Eroica Apple: Frauenschuh's Symphony Studies (2/3)

Studies on the 3rd Symphony of Ludwig van Beethoven

Today I am painting again with oil on plywood, while I listen again to the 3rd Symphony of Ludwig van Beethoven; the music is the inner compass of my artistic activity today.

A kind of landscape emerges. In it, a gigantic apple rises: monumental, almost surreal – and at the same time similar to a futuristic house. Its surface is softly modeled, like the skin of a fruit. This apple is not just an object but a habitat.

I reflect on the context of the creation of the third symphony and ask myself: What does self-responsibility mean to me? And what did self-responsibility mean to Beethoven? He decisively opposed the rigid class system of his time, saw himself as an individual, and unwaveringly upheld human dignity. This attitude pulses for me in the 'Eroica'. The music claims freedom – it demands, it is courageous.

My Apple now becomes a symbol for individuality and insight, as the artistic counterpart of that self-responsibility. This apple symbolizes nothing forbidden, no lost paradise. Here it is living space, a place of individual decisions, a space for thought. The people who could live in it bear responsibility for their world.

While I fill the background of the landscape with cool, almost melancholic shades of blue and gray, I think about home. Is this world, as it is today, home for me? The landscape I am painting is not idyllic in the classical sense. It is a space of exploration where I try to trace Beethoven's relation to the world and his struggle for community and freedom. Beethoven understood his music as a contribution to humanity, as a dialogue between the individual and the world. As a child of his time, he sought connection to the outside throughhis artistic work. Is my art about something similar?

Possibly this is my today Apple of insight: the insight that home is not tied to a place, but arises from actively engaging with the world.