The Bagatelles I've Known

A bagatelle

A bagatelle

A bagatelle

A bagatelle is tiny billiard game, a layered dessert and a French water park. 

A bagatelle is a line of leather jackets. For example, the "red scuba jacket":

Bagatelle is a restaurant in the Meat Packing district of NYC. Here's what Mike F said about it on Yelp: "The food was solid. The environment was decent. Then the DJ hit the floor and the place went nuts."

Then there's Bagatelle, Los Angeles. Sammy C of Trip Advisor fame had a great time, but "my date's food came out over cooked. Then after we sent it back, it came back under cooked. I let her finish my meal. The poulet fermier. It was ok. I wish it was brined a little longer." 

I feel ya, Sammy.

Bagatelle is also an Irish rockband, unfortunate enough to have started recording around the same time as U2 and unfortunate enough to have named their band Bagatelle. Here's their biggest hit, "Summer in Dublin" (with lyrics). I like the way they awkwardly squeeze a lot of words into tiny musical phrases. 

But the bagatelle we're talking about is:

a short piece of music, typically for the piano, and usually of a light, mellow character. The name bagatelle literally means "a short unpretentious instrumental composition" (wikipedia).

Beethoven wrote three sets of these little pieces. Today I listened to two of the sets, the first and the last, Op. 33 and Op. 126. I would've listened to the middle set, Op. 119, but a guy can only consume so many bagatelles in a day. 

The first set thoroughly lived up to the wikipedia definition: light, mellow, short. There was nothing in them that immediately made me think, "Beethoven". As several of my top-secret on-line sources pointed out, Beethoven composed these pieces in his early Classical period, which might be why if played alongside Mozart or Haydn, I'd have a hard time saying, "Beethoven". 

Then I listened to Op. 126. These were Beethoven's last works for the piano. Analysts believe he wrote them to be played in a row because of a margin note he included for publishing, "ciclus von Kleinigkeiten" - cycle of little songs. "Cycle" suggesting they were a tapestry. Beethoven wrote to his publisher, Schott, that the bagatelles "are probably the best I've written."

Op. 33 was near the beginning of his creative life, these were near the end, two years before he died. They are jaw-droppingly contemporary sounding: haunting, spare, even jazzy. 

Here is the fourth in the set to give you a sense of what I mean: 

That's Alfred Brendel playing. I picked it mainly because of the droll Woody Allen-ish screen shot. The recording I listened to was Glenn Gould. I liked it better - even with the humming - because, oddly, I found it lacked warmth which emphasized the strange idiosyncracy of this music.