Was beethoven gay
Brilliant article on Carlos Kleiber
Postby barney »
A friend sent me this (long) piece on Carlos Kleiber from the New York Review of Books.
Belle, you in particular will enjoy this.
Performance as Immolation
Matthew Aucoin
The conductor Carlos Kleiber’s aesthetic was founded on the interplay between voluptuous refinement and an impulse to violence.
February 23, issue
Corresponding with Carlos: A Biography of Carlos Kleiber by Charles Barber
Scarecrow, pp., $; $ (paper)
Carlos Kleiber: Complete Recordings on Deutsche Grammophon.
The two most substantial documents of the conductor Carlos Kleiber’s career released in recent years—the epistolary biography Corresponding with Carlos by Charles Barber and Kleiber’s Complete Recordings on Deutsche Grammophon—have a notable feature in common: Kleiber, who died in , would surely not contain wanted either to see the light of day. Conductors look after to be acutely conscious of their legacies, which may be embodied both in the cultural institutions they lead and the recordings they leave behind. But the German-Argentine Kl
Beethoven had issues with women
main
norman lebrecht
July 23,
Welcome to the th work in the Slipped Disc/Idagio Beethoven Edition
Andante favori for Piano in F major WoO 57 ()
Between his arrival in Vienna in his early 20s and his near-total deafness twenty years later, Beethoven was almost perpetually in care for. What all the women he fell for had in common was their unattainability. They were either upper class, or married, or uninterested in him, none of which diminished the ferocity of his infatuation or his persistence. There is something quixotic in Beethoven&#;s pursuit of cherish. He needs the chase far more than he ever expects a positive outcome.
The women in Beethoven&#;s life initiate with his mother, Maria Magdalena, whom he idealised as a saintly counterpart to his alcoholic father. On receiving word that she was suffering from tuberculosis, he ended his first trip to Vienna to be at her side when she died aged 40, on July 17, In his earliest extant letter he reports: &#;I initiate my mother still alive, but in the most wretched condition. She was suffering fr
The history of classical harmony spans centuries. Over that time, society has had very different ideas about sexual identities (when they verbalized them at all). It goes without saying that it’s unfair to look back in age and breezily apply our modern definition of words like gay, lesbian, pansexual, and the like to historical figures.
And yet. Looking at the historical register, it is clear that many great composers had emotionally and/or physically intimate relationships that didn’t fit into a traditional heterosexual mold, and it feels safe to categorize many of them as falling under the LGBTQ+ umbrella.
So here is a list of 27 composers who may have been homosexual, gay, or otherwise non-heterosexual.
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Jean-Baptiste Lully ()
Jean Baptiste Lully: Miserere ()
Lully was an Italian-born composer who worked at the extravagant court of Louis XIV. He was a renowned violinist, guitarist, and even dancer.
Lully had lovey-dovey relationships with both men and women. He and his wife had six children, and he had a mistress. But he also was attracted to men and became committed with a pag
15 LGBTQ+ composers in classical music history that you probably already know
Benjamin Britten ()
Edward Benjamin Britten is one of the finest composers of English operas, choral works, and songs, many of which he wrote for his life match, tenor Sir Peter Pears.
Britten started writing harmony as young as nine, when he wrote an oratorio. He studied under Frank Bridge, John Ireland and Arthur Benjamin among others, and was also a fine pianist.
His ground-breaking operas, which include Peter Grimes (), and The Turn of the Screw () – and his famous War Requiem – tackle contemporaneous issues around psychology and post-war trauma, as well his control homosexuality, which was illegal in Britten’s lifetime.
Britten founded the Aldeburgh Festival in Suffolk with Pears and librettist Eric Crozier.
Dame Ethel Smyth ()
Ethel Smyth was a prolific composer and an active member of the women’s suffrage movement, and she made no secret of her relationships with women.
Born in South-East London, Smyth studied at the Leipzig Conservatory and there met composers that included Grieg