Greg Stepanich

The 'Voyage' to divine inspiration

Every work of art is the breath of a single eternal idea. That’s it. Forget the rest. Every work of art is the breath of a single eternal idea breathed by God into the inner life of the artist.

— Tom Stoppard, Voyage (The Coast of Utopia, Part 1); Act I, scene vi

I’ve been reading The Coast of Utopia while the New York production of Tom Stoppard’s trilogy about 19th-century Russian intellectuals opens this week; the three volumes were published by Grove Press after the play premiered in Britain in the summer of 2002.

I’m about halfway through Part II (Shipwreck), and so far the play strikes me as a tour de force in at least one important aspect: It makes the life of the mind come alive; it makes it lively. When we hear Mikhail Bakunin pontificate in Voyage, we get a clear sense of someone for whom ideas are life itself. This is a person in love with philosophy, with the conceit that big ideas can not only make a person’s life much richer, but that they literally can turn a nation around.

The quotation above comes from Stoppard’s characterization of the short-lived critic Vissarion Belinsky. It’s possible the real Belinsky actually said something like that, but I don’t know; I imagine that he did, and Stoppard has found a source for it in his reading for the writing of these plays. It's nothing more or less than a poetic rendition of the old "divine afflatus" idea, but it’s a nice bit of writing, and rather mystical.

For me, it says that artistic creation is at once divinely inspired and at the same time no less than a reflection of the eternal in humanity. Belinsky is speaking at that time about how Russia lacked a national literature (the scene is set in autumn 1836), but that one would arise when its artists unconsciously evoked that nation’s inner life. In that very year in the real Russia, Mikhail Glinka was in the process of creating the Russian national musical style with his opera A Life for the Tsar, and the formation of a national literature was not far behind.

It helps to have some inexplicability when it comes to artistic creation, be it the writing of music, poetry or prose, the re-creative acts of the performers who bring them to life, or the readers who give them a cathedral in the vaults of their skulls to let their words ring out. It helps because some of the people who have given us so much in the way of artistic sustenance were disappointing as human beings: monstrous bigots and egomaniacs such as Richard Wagner, for instance, or Glinka himself, described in one biographical note as a man of almost no personality.

Perhaps as I get older I'm getting more willing to allow certain feats of inspiration to be left to mystery rather than science. I would prefer to think of the great music I know as the product of numerous things, some of them unknowable, rather than a series of electrical impulses in a critical part of the brain.

Roberto Colasso, writing in his marvelous The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, laments the loss of the pantheon of deities the Greeks lived among every day; he says that life is much duller without all those gods playing games with human affairs. It's more fun to think of things that way sometimes.

All of which brings me back to another idea for a composer film: Anton Bruckner.

Bruckner was, all his life, a devout Catholic who would stop the composition classes he taught to kneel and recite the Angelus when the bells at a nearby church told him it was time. He tried to marry several times, but he always proposed to women who were far younger than he was and was always rejected; he spoke in his country dialect and wore country clothes all his life despite living for decades in cosmopolitan Vienna.

It would be fascinating to see a movie that tried to sound Bruckner's depths, and inevitably it would come back to God, because he truly believed everything he wrote was written with the help of the Almighty.

It would, again, provide a fascinating glimpse at creativity, the inner life of an artist, and the wide gap between the art a person's life suggests he would write, and the art he really did create.

Perspectives on the shrinking audience

Here are a couple things worth looking at from some blogs I’ve mentioned before:

Over at The Overgrown Path, Pliable offers a post by Henry Holland, an Angeleno who takes the view that classical music should be marketed to older people, not younger, and that audiences prefer the 19th century work that forms the bulk of the repertory. The comments from other readers on the post are well worth reading, too.

I’ll just briefly reiterate my own stand: Yes, people enter into the classical world largely through the 19th century composers, but it’s been my experience that people are open to newer music if given a chance, and that means the repertory is slowly expanding, not ossifying.

The audience as a whole still needs a big contemporary composer who can make an overwhelming impact — on the scale of Beethoven, for instance — but that might not be possible. If it is, that would be a great boost for classical music in general.

But enough about what I think; here’s the post.

And over at The High Hat, an interesting culture commentary site, our blogging friend Steve Hicken dissects Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, and has the courage to say:

“I don’t know if I like it. True enough, it’s not a very likable piece, in the sense that many pieces are. But I do love it, and it is a part of me.”

Steve does a good job of putting this masterwork into the context of the century and composition as a whole, hinting that the special quality of life as it was lived a century ago, and as it is lived now, demanded a new kind of expression. Anyway, here it is; the rest of The High Hat is worth checking out as well.

This weekend: On Sunday evening, the Ibis Camerata continues its more aggressive touring schedule in Fort Lauderdale with a program featuring Dvorak’s moody, beautiful Dumky Trio…tonight in Coral Springs, FSU student Matthew Skantz presents a free concert with a bold program including the Beethoven Op. 109, Liszt’s Funérailles, and wonder of wonders, the Sonata by Alban Berg, the Variations of Aaron Copland and the Lutoslawski Paganini Variations (with a second pianist). Details from the invaluable Diana Akers…And the Society of the Four Arts, which always presents good things, particularly in chamber music, announces that its first concert Dec. 13 will feature the Philadelphia Virtuosi, instead of the Renaissance Classical Orchestra. The Philadelphia group is pictured at the head of this entry.

Getting composers right on film

Writing in The New York Times, Daniel J. Wakin made the case Sunday that while the story of Mozart — even if it's Peter Shaffer-Alexander Pushkin's Mozart — has made an indelible impression on the minds of the moviegoing public, the same cannot be said for Ludwig van Beethoven (a movie, Copying Beethoven, starring Ed Harris and Diane Kruger, has just been released; that's them up above).

That's true, I think, and partly because the story of Beethoven doesn't really lend itself to the idea of Shaffer's Amadeus, which is about the unfairness of talent distribution, and whether or not the hand of God could be seen at work there, more than it is anything Mozart did specifically. The story of Beethoven could be reduced to the sheer tenacity of a creative artist continuing to do his thing despite powerful odds against him.

That's the same story we get for people in other types of endeavor, and so maybe that tale awaits the right playwright.

But it has always seemed to me that some of the composers' stories are well worth cinematic treatment, so here are a few off the top of my head that might make good film treatments. Composers' stories have been steady fodder for film, but other than Amadeus (satisfying for different reasons than veracity), I probably enjoyed The Strauss Family better than anything else. It seemed, if memory serves, to have mixed the portrayal of chaotic lives with enough insight into the real business of music-making to make it worthwhile.

Franz Schubert. His life has been the subject of several films, including The Temptation of Franz Schubert, a TV piece from 1997 that I've not seen but which this unhappy reviewer has. At least it sounds like it explores the reason Schubert died so young (and not typhus, the proximate cause, either): He had a really bad case of syphilis, which he contracted toward the end of 1822. He was dead six years later, at age 31.

I think the thing to examine here is not so much that he had a dark side that led him to have risky sex, but that when he realized he was not going to live out a normal lifespan, he essentially gave up doing everything except composing. His family took care of him, and he worked as hard as he could until his immunocompromised system got socked with typhus.

It would be a story of sacrifice for art, and it would be incredibly moving. He had to know that most of the stuff he was writing was pretty good, and that audiences would one day hold it close to their hearts. But he would never get to hear most of it except in his head or on the piano. Is that a deal we could live with?

Gaetano Donizetti. Another syphilis case (along with Hugo Wolf, Bedrich Smetana, Alexander Scriabin, Frederick Delius and Scott Joplin, at least), but this one is particularly poignant. Donizetti was born desperately poor, and it was only through the agency of a scholarship that he was able to pursue his talent for music.

Donizetti was a major figure in Italian opera in the first half of the 19th century, and had an incredibly productive career until 1843, when the last stage of the disease set in, and by 1845 he was paralyzed, dying three years later. He had other tragedies in his life, including the loss of all three of his children and his wife.

The story of Donizetti is the story of a poor boy who made good, but then was cut off from further greatness in a horrible way. A good movie would show not only his humble beginnings, but the vibrant opera scene that enabled him to flourish. It would also show his tireless industry, and the fascinating people that made up the entertainment world of his day. Would a film that showed the hardest-working man in Italian opera being compelling enough for cinematic treatment?

Carlo Gesualdo. Gesualdo, besides being a Renaissance composer of great daring and originality, was also a nobleman who killed his wife and her lover when he caught them in flagrante in 1590 (this Wikipedia piece has a decent overview of his life). He apparently was tormented by what he had done for the rest of his life (as a nobleman, he couldn't be tried for the slayings), and some suggest that helped color his melancholy music.

I don't know about that; there seems to be plenty of overwrought emotion in the art of the Renaissance to begin with, and you could make a case for his style being a product of his time rather than double homicide. Still, it would make for an interesting film. How are our acts reflected in our art? Is it a mirror held up to the creator, or is it simply art devised according to its own rules, free of the artist's life as far as possible?

Wakin's piece points to John C. Tibbetts' book of last year, Composers in the Movies, which I'm now going to have to order. I have his edited compendium of Dvorak documents, and it's quite good, so I have high hopes about this one.

And one final word about Beethoven: While the new film has an interesting premise about the composition of the Ninth Symphony, to get a good picture of what Beethoven's life was like at the end, you'd have to show the constant trying of remedies for his ears, the conversations that went partly recorded in the books, and the chaos of his daily life, including his possessive love for his nephew Karl, who shot and wounded himself in order to escape his overbearing uncle. You'd also have to show that he was an alcoholic, like his father and grandmother, and detail the appalling physical problems his drinking created for him at the very end.

You might find that listeners would admire him even more, having seen him persevere despite the deafness, loneliness and the drinking.

Weekend: Rare chance to hear Henze

A short look at the weekend:

Masterworks Chorus of the Palm Beaches. The chorus opens its season Sunday at 5 p.m. in West Palm Beach with the Requiem of Gabriel Fauré, an immensely popular, beautiful piece of deceptive simplicity. Fauré rarely gets his due, it seems to me, but he was one of France’s greatest composers. I’d certainly love to hear some more of his piano music at recitals hereabouts, but so far I’ve been let down. Details here.

FAU Wind Ensemble. At risk of repeating myself, the wind band was fundamental to the spread of classical music in America, and today it’s the focus of a huge body of fine work by native composers. Bandleader Kyle Prescott has assembled a program of music by Dukas, Grainger, Bukvich, Delle Cese, Bryant, Stamp and Sousa for a concert at 3 p.m. Sunday in Boca Raton. FAU folks tell me that they’re expecting good things this year from the band program. Details here.

New World Symphony. Starting tonight and lasting through the weekend, the Miami Beach orchestra offers a nifty program of Bruckner, Mozart and Hans Werner Henze. The Austrian conductor Manfred Honeck, who heads the Swedish Radio Symphony, leads the ensemble in the Bruckner 7th, with its great threnody for the dead Wagner, and the Henze is the German composer’s Scorribanda Sinfonica. I literally cannot remember any time over the last dozen years that I’ve ever heard any Henze, who's now 80, programmed anywhere around here — maybe because of his far-left politics — so this is a rare chance to hear a piece by one of the most important writers of his generation (he's pictured above). Details here.

Chagall Ensemble. Also on Sunday, this time at St. Paul’s in Delray, the group, featuring two members of the Boca String Quartet, offer piano quartets by Mendelssohn (No. 1 in D minor) and Mozart (the G minor, K. 478). Details here.

Florida Grand Opera. It’s Die Entführung aus dem Serail on Saturday, and Aïda on Sunday. I’m mentioning this again because this is the first season for this venerable arts organization in its new house in Miami, and I’m eager to hear some opinions about how things are going, in case I can’t get there myself. Details here.

Bernstein should have been composing

Sixty-three years ago today, the front page of the New York Times had a story about the stunning debut the night before of the New York Philharmonic’s assistant conductor, Leonard Bernstein, then 25, who filled in for an ailing Bruno Walter and became at one stroke the man to watch in American music.

It’s been said many times since the death of Bernstein in 1990 that the sheer scope of what he accomplished couldn’t be appreciated until he was gone. It was then that the world in general took a look at the conducting, the teaching, the playing and the writing, and saluted him as a giant. And so he was, if for nothing more than the Young People’s Concerts, which inspired countless people to become musicians, or if they couldn’t play at a professional level, at least avid appreciators. Bernstein left an indelible mark on American music, and the world is a little poorer for his absence.

Which is why I feel a little ashamed of saying that he really could have done more, and by that I mean his composing.

Bernstein had a famous struggle with himself when it came to writing music. He loved conducting as much if not more than writing, and while he always thought he should have been writing more, he always ended up doing more public performing instead of composing.

In Findings, the volume of memorabilia he published in 1982, there is this statement, which we could now subtitle Manifesto of a Multitasker:

“It is impossible for me to make an exclusive choice among the various activities of conducting, symphonic compositions, writing for the theater, and playing the piano. What seems right for me at any given moment is what I must do, at the expense of pigeonholing or otherwise limiting my services to music.”

That’s admirable, at first blush. Here’s someone with enough self-awareness to know what he’s like, and he’s reached an accommodation with it. On the other hand, it also looks like the statement of a man who didn’t relish the solitude required for composition and was trying to justify to it to himself.

I’m aware that I’m saying that he knew deep down that he should have been composing, and that writing was his highest calling. And there are plenty of people out there who actually knew him who would be quick to say that he didn’t feel that way; that he truly felt that whatever he was offering with a full heart for music at that specific time was his highest calling.

And yet, if we look at a list of his work, the toll his activities took on his original pieces is clear. From the time of his Piano Trio in 1937, written when he was 19, to 20 years later, when he took over the New York Philharmonic, it is a record of a composer developing a unique voice. The years 1950-57 are particularly fruitful: The one-act opera Trouble in Tahiti (1950); the musical Wonderful Town (1953); the Serenade for violin and orchestra and the film score for On the Waterfront (both 1954); the operetta Candide (1956), and of course, the musical West Side Story (1957).

This is a fine corpus of American music, and most of it has been accepted as such since it was written, with the possible exception of the Serenade. But that work has received several new recordings in recent years, and for good reason. It’s a masterpiece, a work that does what so many 20th-century composers have tried to do, and not nearly so well — meld all the musical influences present in American life with the classical tradition and his own powerful personality.

But the record is much less distinguished after that, with the exception of the Chichester Psalms of 1965, a very popular work with choral groups. Significantly, he wrote it while taking a sabbatical from conducting so he could concentrate on writing. Aside from that, after 1957, there are some good things in the Third Symphony (Kaddish) of 1963, a couple things I like in the Mass of 1971, and some fine parts of A Quiet Place, his 1983 opera and sequel to Trouble in Tahiti. Much of the rest — the Songfest, the Divertimento, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue — never did much for me, and it doesn’t strike me as being of nearly the same quality.

For me, the conclusion is inescapable: Bernstein killed his compositional career by insisting on performing practically until the day he died. I know he needed the adrenalin rush, I know he got something wonderful out of it every time, I know he reached thousands and thousands of people each time.

But those performances were by their nature evanescent, even though we have plenty of film. It’s the music he left behind that we look to now, and he’s destined to be remembered in concert halls not for his conducting, but for the music he wrote in the first seven years of the 1950s, and one piece from the mid-1960s. Fortunately, it’s terrific work, and to have entered the canon with just a handful of pieces is better than some other composers have done.

Still, I think he could have done much more. I’d rather he stopped picking up the baton after the Chichester Psalms and kept on writing. There were then, and there are now, plenty of charismatic conductors who could fill that void for the audience.

But being a good composer is a far rarer gift, and to me the tragedy of Leonard Bernstein — if that’s even a fair thing to say after a life of such great accomplishment — is that he didn’t actually pursue his greatest talent with the attention it deserved.

I like to think of him at the end of his life having written six symphonies instead of three, more concerti, a couple more operas, chamber music — all this takes time and dedication, and it’s sad that someone with such a distinctive American voice chose to see if he could squeeze it in on his crowded schedule rather than give it the room it needed.

Two composers lost to war

Today marks the 88th anniversary of the end of World War I, and the day on which all our military veterans are honored for their service.

My wife’s grandfather served in the First World War, and she’s inherited his World War I Victory Medal, with the winged Victory on the front, and the inscription “The Great War for Civilization” on the back, over the names of the nations that fought on the winning side (that's a picture of such a medal above).

Looking at the medal always reminds me that without World War I, many of the horrors that followed it might never have come to pass. It truly was a catastrophic event, wiping out the post-Enlightenment consensus that had dominated European civilization up to that point.

I’m listening right now to The Banks of Green Willow, written in 1913 by the English composer George Butterworth. It’s a beautiful, gentle 6-minute work, and the best-known piece by its composer (pictured at right), who died in August 1916, at age 31, during fighting on the Somme. It is one of the few pieces I can think of by composers killed in wartime; the poets and writers such as Wilfred Owen and Alain-Fournier who died in battle during the 1914-18 conflagration are more widely known.

This weekend, another composer lost to armed conflict, this time World War II, will be featured in a concert in Delray Beach. The French composer Jehan Alain, who was killed in action at 29 in 1940, managed to write a great deal of music in his short life — about 140 pieces — and one of them is the Messe Modale, for flute, soprano, contralto and strings. This work will be performed Sunday afternoon at the Church of the Palms by the church’s choir and octet, along with the Pro Arte Chamber Ensemble.

I’m not familiar with this work, but I’m eager to hear it. And I won’t be able to hear it without a certain pang, knowing how Alain died (that's him at left) and that he likely would have done much more with his music given the chance. Given the same lifespan as Olivier Messaien, who was three years his senior, Alain would have been with us as late as 1995. That’s 55 years of lost creativity.

And had Butterworth escaped the bullet in the head and lived as long as his friend Vaughan Williams, he’d have been around until 1971. That’s also 55 years of creativity lost.

On Veterans Day it’s most appropriate to remember all the soldiers who were cut off far too young, no matter what their professions or futures. This year, I’ll be thinking especially about the musicians who didn’t survive, and the loss to all of us of the art we never got to hear.

Also this weekend: Things are gradually getting busier for classical music fans hereabouts. Tonight, the Florida Grand Opera opens its second production, Mozart’s Die Entführung aus dem Serail, a bubbly, brilliant work that sounds better each time I listen to it.

Also, Seraphic Fire is in the middle of its second concert series, with a concert of choral music by Domenico Scarlatti and a world premiere by a young Utah composer (he’s 22) named Matthew Barnson. The second of its three concerts bows tonight in Fort Lauderdale. A bold program by one of the most inventive musical institutions in the area.

Concert beat: Nielsen and Granados

Had a music project to get under control in the last couple days, which prevented me from talking about a couple concerts I recently attended. Here are two short reviews:

Palm Beach Woodwind Quintet (Delray Beach, Oct. 29) — Carl Nielsen is an acquired taste for many listeners, but I've always admired the quirkiness of his invention. One of the Danish composer's best chamber works is the Wind Quintet, Op. 43, which was the final work on the Palm Beach Woodwind Quintet program at St. Paul's in Delray two weekends ago.

The players — flutist Karen Dixon, oboist Jennifer Potochnic, bassoonist Michael Ellert, hornist Thomas Hadley, and clarinetist Michael Forte — gave the Nielsen a fine reading, taking great pleasure in the vividness of the composer's writing for each of their instruments. (Ellert added his own extension to the bassoon to get the out-of-range low A Nielsen calls for at the end.)

Also on the program were quintets by Franz Danzi (in B-flat, Op. 56, No. 1) and the French composer Charles Lefebvre (Suite, Op. 57), both of which are much more conservative in style than the Nielsen, but full of idiomatic writing and charming tunes. Short pieces by Ferenc Farkas (Old Hungarian
Dances) and Adrien (not Adolfe, as the program said) Barthe (Passacaille), added vivid contrast.

The best piece on the program after the Nielsen was for just three of the five players: Jacques Ibert’s Three Pieces for Oboe, Clarinet and Bassoon. Ibert’s canny writing gets close to the sound of a full quintet, and Potochnic, Forte and Ellert sounded at home and at ease.

Overall, a good program of interesting, too rarely heard music, well-played by veteran area musicians still exploring the repertoire and finding things worth scheduling.

Mia Vassilev, pianist (Steinway Gallery, Boca Raton, Nov. 5)— Mia Vassilev, a Kansas-born pianist who now teaches at Florida International University, is a player who appears to prefer the heart-on-sleeve side of things musical. During her concert Sunday afternoon at the Boca Steinway Gallery, Vassilev presented big works by Chopin (Ballade No. 3, Op. 47) and Beethoven (the Op. 109 sonata) alongside pieces by Ravel, Enrique Granados and Lecuona.

Vassilev has a fairly large technique and strong fingers, ripping off the big cascades of notes in her opening piece, the rarely heard (at least by me) Allegro de Concierto of Granados (he's pictured above). It's a showy piece, not as substantive as the Goyescas cycle that keeps this composer's music in the canon, but attractive nonetheless.

Two works by Ravel — Vallée des Cloches and Alborada del Gracioso — also showcased Vassilev's poetic side, with readings of high sensitivity and a nice range of colors. The late Beethoven sonata provided large technical challenges, but an even greater challenge in getting the right mood across. Many of the latest works of Beethoven are tough to parse, and Op. 109 is no exception.

The audience, in fact, didn't know it was time to applaud at the end, so after an awkward moment or two, Vassilev went right into the first of a three-piece set (Cordoba, Guadalquivir and Malagueña) by the Cuban pianist and composer Ernesto Lecuona.

It was the first time in the concert that Vassilev actually appeared relaxed; she sounded much more comfortable with the demonstrative tunes and the vivid contrasts of Lecuona's light-classical milieu, an impression bolstered by her encore, a prelude by George Gershwin.

Soldier's letter makes moving art song

The American composer Lee Hoiby, whose career has been distinguished by his vocal music, has set to music excerpts from a letter by Pfc. Jesse Givens, who was killed in in May 2003 during the first months of fighting in the Iraq War.

Hoiby’s librettist, Mark Shulgasser, has posted on You Tube a performance of this song by the baritone Andrew Garland, accompanied by the composer at the piano (it can be seen at the top of this post). The letter, of course, is tremendously sad; it’s a young man’s statement to his wife about how much she and their children meant to him (his second was on the way when he was killed).

Givens writes that the happiest moments of his entire life were the ones he spent in the bosom of his little family, how much his wife had transformed him, how joyful it was to hear the laughter of their young son. This letter was featured in an HBO special and also has been included in a play.

Because this wasn’t written for treatment as a song, Hoiby, who turned 80 this year, had a tough task in front of him: how to make meaningful music out of something that was written to be powerfully meaningful just as prose. But he’s done a good job of capturing the found poetry of Givens’ letter (“I searched all my life for a dream, and I found it with you“).

The tempo is slow, the melodic movement graceful, and the harmonies conservative but poignant, and it captures the sentiment of the letter beautifully. It is music that is deeply respectful to the author of the letter; Hoiby allows Givens to speak and doesn’t get in his way.

Hoiby has been well-served by Garland, who has a big, strong voice and whose diction is good enough to enable the listener to parse out the soldier’s plain English. It is a surpassingly tender, sad and lovely song, and a powerful memorial to a life lost in a faraway conflict.

There’s little doubt that the Iraq War will be the central issue of Tuesday’s elections, and no matter how you feel about our involvement over there, Givens’ letter shows that war always leaves its deepest scars on the individual home fronts, where perhaps the most eloquent words of a man passionately in love with his wife and family are only heard after his death.

There have been few musical commentaries that I know of about the Iraq War, though surely it deserves more and will have them. Lee Hoiby has done a noble thing in writing this song and reminding his listeners of the cost that has been paid, and will continue to be paid, in thousands of American homes where families have been forever changed.

Art that glorifies military conflict is almost never as important as the art that brings us close to the scars on humanity’s face, and makes us look.

'Keeping Score' makes Beethoven new

Last night, WXEL-Channel 42 aired the first in a series of three music appreciation programs called Keeping Score, featuring Michael Tilson Thomas. The conductor's subject was the Eroica Symphony of Beethoven; the next will deal with Stravinsky's Rite of Spring (like the Eroica, another pathbreaker) and the last, with Aaron Copland and the sound of American music.

In compiling this program, Thomas is following in the tradition of his mentor Leonard Bernstein and adding -- at last -- a new corpus of serious shows about classical music to the video library. It also does something to address the lack of such programming generally on television.

In addition to the old Bernstein Young People's Concerts shows, my touchstone in this has been the 1996 series Leaving Home, which appeared on Britain's Channel Four and was a tour of 20th-century classical music as presented by conductor Simon Rattle. I didn't get to see it, but I’ve got a copy of Michael Hall's book that was produced from the series and I've always regretted that no similar in-depth look had been mounted by any American institution, at least as far as I'm aware.

And Thomas does a good job. He explains what's going on in the music and also explores its contemporary context. Scenes of Thomas at the piano (he's a good player) demonstrating salient moments in the symphony are intercut with shots of him conducting the San Francisco Symphony and walking through the sites in Vienna associated with the piece.

At one point, for example, Thomas takes us to the rooms in Heiligenstadt where Beethoven retreated in 1802 during his most profound existential crisis as he tried to come to terms with the realization that he was going deaf. Out of that crisis came the letter to his brothers Johann and Karl called the Heiligenstadt Testament, in which he poured out his misery and laid bare the humanity-embracing vision that underlay all his art.

It helps, actually, to see those beautiful old buildings in the Viennese suburbs, and to see the interiors of the palaces where Beethoven curried favor with aristocrats. It reminds us that this music, which has been venerated for most of its life, was written by a real person who lived in a specific time and place.

Another smart bit in this show was a vignette about the once-famous pianist and composer Daniel Steibelt, who lost a legendary 19th-century cutting contest to Beethoven at this time and thereafter retreated from Austria, never to return. Thomas played short bits from a Steibelt piece featuring a tambourine obbligato that Steibelt's wife would have played, and joined members of the Vienna Philharmonic for the last 20 seconds or so of the Steibelt Piano Quintet in D.

In so doing, Thomas gave us at one stroke a view of the entertainment culture of the time, the sound of Beethoven's contemporary composing colleagues, and an object lesson in how Beethoven's music was so radically different and groundbreaking than what anyone else was writing.

That's smart programming, and it fit in nicely with Thomas' basic approach, which is so unabashedly enthusiastic. This is a man who loves and understands this music, and can encourage neophyte viewers to take a chance on it, too. There's not a hint of pretentiousness in Thomas' presentation of the Eroica, just pure engagement.

His ultimate view is that Beethoven himself is the real subject of the work, and while in other hands that could be a recipe for stuffy hero worship, in this program it simply made logical sense and illuminated the music rather than detracted from it.

Beethoven's message was as straightforward and honest as he could make it, but more than 200 years have passed since the Eroica was new, and while it can easily be enjoyed for its own sake, it helps listeners to know more about it so it can be better appreciated.

For that, you need gifted teachers, and Thomas is clearly one of them. In his hands, truly everything old is beautifully new again.