Beethoven Fan Discards Romantics

Boise, ID -- Area music teacher and Beethoven fan Al Stewart, 38, was thinking of expanding his horizons a bit. He has listened to all symphonic music from the Beethoven era, Mendelssohn and followers. In other words the classical and early romantic era. He then realized the late romantic era had some composers too. He was told that Schumann and Mahler were cool. Even Brahms was enjoyable. But the cheap download of 100 Scumann hits did not get him excited. "I only have a 20 minute drive to work. I had time to listen to all of Schumann symphonies a bit this week, at least one movement of each symphony and samples of the rest. It did not do anything to me. The Mahler did not even fit on an 80 minute disc. I burned it as an mp3 to save discs, I had bought it for 99c at Amazon. I have nothing to show for a week's work.

Al rehearsed band players and did a bit of work backing a singer at the high school. On the way home he decided to go beyond the Richard Strausses and Tchaikovskis.

"I think I will have to look at Sibelius and then Stravinsky and some American composers of the 1900s."