New London Orchestra
(Leader, Leonard Hirsch )
Conductor, Alec Sherman
Beethoven's Second Symphony is the only one of his nine symphonies that is not bang broadcast from the Promenade Concerts, where they are being performed this season in numerical order. It is therefore-included in tonight's concert, so that the sequence may not be broken.
The vigour and brilliance of the work are more than ever astonishing when one calls to mind the circumstances in which it was written. By 1802, when he was thirty-one, Beethoven was forced to realise that his deafness was incurable and his career as a pianis-t at an end. Just about this time he fell in love with ' a dear, fascinating girl '-believed to be Giulietta Guicciardi-though he declared that he could not marry her because she was ' not of his station,' and there was the further handicap of his deafness. Eventually Giulietta herself put an end to their relationship by marrying Count Gallenberg. Meanwhile Beethoven, on the advice of his phys'cian. had decided to spend the summer of 1802 at Heiligenstadt, a small village just outside Vienna. There, amid the pleasant countryside with its views of the Danube and the Carpathian mountains, he sought relief from his troubles by building up an ideal world of the spirit; there, in fact, he wrote his Second Symphony. Harold Rutland