Composer of the Week: Beethoven: New Pathways

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Composer of the Week

Music: Classical

Composer of the Week - Brand

An informative guide to composers' lives and their music.

An informative and accessible guide to composers' lives and their music.

Composer of the Week: Beethoven Unleashed: New Pathways: A Family Business

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A Family Business

Beethoven Unleashed: New Pathways

BBC Radio 3 - Composer of the Week, Beethoven Unleashed: New Pathways, A Family Business

Exhausted and overworked, Beethoven turns to his brother for help. With Donald Macleod.

Beethoven makes the fateful decision to ask his volatile younger brother, Caspar Carl, to act as his agent. Presented by Donald Macleod.

Beethoven was discovering that dealing with his publishers was consuming more of his time and energy. Frustrated and overwhelmed with work, the composer turned to his younger brother for help in managing his business relationships. It’s a job for which the volatile Casper Carl van Beethoven was eminently unsuited. 

All this week, Donald Macleod traces Beethoven’s story through the momentous years of 1802 and 1803. It was a time that saw remarkable developments in Beethoven’s creativity as he pursued a self-declared ‘new path’ for his music. He undertook his most ambitious works yet, pouring his whole self into his art.  At the same time his personal life was reaching a crisis point that would plunge him to the darkest depths of despair and threaten to ruin all his carefully laid plans for the future.  

Composer of the Week is returning to the story of Beethoven’s life and music throughout 2020. Part of Radio 3’s Beethoven Unleashed season marking the 250th anniversary of Beethoven’s birth.


String Quartet No 1 in F Op 18 No 1, III. Scherzo
Danish String Quartet

Violin Sonata in G major Op 30 No 3, I. Allegro assai
Esther Yoo, violin
Zhang Zuo, piano

Piano Sonata No 18 in E flat major, Op 31 No 3
Christian Hadland, piano

String Quintet in C, Op 29, I. Allegro moderato
Elias Quartet
Malin Broman,viola

Gellert Lieder, VI. Busslied
Olaf Bär, baritone
Geoffrey Parsons, piano

Composer of the Week: Beethoven Unleashed: New Pathways

Live music and the arts: broadcasts more live music than any other radio network. Classical music is its core. Genres include world and new music, jazz, speech and drama.

Donald Macleod traces Beethoven's story through the momentous years of 1802 and 1803.

Donald Macleod traces Beethoven's story through the momentous years of 1802 and 1803 - a time that saw remarkable developments in Beethoven's creativity as he pursued a 'new path'.

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