daily do "Vienna at that time was a marvelous place for young musicians to
go to. It has always been a city of pleasure or frivolity right back to the middle ages. The city was the most
crowded city in Europe at the time. It had a population of probably around a quarter
of a million, and that is about 25 times the size of Bonn. At the top society
there would be endless balls, and then musical concerts, and then for the
ordinary people in the streets there would be juggling acrobats, street music, puppeteers, but there was another side to it, as some one described it as a city of frivolity but despairing frivolity."
The rulers of Europe were terrified that the French Revolution would
spread. In Vienna, the emperor tightened censorship and gave extra powers to the secret police, but
instrumental music, the most abstract and least censorable of the arts, flourished.
“I think it was recognized from the beginning the extent to which
Beethoven was within the whole influence of Mozart and, of course, /// Haydn, but I think it
was also shocking from the beginning what he was doing to that and people
really hated it, I mean there was… there is no
question about the fact that from the beginning, Beethoven’s style of playing
the piano and his style of composing were repellent.”
“Comments such as Beethoven’s music was hairbrained, ah, that, it was bizarre that it was really complex, that it jolted the listener out of transports.
All of these comments came from musicians.”
“The openings have
upstanding bi-tone. As a kind of Haydness quality I mean even that, is
sort of more humorous than Haydn's, slightly more rough than Haydn would do but
and you know that a little coarser
than Haydn, but it still has the Haydn thing,
but later in the piece--I mean all that, there was the basic keep going up, I
mean that is the real Beethoven trick of, the
middle years but he's already using when he was
quite young and this sort of tremendous surge of
energy that you get in there and this was something that people already
complained about in Beethoven, this kind of violence that he was doing.”
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