Portrait of Ludwig van Beethoven. Via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).
The date is 26 March 2027: two hundred years since the Viennese afternoon, stormy according to witnesses, on which Ludwig van Beethoven died. Round anniversaries are the legal drug of musical programming, and this is the roundest of the decade: the 2026/27 seasons, which we have been reviewing in recent weeks, have already lined up, and it is worth reading the strategies between the lines, because they tell you who programmes and who celebrates.
The most ambitious strategy is Berlin’s, recounted two days ago: the bicentenary set inside a biennial on faith, with the Missa solemnis as a question and not a monument. The most systematic is Italian: the San Carlo devotes to the bicentenary the bulk of its fourteen symphonic concerts, within the year of its own 290th anniversary. The most pervasive is Roman: Santa Cecilia spreads Beethoven over the whole winter, the Eroica with Minasi in January, concertos and symphonies between January and April, the Missa solemnis with Luisi in February, in the heart of the anniversary. And the most refined, almost a riddle for connoisseurs, is La Scala’s: Ferdinando Paër’s Leonora, the opera that set the Fidelio subject to music before Beethoven, programmed in the bicentenary year as a mirror: to understand what Beethoven did, listen to what it could have been.
The risk, we say it with affection, is the traffic jam: twelve months of complete symphony cycles threaten to turn the most subversive composer of the canon into the institutional background of the year, which is exactly what he never was. The real Beethoven is the one who writes the Heiligenstadt Testament and at the same time a cheerful symphony, the one arrested as a vagrant while composing the last sonatas: a man at war with the conventions of his own market. The right way to celebrate him, for a theatre, would be to programme today’s music with the courage with which his contemporaries programmed his; the right way for a listener, to choose from the deluge the performances that risk something. On these pages, when the year comes, we will act as a compass: meanwhile, mark the date, 26 March, and at least one live Missa solemnis. It is the piece he considered his best, and it is still the highest bet one can make in a concert hall. Sources: official 2026/27 programmes of the Berliner Philharmoniker, Accademia di Santa Cecilia, Teatro di San Carlo, Teatro alla Scala.