Adagio Cantabile by Beethoven

Last Thanksgiving, the Peanuts gang aired on television, as it does every holiday season. So, I performed my duty as every American citizen ought to do- I watched the Charlie Brown Special for the umpteenth time. Who doesn’t love Peanuts? Dynamic characters, a silly canine, and utmost adoration for Beethoven are plentiful reasons to tune in each year.

Schroeder makes me feel guilty for not knowing as much about Ludwig van Beethoven as he does- he is Beethoven’s Wikipedia, if you will. His sole purpose in life is to play Beethoven’s music and make his birthday into an international holiday. Nothing gets in the way between Schroeder’s toy piano and Beethoven, not even a girl named Lucy. This makes me wonder if I would ever let anything or anyone get in the way of my passionate pursuits.

Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 8 Op. 13, also called Sonata Pathétique, is “pathetic” indeed. Remember that language changes over time; in 1798, the word meant to affect the emotions of sorrow and tragedy. The sonata contains three movements, all of them eliciting feelings of grief and pity. The second movement, Adagio Cantabile, takes listeners on a melancholic journey to help them possibly empathize with Beethoven’s tragic sentiments about discovering his onset of deafness, which had already begun two years prior at age 26. Yes, he had written this piece when lip-reading was his method of making out conversations.

Schroeder’s performance navigates our travels to abstract paintings that may represent Beethoven’s psyche and later to landscapes and artwork of Vienna, where the composer spent most of his life producing his immortal masterpieces.