Outback Beethoven

The arc of western world history was redirected in 1776 when when a gaggle of pioneering yankees severed their national ties with King George of England. Thirteen years later, revolutionaries in France, having caught wind of the American bravado, decided to act upon that fresh pan-Atlantic wind of Liberty. Filled with revolutionary urgency, they formed a National Assembly, composed a Constitution and initiated their own 18th-century style government by the people. A few decades later, the French revolutionaries had fallen into disarray. A strong military leader emerged: Napolean Bonaparte. He changed France, and ultimately all of Europe, forever, by casting the smoke of military might upon most of the Continent. The flying sparks of Liberty would, as years and decades rolled by, revise the entire European way of governance. In the course of the next two hundred years, kings, queens, emperors and their royal consorts lost their hold on political power. By the end of World War I, Monarchy had pretty much, as we Americans say, "gone the way of the buffalo." In the early years of the 1800's, the Austrian empire, ruled by the Hapsburg dynasty, held the reins of authority in a large chunk of central and eastern Europe. The Austrian imperial court had been established long ago in the charming, cultured city, Vienna. Serving as musical leaders, Franz Josef Haydn and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart composed orchestral music for the Imperial court of the Austrian empire. From their base in Vienna, they called the shots for symphonic sounds anywhere in Austria and beyond. Meanwhile, "back at the ranch", so to speak, in 1770, a musical genius was born in the German outback. More about Ludwig in a minute. In France, the new wave of republican and democratic fervor was rearranging the entire nation in a flood of liberation that would eventually engulf the entire continent. At the turn of the 19th-century,Ludwig van Beethoven left his home in Bonn and traveled to Austria to get in on the musical action that Haydn and Mozart had set in motion. In 1804, a rehearsal for Beethoven's 3rd Symphony, the Eroica (hero) was being conducted in the Lobkowitz palace, near Prague. In 1992, Simon Cellan Jones produced a movie, Eroica, about that rehearsal. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UtA7m3viB70  The story therein reveals the difference between imperial music, composed and performed for princes and emperors, and the revolutionary sounds that were originating in Beethoven's heart, mind and musical compositions. Long story short, Ludwig van Beethoven changed music forever.

Simon's 1992 movie, Eroica, provides a cinematic glimpse into that revolutionary angst expressed in Beethoven's third symphony, the Eroica, which means, in English, Hero. Long story short. Beethoven viewed Napolean as an innovative hero, whereas the royals of Europe, as represented by the genteel Austrian bluebloods. . .

saw Napolean as a nuisance and a serious threat to their imperial hold on power in the 19th century. Prince Lobkowitz' remark about what he hearing in the reherasal was: "needlessly violent. . .a tasteless intermarriage of the diatonic (music) with the climatic." We discern here a cinematic glimpse of the revolutionary 18th century as it was discomforting not only the powers that be in imperial Europe, but also the wider world of music that Beethoven would change forever, stretching all the way into the 20th century. . . when Chuck Berry, the Beatles and many other singers wailed out "Roll Over, Beethoven." In other words . . . we hear you, Ludwig, and we are passing the baton of revolutionary music! As Beatle John Lennon sang, back in the day:  "You say you want a revolution. Well, you know we all wanna change the world." Well, Ludwig van Beethoven certainly did, even as Joni Mitchell later expressed, in her version of the Beethoven's legend, as she sung it in 1972 in her "Ludwig's Tune". . . it's the judgement of the moon and stars, your solitary path." King of Soul