New York - Day 2: The Barenboim Lecture

I can't remember another single night I've ever learned more - or if I have, it most certainly wasn't about music, and in that case, I probably don't remember it, unless there is incriminating evidence.

Despite the anti-congeniality rumors about Barenboim, the bar-table rumors whispered about his love life, and the never-ending speculation on how he treated a droolingly crippled Du Pre, I have to say I've never met a more charming person. Aside from his bio, he has a way of giving an audience the poignancy of despair and joire de vivre without even touching a note.

First point he made: the relativity between significance and quality of a composer is an idealistic method to determine the more-important-than-both: greatness. Definitively (or not, if you don't agree), significance is judged mainly by creation of a new idiom - it's judged by the courageous radicalness that sticks (lots of composers were courageous, but it never stuck, so who cares about them?). Likewise, quality is judged by...well, whatever history has used to judge what a good composer is.

Example: Mendelssohn was a good composer (as judged by classics like his violin concerto, piano concertos, symphonies, hebrides, etc.), but had he not existed, the course of music evolution would probably have evolved in the exact same way it did. Hence, insignificant. But take Berlioz - not such a great composer (just look at Symphonie Fantastique), but his early inventiveness was too important in the creation of Wagner and Liszt, and so on down that avant-garde food chain. Hence, significant. Beethoven, as Barenboim argues, was the one composer who bridged the gap between Good and Significant, and was possibly the first composer to do so (and if you think Bach was radical, then I'm sorry. You're wrong.).

Second point he made: Beethoven was also the only composer to mold the concepts of aethos and ethos together (don't ask, those are the words he used). The aesthetic aspect of Beethoven vs. the ethical aspect, I guess, meaning basically that Beethoven was the most moral composer to walk the planet. (He even hated Don Giovanni just for the content)

The last point he made is the most important: Beethoven, after he invented the romantic language, dramaticized an undramatic era of history, gave deaf people a reason to live, and whatever other philantrophic things he did - is ultimately about courage and redemption. Beethoven, in essense, is as Schnabel put it: The point of hardest resistance. He's not about taking the easy way out, and definitely not about any sort of compromise. He's about taking the hardest possible means to achieve the most glorious possible end (See 9th Symphony). Beethoven is about crescendo, crescendo, crescendo, and then subito piano (even, and especially if it's difficult); he's about dolce espressivo.

There's a famous conversation between a reporter and Leonard Bernstein, and the reporter asks, "why is Beethoven so great?"

Bernstein: Beethoven was the epitome of perfection - a composer whose music you know in the deepest of your heart, contains perfection so great that given any random note, not a single note could precede or follow it and make it any better.

Reporter: But Mr. Bernstein, your description of Beethoven sounds more like the description of some kind of God.

Bernstein: I meant it to be.