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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Rare Beethoven -- Early and Late, 2 Jan 2009
Even the greatest of composers have left us works which remain undeservedly obscure. This outstanding CD, also available on the Musical Heritage Society label, includes two cantatas Beethoven composed at the age of 19 together with two little-known late choral works. Matthew Best conducts the Corydon Singers and the Corydon orchestra together with five soloists.
The "Joseph" and the "Leopold" cantatas date from 11790. Young Beethoven was still living in Bonn. The "Joseph" cantata, WoO87 (this designation is used for Beethoven's works without an opus number) commemorates the death of Emperor Joseph II while the companion "Leopold" cantata, WoO88, celebrates the ascension of Emperor Leopold II. These two cantatas are the greatest works of Beethoven prior to his fateful move to Vienna in 1792. The works remained unperformed during Beethoven's lifetime and were not discovered untill 1844. Brahms was greatly impressed by these works, especially the Joseph cantata. He praised its "noble pathos... its feeling and imagination, the intensity, perhaps violent in its expression, also the voice-leading and declamation, and, in the two outer sections, all the features that we may observe in and associate with his later works." (Quoted in Lewis Lockwood, "Beethoven: the Music and the Life at 65)
The Joseph cantata is the better-known of the two, and it is remarkable in its depth and in its creation of a feeling of tragedy. The work both opens and closes with a lengthy chorus, with solo quartet, which has the feel, as the liner notes point out of a chorus from a Gluck opera. The music is solemn and heroic. Beethoven used the extensive soprano aria from the Joseph cantata, "Da Steigen die Menschen an's Licht" (then mankind climbed into the light) for the finale of his opera, Fidelio.
The Leopold cantata is a joyous, celebratory work. As a young composer Beethoven uses these two cantatas, to move from sorrow and tragedy to a spirit of triumph. He would use this pattern many times in the works of his maturity. The Leopold cantata has the feel of Italian opera in its floridity and in its chief aria, the sopranos' "Fliesse, Wonnenzahre, liesse!" (Flow, tears of joy, flow!) The cantata also includes a heavily operatic trio, "You who called Joseph your father" and a finale which in both its text (Hail!Prostrate yourself, you millions) and its music is a predecessor to the chorale finale of the Ninth symphony.
The two works from late Beethoven on this CD are substantially shorter than the cantatas, and they are worthy, if relatively unfamiliar, works of the composer's final years. Beethoven composed his "Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage", opus 112, in 1815 to a text by Goethe. Mendelssohn's setting of this text is substantially better-known than Beethoven's. Beethoven's brief work is in two radically contrasting parts. The first of which, the "Calm Sea" features an almost total stillness (an "awesome, deathly stillness" as in Goethe's poem) punctuated by a dramatic outcry near the end. The finale, the "prosperous voyage" is Beethoven at his most triumphant and boisterous.
The final work on this CD is the rarely-performed Opferlied (sacrificial song) opus 121b, composed in 1824. While in Bonn, Beethoven had made an earlier setting of this text, WoO126. While infrequently performed, Beethoven's mature setting exhibits the introspective, mystical quality of much of his late music with a lovely mezzo-soprano solo and a cello obligato accompanying the chorus and orchestra.
The CD includes excellent program notes which illiminate this infrequently heard music together with full texts and translations. Listeners who want to explore some lesser-known, but hardly lesser, music of Beethoven will love this CD.
Robin Friedman
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3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Sublime, 8 Jun 2005
This is perhaps Beethoven's first master masterpiece. In particular the soaring motif accompanying the solo female voice in the third movement of the Cantata on the Death of Joseph II can not help but bring a tear to the eye, a frisson of ectstacy, an awareness of one's mortality. Yes, it achieves so much! This motif is to re-appear in many of his later works.
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~ Stephan Genz
~ Paul Hongne
~ Ludwig van Beethoven
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