Dear music and literature lovers,
Most recently, on March 23, 2019, we celebrated the 200th anniversary of the death of the famous playwright and writer August von Kotzebue. Well, to mark the 250th anniversary of Ludwig van Beethoven’s birth, musicologist Dr. Axel Schröter and the pianist Yizhuo Meng, who also teaches at the Musikstudio, prepared a very interesting program for us.
During Beethoven’s time it was not uncommon for the most famous composers of this epoch to write music for August von Kotzebue. After all, August von Kotzebue was a world celebrity in his day and the opportunity to devote ones own music to his works promised great fame!
Kotzebue and Beethoven
In the course of the monumentalization and heroization of Beethoven in the 19th century, which coincided with Kotzebue’s literary and national dismantling, it is easy to forget that Beethoven not only read and sometimes set to Goethe, Schiller and Shakespeare, but that he probably often fell back to writers which are much more marginalized today.
The most prominent of these was August von Kotzebue, who enjoyed a much greater popularity as a playwright than the Weimar classics. Kotzebue’s texts apparently inspired Beethoven to such an extent that after composing the acting music for “King Stephan” and “The Ruins of Athens” he approached Kotzebue with the request that he also write an opera libretto for him.
As is well known, this did not happen. Nevertheless, it can be stated that the drama music for Kotzebue’s “The Ruins of Athens” has become its most extensive. Why they had to be forgotten in the context of a later high-culture thinking, about which the educational elites increasingly defined themselves, and why even the revision of Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s or Liszt’s fantasies about “The Ruins of Athens” changed, will be addressed in this lecture.
Look forward to a literary as well as a musical treat!
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)
Marcia alla turca (The ruins of Athens)
Lecture by Dr. Axel Schröter
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)
Piano Sonata No. 26 in E flat major, op.81 a
I. Farewell
– Adagio
– Allegro
Lecture by Dr. Axel Schröter
Franz Liszt (1811-1886)
About motifs from Beethoven’s “The Ruins of Athens” for piano
Allegro moderato
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