Holy Smoke: Beethoven's victory over sickness and fear

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4.4 • 785 Ratings

🗓️ 30 March 2020

⏱️ 21 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This week's Holy Smoke podcast is a celebration of what must surely be the most inspiring piece of music ever written by a sick man recovering from illness – the slow movement of Beethoven's String Quartet, Op. 132, which he entitled 'A Song of Thanksgiving to the Deity by a Convalescent'.

The relevance of this sublime music hardly needs spelling out. But what makes this episode particularly special is that, when they learned of the plans for the podcast, a brilliant young string quartet based in Kansas City, which calls itself The Opus 76 String Quartet, offered to record it for us. And that's what they did, without charging a fee, in the lovely acoustic of Visitation Parish Church just before it closed its doors because of the virus. They made a video of their luminous performance, which you can find on the Spectator's website, and there are two short extracts in the episode.

My guest is the leader of the quartet, Keith Stanfield, who must be the only classical chamber musician in history to have played football in a World Cup qualifying match, for his mother's country, Western Samoa. I couldn't resist asking him about that.

He and his colleagues went to heroic lengths to play Beethoven's 'Song of Thanksgiving' for Holy Smoke. Do tune in.

Holy Smoke is hosted by Damian Thompson, who dissects the most important and controversial topics in world religion, with a range of high profile guests. Click here to find previous episodes.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Before you start listening to this podcast, we've got a special subscription offer.
0:03.8	You can get 12 issues of The Spectator for £12, which will give you full access to everything on our website,
0:09.7	and we'll also throw in a free £20,000 Amazon voucher.
0:13.5	Just go to spectator.com.uk forward slash voucher if you'd like to get this offer.
0:22.9	Welcome to Holy Smoke, the Spectator's Religion podcast.
0:27.0	I'm Damien Thompson.
0:31.2	Today's Holy Smoke episode is one that I've been looking forward to very much.
0:39.3	It's a subject very close to my heart.
0:44.7	I'm trying the experiment of doing it without any notes. See if I can do it in one take.
0:50.8	It's about Beethoven, my favourite subject. And of course, it's his 250th anniversary this year.
0:56.2	And it's about a particular movement, a particular piece of music he wrote. It's the slow movement of his string quartet, Opus 132 in A minor. One of the string quartets he wrote at the end of his
1:06.2	life, five string quartets that contain his most intimate and profound thoughts.
1:11.8	And this movement in particular is special because it is a beautiful motto adage,
1:19.1	a very, very slow movement, broken up by quicker optimistic episodes.
1:22.9	But it's headed a hymn of thanksgiving to the divinity from a convalescent in the Lydian mode and I'll explain the Lydian mode later.
1:33.3	But it's music written by a man who's been very ill and is enjoying a period of recovery and is thanking God for his recovery.
1:45.7	So it's a piece of music that means a lot to me.
1:48.5	It's a piece of music, one of two or three pieces of music that I would go to if I was looking for consolation.
1:54.0	And I do go to it quite often.
1:56.0	But there's something else lovely about this episode of Holy Smoke, and it's no credit to me.
2:04.8	It's credit to my amazing friend Keith Stanfield and his string quartet in Kansas City, the Opus 76 string quartet.
2:13.8	Because I was planning to do a talk on this string quartet and illustrate it with an old recording.
	...

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