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Colin

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• Publié par: yrokaleb
• Nombre de lectures: 54
• Langue: Français

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Hello Dalí

Program Notes

Overture,

Die Weihe des Hauses

(“

The Consecration of the House

”), Op. 124

LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN (1770-1827)

Composed in 1822.

Premiered on October 3, 1822 in Vienna.

Beethoven suffered increasing physical distress during his last decade from dropsy and severe

intestinal inflammation, conditions exacerbated by his Type-A personality and his none-too-tidy

lifestyle. He regularly sought (and ignored) advice from physicians, but he did believe in the

restorative powers of mineral baths and water treatments, and many of his travels during those

years were planned around extended stops at various German and Austrian spas. Early in

September 1822, he installed himself in the town of Baden, a few miles south of Vienna

(Constanze Mozart had been a regular patron there thirty years earlier in a barely successful

attempt to preserve her health in the face of the constant pregnancy and worry that troubled the

nine years of her marriage to Wolfgang), and was immediately pounced upon by the enterprising

theatrical impresario Carl Friedrich Hensler. Hensler, born in Würtemberg in 1759, had been

involved in Viennese show business since 1803, when he became manager of the Leopoldstadt

Theater, a small house just outside the city walls best known for its stagings of popular Austrian

Singspiels

. In 1817, he took over the management of the Theater-an-der-Wien, and four years

later acquired the Josephstadt, which he completely renovated. The refurbished theater was to be

reopened on October 3, 1822, the eve of the Emperor‟s nameday, and for its inaugural

performances Hensler invited Beethoven to resurrect

The Ruins of Athens

, a ceremonial play

with incidental music that he had supplied for the opening of the National Theater in Budapest

ten years before. The text was to be rewritten for the occasion by the Viennese poet Carl Meisl,

but most of the

Ruins

music could be adapted for the Viennese spectacle, which would be

appropriately titled

The Consecration of the House.

Beethoven, who was eager to renew his

public presence in the city after having shut himself away for nearly two years to work on the

monumental

Missa Solemnis

, agreed to supply a new overture and closing chorus, and to oversee

the premiere.

Beethoven fretted over the composition of the Overture, complaining in a letter from Baden late

in September to his brother Johann, a prosperous pharmacist in Linz, that he was finding work on

the piece “really very difficult to fit in with my water and bath cures.” Sometime during that

month, Anton Schindler, the composer‟s companion and eventual biographer, reported that

“while walking with him and his nephew near Baden, he told us to go on in advance and join him

at an appointed place. It was not long before he overtook us, remarking that he had written down