On 20 Feb 1790, Holy Roman Emperor and German Enlightenment icon Joseph II died, and the 19-year-old Beethoven was recruited to write a cantata in commemoration. The music was too complex for the Bonn orchestra, so it wasn’t performed, and the score was lost for nearly a century.
#Beethoven250 Day 17
Cantata on the Death of Joseph II (WoO 87), 1790
Beethoven’s cantata for Joseph II is startlingly mature in both its powerful sorrow and gentle sadness. English texts are available at raptusassociation.org/cantatas.html.
Brahms on the cantata for Joseph II: “it is Beethoven through and through! The beautiful and noble pathos, sublime in its feeling and imagination, the intensity, perhaps violent in its expression … all the characteristics which we may observe and associate with his later works.”
John Clubbe writes in his Beethoven bio “The heartfelt and genuinely moving… Joseph cantata reveals not only Beethoven’s admiration for the deceased emperor and his enlightened policies but also his hopes that the Revolution in France had truly announced a new era for humanity.”