By APRIL DEMBOSKY


SANTA ROSA, California - In a“Peanuts”comic strip from the mid- 1950s, Charlie Brown walks through the first panel and finds Schroeder sitting in front of an adult-size record player, his ear to the speaker.“Shh,”Schroeder says,“I’m listening to Beethoven’s Ninth.”Charlie Brown inspects Schroeder’s outfit.“In an overcoat?”he asks. Schroeder leans even closer to the speaker and responds,“The first movement was so beautiful it gave me the chills!”


In the world of“Peanuts,”of course, Schroeder was the Beethoven-obsessed music lover who lost patience when Lucy interrupted his practice. Yet musicologists and art curators have learned that there was much more than a joke behind Charles Schulz’s invocation of Beethoven’s music.


“If you don’t read music and you can’t identify the music in the strips, then you lose out on some of the meaning,”said William Meredith, the director of the Ira F. Brilliant Center for Beethoven Studies at San Jose State University, who has studied hundreds of Beethoven-themed“Peanuts”strips.


Schulz carefully chose each snatch of music he drew and transcribed the notes from the score. The music was a soundtrack to the strip, introducing the characters’state of emotion, prompting one of them to ask a question or punctuating an interaction.

“The music is a character in the strip as much as the people are, because the music sets the tone,”Mr. Meredith said. To understand what gave Schroeder chills, he said, you have to listen to the musical passage.“When you actually hear the symphony, the whole thing feels completely different.”


That linkage is the theme of“Schulz’s Beethoven: Schroeder’s Muse,”an exhibition at the Charles M. Schulz Museum and Research Center, which was organized with the Beethoven center. (It continues through January 26 and will reopen on May 1 at the center in San Jose.)


Mr. Meredith spent more than a year identifying the compositions, gathering recordings and reinterpreting the strips; Jane O’Cain, the museum’s curator, researched Schulz’s artistic process and musiclistening habits.

Mr. Schulz mined Beethoven’s life for material. He had numerous books in which he underlined details about Beethoven’s love life, clothing, even his favorite recipe (macaroni with cheese). As a result, Schulz fans like to point out, the strips are as educational as they are entertaining.

“What you thought was a funny tagline was an absolutely true story out of Beethoven’s life,”said Karen Johnson, the Schulz museum’s director.