KRAKOW: One wrote neatly and methodically, the other crossed things out and tore pages up in frustration.
Beethoven and Mozart may be two of the greatest composers of all time but they could not have arrived at the same point by means more different.
The personalities of the deaf German legend and the Austrian child prodigy come alive through a collection of their musical manuscripts now on show in Poland’s southern city of Krakow.
“Mozart was very tidy. He wrote without making any changes. Beethoven on the other hand, that’s another story,” said Zdzislaw Pietrzyk, director of the library organising the show.
“His manuscripts were messy, there are crossed out sections, corrections. And that passion is reflected in his symphonies and music,” he said.
Krakow’s Jagiellonian Library picks out a different selection of musical works from its vaults to display each year alongside evening concerts during the annual Beethoven Easter festival.
This year’s collection of several dozen works by various composers, on display until April 22, includes a sketch for Beethoven’s 9th symphony and the original handwritten score of Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 27 in B-flat major.
“You can really see that Beethoven was human and he did really, really suffer when he did not find the right idea again or when he changed his mind or he made a mistake,” said German pianist Hinrich Alpers, who performed at this year’s Beethoven festival.
“He was very, very upset and the way he crossed out things was very fierce and brutal sometimes. He even ripped the paper and had to glue in a new page,” he said.
The composers’ distinct working styles build on a view also reflected in their appearances: Mozart always pictured with a perfect wig and Beethoven shown with a mad mop of hair.
Their manuscripts on show in Krakow were originally stored in the Prussian State Library in Berlin but the Nazis removed them during the Second World War to protect them from Allied bombing. They were moved to a monastery in Silesia, which after the war became part of Poland. They were later transferred to Jagellonian University in Krakow.
Germany has for years called for the return of the manuscripts, but Poland points to its own losses.
Warsaw says it lost half a million works of art during the war that today would be worth around $20bn.
AFP
