"To resist the resistance, to make peace with this score on its own terms, may not be possible in our time. It would signal recovery of an optimism that our century's wars, upheavals, atrocities, and holocausts - and the despairing attendant cynicism that has from the beginning undergirded the modern movement - may have precluded once and for all. Yet the fact that we continue to insult and distort Beethoven's gigantic affirmation shows that it is still under our skins, that it still troubles the conscience of trivial artists like Ned Rorem, that it still awakens in us longings for what we can no longer believe in, but wish we could. We are still in the valley of the Ninth. And that gives hope."

-Richard Taruskin, regarding Beethoven's Ninth Symphony (1989)

Cheap shot on Rorem, Richard. Cheap shot!