The Boston Globe | When Boston’s music scene was built on Beethoven
In honor of Beethoven's 250th birthday, The Boston Globe's Jeremy Eichler gives a history of Boston's relationship with the composer, through the lens of NEC's storied Beethoven statue.
This Wednesday, Dec. 16, is Beethoven’s 250th birthday, an occasion for celebration. Yet even before the pandemic shut down normal concert life, exactly how best to celebrate has not been a simple question.
Some composers are desperate for the attention that major anniversaries bring. But what does it mean to give special consideration to a composer whose music is already ubiquitous, a figure who dominates orchestral programming to the extent of crowding out too many other voices? Calls to extravagantly mark the Beethoven year can sometimes feel a bit like calls to celebrate white men’s history month. Even without a formal designation, it already comes — every month. And similarly, in concert halls across the country, every year is a Beethoven year.
But ignoring the anniversary is not an option either, especially around these parts. That’s because Boston is resolutely a Beethoven town — in fact it might be, historically, the most Beethoven-besotted city in America. And don’t just take my word for it.
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But the most telling indication of all is surely the 7-foot-tall bronze statue of the composer that presides over a lobby space outside of New England Conservatory’s Jordan Hall. At a time when no one can go hear concerts anyway, why not use this anniversary moment as an occasion to recall how this Beethoven — the original Boston Beethoven — came to reside in our midst?
The statue’s history just might help us grasp Beethoven’s music more meaningfully by taking an art we tend to imagine as timeless and universal, and reconnecting it to a particular time and place. It’s a story that links Old World and New, a city’s cultural past and its present, a composer’s elemental power to uplift and the ways that very power has shaped an entire field in its image. It’s also a story that’s been almost entirely forgotten, even as the statue hides in plain sight.