Moonlight Sonata

Welcome back to Tea with Liya! Today, I'm playing the famous classical song by Ludwig van Beethoven called "Moonlight Sonata." Unlike some other classical musicians, Beethoven was a composer who lived to see his work become popular. However, he didn't really understand the reason why everyone liked this song. I hope this will be a song that you like, too!


Listen to the song here
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If Beethoven created a piece that was so good that it would still be played hundreds of years later, then why didn't he think it was a good piece?

He reportedly told Carl Czerny, a fellow musician, that he had "surely written better songs..." because he didn't see the reason for why everyone wanted to listen to his song. He had probably invested months of work into other songs, and not received nearly as much attention or revenue.

The thing about successful art is that it doesn't usually come down to one specific property that makes it objectively "good" - like the amount of time you put into it, or the colors you used - but rather, it just has to be something that a lot of people like. Not everything that is famous can objectively be considered excellent. Of course, there might be factors that are potential reasons for why people liked it, but there's no way of knowing for sure.

That means that there's also no way of making a song that people are guaranteed to like; you just have to keep writing songs, and hope that they like some of them. And if they don't.... then you just won't become one of the famous composers. So, not everything that is excellent becomes famous, either.

For example, there were a lot of composers in the Baroque era (the 16- and 1700s) that wrote for the piano (or the "clavier" as it would have been called then), but none of them were as well-known as Bach, who is called "The" Baroque composer. Of course, one can't question the complexity of his work. He actually lost an opportunity to compose for an orchestra because it wasn't capable of playing the music he had written for it. But what about all the other great composers that didn't get noticed?

I remember an article written by a jazz musician who was saying he lives in New York City, where there is a large market for this style of music. He says that a lot of musicians in the city are good enough to be performing around the world... except they aren't. There are only so many stars in one place and time, so you have to be in the right ones to have any chance of getting there.

Not only is it hard to collect attention, but it can also be hard to appreciate the fact that you have it. Everyone seems to have agreed that Beethoven was a great composer, and his sonata is still a song that you hear hundreds of years later. However, he didn't really think it was an important accomplishment. Maybe he was the kind of composer who would just come up with song ideas even when he wasn't sitting in front of a piece of paper, so it wouldn't seem like a herculean effort to write another song. (I know that I've done that.)

In fact, a composer probably has their own opinion of what songs were "better" than other ones, and then that opinion might not be corroborated by their listeners. "Hmm... why would they want to fill their teacups with that song?"

What if this bronze trophy is actually made of better quality metal than the gold one? Image by Arek Socha from Pixabay

We might never know why this song became so popular, but you can know why you decided to listen to it. Maybe you noticed that there was a new post on Tea with Liya, or you had seen the song title before, or you hadn't, but you wondered how the moon was connected to a sonata.

Or maybe you just needed another way to...

...keep filling your teacup with music!
~Liya