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:
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