Beethoven Walks at the Nasher
February 5 – July 23, 2023
Beethoven Walks is an installation of sight and sound created by Yellow Barn Director Seth Knopp. Originally conceived in the spring of 2020, during our collective isolation, Knopp engaged walking trails near his home in Southern Vermont with reproductions of Beethoven’s sketches and leaves from his autograph manuscript. The installation vivified Beethoven’s practice for those walking the path, allowing his music to comingle with sights and sounds from the surrounding forest.
Beethoven Walks at the Nasher engages the outdoor terraced gardens, presenting listeners with a visual and auditory experience of Beethoven’s music, his creative process, and the inspiration he drew from nature.
“Beethoven’s process is visually staggering,” says Knopp. “A kaleidoscopic embodiment of determination and vulnerability, it begs the question, in the words of the great Beethoven scholar, Maynard Solomon, of whether it ‘documents the path by which the work is created or by which it is discovered’. Beethoven Walks at the Nasher serves a universal need to better understand our humanity through music and the beauty of our world.”
The installation can be accessed Wednesday through Sunday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. with regular museum admission.
Soundings: New Music at the Nasher is made possible by generous support from Kay and Elliot Cattarulla. Additional support is provided by Sally Warren and Jeff Jackson, The Rea Charitable Trust, and Paul Hunter (in memoriam) and Kathleen Cook-Hunter.
CANCELLED
Due to the week's inclement weather, both performances of Soundings: New Music at the Nasher (February 4 & 5) are cancelled. In lieu of the performances, you are invited to a special reception with Artistic Director Seth Knopp to celebrate the opening of Beethoven Walks.
Sunday, February 5, 5:00 p.m. FREE Admission
We apologize for the inconvenience and will be issuing refunds to ticket holders immediately. The concert series invites musicians traveling from all over the country, many of which are experiencing flight cancellations caused by freezing conditions in North Texas.
Saturday, February 4, 2023, 7 p.m.
Songs Of Our World: Three Voices of Our Last 100 Years
György Ligeti (1923-2006): Études
George Crumb (1929-2022): Black Angels: Thirteen Images from the Dark Land
Valentin Silvestrov (b.1937): Stille Lieder (Silent Songs)
György Ligeti, George Crumb, and Valentin Silvestrov—children of the Holocaust, Vietnam, and now the war in Ukraine—celebrate music’s power to speak for human existence in the face of violence and political destruction.
“I believe that Music — even if it cannot be "sung" — is song nevertheless; it is neither philosophy nor a world view, it is the song of the world about itself, as if it were a musical testimony to existence.”
These words, spoken by Valentin Silvestrov, resonate throughout this program of discovery, parable, and memory.
Sunday, February 5, 2023, 7 p.m.
Beethoven in Search of Creation
An die ferne Geliebte (To the distant Beloved), Opus 98
Sonata in A-flat Major, Opus 110
String Quartet in A Minor, Opus 132
On January 25th, 1815, Beethoven played the piano for the last time in public. With his hearing severely deteriorating, and increasingly cut off from customary human interaction, what follows is one of history’s most prolific periods of towering artistic achievement, a decade often reverentially referred to as “Late Beethoven”.
Extraordinarily, Beethoven left behind a vast visual record?of his compositional process. The hundreds of surviving sketches and autograph manuscripts from the final decade of his life are staggering reflections of the profound humanity that defines Beethoven’s later works.
Soundings presents three works of “Late Beethoven”: his song cycle An die ferne Geliebte (To the distant beloved), Piano Sonata Opus?110, and String Quartet Opus 132, illuminated by sketches and manuscripts culled from those that Beethoven made while composing them.