On the Beauty of Beethoven
Music means different things to different people
and sometimes even different things
to the same person at different moments of his life.
It might be poetic, philosophical, sensual,
or mathematical, but in any case it must,
in my view, have something to do
with the soul of the human being.
Hence it is metaphysical; but the means of expression
is purely and exclusively physical: sound.
I believe it is precisely this permanent coexistence
of metaphysical message through physical means
that is the strength of music.
It is also the reason why when we try to
describe music with words,
all we can do is articulate our reactions to it,
and not grasp music itself.
Beethoven's importance in music
has been principally defined by
the revolutionary nature of his compositions.
He freed music from hitherto prevailing
conventions of harmony and structure.
Sometimes I feel in his late works a will
to break all signs of continuity.
The music is abrupt and seemingly disconnected,
as in the last piano sonata. In musical expression,
he did not feel restrained by the weight of convention.
By all accounts he was a freethinking person,
and a courageous one, and I find courage
an essential quality for the understanding,
let alone the performance, of his works.
This courageous attitude in fact becomes
a requirement for the performers of Beethoven's music.
His compositions demand the performer to show courage,
for example in the use of dynamics.
Beethoven's habit of increasing the volume
with an extreme intensity and then abruptly following it
with a sudden soft passage
was only rarely used by composers before him.
Beethoven was a deeply political man
in the broadest sense of the word.
He was not interested in daily politics,
but concerned with questions of moral behavior
and the larger questions of right
and wrong affecting the entire society.
Especially significant was his view of freedom,
which, for him, was associated with the rights
and responsibilities of the individual:
he advocated freedom of thought
and of personal expression.
Beethoven's music tends to move from chaos
to order as if order were
an imperative of human existence.
For him, order does not result from forgetting
or ignoring the disorders that plague our existence;
order is a necessary development,
an improvement that may lead to
the Greek ideal of spiritual elevation.
It is not by chance that the Funeral March
is not the last movement of the Eroica Symphony,
but the second, so that suffering does not have the last word.
One could interpret much of the work of Beethoven
by saying that suffering is inevitable,
but the courage to fight it renders life worth living.