The following article is from our April 2009 issue.

A Beethoven First in Second City The rage for classical music in the capital of the blues is rewarded with an amazing world premiere - By Uwe Siemon-Netto

Wind-swept Chicago is known as the hub of the blues, of jazz, and as the home of the world's currently top-ranked symphony orchestra. Now America's "Second City" amazed international music lovers with the world premiere of a Beethoven piano trio.

On the balcony of one of America's most charming halls, Franklin McMahon moved his ebony pencil over a large pad of paper with a vigor unexpected in an 87-year-old gentleman. McMahon is a unique holdover from a bygone era altogether different from the breathless media manner of our time. He is an artist-reporter who has documented world events of decades past, such as the U.S. civil rights movement, the Second Vatican Council, President John F. Kennedy's funeral, the first manned space rocket launch and 1960s counterculture.

On this evening in Chicago's Renaissance-style Murphy Auditorium of the American College of Surgeons on Erie Street, McMahon drew history of a different nature - a musical episode of such significance that its pivotal figure, pianist George Lepauw, 28, later exclaimed, "I don't believe that an experience like this will ever happen again in my lifetime."

Before an audience including billionaires and scions of Europe's ancient dynasties, Lepauw and two fellow musicians of international fame, violinist Sang Mee Lee and cellist Wendy Warner, performed the world premiere of Beethoven's Piano Trio in E Flat Major (Hess 47). This was a curious, fragmentary piece consisting of just the first movement and 43 measures of the second. Beethoven arranged it from one of his earlier string trios at a time when he had advanced from his Classical period toward a more modern form, probably in the first decade of the 19th century.

To Lepauw, it was only logical that he, a Frenchman, and two Americans, including one of Korean ancestry, should have premiered this Beethoven fragment in the United States. "Beethoven was the first globalized composer," said Lepauw, a citizen of France and the United States who had rediscovered this obscure composition during a visit in Paris. "At the time he wrote this particular work, he had turned into a global thinker, an enthusiast of America, and a true European, which is why I also find it right that his 'Ode to Joy' became the anthem of the European Union."

Paris is Lepauw's birthplace. Here he spent his childhood as the son of an American mother and Didier Lepauw, a first violinist of the Orchestre de Paris. Here he enrolled at the age of three at the Rachmaninov conservatory and became the youngest student of Aida Barenboim aside from her son, Daniel Barenboim, the conductor.

And it was in Paris where Dominique Prévot, president of the Beethoven Association of France, told Lepaux about some almost forgotten works stored in the Beethoven Haus in Bonn, the composer's birthplace, which is now a museum. They included the Piano Trio in E Flat Major. To Lepauw this was a stirring discovery, given that during the bombing raids on Germany in World War II "many treasures were irretrievably lost, including some original Beethoven manuscripts." In 1956, after a circuitous journey through war-torn and bomb-shattered Germany, the autograph of the E Flat Major Trio had found its home in Bonn.

Lepauw, Lee and Warner also played two other Beethoven Piano Trios that had never before been heard in the United States, making this concert an international cultural event of grandiose American proportions matched by the caliber of the instruments onstage. Lee played a 1703 Stradivari and Wendy Warner a 1740 Guarneri cello, both worth millions of dollars. Even the bow Warner used has an estimated value exceeding $100,000.

These instruments belong to the Stradivari Society, a philanthropic foundation whose presence in the center of Chicago reflects this city's stature as a leading musical sanctuary. The society's founder, Geoffrey Fushi, once called it the "most expensive club in the world." Its mission is to facilitate the loan of the most famous, rare and valuable string instruments to young performers.

"The existence of this foundation right on Chicago's Magnificent Mile (Michigan Avenue) tells us a great deal about lovable character of this city. While cursed with a harsh climate it is "blessed with the most fantastic people," according to Wolfgang Drautz, Germany's scholarly consul general whose government co-sponsored the "International Beethoven Project" created to raise public awareness of the composer's life and work; the world premiere in Murphy Hall was the opening round of this ambitious undertaking.

Drautz represents Germany in the Midwest but will leave Chicago soon for another diplomatic assignment, much to the regret of this city's musical community. "We will miss him; he has done so much for us," said Lepauw sadly. Another musician recalled the "fabulous continuous consular tandem" conducted by Drautz and his French counterpart, Jean-Baptiste de Bossière, who for the last years were observed traveling together on consular business throughout their huge territory, regaling in its cultural riches.

Drautz, himself an amateur musician, marveled at the singing and swinging charms of Windy City, whose love for great sound is so unquenchable that Swiss-born Thomas Zoells managed to build up a thriving dealership for Italy's expensive Fazioli pianos costing up to $190,000 in less than half a decade. "I sell more and more every year," Zoells said. "Last year I sold five Faziolis - incredible!" It was one of Zoells' Faziolis on which Lepauw premiered the Beethoven Piano Trios.

"In Chicago it obviously pays off that this city does so much for the musical education of its young," said Sel Kardan, president of the "Music Institute of Chicago," the largest of ten such institutes in town, where Wendy Warner and Sang Mee Lee serve on the faculty. "While in many other urban centers of the Western world school systems economize by first cutting musical instruction, Chicago has taken the opposite route."

"Not only does the city support musical instruction in public schools generously but private benefactors do the same, and many of these are not Chicago residents but live in the suburbs," said Kardan whose establishment has six campuses with 3,000 students of whom the youngest is only eight months old. "Some of our students' parents work second jobs to pay for their children's $82-per-hour tuition. On the other hand, we send instructors out to teach kids in Chicago's roughest neighborhoods for free." Some inner-city kids develop such enthusiasm for classical music that they graduate at the top of their classes at the institute.

Chicago's musical vibrancy has always been the consequence of huge waves of immigrants from every corner of the world. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, the Germans were in the vanguard; now Koreans, Chinese, Japanese, Indians and Eastern Europeans have taken over the classrooms of Kardan's institute and similar schools. Like the Germans a century ago, the parents of these new immigrants make sure that their offspring learn to master at least one instrument.

And so it was that young Asians and Eastern Europeans mingled freely with members of the American and European élites on that wintry Sunday evening when Beethoven's Piano Trio in E Flat Major was brought back to life. After the intermission, this reporter, who once studied in this astonishing town, witnessed another facet of European-American history in the Windy City. Lepauw, Lee and Warner played Beethoven's beloved Piano Trio in B Flat Major, titled "The Archduke." This reporter's eyes wandered slightly to the right. And who should be sitting there, just one seat removed? Princess Maria Anna Galitzine, Archduchess of Austria, granddaughter of that country's last emperor, Karl.

She and her Russian husband, Prince Piotr, rank among the patrons of musical life in America's Second City, which, measured by the vastness of its human and cultural eminence, is really second to none.