For the Love of Music by John Mauceri

Author:John Mauceri
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2019-09-16T16:00:00+00:00

· CHAPTER 7 ·

The First Time: Weaving the Web of Continuity

Marie Antoinette’s little theater at Versailles, where she performed the role of Rosina in Beaumarchais’s play The Barber of Seville, before she was arrested and ultimately executed in 1793

IS THERE A WAY TO PREPARE for a first encounter with a piece of music? Is it by a composer you already know? Is it a composer you have heard about but whose music you have never heard? Is it a complete unknown in every sense of the word—and are you dreading it? All of these categories create new and unique opportunities. Let’s take a look at them.

In 1810, the German composer/conductor/writer E. T. A. Hoffmann, the man who would create the modern fairy tale with his Nutcracker and the Mouse King, read the published score of Beethoven’s latest symphony, the one simply called no. 5, and discovered something unexpected, life altering, and clearly a game changer for music. (He had not yet heard the symphony performed.) He wrote an enormously long review in a Leipzig publication that would have immense influence. Here’s a segment:

Beethoven’s music…discloses to us the realm of the colossal and the immeasurable. Beams of incandescent light shoot through the deep night of this realm, and we become conscious of enormous shadows; shadows that, in the ponderous weight of their alternating ebb and flow, ever-more-narrowly constrain, and, ultimately, annihilate us—without, however, annihilating that pain of infinite yearning upon which each and every pleasure that has fleetingly come into its own in the exultation of melody founders and then perishes, and it is only in virtue of this pain—this pain of mingled love, hope, and joy that is intrinsically consumptive but not destructive, this pain that strives to tear our breast asunder in a full-voiced concord of all the passions—that we survive the ordeal as enraptured communicants with the great beyond!

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.