MUSIC MASTERS: We watched many a lecture about classical music today. Several were about the life and music of Ludwig van Beethoven. He's widely credited with inventing the stereotype of a wild-haired mad genius.
There were wild stories about the squalor in which he lived (think crusted over plates and overflowing chamber pots, for starters). As I was listening, I could only imagine how thrilled people were to have him for a neighbor. I mean, picture the preceding and then add in his deafness and pounding on the piano. Yowza.
His former apartment in Vienna looks downright serene today, however.
We listened to Beethoven's most famous composition, Symphony No. 5 in C minor. Its distinctive "short-short-short-long" four note intro is highly recognizable, and dramatic. We wondered if perhaps Beethoven's hearing difficulties was one of the reasons he introduced a number of additional instruments to the orchestra for his music (everything from piccolos to contrabassoons).
Here's a life mask of Ludwig. There's also a death mask, but this is ever so much more interesting to me.
When Beethoven died in 1827, some 20,000 reportedly turned out for his funeral procession in Vienna, a huge number per capita. He was a "rock star" of his day and time.
Our lectures also moved on to the Romantic period of music, generally thought of as 1820 to 1900. We listened to some Johannes Brahms, Franz Schubert and learned about and Robert and Clara Schumann, the first "power couple" of classical music.
Clara's father was a musician and she was a piano prodigy as a child, and wrote music as a young woman. She met and married Robert, about 10 years her elder. They had eight children in short order. Meanwhile, Robert battled manic depression, and threw himself into the Rhine in a suicide attempt. He spent his last three years in a mental hospital, before dying in 1856, at age 46.
Somewhere along the line, poor Clara's confidence and creative juices dried up. She's famously quoted as saying, "I once believed that I possessed creative talent, but I have given up this idea; a woman must not desire to compose — there has never yet been one able to do it. Should I expect to be the one?"
Bummer.
Fortunately, Clara did keep performing, and lived until 77.
IT'S A TRAP(EZOID): We don't talk about it much, but we do actually do math here at MPA on a regular basis. Today, we were working on figuring out interior angles of trapezoids. We read up on the properties of a trapezoid on coolmath.com and we watched a math teacher's short lecture on YouTube about how to calculate trapezoid angles, thanks to Mr. McLogan's math channel! We heart the Internet!
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