About this Website
This website celebrates the 250th anniversary of the birth of Ludwig van Beethoven with a chronological exploration of his life and music.
The contents of this site were created during the year 2020 with daily posts on the Twitter feed @beethoven250. Each day focused on one or more compositions accompanied by YouTube videos of mostly live performances.
I discussed my intent and strategy for this Twitter feed in the blog entry Celebrating Beethoven 250 All Year Long. The year-end blog entry 366 Deadlines: My Year with Beethoven is a postmortem.
I want to think all the musicians who have graciously posted videos of their Beethoven performances on YouTube. This website is dedicated to you all.
I also thank my wife Deirdre Sinnott for doing everything she could to accomodate the Beethoven 250 project in our lives.
The “Complete” Beethoven?
The quibble-quotes around the word “Complete” mean that the completeness is reasonable rather than fanatical. Included are the following:
- Every composition with an Opus number from 1 through 138.
- Every composition with a WoO number from 1 through 204, plus WoO 221 and WoO 227.
There are some exceptions, however:
- Of the 20-odd WoO 99 Italian partsong settings (Day 148), only four settings in live performance are included.
- Of the 179 folksong settings, only about 77 in live performance are included.
Generally, compositions that have Hess numbers but not WoO numbers are not included, but Hess 30, 31, 34, 40, 115, 118, and 297 are included.
For now, I hope that the maintenance of this website will be as minimal as possible. I will try to correct errors and replace YouTube videos that have become unavailable, but that's about it. Send corrections or other feedback to [email protected].