The Concubine's Children

My mother is Iranian.

In Persian culture, there is an expression for that piece of food left in a dish that no one will eat at the end of a meal.  Everybody goes "I couldn't possibly" or "Too full" or "There just isn't room" and it just sits there. Persians call that unwanted piece of food "the concubine's child". Because - as the saying's clearly awful origins indicate - when you're a concubine, no one wants your kid.

Lately when I look at my list of Beethoven's complete works, I've been having a hard time ignoring his concubine's children. There they are, shivering and shunted down below his works with shiny opus numbers: the WoO. WoO is the abbrieviation for the German: Werke ohne Opuszahl. In English, "works without opus number". According to wikipedia, these are the works "that were not originally published with an opus number, or survived only as fragments."

I feel bad for these little guys. I see them on the list and get the same feeling I get walking around the Adopt-A-Cat section of the Humane Society. "Aawwwww".

Seems that in 1955, two musicologists named Georg Kinsky and Hans Halm (it's also called the Kinsky-Halm Catalogue) felt the same way about these lesser known pieces and fragments and decided to compile them into their own list. This Island of Misfit Toys for Beethoven's music has some 205 items, all squished together with their patchy fur and missing teeth.

Heart-breaking.

So my goal for this blog has changed:

Instead of only listening to his works with opus numbers, I'm going to listen to his WoO as well. That means this blog will continue until approximately 2035 AD - a fact that will affect very few people, but will give me something other than Facebook to do until I'm 61.

To wrap this entry up, I should mention the one WoO that broke from the pack and, through sheer talent and good-looks, became arguably Beethoven's most famous piece of music. Alone it stands, high in its mansion in the Hollywood Hills, having completely forgotten all its friends from the WoO list it came up the ranks with:

WoO 59.

"Für Elise"

And proving its timelessness, this guy dubstepping in his bedrooom to it:

In addition to being what 61% of music boxes and Casio keyboard demo buttons play, "Für Elise" is my wife's favourite piece of classical music and, as if that wasn't enough to make me love it, my daughter's name is Eliza which is, you know...close enough. Here are the facty facts:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F%C3%BCr_Elise

Fur Elise, fur you.