SANTA ROSA – "Good grief!"
That familiar Charlie Brown cry from "Peanuts" might have been Ludwig van Beethoven's reply had he learned that, 130 years after his death, his music had become part of the internationally distributed comic strip.
It's tempting to think that Beethoven would have warmed to the idea of being part of the long-lived "Peanuts" comic strip by Charles Schulz.
After all, "Peanuts" was often about unrequited love. And Beethoven's own love life suffered plenty of it.
This theme is the focus of the exhibit "Schulz's Beethoven: Schroeder's Muse," which runs through Jan. 29 at the Charles M. Schulz Museum in Santa Rosa.
The show tastefully and engagingly offers more than 50 comic strip panels and other media. Some of those include displays of Schulz's most-loved Beethoven recordings. The show offers 50 musical excerpts as well as spoken narratives that can be heard using an audio wand. Also in the show are some Beethoven ephemera on loan from the Ira F. Brilliant Center for Beethoven Studies in San Jose. Those include a life mask of Beethoven, first- edition scores and two vials containing tiny wisps of the composer's hair.
"It's interesting to see how much of the strips start out with sheet music from Beethoven's work," said Bill Meredith, director of the Brilliant Center and co- curator of the exhibit. Schulz was keen on including Beethoven's music, faithfully reproduced, in the strip's panels. It proved to be an unprecedented use of music in a comic strip.
Most interesting is how the exhibit chronicles Schulz as an artist ready to use musical ideas in graphic form. The medium for his musical interests was the character of Schroeder, whom Schulz drew as a young and aloof piano prodigy hunched over a toy piano. Schroeder first appeared in "Peanuts" on May 30, 1951. However, the first mention of Beethoven came earlier that year, in January, when a violin-playing Charlie Brown talks about the composer to Snoopy.
Schulz actually preferred the music of Johannes Brahms, but he told interviewers that the name "Beethoven" offered more comic possibilities.
For many, it was in the comic strip, and not school, where the name "Beethoven" was first encountered.
"That was true for me," said Derrick Bang, entertainment editor for the Davis Enterprise and a Peanuts expert. Bang has written four books on the strip including the upcoming "Security Blankets: How Peanuts Touched Our Lives," due in 2009 from Andrews McMeel Publishing.
"I was born in 1955 and started reading 'Peanuts' somewhat precociously in the early '60s, which was the period when Schulz nailed Schroeder's big Beethoven involvement," said Bang.
At the time, Bang was taking piano lessons, but Beethoven was yet to pervade his musical mind.
"I don't think I sought out Beethoven, because his music is incredibly complicated to play, particularly for a small kid," he said. "But whenever I heard something and I discovered that it was Beethoven, I would immediately say: "Oh, that's 'Peanuts.' "
"Peanuts" has outlived Schulz, who died in his Sebastapol home in 2000 at 77. The strip is still published daily in The Bee and in publications worldwide. The global readership is estimated at 330 million.
Schulz drew music into the strip with painstaking accuracy, Meredity said.
"Schulz mentioned that he liked to have things exactly perfect because he knew that musicians would be looking closely at the music," Meredith said.
And look at it they did.
It is a little-known fact about the Beethoven strips that if you were to take the music in them and play them at the piano, they would be as accurate as any of Beethoven's sheet music.
Curiously, the comic strip appeals to musicians in ways that are not apparent to non-musicians. That's because Schulz deepened the meaning of what was going on in any given comic strip panel by his use of music.
To glean that meaning required knowing enough about Beethoven's works to identify which piece of music and which movement of it Schulz was alluding to.
Call Bee arts critic Edward Ortiz, (916) 321-1071.
