At some point over the next couple of weeks, we will be heading to somewhere in Bristol that serves nice beer and raising a pint or two to 30 years of BBC Music Magazine. That's 378 issues, 46,872 pages (or thereabouts) and Lord-knows-how-many words and pictures in the can. But before we go slapping ourselves on the collective backs, maybe we should put our achievement into context with a look back over history. By the time of their 30th birthdays, where along life's path had some of the best known composers got to? Here are 15 notable examples...
1 Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
By the time he reached his 30th birthday on 27 January 1786, Mozart had already racked up, among many other works, 37 symphonies, 22 piano concertos, 19 string quartets and a fistful of operas. And for his 31st year, he had something special up his sleeve: The Marriage of Figaro. The opera was widely appreciated at its first performance in Vienna, with Haydn declaring himself a major fan and the Wiener Realzeitung's reviewer enthusing that 'It contains so many beauties, and such a wealth of ideas, as can be drawn only from the source of innate genius'. Today, many would still deem it the greatest opera of all time.
2 Ludwig van Beethoven
Beethoven spent much of his time as a 30 year-old bathed in the glow of C sharp minor, as he worked on his Moonlight Sonata. C sharp? No problem. Hear sharply? This, alas, was proving more of a problem. While it would be a year later (1802) that he wrote his Heiligenstadt Testament outlining his despair at the onset of deafness, other correspondence shows that he had started to notice it from his late twenties. With his First Symphony only recently completed and the other eight yet to be begun, it's safe to assume he heard none of them in crystal clarity.
3 Franz Schubert
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هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة September 2022 من BBC Music Magazine.
ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 9,000 مجلة وصحيفة.
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Look back in anguish
Despite Korngold's denials, there is much to suggest that his Symphony in F sharp is a grim depiction of the dark days of Nazism, argues Jessica Duchen
Come again?
If something is worth hearing once it's worth hearing again, explains Rebecca Franks, who charts a history of the use of echoes in music
THE BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE INTERVIEW
Music by women and composers of colour is not a separate set of pieces from the ones we know
A brilliant melting pot of discoverable works
Erik Levi enjoys Patricia Kopatchinskaja and friends' eloquent performances of lesser-known works by exiled composers
Pierre Boulez
Tom Stewart celebrates a composer, conductor and musical iconoclast for whom breaking from tradition was not an option but a must
Vienna's cacophonous concert ends to the sound of slapping
‘Fighting at a Schoenberg concert.
Molto humoroso
Cartoonist and broadcaster Gerard Hoffnung lampooned the world of classical music with splendid affection and wit, writes Andrew Green
There and back again
With retrospectives on album and in concert this month, Oscar-winning composer Howard Shore reflects on his years in Middle-earth and tells Michael Beek why he has a lot to thank the LPO for...
THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN Pick a theme... and name your seven favourite examples
Composer-conductor Odaline de la Martinez prizes tempo, swing and bounce in her top rhythmic works
Crystal clear with plenty of punch
The great is, they say, the enemy of the good, and that is certainly the case with David Sanger’s interpretation of Vierne’s Organ Symphony No. 1, which stands head and shoulders above a strong field of alternative versions.
