Heiligenstadt

Written as a companion piece to Beethoven's Fifth, Stephen McNeff's 10 minute piece dates from a commission by the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra for a piece which would fit into a classical programme consisting of Brahms, Liszt and Beethoven. According to the composer himself, it “was inspired by Beethoven's struggle to come to terms with his deafness and, although the music is not programmatic, it embodies an acceptance of human mortality alongside a refusal to be daunted by its inevitability.” The resulting Heiligenstadt was unadvertised, its premiere packaged shrewdly as an unexpected goodie in an already big programme.

The reference to Beethoven's Heiligenstadt testament - the revelation that, in utter despair at his increasing deafness, only art had kept him from suicide - was key. For McNeff, the Fifth is about succeeding in the face of adversity, and the quotation from the song Sehnsucht (Longing) offered the contemplative starting point for an exploration of something angrier but no less profound, with the transitions from Beethoven into his own terse language artfully wrought.