Upcoming Events

The Mütter Museum

The College of Physicians of Philadelphia, 19 South 22nd Street Philadelphia, PA 19103

Ludwig van Beethoven: Innovation with ATTITUDE!

The Bernard Behrend Lecture and Concerts at the College present an evening with Robert Greenberg

Late in his career, Ludwig (my friends call me “Louis”) van Beethoven coined a phrase that had been his creative maxim since the beginning of his career: “Art demands that we never stand still.”

And stand still he did not. Beethoven’s views on creativity and personal expression were revolutionary, even heretical for his day. At a time when most composers were happy to turn out works in a shared (or “period”) style, Beethoven insisted that each new work be different from what came before it and that his music should sound like his music and his music only. In this, Beethoven was the first truly modern composer. But his innovations were not made in a vacuum. He lived at a dangerous time of societal change and was haunted by his dysfunctional upbringing and the progressive hearing loss he experienced as an adult. Beethoven’s compositional innovations were thus adaptations to a changing and perilous time, and have much to tell us about creativity and adaption in our own time of rapid and discontinuous change.

This presentation will focus on Beethoven’s life and times and his extraordinary compositional innovations, innovations which we will observe through the lens of the first movement of his Symphony No. 5 of 1808.

Light refreshments provided.

This event is open to all ages. 21+ to drink.