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Home > Composers Datebook > Beethoven in New York


	Podcast:		Composers Datebook
	Episode:		Beethoven in New York
	Category:		Health
	Duration:		00:01:59
	Publish Date:		2018-05-20 00:00:00
	Description:		On today’s date in 1846, a Grand Festival Concert took place at New York’s Castle Garden, a popular spot for 19th century Manhattanites to enjoy fireworks, balloon ascensions, ice cream, and band concerts. The band on this occasion consisted of some 400 vocalists and instrumentalists, including members of the four-year-old New York Philharmonic. They gave, for the first time in America, a complete performance of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9, the “Choral Symphony.” In attendance was a 26-year-old lawyer named George Templeton Strong, who kept a diary and recorded his impressions – which were NOT favorable: “A splendid failure, I’m sorry to say,” he wrote. “The first movement was utterly barren… the minuet was well enough, quite brilliant in parts [and] the only point I found worth remembering in the whole piece… then came an andante (very tedious)... then the fourth movement with its chorus, which was a bore… a small achievement for Beethoven, and the orchestra might as well have been playing at the bottom of a well. Every note of the music was blurred and muddied, a mere confused storm echoes and reverberations… [But] after all,” concluded Strong, “‘tisn’t fair to judge, hearing it under so many disadvantages.” Fourteen years later, after a more advantageous Philharmonic performance in 1860, Strong changed his mind about Beethoven’s Ninth, and wrote: “Strange I should have missed its real character and overlooked so many great points when I heard it last. It is an immense, wonderful work.”
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