Celebrating Beethoven’s 250th
If you think of Ludwig van Beethoven mostly as the Ninth Symphony and the dih-dih-dih-DAH Fifth, I propose your spending his epic 250th anniversary these days by looking at him as the audacious innovator, many decades ahead of his times, as reflected in his late string quartets. He had been many things to many people: a feminist (in “Fidelio”), a freedom fighter battling oppression (“Egmont”), a master reformulator of the piano, and an unprecedented purveyor of high drama in music…