Art & Music Appreciation: Week Nineteen (December 15, 2025 – December 19, 2025)

ART APPRECIATION

^{Portrait of Louis XIV (1701) by Hyacinthe Rigaud}

Rigaud’s most famous portrait is of Louis XIV. He made two copies as the king requested. Today one hangs in the Louvre Museum in Paris and one hangs in the Palace at Versailles. Rigaud painted many portraits for Louis XIV; they were of the royal family, nobility of Europe, and even members of court.
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Hyacinthe Rigaud (1659-1743) was born in southern France to a family of painters. His art training was all done in France, but he studied the Dutch artists like Rubens and Rembrandt. His early work won awards and allowed him to be accepted into a very prestigious group of artists. It wasn’t long before he was the top artist, and he remained the best until he retired. He was known as one of the greatest portrait painters of his time because he could paint exact likenesses, he included historical background, and he had a talent for posing his clients in a unique way. Rigaud painted nobility, poets, friends, family, and religious figures. Over his life he produced thousands of paintings and kept a record of their location.
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MUSIC APPRECIATION

Piano Concerto No. 5 in E-flat Major, op. 73: I. “Allegro”

This is Beethoven’s fifth and last concerto for piano and orchestra. Beethoven did not give it a specific name, though it was nicknamed “The Emperor Concerto” by the concerto’s English publisher. This piece is in the key of E-flat major, a very majestic tonality, and Beethoven used it masterfully to emphasize its royal character. The piano and the orchestra interact in a way that is common to most concerti written at that time, taking turns playing the main melody and the accompaniment parts. Toward the end of this movement, there is a traditional cadenza where the piano plays by itself for an extended period of time.
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Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) is widely acknowledged as one of the greatest composers in history. His originality, the sophistication of his composing techniques, and the variety and profundity of his emotion form a combination virtually unmatched by any other composer. Born in the Classical era, he spent most of his working life in Vienna, building mainly on the models of Mozart and Haydn and taking their inheritance to new levels. Almost single-handedly he elevated the whole concept of instrumental music, demonstrating that a major instrumental work could be regarded as high art on a par with great paintings or epic poetry, designed for posterity—a concept previously unrecognized but one that is still prevalent today. He also excelled in vocal composition, even blending voices with an instrumental genre in his Ninth Symphony, and he regarded his Missa solemnis as his finest work. He was a man of high morality and integrity, sometimes admired for his humanity as much as for his compositions. ⁴