Tomb

“[Beethoven’s] friend goes up the stairs and knocks on the door,” says the Calgary Philharmonic Orchestra’s (CPO) John Anderson. He’s telling one of his favourite stories about the famed composer.

“There’s no response, and he can hear some sort of chaos going on inside the apartment,” he continues. “He knocks again. Still no response, and the chaos inside is getting louder and more violent. Finally, he lets himself in, expecting to find a corpse, and he says ‘Herr Beethoven are you there? Is everything OK?’ Beethoven says, ‘Oh yes, come in, come in. Good to see you. How are you?’

“His friend is kind of looking under the carpet, behind the bookshelf, thinking ‘Where did he stash the body?’ He says. ‘I heard some loud noises, is everything alright?’ Beethoven looks at him and looks over at the piano and says, ‘The piano and I were having a fight, and I won.’ And there’s the piano, collapsed on the floor, in pieces.”

Anderson is the artistic and operations manager of the CPO as well as a musicology professor at The University of Lethbridge, Calgary Campus. When it comes to Beethoven, he is extremely passionate. As a child, he heard Symphony No. 6 in F Major and “It just took me to another world — I’d never heard anything like this before, and it sparked a curiosity in me to understand what this music was trying to say.”

Beethoven’s stature as a symbol of raw artistic passion and genius is so enormous that it almost overshadows the greatness of his music — the pop culture references alone could fill this entire article. Still, the opening of his fifth symphony is probably the most recognizable eight notes in all of musical history, and of all the best-known orchestral composers, Beethoven is the one classical composer that the average person could most readily pick out of a police lineup. Anderson credits his physical recognition factor to the famous alabaster bust, that of a defiant, wild-haired Beethoven who seems to stare you down from beyond the grave.

“It hints at a man who’s a little bit untamed, who’s a little bit wild, and that’s not untruthful,” Anderson says. “When Beethoven first moved to Vienna to start making a name for himself, he was young, he was provincial, he was precocious. The way that you made a living in Vienna back then, in the music world, was mostly as a piano player. It was kind of like hockey is today. It was about showing off. Beethoven would enter into these competitions where he would play for people, and you would actually battle, like duelling banjos, [to prove] who was the better improviser, who had the flashiest stuff. This is how Beethoven announces himself in Vienna.”

Two centuries later, Beethoven is acknowledged for launching music’s Romantic era, challenging the patronage conventions of the day and pushing the evolution of the piano, from it’s early 19th-century prototype to something closer to the expressive, dynamic keyboard of today, all while battling the progressive deafness that began in his mid-20s.

“He was a really difficult personality,” Anderson explains. “He could be aggressive, he could be abrasive, he could be obnoxious — but he had so much talent, both as a performer and later as a composer, that certain influential people could see that there was something exceptional about this young man.” Even Mozart is alleged to have recognized his potential greatness and said something like “Hey, watch this kid!”

Modern Calgarians now have a chance to hear this greatness live and large. Over the course of the festival, the CPO, with conductor Roberto Minczuk, will perform, in sequence, all nine of Beethoven’s symphonies, with Mount Royal College mounting some of his sonatas and work for smaller ensembles. “It’s a bold project,” Anderson says, laughing heartily when asked about some of the logistical challenges he’s faced staging this event. “By the time you get to the ninth symphony, you’ve got a full orchestra, and we’re going to have a 100-person choir on stage. It’s going to sound very full and robust, and that’s created logistical challenges for us that, hopefully, the audience will never know about.

“I can hear my production manager in my head, cursing me.”