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This is the stuff. I like the concept for this book and the execution. I think it has things of interest and importance to say to many regardless of their feelings about Beethoven’s ninth symphony. However if you have never listened to any of Beethoven’s music I would not recommend it is an introductory text.

I have typed out some passages from the text below.

Beethoven is, among other things, an iconic figure to worshippers of a certain type of genius, whereas Michelangelo serves that purpose for others, and Mozart or Dante or Goethe or Shakespeare or Picasso or Stravinsky for still others. Many human beings need to worship someone or something, but the object of the worshipful person’s worship says more about that person than about the worshipped object.

Quote from a section on living under repression in restoration Europe:
Although the despair factor was as present in the human psyche in the early nineteenth century as it is today and as it has been throughout human history, the search for absolute meaning was still a reasonable option two hundred years ago.

[S]piritual and intellectual liberation requires endless internal warfare against everything in ourselves that narrows us down instead of opening us up and that replaces questing with certitude.

Nearly two centuries later, the world still overflows with people who believe that truth not only exists but that it is simple and straightforward, and that their truths - be they political, religious, philosophical, moral or social - constitute The Truth. Federico Fellini’s characterization, a generation ago, of the fascist mentality as “a refusal to deepen one’s individual relationship to life, out of laziness, prejudice, unwillingness to inconvenience oneself, and presumptuousness� describes the obedient adherents of most prefabricated beliefs, everywhere and at all times.�

In 1996, while I was helping Sir Georg Solti to write his memoirs, we discussed many works in considerable detail. When we talked about Beethoven’s Ninth, he happened to be studying it for a forthcoming performance with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra at the Proms in London, and he told me he was determined to use Beethoven’s quick metronome indication - quarter note = 88 - or something close to it, as the basic tempo for the first movement. He asked me what I thought of his plan, and I expressed the opinion that if one exceeded approximately 80 as a basic tempo, one would have to slow down substantially at many points to convey the music’s full power - at all the big climaxes, for instance - and in the violins� and violas� thirty-second-note forte passages... I was not in London when he gave the performance in question, but the next time I visited him he had just received a videotape of it and was eager to have a look. I was more than a little surprised to see and hear Solti and the orchestra begin the movement at a fairly deliberate, average tempo well below the one indicated by Beethoven’s metronome mark. I asked what had happened, and Sir Georg, Who was eighty-four at the time, smiled as sheepishly as a schoolboy who has been caught at some mischief. “I didn’t have th e courage,� he said.

There is so much more I’d like to include but am afraid I lack the patience to type more out on this pad.

The book includes a brief biography of Beethoven, a look at political life in Europe leading to and during 1824, other key figures of the time in the other arts, a description of the ninth written for the non-musician* , and a look at how the ninth symphony impacted other major composers who were alive at the time of it’s premiere.


*(The prose description of what “happens� in the ninth is my least favorite section, thus the four star rating for the book. To me programmatic descriptions of symphonies are unrevealing and just not fun to read.)