200-Condlepower

Everywhere last week, or so it seemed, music was celebrating the birth of one of its mightiest titans 200 years ago on an upper floor of Bonngasse 515, Bonn. New productions of Fidelio were unveiled at Stockholm's Royal Opera and New York's Metropolitan. Bonn capped months of festivities with the Missa solemnis. In Tokyo, where Beethoven is a rapture-inducing favorite, the Ninth Symphony was done twice in one day. In Los Angeles, Zubin Mehta, the Los Angeles Philharmonic and a phalanx of friends staged a twelve-hour Beethoven marathon. And in honor of the 200-candlepower occasion, that most devout of Beethoven fans, Schroeder, dispatched Snoopy with a canine kiss for Lucy.

Like the work of every great creative artist, Beethoven's music evokes different deep, personal responses in different people. The one trait he symbolizes to everyone, however, is freedom--his own freedom as an artist, all men's freedom to live their own lives. Beethoven's loftiest hymn to that core symbol is Fidelio, which today has a special pertinence to those European countries, as Austrian Conductor Karl Boehm puts it, "that experienced foreign occupation and domination within the recent past." Thus it was thoroughly proper that the Met's new Fidelio was entrusted largely to Europeans, Boehm included.

Vocal Heart. A thoroughly proper success it was, too. Boehm gave Beethoven's orchestral writing a brassy surface excitement that had a celebrity-filled audience cheering to the chandeliers. Save for a shaky Abscheulicher! in Act I, Soprano Leonie Rysanek as Leonore rescued her mate Florestan from Pizarro's dungeon with a heroinism that any latter-day Women's Lib leader would envy. Tenor Jon Vickers gave glorious vocal heart to Florestan's piteous degradation. Austrian Stage Director Otto Schenk clothed the production in medieval-dungeon darkness that gave way brilliantly at the end to the blinding whiteness of day--and freedom. Though the Nazi-like greatcoat worn by Pizarro (formidably portrayed by Baritone Walter Berry) was an irrelevant touch, the eyeglasses he took from a pocket--a desk man--were the perfect way to suggest Pizarro as not just a vague, timeless man of evil but the product of a villainous system.

The Beethoven year may have worn out some performers, but not the welcome of the music itself. The LPs have come along by the truckload. The books have been fewer, but choice--notably Thayer's century-old pioneering biography (newly reissued in a one-volume paperback; Princeton, $6.95) and the more compact Beethoven: Biography of a Genius, by George R. Marek (Funk & Wagnalls, $10). Marek, an American of Viennese birth and a former General Manager of RCA Records, has produced a fair, frank and freshly researched study of one of the most fascinatingly contradictory personalities in all the arts. Marek's research was conducted by a team of scholars headed by the noted Haydn expert, H.C. Robbins Landon. So productive was their work that Landon has just come out with his own book, Beethoven: A Documentary Study (Macmillan, $25), an iconographical gold mine of letters, manuscripts and rare color engravings. Beethoven was one of the great creative agonizers of all time. The evidence lies in a marvelous new facsimile of his sketchbooks, circa 1786 to 1799, just published by the British Museum for distribution in the U.S. by Columbia University Press (two volumes, $75).

The result of all that labor proves that Beethoven did not just "free music"--as his romantic biographers put it--but the creative ego and id of every composer who followed. Prior to Beethoven, music in general never moved too far from the everyday interests of its patrons, be they commoners or royalty; this was true of a Bach cantata or a Mozart serenade. Beethoven changed that. As the father of musical romanticism, he made music an expressive function of himself. Later composers carried the cult of music for music's sake too far, and divorced "serious" composition from the interests of large audiences. One reason that every year is a Beethoven year, not just 1970, is that no composer since has been able to match the towering combination of talent, energy and soul that made his self-expression worth listening to.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.