Wednesday marks what would have been Beethoven’s 250th birthday, but like many events this year, celebrations have had to adapt.
Maybe that’s how Beethoven would have wanted it anyway.
"This piece really shows, his struggles with everything, his anxiety, the fact he was going deaf," said Chen Zhao, violinist with the San Francisco Symphony.
Zhao is talking about their recent performance of Beethoven’s String Quartet 11.
What you can’t see is there is no one in the audience.
Even they had to sit six feet apart and wear masks.
"When you play with a mask, we discovered a lot of problems," Zhao said. "When you play with a mask you don’t hear it the same way. When you have mouth and nose all open, you hear the resonance differently. Only using (your) ears, it’s slightly off balance."
But such is the celebration of the 250th birthday of Ludwig van Beethoven, a man who ended up going completely deaf and spent most of his life living alone.
"I think it’s important to remember, why music history is important," UC Berkeley professor and music historian Nicholas Mathew told KCBS Radio. "it’s important to remember he didn’t become Beethoven with capital letters until after his death."
Of course, Beethoven’s legend did grow. Large performances were planned 100 years ago in 1920 to celebrate him, but a similar challenge stopped those.
"This year was very like 1920, which was also affected by a virus," Mathew explained. "Just coming out of Spanish flu. A lot of planned events weren’t able to go ahead."
Take it from concert pianist Jonathan Biss, who spent the last decade recording Beethoven’s piano sonatas and had big plans for 2020.
"This year was supposed to be devoted to playing the complete cycle of the 32 sonatas on tour, and then I don’t really have to tell your listeners what happened," Biss lamented.
Instead of packing concert halls, Biss wrote and recorded a multi-media audio book called "Unquiet: My Life with Beethoven." It’s the story of his personal relationship with Beethoven’s music. "It is intense, but it has an incredible amount of optimism and idealism and consolation in it and was the product of someone who knew how to live alone," he said.
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