VII. BEETHOVEN
Beethoven's Later Years and the Conventions of His Childhood
By ERIC WAGNER
Special guest blogger
"More of Beethoven's intelligence is needed, desperately, to create a signal that the current Lenins cannot ignore, that will make them weep, and stop hitting heads."
- Prometheus Rising, pg. 271
Writing about the page around 29:41 - 29:58, Charles Rosen wrote, "This transitional page is one of the most astonishing in the history of music. No other work until then, to my knowledge, combined the effect of almost uncontrolled improvisatory movement with such a totally systemic structure" (The Classical Style, pg. 429).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g5jBD_vxy8w
"Beethoven was conducting celestial astronomy in his own way. Before our eyes (this fugue cannot be completely realized in sound, so the printed music is important in its own right) he demonstrates the various rotations of the planets: retrograde, inversion, augmentation - at the same time reaching the frontier of atonality."
- Wilhelm Kempff on the last movement of the Hammerklavier Sonata
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