Harvey Sachs by The Ninth: Beethoven & the World in 1824

Author:The Ninth: Beethoven & the World in 1824 [Beethoven, The Ninth: & 1824, the World in]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Europe, Classical, General, Music, Genres & Styles, History
ISBN: 9781588369819
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2016-06-19T16:00:00+00:00

In a sense, every human being who has ever used his or her brain for nondestructive purposes counts as a brave soldier in humanity’s War of Liberation, but the conjunction of Beethoven’s last symphonic masterpiece with crucial works or events in the lives of so many other outstanding artists made 1824 a particularly fertile year in the history of that struggle. The fact that the Ninth Symphony, Byron’s death, Pushkin’s Boris Godunov and “To the Sea,” Delacroix’s Massacres at Chios, Stendhal’s Racine and Shakespeare, and Heine’s Harz Journey and North Sea Pictures all furthered, in one way or another, Romanticism’s rear-guard action against repression underlines the significance of that speck of time. And perhaps these brief glances at those artists and their states of being at that moment will have helped to remind readers—as they reminded this author—that spiritual and intellectual liberation requires endless internal warfare against everything in ourselves that narrows us down instead of opening us up and that replaces questing with certitude.

Nearly two centuries later, the world still overflows with people who believe that truth not only exists but that it is simple and straightforward, and that their truths—be they political, religious, philosophical, moral, or social—constitute The Truth. Federico Fellini’s characterization, a generation ago, of the fascist mentality as “a refusal to deepen71 one’s individual relationship to life, out of laziness, prejudice, unwillingness to inconvenience oneself, and presumptuousness” describes the obedient adherents of most prefabricated beliefs, everywhere and at all times. The others—the disobedient, the nonadherents, those who think that the world is not easily explained and that human experience does not fit into tidy little compartments—are still fighting the eternally un-winnable War of Liberation. Until our sorry species bombs or gluts itself into oblivion, the skirmishing will continue, and what Beethoven and company keep telling us, from the ever-receding yet ever-present past, is that the struggle must continue.

The uniquely vital expressive power of the Ninth Symphony, which is one of the most striking products of human beings’ attempts to continue the struggle, as well as to deepen their individual relationships to life, is the subject of the next part of this book.

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