Beethoven 250

Beethoven would have been 250 in 2020, had he lived. Not until December 2020, actually, so all the commemorations and, let's face it, attempts to cash in, are a year early and it will seem all over by the time of his birthday but since Gramophone turned up today with plenty about him and they're publishing a special, separate magazine, too, I thought the least I could do was have my say.

He is the only composer to have his own tag at DG Books. That's because he got in early when I thought Bach, Handel, Mozart and Buxtehude would have them, too, but it looked like getting out of hand and so poets get their own tag, poetry once having been the main subject here, but not many others do.
It would be true to say that Mozart was my first music hero but it was Beethoven who was on my teenage bedroom wall, brooding and a bit scary on a black and white poster, later augmented by Deutsche Grammophon posters brazenly asked for from shops once they'd taken them down. Other teenage boys might have had Suzi Quatro or Stevie Nicks but by the age of 14, I gave myself a year's sabbatical from pop music, and listened to Beethoven, Shostakovich and Radio 3, as vainly elitist as a Rees-Mogg, considering myself above Pink Floyd.
The favourite recording was Carlo Maria Giulini's Pastoral Symphony on a cassette that must be somewhere near the most played thing I've ever owned, there not being quite so much to choose from then. As with Hamlet, I like to think I can pick it up from anywhere and do what comes next but I don't suppose I can. Not with Hamlet, anyway.
I collected symphonies because at that age I thought symphonies were what classical music was all about and composers who didn't write symphonies were of a lesser order. I know better now but then, one way or another I either bought or taped from the wireless all nine except I didn't dare play the ninth because it was on a C120 cassette and they were known to use thinner tape more easily chewed up by cassette players.
One Saturday morning, I bought an LP of 5 and 8 in Gloucester W.H. Smith's and I'm sure the girl in the upstairs record section said to her mate, it takes all sorts, as if I ought to be buying Deep Purple or Frankenstein by the Edgar Winter Group but I knew all that and didn't want it.
The Pastoral is still my favourite symphony and thus, by now, always will be and is where, if I ever get the opportunity, I would begin to explain, to anybody who will listen, the History of Western Classsical Music. It is where Romanticism has replaced Classicism, which must have seemed like progress at the time but, like so many things, you can't always immediately tell if what you've invented will turn out for the best.
It wasn't all symphonies, of course. 5 might have been very famous for its dramatic opening and in the exam for Music in the third year at school, we had to note down which bar we were on when the music stopped. I missed the repeat markings that sent you back to the start and so got lost immediately, realized as much and so just enjoyed the rest of the first movement and scored 0/30 while knowing more about Dvorak, Rachmanninov and Tchaikovsky than the rest of the class put together. I liked 7, too, for its outrageous rhythms, 'apotheosis' or not. But it was the Moonlight Sonata, Egmont, Fur Elise, it was his deafness and, yes, the drama of the Choral Symphony, not just the tub-thumping anthem but the first movement with which I tried to induce dreams, as had been discussed at school, and so played it under my pillow, fell asleep and dreamed of newspapers being delivered in bundles with headlines of war.
This was an artist, and a troubled one, possibly not much more troubled than Mozart but he looked it even if both of them could be as serene as they liked on the face of it.
Since then, there's been Tasmin Little playing the Violin Concerto for sheer joy in Portsmouth Cathedral. In protest at Richard Morrison finding fault with Mitsuko Uchida's performance of a concerto at the Proms, I bought her Complete Concertos, which isn't quite like seeing them live but Maria Luc played the Emperor to standing room only in Chichester earlier this year.
Neither Fidelio or the much revered Late Quartets are as forbidding as one might think but in the presence of the Grosse Fugue, there might be more to it than we'll ever know.
A recent visit to Chichester involved a Violin Sonata, along with similar by Brahms, and that meant buying the complete of both and they've been resident on the CD player for much of the time since.

It turns out that such early enthusiasms can last a lifetime without one ever finding anywhere near the bottom of them while other things (like sport, perhaps) don't.
So, happy 249th birthday to Beethoven. A lot of people were so keen to get in on it, they jumped the gun.