Word: beethovens
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...birth of one of its mightiest titans 200 years ago on an upper floor of Bonngasse 515, Bonn. New productions of Fidelio were unveiled at Stockholm's Royal Opera and New York's Metropolitan. Bonn capped months of festivities with the Missa solemnis. In Tokyo, where Beethoven is a rapture-inducing favorite, the Ninth Symphony was done twice in one day. In Los Angeles, Zubin Mehta, the Los Angeles Philharmonic and a phalanx of friends staged a twelve-hour Beethoven marathon. And in honor of the 200-candlepower occasion, that most devout of Beethoven fans, Schroeder, dispatched Snoopy...
Like the work of every great creative artist, Beethoven's music evokes different deep, personal responses in different people. The one trait he symbolizes to everyone, however, is freedom-his own freedom as an artist, all men's freedom to live their own lives. Beethoven's loftiest hymn to that core symbol is Fidelio, which today has a special pertinence to those European countries, as Austrian Conductor Karl Böhm puts it, "that experienced foreign occupation and domination within the recent past." Thus it was thoroughly proper that the Met's new Fidelio was entrusted...
...TOLSTOY found in Beethoven's Kreutzer Sonata a novel of homicidal sexuality: others find in it only the noblest aspirations of their own souls. In these higher voltages of the spirit one is creating at levels both above and below the consciously worded thought or the consciously planned act. The totality of him goes forth and exerts itself on the totality of other personalities. They will respond at that level to which they are attuned. Perhaps this is what we mean when we say that we are not influenced by what a man says, or even by what he does...
...have thought also that, knowing and loving that trio of Beethoven, and having composed perhaps as great music of his own, he too must know-and far better than you or I-that, although this world may be no great shakes, the future problematical, and no telling what may become of us, one thing is certain: so long as there is such music in the world, there is always something we can do about the worst that the world...
Then of a sudden he was speaking of Beethoven, and of a sudden I realized that he was speaking of that andante cantabile, the slow movement of the B-flat Trio [Opus 97]. He stopped speaking and began to sing. It was as though the composer, impatient of words, had found speech an impertinence in the presence of such music. The conversation ceased while he sang the theme through to its end. Then he resumed...