94
For those so inclined, celebrate by spinning up some old favorites. I know I will be, starting with the piano trios op. 1 numbers 2 and 3.
With your indulgence, I'll share two favorite quotes:
The capacity for melody is a gift. This means that it is not within our power to develop it by study. [In Beethoven] we have one of the great creators of music who spent his whole life imploring the aid of this gift which he lacked. So that this admirable deaf man developed his extraordinary faculties in direct proportion to the resistance offered him by the one he lacked, just the way a blind man in his eternal night develops the sharpness of his audible sense.
--Igor Stravinsky, quoted by violist Peter Yarbrough of the Alexander Quartet
What the New Testament is for Christians, Beethoven could be--and even is to a large extent--for those who strive after the humanitarian ethos. Is it perhaps that the human being is the subject of all he has to say?
The human being who in Bach lived, believed, suffered, and died sheltered but also confined within the strictly defined bounds of Protestant Christian existence, humble, bound to God in an objective order. The human being who in Mozart already enjoyed full freedom in the seraphic beauty of a perfect harmony, almost innocent, in spite of every refinement touching only in Don Giovanni the dark substratum of the world, hubris, and destruction, but in the confrontation of forces returning to the law.
But what is the human being in Beethoven? He is the entity entirely filled with consciousness of himself, the hazards of his existence, his suffering, his nobility, and his greatness. This man Beethoven, who was he?
Certainly no hero in the sense of the martial victor, no Achilles, radiant even in downfall, but a man pursued by the demons of his inmost being, searching for freedom, greatness, and above all love. And all wrung under the most adverse circumstances from humiliation and misery, and in the unimaginable loneliness to which deafness condemned him, without ever the sound of a loving voice to break through this barrier.
As “God gave him the power to say what he suffered,” he could only put all that white hot emotion, mute suffering, humiliation, and intimations of an ineffable sublimity into musical form. And so he transmuted in the forge of suffering the human means of expression into musical form, the strictest most crystalline form, relentlessly wrought into the most exact design. And then the miracle happens, that in this most pure, virile music all that stirs the heart of a human being is turned to speech: suffering, grief, loneliness, but also, and above all, the indescribable sweetness of consolation, happiness, dance, ecstasy carried to the bounds of mystical transport; from the Virgilian secular piety of the “Pastoral” Symphony and the ”Convalescent's hymn of thanks to the Godhead,” of the String Quartet, op. 132, to the visionary perception of a Father beyond the stars and the devotion of the Missa Solemnis. The entire span of the human heart and spirit is in that work, perceptible, communicable. There is appeal and reassurance, the courage to shoulder one's own destiny in the faith of the indestructible, invincible dignity which makes human beings what they are.
That is Beethoven for me.
--Eugen Jochem, in a note accompanying his RCO recording of the Missa Solemnis
Recent Posts