If we speak in terms of proportions, there is one that is very easy to observe in Beethoven’s output: for every Symphony, the composer left us —approximately— two Quartets and four Sonatas. In his early years in Vienna, Beethoven made his piano sonatas his calling card as a virtuoso: around twenty in just some seven years, while his six Op. 18 quartets paved the way for the first two symphonies. In his middle period, the pace of the sonatas slowed to make way for his most famous symphonies —from the Eroica to the 8th— and the three genres coexisted in balance. In his final years, the symphony became a unique event —the Ninth— and the sonatas disappeared after Op. 111, as he devoted himself obsessively to the string quartets, as the purest form of expression.

Within the framework of the Complete Beethoven Symphonies conducted by Danielle Gatti, Prof. Carlos Calderón presents a cycle of 6 lectures with numerous sound and multimedia examples to take us inside what we have called the “Beethoven Laboratory”. We will thus enter this “workshop” where the piano is the experimental basis on a personal level; the quartet, a design space for a circle of friends and the symphony, the act of proclamation to the public. At the end of his life, when he no longer had anything to proclaim because his deafness was almost total, nothing to share because his social isolation was almost absolute, he stopped using the piano and the orchestra and remained only with the quartet: four voices that, in reality, were in his mind discussing the limits of beauty and of his own musical laboratory.

Subscribe to the 6 lectures for €125