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National Public Radio Weekend Edition
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SUSAN STAMBERG, host:
And now for the very first time in American broadcasting, music composed by Ludwig van Beethoven in 1792, then lost to the ages and recorded for the first time ever this month.
(Soundbite of music)
STAMBERG: A section from seven minutes of a Beethoven oboe concerto, performed and recorded by the Rotterdam Chamber Orchestra, the score reconstructed by musicologist Jos Van der Zanden. He joins us from the studios of Radio Netherlands.
Hello.
Mr. JOS VAN DER ZANDEN: Good morning.
STAMBERG: I think this is very exciting. It's like finding a Rembrandt in your attic. Bits and pieces of the oboe concerto were found over the years. What did you have to do for us to be able to hear it?
Mr. VAN DER ZANDEN: Well, the sketches have survived only in a skeletal form so only the melodic phrases of the piece, not the harmonies, not the orchestration, not the accompaniment. And that was our task.
STAMBERG: And you tried, I bet, to make it accurate to its day. I mean, he wrote this in 1792. So you had to reconstruct it for an 18th century orchestra.
Mr. VAN DER ZANDEN: Yeah, that's true. Beethoven was very young when he composed this piece. He was in his early 20s. He was still living in Bonn, his birthplace, and shortly afterwards he moved to Vienna to take lessons from Haydn. He took this concerto, which was finished. It was a three-part concerto. He took it with him to Vienna. And when he was in Vienna under Haydn, he decided to rework it, and make a new slow movement, so it's a piece of the very young Beethoven, who is not the composer of the major masterpieces we now all admire, it's a composer which still takes lessons and has to get acquainted with things you have to learn at school.
STAMBERG: Harmony, theory, yeah.
Mr. VAN DER ZANDEN: Counterpoint, those kinds of things.
STAMBERG: Let's listen again and see if we think it sounds like the work of a student.
(Soundbite of music)
STAMBERG: You know, listening to that oboe, it's such a beleaguered instrument. It is one of the earliest woodwinds in the orchestra and people make fun of it all the time. In fact...
Mr. VAN DER ZANDEN: Yeah.
STAMBERG: ...they make jokes. Let me tell you one. What's the difference between an oboe and an onion.
Mr. VAN DER ZANDEN: I wouldn't know.
STAMBERG: When you chop up an onion, you cry.
Mr. VAN DER ZANDEN: Yes, that's very nice. Yeah.
STAMBERG: But it's very mean. Now...
Mr. VAN DER ZANDEN: Yeah. Yes, of course.
STAMBERG: ...did Beethoven have any particular affection for the oboe?
Mr. VAN DER ZANDEN: Well, not really. He never tried his hand at an oboe concerto later because in the 18th century there were written hundreds of these concertos. Every composer wrote a number of them. But after about 1800, it was not as popular as before. I don't know for what reason. It has to do with virtuosos touring around Europe or something. But it was the end of an era.
STAMBERG: Now you and a partner have put together this second movement of Beethoven's oboe concerto. Where are the first and the third movements?
Mr. VAN DER ZANDEN: They vanished. The concerto was at some time complete. After Beethoven died, the concerto was seen at publishing house, Diabelli, in Vienna, in the 1840s, and after that, it suddenly vanished. Nobody knows what happened with it. And the only thing that is left now are these sketch for the slow movement.
(Soundbite of music)
STAMBERG: I find this such a charming sound, a little bashful maybe. Do you hear any traces of what will become Beethoven, the great composer of the symphony?
Mr. VAN DER ZANDEN: Well, just the glimpses. It's a rather reflective, quiet music, very fragile music, and there are some pieces of the late Beethoven that sounds similar, but the overall impression is that this rather Mozartian, the way Mozart and Haydn composed.
STAMBERG: Can you guide our ear to a part of--in these seven minutes where you hear what will become Beethoven with a capital `B'?
Mr. VAN DER ZANDEN: Well, the little credenza at the end of the piece is very expressive, and you don't know what will come in these notes. It's always a surprise, and that's exactly what Beethoven in his later works did.
(Soundbite of music)
STAMBERG: From the ending of a long-lost section of an oboe concerto, written by Ludwig van Beethoven when he was just 22, reconstructed by musicologist Jos Van Der Zanden and Cees Nieuwenhuizen, the oboist Alexei Ogringchowk.
(Soundbite of music)
STAMBERG: Our thanks to Jos Van Der Zanden who spoke to us from the studios of Radio Netherlands.
This is WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News. Mr. Simon will be back next Saturday. I'm Susan Stamberg.