I'm glad there aren't any other instruments or vocals to this song, because adding anything to it would just drown out the perfect sadness.
I'm not a big orchestral music person, by and large. Which is less about not being interested at all so much as having a limited scope--only a few pieces by a few composers at any point in my life. I was a Mozart person growing up, because he wrote a lot of stuff for clarinet that wound up in audition pieces. Then I got into Holst in high school, but I never paid much attention to Beethoven, because his biggest hits, the stuff I was exposed to as a child, never much appealed to me at the time. The reason for that is probably just that I never played it in band, but I'm not sure.
I spent a summer in Brussels when I was in college, during which I took a weekend trip to Germany with a few friends of mine from the program. We stayed in Cologne, but took a boat down to Bonn that Saturday and found ourselves with an afternoon to kill. I wanted to go to see the museum of West German history, but was overruled, and so we went to the Beethoven House.
There's a room in the house where you can sit and listen to recordings of Beethoven's music, and I tried to call up a song I remembered parts of, but couldn't come up with the title. Days later, I finally figured out where I remembered it from.
This video comes from a movie called A Boy Named Charlie Brown, where Charlie Brown goes off and competes in a spelling bee ("Return victorious, Charlie Brown! Or don't come back at all!"), while Schroeder, for reasons that are still unclear to me, plays "Pathetique" over a series of animated images that in no way fit with the rest of the story.
I had that movie on tape when I was preschool-aged, and watched it so many times that the song, whose name or significance I didn't know, stuck with me. And listening to it again at 21--and thousands of times since--I finally came to appreciate it.
I'll be totally honest with you--most times I just zone out after the first 14 seconds, which really tell the whole story. I can't really express what about it is so powerful, whether it's the sense of climbing or the sparseness of the melody, but it's an incredible theme that Beethoven builds on, then departs from, then returns back to, at which point it feels like you're seeing an old friend again.
It combines brilliant composition with overwhelming you-can't-bullshit-this emotional heft, and as a triumph of technique and soul-baring beauty, it's nearly perfect.
