Saturday, July 28, 2018
There's a better argument
The Imaginative Conservative often publishes essays on real music, ranging from academic analysis of the score to discussion of the physical and neurological effects of music. One recent example of the latter, Deep Listening by Borstlap, gets EVERYTHING right, from the subjective feel to the objective facts of neurology.
Today's essay on Beethoven's 9th by Emina Melonic is a defense of Beethoven against one obscure critic.
The obscure critic attacks the last, choral movement of the symphony—which sets Friedrich Schiller’s “Ode to Joy” — claiming that the libretto is essentially a political message and that “calls to world brotherhood” can often times result in tyranny. As much as he hates the last movement of Beethoven’s Ninth, Mr. Terauds is not really that much impressed with the rest of the symphony either, especially since Hitler apparently liked it too.
Melonic responds with a personal experience of discovering the 9th while living in a refugee camp resulting from our 1990 Yugoslavian wars.
Any music that has transcended its time (and this is especially true of most classical music) has also succeeded in reaching the innermost crevices of the human soul. For whatever reason, Mr. Terauds’ weak commentary completely leaves out Beethoven’s impact on the individual human being. We rarely listen to music collectively, except of course, when we go to a concert. But for the most part, people experience music alone. For each individual, Beethoven may mean something different, and it may take him on a path toward a particular memory.Yes, but this isn't the strongest defense of Beethoven. There's an intrinsic defense. Beethoven himself understood that the romance of revolution always leads to tyranny. He saw it in the same way and the same time as Gouvernour Morris. Beethoven originally dedicated the Eroica to romantic revolutionary Napoleon, then removed the dedication when he saw that Napoleon was just another megalomaniac empire builder.
Labels: From rights to duties
¶ 11:50 PM
