Today is Beethoven’s 243rd birthday and we’re celebrating on Classical WQED-FM with (nearly) All Beethoven, All Day.
Beethoven’s music is so popular that birds learn to sing it. Click on the photo above to watch a pet starling whistle his favorite Beethoven symphony over the phone.
Can you identify the symphony?
(screenshot from YouTube video)
Symphony No. 6, Pastorale, if I’m not mistaken. I didn’t realize starlings were such good mimics.
Freude, schöne Götterfunken, Tochter aus Elysium—last movement of the ninth.
Now you’re confusing me. Watching this on my phone, where I use Beethoven’s 6th as my ringtone.
Our classical music experts at WQED-FM have confirmed it is the Pastoral Symphony, #6
Isn’t it the slow movement of the 6th that ends with overlapping calls of yellowhammer and cuckoo (oboe and clarinet)? I believe Beethoven could hear birdsong even after it became hard to understand speech–or at least, he remembered how it goes.