I haven’t written about Beethoven in a while. I was thinking
this morning that what impresses me most about his lifelong output (roughly
from age 14 to 56) is its inevitability, the logical way it developed from those
first songs and piano sketches to the almost unbearable intensity of the final
symphony, quartets, and sonatas.
It’s mythic, as though a Vedic god or goddess stood at the
peak of Mount Everest and, blowing on a conch shell, filled the valleys below with
this precisely ordered revelation. The peaks and valleys of his music unfold as
though planned for centuries by an Immortal Being. Beethoven’s life similarly
evolves like some mythic hero destined to suffer and die for his art. Even he
recognized his likeness to Prometheus, the Greek titan tortured eternally for
bringing fire to humankind.
I know I get a little crazy about Beethoven. But I can’t see
this inevitable, logical unfolding of music and human life in any other
composer or artist. Like the heroes of the great religions, Beethoven seems to
take on the sufferings of the world and offers a kind of preordained musical
redemption that is satisfying both in its finality and in the way it points to
greatness beyond. It is more than music. It may even be more than life. (L.L. Holt, author of The Black Spaniard)
