Two Flutes, One Sad Friend

On July 26th I looked for Beethoven's 26th WoO. Oh my God, you must be thinking, how can I make my life more like his? Well, envy dogs, it gets better. When I entered "Beethoven WoO 26", I got a flute duo.

According to Robert Cummings, the guy who wrote the blurb about the piece for www.allmusic.com, the duo was the last thing he wrote before leaving Bonn for Vienna in 1792. He wrote it for his "law-student friend, Degenhart, to whom he also dedicated the work. In a note on the autograph score, the composer declares the piece is a "souvenir" to mark his approaching departure to Vienna".

I hope his friend Degenhart played the flute. I also hope he had another friend who played flute, since Beethoven was leaving town. It's a bit like giving your friend a tandem bike with a note that says, "Enjoy. I'm moving."

Robert Cummings also wrote "Here is yet another work whose publication Beethoven suppressed throughout his life. It is likely that he would have strongly opposed its posthumous appearance, viewing this duo as an early effort meant for a friend, not the public."

I think Robert's right. And what Beethoven would've been trying to suppress, was his work getting published and played by professionals or amateurs to limited audiences. Imagine if he'd known that, one day, any individual could record themselves playing his music, at whatever skill level they possessed, and then put that recording on a platform viewable by the entire planet.

Like his just-for-my-friend flute duo, played by one guy, with himself:

And in case you want to hear the allegro too, here's the whole thing played by two people:





Eggmont

In 1809, Beethoven was commissioned to write incidental music for a play by Goethe called 'Egmont'. Egmont is a play about resisting tyranny, noble suffering, and love through separation and death. Beethoven's famous 'Egmont' overture, Op. 84, with its echoes of the 5th Symphony, is an astonishing musical argument on the same themes. Beethoven and Goethe - not guys to aim low.

Neither am I.  So I listened to it for the first time, standing pantless in my kitchen, doing the dishes. The overture's climax is a great soundtrack for clawing wet Cheerios out of a drain stop. And having listened to it a few times lately, it's also an excellent pairing with folding children's clothes.

The video I'm posting has many joys.

Of course, the Overture, played by the Gewandhausorchester of Leipzig, conducted by the late great Kurt Masur. Also:

At 0:33, a 12 second shot of ceiling porn. THAT'S a ceiling.

At around 1:00, as Masur makes his entrance, I noticed the pinky finger on his right hand is permanently curled in half. My father-in-law Barry lost half of one of his pinky fingers when it got stuck between a trailer and a trailer hitch. To make his grandkids laugh, Barry likes to stick his half-finger in his nostril and pretend the missing half is way up his nose. I bet Masur did that for the orchestra and got huge laughs.

At 1:34, Masur comes in humming just before the orchestra plays its first note. It's a deep old growl. I'm guessing it's the same noise he made when he was eating anything involving milk.

But for pure comedy, at 10:26, in the bottom right of the screen, amidst Germans applauding and looking as happy as Germans can look, a young man in a blue blazer and red striped tie, who would clearly rather be anywhere else on Earth. Even if you don't have time to listen to the overture, cut to this kid. It's worth it.

And as an addendum to this definitive look at the Egmont Overture, here's a link to the Short Film Palme D'Or winning 1965 Hungarian film "Overture" by Janos Vadasz (apologies for the two missing accents).

http://www.daazo.com/film/5698ae82-910e-102c-a455-000e2e531ae0/

Wikipedia describes the plot as: "After the opening title card, a white blur in the center of a black screen resolves to the shape of a chicken egg. We penetrate the shell, and watch, in time-lapse, the 21-day development of a chicken embryo, from a germ spot on the yolk to the emergence of the baby chick, compressed into under eight minutes, set to Beethoven's Egmont Overture."

It's a hypnotic little visual poem.

It's also the cause of this blog's awful pun title. Sorry.