WPR Music Album of the Week: 'Beethoven and the Italians'

In March of 1823, Ludwig van Beethoven sat down at his desk in Vienna not to compose a new piece, but to write a fan letter. The recipient was Luigi Cherubini, an Italian composer who had made his home in Paris since the 1780s, where he was a fixture on the city’s opera scene. What occasioned the letter was Beethoven’s own “Missa Solemnis”: he had just finished the work, and was looking for opportunities to have it performed abroad. But while he wrote a few composers and friends about this new mass that spring, to Cherubini, he added a personal message: