Who can best portray the great Viennese classicist Ludwig van Beethoven (1770 – 1827) if not his fellow composers? Here’s what Anatol Vieru wrote in an essay about the Master: “There are values that twinkle permanently like stars in the sky, illuminating nations and defying the centuries. Near or far, these stars remain in the heights forever. Beethoven is such a star by which navigators in the sea of culture determine their location. Beethoven is not just an innovator, he radically changed the musical climate itself… He brings together as a focus the achievements of music since Bach and sheds light far ahead into the twentieth century” (translation by Dragomir Yossifov).
There was no genre in which a composer could create and not be challenged. His modernity, which we decipher to this day, has a particularly powerful and vital impact with the universe of his symphonies – “only” nine in number, but so different and unique in their intoxicating spiritual potential! Beethoven established in them a new language, new relationships of means of expression, a new concept of orchestral sound and thought. The genre is the object of his constant experimentation. The hundreds of sketches that precede the stages of the birth of each symphonic opus contain “innumerable imaginative developments, reflecting at once the predictable overall conception and the unpredictable bounces of the imagination” (André Boucourechliev).