The German composer Ludwig van Beethoven died in his apartment in the Schwarzspanierhaus, Vienna, on March 26, 1827 at the age of 56, following a prolonged illness, and as a severe thunderstorm raged outisde. Among those at his side, witnessing his death were his sister-in-law, Johanna van Beethoven, possibly by his secretary, Karl Holz, and his close friend, Anselm Hüttenbrenner, who provided a vivid description of the event. Beethoven's funeral was held three days later, and the procession (which included Franz Schubert, who would die and be buried next to Beethoven the following year, as one of the torch-bearers) was witnessed by an enormous crowd of 20,000 people. He was originally buried in the cemetery at Währing, although his remains were moved in 1888 to the Vienna Central Cemetery.
Beethoven's last words and the exact cause of his death have also been the subject of some historical debate. This afternoon, in honor of the 199th anniversary of Beethoven's death, Foley Schuler will share some of the elements of that debate as well as some of the last music written this titan, who had turned increasingly to the medium of the string quartet for his most personal and profound musical statements in his last years. We'll hear his monumental Quartet in B-flat, Op. 130, which is widely considered one of his crowning achievement—and whose revised final movement stands as the last music we would write, and whose slow, Cavatina, movement (as performed by the Budapest String Quartet) would serve as the final piece on the famed Voyager "Golden Record," a phonograph record containing a broad sample of Earth's sounds, languages, and music sent into space 150 years later, in 1977, with the two unmanned Voyager probes—Voyager 1, which eventually entered interstellar space in 2012, and Voyager 2, which followed suit in 2018, both continuning, and carrying his music, on their respective journeys...
You can hear Foley Schuler's musical selections—and stories behind the music—every weekday afternoon from 1 until 4 on Blue Lake Public Radio.
