Beethoven, Egmont Overture, op.84

Music for the masses! This could have been the war cry of both Beethoven and Karajan. For this they had in common: the wish to reach out to millions and ensure the survival of their art. Beethoven, at the dawn of the romantic era, no longer wrote exclusively for titled patrons, but for the middle classes. To reach them, he needed
new means of popularizing and distributing his works, such as concerts for paying audiences and the publication of arrangements for everything from piano to brass band. In the mid 20th century, Herbert von Karajan also saw a new way of reaching out to greater numbers of people through the combination of picture and sound – the video recording. This recording of the Egmont Overture dates from 1975 and is part of a special ‘overture’ special produced with the Berlin Philharmonic for Unitel.