Playing Favorites - Beethoven

I love Beethoven.  I just need to put that out there.  He is possibly my favorite composer.

So it was a treat for ME to be studying this composer in A Young Scholar's Guide to Composers this week.  Our additional reading included Beethoven and the Classical Age by Andrea Bergamini, The Life and Times of Ludwig van Beethoven by Susan Zannos, Getting to Know the World's Greatest Composers: Ludwig van Beethoven by Mike Venezia, and Beethoven Lives Upstairs by Barbara Nichol.  I decided to limit ourselves to those books, or I would overload the kids!  For myself, I picked up Jeremy Siepmann's biography of Beethoven to read.  (I read his work on Mozart while on vacation and loved it - I wrote a few comments about it on my book blog, and I highly recommend it!)

I'm pretty sure the kids thought I was losing my marbles, because I was getting choked up trying to read this book to them.  All the sources we've looked at so far (including the Siepmann book, which I have just started) have mentioned Beethoven's difficult childhood and how he tried so often as an adult to find a "perfect" family, but remained lonely and often misunderstood.  And how difficult it must have been for him to lose his hearing.  Yet he continued to write music that is so powerful and beautiful, and even towards the end of his life, when he was deaf and lonely, the music he produced was full of beauty and hope and joy.

Since Ludwig van Beethoven is such a favorite of mine, we had NO trouble at all finding CDs to listen to - I've already got a collection!   We narrowed it down to just a few...

 

Kennady continues to claim Fur Elise as a favorite piece, and she and Landon both enjoyed the energy of the Third and Fifth Symphonies.  And I think even they were able to appreciate the newness of Beethoven's use of voices in the Ninth Symphony's musical setting of 'Ode to Joy'.

I loved this unique setting of the Moonlight Sonata.  And on a less serious note:

I do not know how Rowlf plays this without tipping the candles over...

This post is linked at ~a teaching heart~ where we are keeping each other accountable for making time for music in our homeschooling!

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