We listened in, as we finished some drafting. Below is the version WFMT | Chicago, our home station, played -- from a Riccardo Muti CSO recording of a few years past. [We were in the audience that very night, as it happens.]
A number of conductors have made alterations in the instrumentation of the symphony. Notably, Richard Wagner doubled many woodwind passages, a modification greatly extended by Gustav Mahler, who revised the orchestration of the Ninth to make it sound like what he believed Beethoven would have wanted if given a modern orchestra. Wagner's Dresden performance of 1864 was the first to place the chorus and the solo singers behind the orchestra as has since become standard; previous conductors placed them between the orchestra and the audience. . . but with the magic of stereo radio or more recently streaming, that is no longer needed.
Do give a listen -- and meditate as you do, both on the proud, defiant tones of his soaring anthem, and the clear plaintive call for. . . peace, in Ukraine -- the right to self determine:
Onward, now with an immortals' spring in my afternoon step. Grin. . . .
नमस्ते
1 comment:
For at least 100 years, give or take, in various portions of the US African American community, there has been persistent talk of the probability that Ludwig Van Beethoven's mother may have had a lover of African descent. An extramarital liaison may have created the man we know as Beethoven the composer.
Moreover, the story repeatedly told (and disputed by supposed "scholars") held that marble busts subsequently made of him, as well as paintings -- all from artists' "memories", not actual live sessions -- were subsequently more or less "white-washed" to hide this fact. There were also persistent stories that suggested his his existing hair samples showed some distinctly. . . African characteristics.
Many serious whyte scholars scoffed at this entire notion.
But now, with five separate authentic samples of the hair of Beethoven, less patrician research on the DNA in the hair samples confirms an admixture event.
https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(23)00181-1
That is, it is likely that Beethoven's two brothers were, in fact. . . only half brothers.
Due to the degradation of the samples, and the lack of consistent German naming of family conventions, prior to Beethoven's day. . . it is not possible to discern much about the identity, geteric or surname based, of the affair partner.
But it is doubtless true that either a generation or two before Beethoven, or one or two after. . . there was a non-related male in the line. Non-related to any other "Beethoven".
So -- at least half of the long told story seems probable: he was of a markedly different DNA than his other "brothers", by his mother.
Is it really that hard to believe then, that this true father of Beethoven might have been an African man, a man essentially without a surname, in German society at the time?
I for one am ready to accept the high probability that the Black community, world-wide, has been right after all, and may properly. . . claim him. Not definitive, yet -- but probable.
And as more and more millions around the globe are fully sequenced by 23andMe and others, we may only be a few more years from identifying -- at least by village / region, in Africa. . . from whence his true biological father hailed.
And that is gratifying -- to me, at least.
Namaste. . . on my birthday!
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