Tyrades! What Are You Doing for Beethoven's 250th Birthday?

I must confess that I haven’t attended a symphony orchestra performance since a long-ago elementary school field trip.

(Perhaps memory fails me, but I could swear we rowdy youngsters heard Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Flight of the Cooties” – or maybe it was excerpts from Mozart’s opera “Beans, Beans, They’re Like A Magic Flute.”)

My generation mostly knows Ludwig van Beethoven because (a) Schroeder in the “Peanuts” comic strip kept a bust of the German composer on his piano (fun fact: Pigpen carried around a full-size statue of Joseph Haydn, but no one could ever see it through the dust) and (b...