Confessions of an aging Beethoven fan

This essay is dedicated to the memory of Mark Harrison Williams, 1955-2008.

When I was 16, I had a very unusual hero for a kid of that age at that time.

Beethoven.

And here's the kicker: I didn't even play an instrument. Oh, I sang in my high school choir -- baritone -- but I learned the songs we sang by ear; I never did master reading sheet music, although I could point out a treble clef and a half note if I had to.

But I had a couple of friends, Armand Silva and Charlie Berigan. Armand was a few years older than the rest of us. He loved Bach and Mozart and also had a burning interest in science. I used to go over to his house and we'd listen to the Goldberg Variations or Mozart's Piano Sonata in D major K. 284 as played by Glenn Gould while we discussed particle physics. Armand's taste in music rubbed off on me a bit -- Top 40 radio was going down the toilet in 1971 and I was looking for other things to listen to.

I started tuning in the local classical station in San Diego, KFSD, half paying attention to what I heard. With a teenager's finances, I couldn't afford to buy records very often, but I would check classical vinyl out of the public library. I do remember my first classical purchase, ever. On May 14, 1971, Armand and I walked three miles to the White Front store where I bought the London recording of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, with Zubin Mehta conducting the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Stravinsky had just died, so we were interested in his music. The music puzzled me, but man, did I think I was cool. My slack-jawed classmates were ooh-ing and hey-wowing over Black Sabbath; I was the supersophisticate tuning in Stravinsky instead.

In the fall of that year I met Charlie. Unlike Armand, Charlie was a couple of years my junior. But Charlie was something else Armand wasn't. Like me, Armand was a non-musician; the only instrument he played was the stereo. At 14 Charlie was an accomplished pianist. Our very first meeting was serendipitous. We were playing football in gym class and I began whistling the opening notes of the "Eroica" Symphony. As a teenage classical pianist, Charlie was of course familiar with that piece, recognized it, mentioned it and we became immediate friends. Our friendship is now in its 37th year. After high school Charlie went on to conservatory studies, then to New York, where he attended Juilliard and studied with Earl Wild for a couple of years. Later he had extensive involvement in theater, playing, arranging and sometimes composing music for the stage.

Armand, I'm sorry to say, didn't turn out so well. He already had some emotional problems in the early days when I knew him, and with the years they didn't improve. The last time I saw him he was a 50-ish homeless person, sleeping on the trolley and subsisting on disability checks from the State of California.

Charlie's musical horizons were wider than Armand's, and he introduced me to a wider range of music by more composers. But Beethoven was my main man, always. I admired his rebellious spirit, his ferocious independence, his messy room. But mostly I admired his wonderful music. I started with the popular middle-period stuff of course, the Fifth and Sixth Symphonies, the "Emperor" Concerto, the "Egmont" Overture, etc. But soon I was sampling his later, more inward-looking and less theatrical stuff, such as the heavenly C-sharp minor String Quartet Op. 131. At the tender age of 16 I was transported by that piece. It inspired me to rent a violin and try to teach myself how to play it, a doomed enterprise if ever there was one.

I wanted to be like Beethoven. There was just one problem: aside from a more-or-less passable singing voice, I had no musical talent to speak of. But that problem was easily solved, actually -- there are other arts, after all. If I couldn't play the piano I'd write poetry. So I did that instead. I was the nerd who strode around campus with his hands behind his back, a scowl on his face, his notebook filled with recently-scribbled free verse.

Actually, my teachers liked my poetry. They thought I had talent, for that, anyway. Okay. If I couldn't be Beethoven, I'd be Goethe. Or Baudelaire or T.S. Eliot or one of those guys. I wrote poetry like a fiend the rest of the way through high school. Even got one poem published about the time I graduated. I suppose it was an acceptable consolation prize for not having written the "Appassionata," but boy, did I love to fantasize that I had! I used to dream of girls swooning over me as I sat at the piano playing the slow movement in a very soulful way, then launching with great elan into the tempestuous final movement. I didn't bother to notice that Charlie could actually do this, and the girls weren't swooning over him, either. I think that year they were swooning over Elton John.

Well, of course we outgrow our heroes if we grow up at all. Beethoven -- the persona, not the music -- faded for me as I left my teens behind and became of necessity less of a romantic. But I remained a faithful classical-music buff. I joined the Musical Heritage Society, shopped the record stores and built a huge collection, almost all of which which I had to give away in 2003 when I decamped from Maryland to return to the west coast. You want to know that broke my heart? But I kept one box of vinyl, and made sure that it included that Zubin Mehta Stravinsky recording which had been the acorn from which the unwieldy oak -- too unwieldy to transport 3,000 miles, anyway -- grew.

Since then I have been rebuilding the collection. Vinyl is hard to find these days, but I'm back up to perhaps 500 or 600 CDs. I've done a few iTunes downloads, but I try not to go crazy. Yes, I have re-acquired a great many of the titles I bid farewell in '03. It's been a satisfying experience, but also in some ways a revelatory one.

I'm discovering that some of these pieces of music I just don't want to hear any more. One of the appeals of classical music, to me anyway, has always been its perennial freshness. It can astonish and delight just as much today as it did when it was written down 250 years ago. Can you honestly say that about very much popular music? Well, sure, there are the timeless great figures in pop of which we never tire: Cole Porter, Duke Ellington, Gershwin, Rogers & Hart, Lennon & McCartney. Sinatra, of course. I would even add the young Billy Joel to that list. But by and large popular music is a sea of dreck in which occasionally you find treasure floating. Classical is different. It's all good. As a pompous jerk said to me one evening in 1975 at an all-Mozart concert at the Hollywood Bowl, "There's no bad Mozart." He was a pompous jerk, but he was right. There is no bad Mozart.

But there is, admittedly, some Mozart I just don't want to hear any more. I'll give you an example: Eine Kleine Nachtmusik. There are some pieces, even by Mozart, that after 10,000 hearings in 35 years, I'm ready to retire them. And that goes for every other major composer I could name.

Classical radio is partly responsible for this. I know it's fallen on hard times lately, and no one could be more sympathetic than I. But even as I twist my dial back and forth between the two classical stations I can pick up where I live, WETA Washington, D.C. and WBJC in Baltimore, I am forever exasperated at hearing the same old stuff over and over and over again. I know classical radio has to play softball if it's to survive. I learned that way back in 1978 when I called up KFSD's Sunday-afternoon request program and asked the deejay if he would play Pierre Boulez' Pli Selon Pli, about as esoteric an essay in masturbatory serialism as you could ask for. Don't ask me why I wanted to hear that; maybe I'd been drinking. Pli Selon Pli is the one piece of music on earth that I have never, ever, been able to sit all the way through. It's that boring.

"Oh, I couldn't play that!" The deejay laughed. "We have a strict rule: no 12-tone music."

"Really?" I said.

"Yeah. Our station manager likes country-western."

"You're kidding."

"No. His favorite song is El Paso. If you want to hear a nice piece by Tchaikovsky or Brahms, I can play that for you."

I compromised and asked for Prokofiev's First Violin Concerto.

I've found this, or something like it, to be a problem everywhere I've gone. I'm not complaining that radio stations don't play Boulez -- I don't think his music should be played anywhere but Patagonia anyway. but I would like to see some slightly more-adventurous programming than what I hear. Shortly before my mother died in 2000, I was talking with her on the phone and I mentioned that between WETA and WGMS, I had heard Rachminanoff's Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini three times that week.

"Oh, I love that piece!" Mom said.

"Well, so do I, but I don't want to hear it three times a week," I replied.

I know, the radio stations want to keep their audiences happy and yes, people like to hear what's familiar, which is why the Beatles are still selling like cold beer at a jalapeno festival 38 years after they self-destructed. But you can only hear Toscanini's famous "50 basic pieces" so many times before you're groaning. And if you've been listening since your teens and are now in your fifties, like me, it starts to go beyond 50 basic pieces. It becomes 100, 150...and mounts.

I never thought I would hear myself say this, but if I never heard another Beethoven symphony on the radio, it would be just fine with me. I prefer to have my private collection handy, so if for whatever reason I ever get a hankering to hear his 7th (my long-time favorite, but even it now getting old for me) I can pop it into the CD player, enjoy it once and then put it away for another six months.

Should I ever win the Lotto (unlikely because I never play) I just might be tempted to buy a radio station and give it a classical format if it doesn't have one already (and if I can swing an NPR affiliation. Not that I'm a fan of NPR, but I really do think non-profit is the future for classical radio, and NPR, with its government subsidies, is the king of nonprofit radio.) As owner of KFUD or WUSS or whatever unfortunate call letters I wound up with, I would of course give myself a weekly radio show to ingratiate myself to my own annoying ego. I would also post a list on the wall outside the production room, of pieces I do NOT want to hear. Ever. Or at least until further notice.

THE LIST:

1. Mendelssohn: Violin Concerto in E minor.

2. Berlioz: Symphonie Fantastique.

3. Any symphony by Brahms, Beethoven or Tchaikovsky.

4. Rachmaninoff's Second and Third Piano Concertos.

5. Mozart: "Eine Kleine Nachtmusik."

6. Mozart: Piano Concerto No. 21 in C major.

7. Mussorgsky: "Night on Bald Mountain."

8. Grieg: "Peer Gynt" Suite (I loathe "In the Hall of the Mountain King." Too noisy.)

9. Grieg: Piano Concerto in A minor.

10. Chopin: Piano Concerto No. 1.

11. Mozart's Variations on "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star" or whatever that damn thing is called in French, I can never remember.

12. Mozart: Sonata in A major, K. 331 (the one with the "Rondo alla Turca.")

13. Beethoven: "Coriolan" Overture.

14. Gershwin: "Rhapsody in Blue."

15. Prokofiev: "Classical" Symphony.

16. Tchaikovsky: 1812 Overture (Even Tchaikovsky hated it.)

17. Tchaikovsky: Piano Concerto No. 1 in B flat.

18. Dvorak: "New World" Symphony (Yes, we all love that slow movement, but enough is enough!)

19. "The Ride of the Valkyries." (I'm a Wagnerite, but can we lose that one?)

20. Vivaldi: The Four Seasons. All four.

21. Schumann: Symphony No. 1 "Spring"

22. Weber: "Invitation to the Dance"

23. Pachelbel's Canon in D major (Surely he must have written SOMETHING else?)

24. Ravel: Bolero

25. Chopin: "Military" Polonaise

26. Dvorak: "American" String Quartet (I used to love this piece, but radio overkill killed it.)

27. Liszt: "Totentanz" (Actually, this one isn't a case of overkill. It's just loud and ugly and I don't like it.)

28. Tchaikovsky: Violin Concerto

29. Beethoven: Violin Concerto

30. Brahms: Academic Festival Overture.

I could probably add to this list for another hour, but you get the idea. By the way, feel free to suggest additions. (My late friend Mark Williams would have added Liszt's "Les Preludes." But somehow I've managed to avoid that one lately, so I haven't burned out on it yet.)

Lest you think I'm just an old sourpuss, there are pieces by each and every one of the composers I've listed above that I can still listen to with love and delight. They're all great composers, every last one of them. And they all wrote a great deal more than the overworked, overbeaten, overplayed chestnuts listed above. Perhaps I'll dedicate a future posting to pieces I still love by all of these composers (Except maybe Pachelbel. That treacly Canon is the only thing of his anyone's ever heard. He must spin in his grave every time it goes out over the airwaves.)

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go change the radio station. They're playing the suite from "Swan Lake" again.