Now, scores of years later, Beethoven's music still commands my attention and my reverence — and seems to do the same for legions of other people as well.
So, just what IS it about the music of the short, stocky, wiry haired Rhenish composer who lived so long ago from 1770 to 1827? What could a fellow whose surname translates from the Flemish as "beet field" possibly say to us in our sophisticated age of technological wonders and extra-terrestrial exploration?

The Peninsula Symphony Orchestra will offer some answers with its all-Beethoven concerts scheduled for 8 tonight at the Performing Arts Center, 600 N. Delaware Ave., San Mateo and repeated at 8 p.m. Saturday at Flint Center on the DeAnza College campus in Cupertino.

Explains PSO Music Director Mitchell Sardou Klein, "We have the privilege of performing three of the most significant works of the greatest symphonist of all time ... Beethoven's awe-inspiring Ninth Symphony, his violin concerto (which set the pattern for all the concerti that followed), and the Overture to his only opera, 'Fidelio.'"

According to Maestro Klein, the amazing Jung-Min Amy Lee, the latest in the series of the Klein String Competition winners, will serve as violin soloist in the Beethoven Concerto and the San Jose Symphonic Choir, under the direction of Leroy Kromm, will join the orchestra for the performance of the monumental Ninth. Soloists will be Aimee Puentes, soprano; Wendy Hillhouse, alto; Christopher Corley, tenor, and Kirk Eichelbergber, bass.

But, back to Beethoven himself. What was/is it about his work that speaks so eloquently through the ages? For beginners, the poor fellow suffered what is probably the worst possible fate for a musician: He began to go deaf in his mid-20s. His malady progressed inexorably, along with a particularly nasty clanging, banging tinnitus, into complete deafness.

Could any fate be worse for such a man? Rather than commit suicide (which he indeed contemplated), he decided that, ears or no ears, he was going to compose music.

And he did. Although he was not able to hear much of his own music with his own mortal ears, he gave the rest of mankind some of the greatest music that their collective ears will ever hear.

One respected music scholar explains such a phenomena with the words, "Beethoven inspires awe not only because of his stature as a composer, but also for his qualities as a man: his vision, sense of personal dignity, pride, idealism and genuine heroism. He created some of the mightiest music conceived by man; he was also the central figure in a life-and-death struggle with destiny, from which he emerged triumphant."

Another, Lewis Lockwood, writes that "the eternal challenge to overcome adversity, became the leitmotif of Beethoven's music. Indeed, the dramatic outlines of his Third, Fifth and Ninth Symphonies, of his opera 'Fidelio' and most of his piano sonatas, concerti and other works, took the form of musical commentaries of mankind's journey from struggle and turmoil to ultimate triumph."

Once I asked Michael Morgan, the excellent maestro of the Oakland East Bay Symphony (who at 8 p.m. today and again at 3 p.m. Sunday, is conducting his musicians in Leonard Bernstein's dramatic, multi-media "Mass" at the Paramount Theatre in Oakland), "What is the one work that best sums up the aspirations of Western music and philosophy?"

With nary a pause, Morgan answered "Ludwig van Beethoven's Ninth Symphony."

Then he elaborated. "The first movement of Beethoven's four-movement symphony depicts mankind's destiny. The second, more lyrical, movement, has a vital energy that Beethoven scholars have explained as having flashed upon him as he stepped from 'darkness into light.'"

The third movement of this great magnum opus, Morgan maintained, is about love, while the fourth, extols the universal brotherhood of man.

For years before the Ninth's 1824 completion, Beethoven had been deeply moved by the epic poem written by Johann Friedrich von Schiller extolling the brotherhood of man and mankind's birthright to joy. Beethoven's final musical realization of these ideas, merged with his own intense blend of spiritual and humanistic philosophies, were completed shortly before his death at a time when he was profoundly deaf. In doing so, he had not only accomplished a near super-human feat, but had produced an all-encompassing paean to humanity, spirituality and exaltation.

But despite Beethoven's monumental contributions to mankind, he was still a flawed, very human, individual and was often accused of brusqueness, crude manners and a bad temper.

A talented young pianist, Fraulein von Kissow, once described the scene at a concert in Vienna's Lichnowsky palace: "I still remember distinctly how both Haydn and Salieri sat on a sofa on one side of the music room," she wrote. "Both (were) most carefully dressed in the old-fashioned style, with bagwig, showes and silk stockings, while Beethoven used to appear even here in the freer ultra-Rhenish garb, almost carelessly dressed."

Moreover, Beethoven was not particularly magnanimous toward fellow musicians. Although he saw Bach, Handel, Mozart and Haydn as role models and competitors, he had nothing complimentary to say about contemporaries like Muzio Clementi, Ignace Joseph Pleyel or Jan Ladislav Dussek, although he professed admiration for Luigi Cherubini's operas.

Instead of aiming to please his listeners as did Mozart,

Beethoven sought to arouse, disturb and even alarm them. By 1806, he had begun dramatically Romantic works like the "Appassionata" and "Waldstein" piano sonatas, and some of the themes of the revolutionary Symphony No. 9 were already stirring about in his brain.

Tickets for PSO's Beethoven feast are $27 general; $21 for seniors and students. Call (650) 941-5291. Tickets for the Oakland East Bay Symphony's performances of the Bernstein "Mass" range from $20 to $65. Call (510) 444-0801.

By Cheryl North