Oct 26, 2014 05:37 PM
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/1...-ex-musica
EXCERPT: Beethoven transformed music—but has veneration of him stifled his successors? ... For this conundrum—an artist almost too great for the good of his art—Beethoven himself bears little responsibility. There is no sign that he intended to oppress his successors from the grave. Although he expected that posterity would take an interest in him—otherwise he would not have saved so many of his sketches—he did not picture himself in the magniloquent terms employed by Hoffmann and others. “Everything I do apart from music is badly done and stupid,” he once wrote. And the music was the butt of withering self-criticism. On the subject of his late string quartets, which generations of listeners have hailed as a pinnacle of Western civilization, Beethoven once remarked to his publisher, “Thank God, there is less lack of imagination than ever before.” The comment remains staggering after nearly two hundred years, not merely because of the radical understatement—it would be like Shakespeare saying, “ ‘The Tempest’ is not as trite as my earlier plays”—but because of the implicit challenge to contemporary musical life. To perform Beethoven to the exclusion of the living is to display a total lack of imagination....
EXCERPT: Beethoven transformed music—but has veneration of him stifled his successors? ... For this conundrum—an artist almost too great for the good of his art—Beethoven himself bears little responsibility. There is no sign that he intended to oppress his successors from the grave. Although he expected that posterity would take an interest in him—otherwise he would not have saved so many of his sketches—he did not picture himself in the magniloquent terms employed by Hoffmann and others. “Everything I do apart from music is badly done and stupid,” he once wrote. And the music was the butt of withering self-criticism. On the subject of his late string quartets, which generations of listeners have hailed as a pinnacle of Western civilization, Beethoven once remarked to his publisher, “Thank God, there is less lack of imagination than ever before.” The comment remains staggering after nearly two hundred years, not merely because of the radical understatement—it would be like Shakespeare saying, “ ‘The Tempest’ is not as trite as my earlier plays”—but because of the implicit challenge to contemporary musical life. To perform Beethoven to the exclusion of the living is to display a total lack of imagination....