandfather, Khosrow Hirbod, used to visit us in the summer occasionally when I was a kid living in and around Oshawa, then later, Kitchener, Ontario. A life-long classical music buff, Khosrow (we never called him grandpa) often claimed that if he hadn't been busy making a fortune working for oil companies and the Shah of Iran, he would've been a music historian.  I didn't and don't believe him - music historians don't roll high - but there wasn't and isn't a doubt about his enthusiasm for music and on his long visits, he made this enthusiasm my mother's problem.

He would have my Mom drive him to the library in whatever town we were living in and he would spend hours flipping through the vinyl collection, picking out what he considered the best recordings of his favourite works (meaning, of course, all recorded before 1980. Like, on tenors: "Jussi Bjorling "A master". Domingo: "Sounds like he smokes."). He would pile into the car with his arm-load of vinyl, then have my mother take him to buy about 50 blank cassette tapes.  Then he'd sit in our living room, in front of my father's silver multi-unit Marantz sound system, big headphones on his big head, listening to the LPs and making at least two cassette copies of every LP: one for himself to bring back to Nice and one for us, as a gift.

The thing I remember most about his cassette copies - and there are still a few floating around - was his handwriting. My grandfather was an engineer and/or an architect (I've never been clear which) and his penmanship is exquisite. Artful, beautiful, always in black ink. It made the cassettes feel exotic and special - of another time and place.

One of these cassettes, that I listened to on and off into my teens, was of Beethoven's Romances. The "best" recording, in Khosrow's esteem, was of David Oistrakh (Russian, 1908-1974). I don't know which orchestra Oistrakh was playing with on this recording, but it was achingly beautiful. I'm gonna write "I loved it" a lot in this blog, so if you don't like a guy loving stuff, sign off. I LOVED that recording.

But I do not have that cassette anymore. My CD is of Yehudi Menuhin (slouch) playing with the Philharmonia Orchestra, conducted by Sir John Pritchard. It was recorded at Studio 1, Abbey Road, in 1960, which is nerdy-great when you think of what happened there in the same decade. It's also an amazing recording, though I do wish I had that cassette.

I only had time today to listen to Romance No. 1 in G, Op. 40.

I love how the orchestra tip-toes around the solo violin as the central theme is introduced - all hushed and pizzicato. Then when the full heft of the orchestra comes in it's after an almost rockstar 2-3-4!
I also love the almost gypsy direction the solo takes. I just LOVE IT.

There. That's me talking about music. It doesn't get more erudite than that, folks, so pop on your blissful ignorance hats and enjoy.

Here's my grandfather's fave David Oistrakh playing the piece in 1966 in Moscow.

You're a Good Man, Ludwig Van

This blog will chronicle my attempt to listen to - really listen to - the complete works of Ludwig Van Beethoven. I don't know a lot about Beethoven. I know Gary Oldman played him in 'Immortal Beloved' and he was grumpy and sexy. And Neil Monro, a great actor/director I knew, played him in 'Beethoven Lives Upstairs' and he was grumpy with grownups but nice to kids.

I know he wrote much of his staggering music while deaf, which is a fact I routinely repeat to people, my head shaking in disbelief,  and everyone says, "Yeah I know".

I don't know a lot about him.

I know a bit about music, but very little about how it works or how it's structured. For example, I don't know what Sonata form means. I enjoy listening to Sonatas, I know Hyundai named a car after them, but I listen to them like I eat fine dining: I enjoy it but have no fucking clue how it happened. It just seems like magic.

 I own it: I'm not a musicologist. I'm a guy who knows putting on the Ode to Joy makes me joyful, often weepily, disbelievingly, deliriously joyful.

I know Fur Elise is my wife's favourite piece of classical music. I found that out tonight while I was doing dishes.

I know I first listened to the 2nd movement of his 7th symphony with my buddy Steve. I was loaded. He was stoned. We sat on the floor in rental house in Belleville, Ontario, teary and giggly with astonishment. "It's sooooooo gooooooood!!!" It always gives me goosebumps and it also always makes me smile thinking of Steve with blood-shot eyes, happy that I liked it as much as he did.

I know Beethoven straddled the Classical and Romantic period and was a man who thought and felt big things.

The big feelings I can understand, minus the god-forged history-changing genius. I am writing a blog with all my senses intact; he wrote the Pastorale symphony deaf.

He was deaf! Did you know that???

Yeah I know.

Still gives me chills.

I like the idea of listening to all of his music - not because I think there's an end or completion to enjoy or boast about, though I will probably drop it here and there, "Yes. ALL OF IT." - but because I think it will expand my insides. It will be fun. It will be a meditation. It will be a discipline, somewhere to show up. It will be a one-sided groupie friendship with a dead grump genius. It will hopefully be a pleasure. So I don't want to listen to it all, like "Look Mom, I ate my whole dinner!" I'm not going for consumption - the thing I hate - people teaming around famous paintings in art galleries, taking their cellphone picture and walking away - check, saw that - unchanged.

Like I said, I want to listen. 

I found a list of his complete works.

http://imslp.org/wiki/List_of_works_by_Ludwig_van_Beethoven

As you can see, he composed hundreds of pieces. But only some of his works were published in his lifetime and, in publication, they received an opus number. I always thought composers themselves gave their works Opus numbers, but no - it was when they were published for sale. Opus - Latin for "work". Like that Rihanna song, "Opus opus opus opus opus opus...you see me, I be opus opus opus opus opus."

Beethoven and Rihanna. She'd totally feature for him.

Anyway, I am going to begin with the works which have been assigned an Opus Number. Not in order of composition, but in how they present themselves. For instance, I might be all set to listen to his first piano sonata, then eat pad thai in a pub (classic optimist mistake) and realize, "No. It has to be 'cello tonight. Only 'cello can right how few shrimp there were in that." Things like that. I need to be allowed to be capricious and undisciplined. Two things I'm pretty sure Beethoven wasn't.

I won't begin at the beginning. I'll begin wherever this takes me. Check 'em off as I go.

And I'd like to listen to it all in 2017. Just to make the game more fun.

Oh, and this blog's title is stolen from the song "Beethoven Day" from the musical "You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown". I played Charlie Brown in that show at the Young People's Theatre in Toronto in 2007.  I had a giant hat and underwear sewn all over the outside of my costume. To this day, I don't know why.

To begin my blog about me and the works of Ludwig Van Beethoven, here's a song he didn't write: