Beethoven's Hammerklavier Sonata, Op. 106

Beethoven's Hammerklavier Sonata, Op. 106

What did a great genius do

while gaining  custody of an annoyingly  dummkopf nephew?

He wrote a sonata that now  both artists and listeners fear:

 the terrifyingly  tiresome,yet awesome and mighty,  Hammerklavier.

Right now I feel as if I have been beaten by sticks

but no, it's because  I've just heard Opus 106.

But then,

 we must give a great man his  his due,

so I'll try to listen  again...

perhaps, in another century or two?

HZL

7/5/15

Beethoven Piano Sonata No. 29 in B-flat major, Op. 106 ...

▶ 1:22:36

www.youtube.com/watch?v=rR5f8yAnGik

Feb 3, 2013 - Uploaded by Klassik Verzaubert

Andras Schiff: The Lectures Beethoven Sonatas Wigmore Hall from ... 29 in B-flat major, Op. 106 'Hammerklavier'by YouTube; 32 videos Play  ...

Analekta || Beethoven: Hammerklavier Sonatas, Op.101, 106

www.analekta.com/.../album/?...beethoven-hammerklavier-sonatas-op...1...

To this day, almost two centuries after their creation, the late works of Beethoven, like the Sphinx, retain a touch of the enigmatic, the unfathomable, which ...







https://www.awesomestories.com/.../BEETHOVEN-and-HIS-NEPHEW-B...

Mar 23, 2015 - Ludwig becomes so obsessed with gaining custody of his nephew, Karl, that he does not compose for two.




By Desmond Ryan, Inquirer Movie Critic

POSTED: October 08, 1988

'Beethoven's Nephew' Shows Awesome Composer's Awful Side

Remember that daft moment in Amadeus when the creation of Don Giovanni - one of the supreme masterpieces of Western civilization - is explained by the fact that Mozart didn't get along with his dad?

Thus, genius that is beyond the grasp of mere mortals was scaled down to a point everyone could "relate to." It was this facile technique, and not the exposure of Mozart's flaws as a human being, that - for me at least - did great damage to an otherwise highly enjoyable film. That the lives of the great composers can bring out the very worst in our directors is a truth reiterated every time Ken Russell makes one of his musical biographies. Ludwig van Beethoven, the most awesome figure in music, escaped such attention until now.

He receives it in Beethoven's Nephew, but the odd thing about Paul Morrissey's absorbing and imaginative film is that this is a case of an artist's getting the treatment he deserves. Unlike, say, Mozart or Haydn, Beethoven, the composer of so much heaven-storming music, was a very earthbound and rather unsavory figure. The distance between the immortal beauty of the music he left us and the ugliness of his personality and dealings with others is a chasm that Morrissey explores with speculative and justified license.

Beethoven's Nephew focuses on the pivotal relationship in the last decade of the composer's life. When his brother Johan died in 1816, leaving a 9-year- old son, a legal custody battle that was as drawn out as it was bitter erupted between the boy's mother and Beethoven, then in his mid-40s.

Although Beethoven's life has been minutely documented, several aspects of his relationship with his nephew Karl remain shrouded in mystery. For one thing, Karl, the unwilling object of his uncle's cantankerous attention, went on to live out a quiet life as a minor bureaucrat and never spoke about those tumultuous years.

But it is well-known, as Martin Cooper notes in Beethoven: The Last Decade, that the lawsuit brought out the very worst in Beethoven's character. And that - as Morrissey and Wolfgang Reichman (as Beethoven) make unsparingly clear - was pretty bad indeed. Karl's mother confirmed Beethoven's rancid misogyny, an attitude deepened by advancing and, at that time untreatable, syphilis.

That Karl should be saved from women Beethoven considered whores (starting with Karl's mother) became an obsession that bordered on madness. Understandably, Karl bridled at the interference and even attempted suicide.....

This eloquent film rises to a brilliantly executed sequence in which the stone-deaf Beethoven attempts to conduct the first performance of the mighty choral symphony. Unable to follow his wild and ill-timed gesture, the ensemble degenerates into a cacophonous shambles and the concertmaster has to take over the podium. Beethoven is led to a chair as the rapt audience listens to the Olympian music he cannot hear. He doesn't care because Karl has come to the performance with his mistress and Beethoven is enraged.

There are two tragedies here, as Morrissey notes with skill and economy. There is the personal tragedy of a genius rebuffed by the only human being he ever really loved. And there is the more enduring tragedy of all the superb music Beethoven could have given us in his last 10 years of life, but didn't write because of time-consuming court battles.

BEETHOVEN'S NEPHEW * * *

Produced by Marita Coustet; directed by Paul Morrissey; written by Paul Morrissey and Mathieu Carriere; photography by Hanus Polak; music: various works of Beethoven; distributed by New World Pictures.

Running time: 1 hour, 43 mins.

Ludwig van Beethoven - Wolfgang Reichman

Karl van Beethoven - Dietmar Prinz

Johanna van Beethoven - Jane Birkin

Leonore - Nathalie Baye