Welcome! 🙂 I hope the daily music posts here on the blog are giving you a boost, in these strange and unsettling times. If you’re new to the series and would like to check out earlier posts, you’ll find the first one here.

Today’s post features two short Bagatelles by Ludwig van Beethoven. As I talked about in this post, Bagatelles are a “miniature” musical form that Beethoven was interested in throughout his life. While in other areas, like symphonies, concerti, and piano sonatas, Beethoven was expanding the scope of music, writing bigger and more complex pieces than anyone else had written before, he also remained fascinated by musical microcosms.

Both of today’s Bagatelles come from his Op. 119 set, which he wrote late in life. They’re both very short, just over a minute. They’re striking, though, in that the harmonies Beethoven uses belong much more to the Romantic era than the Classical era in which Beethoven was trained. These could be pieces written by composers of the next generation. We can see Beethoven breaking with the traditions of his own time period even in these very small works.

I learned and recorded both of these yesterday afternoon, so the recordings aren’t quite perfect. 😉 They do give a taste, though, of the changes Beethoven was making in the way music was written, and they give the flavor of these charming little pieces.

As always, you’re welcome to share your thoughts and responses to the music in the comments. Make sure to subscribe to the blog if you’d like a daily dose of music, and visit back soon!

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If you’re enjoying the blog and would like to help support it, please consider clicking on the link below to leave me a tip. You’ll choose your own payment amount and pay securely through PayPal’s platform. As always, thanks for visiting!

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Welcome! 🙂 I hope the daily music posts here on the blog are giving you a boost, in these strange and unsettling times. If you’re new to the series and would like to check out earlier posts, you’ll find the first one here.

Today’s piece continues an exploration of a collection I started looking at a couple of days ago: Ludwig van Beethoven’s Bagatelles. As I mentioned in this post, we know Beethoven as an innovator who changed the course of music history, especially expanding musical forms and diving into drama and passionate expression that other composers of his generation hadn’t considered.

The Bagatelles, though, are miniatures. In them, we hear a lot of the elegance and charm of more “typical” Classical Era writing…although there are still some surprising Beethoven-esque twists. We’ll see that especially in a couple of other Bagatelles I’ll be posting soon.

Today’s piece is gentle and conversational. You’ll hear how the right hand starts with the tune, and how later in the piece, the left hand takes it over as if the hands are having a dialogue. As you listen, if you’d like, think about what this musical “conversation” might be about. As always, you’re welcome to share your thoughts and responses to the music in the comments.

Make sure to subscribe to the blog if you’d like a daily dose of music, and visit back soon!

Tip Jar (no pressure!):

If you’re enjoying the blog and would like to help support it, please consider clicking on the link below to leave me a tip. You’ll choose your own payment amount and pay securely through PayPal’s platform. As always, thanks for visiting!

https://www.paypal.com/paypalme2/krisfaatz

Welcome! 🙂 I hope the daily music posts here on the blog are giving you a boost, in these strange and unsettling times. If you’re new to the series and would like to check out earlier posts, you’ll find the first one here.

For today’s piece, I started exploring a collection of music I haven’t looked at in a very long time (somewhere around 30 years): Ludwig van Beethoven’s Bagatelles. I think several of them will be making an appearance on the blog over the next couple of weeks.

Beethoven, as I’ve written about before on the blog, was one of the single greatest innovators of music history. He was born and trained during the Classical Era (1750-1825), when some of the ideals of music included simplicity, clarity, tightness of form and structure, and an overall sense of elegance and restraint. Beethoven quickly found that he wanted to explore different ways of writing music; his deafness helped to drive his personal musical revolution. He began writing longer, more intricate, and far more dramatic works than his listeners were used to. He used instruments that had never been showcased in concert, and embraced a level of drama, fire, and passionate expression that changed the course of music history.

While so much of Beethoven’s writing taps into this “heroic” style and approach, with his Bagatelles, we find a charming contrast. Beethoven wrote these short piano pieces throughout his compositional career. Most of them are straightforward from a technical standpoint, but they include contrasts of mood and an overall sense of sweetness and humor that are uniquely Beethoven. Many of them also have a “sung” or “spoken” feel, as if, like Mendelssohn’s Songs without Words, they’re actually short stories told through music.

As you listen to today’s piece, if you’d like, think about whether it conjures up any particular sense of story for you. Does it make you imagine a character, or maybe a place? Some sort of action? As always, you’re welcome to share your thoughts and responses to the music in the comments.

Make sure to subscribe to the blog if you’d like a daily dose of music, and visit back soon!

Tip Jar (no pressure!):

If you’re enjoying the blog and would like to help support it, please consider clicking on the link below to leave me a tip. You’ll choose your own payment amount and pay securely through PayPal’s platform. As always, thanks for visiting!

https://www.paypal.com/paypalme2/krisfaatz