Dave Pitzer wrote:

>walter Meyer quoted a John Hersey's novel *The Wall* ....
>
>>   "said he thought the second movement of Beethoven's
>>   Fourth Piano Concerto was one of the greatest love scenes in music--
>>   with the orchestra masculine, the piano feminine.  Rachel remarked
>>   that her idea of a love scene was not simply a situation where a
>>   woman talks a man to sleep."
>
>This attaching of motives/emotions and even programs to non-program music
>is disheartening to see -- especially on what is -- to me -- an erudite,
>informed music discussion group.  To me, saying that a particular Beethoven
>movement, for example, is meant to express "love" or "hate" or "bravery" or
>represents a "love scene" between a man and a woman is sheer poppycock.
>It's juvenile, in my opinion.

I hope readers will have noted that: 1.  I did not attach any story or
scenario to the movement, and 2. the character whom the novel's narrator
admires, Rachel, rejected someone else's reading of such a story into the
movement, w/out necessarily substituting a story she was willing to accept.

I happen to agree that music, like beauty, is its own excuse for being.  I
don't agree, however, that it's juvenile poppycock for someone to see tales
in the music s/he also hears.  I believe Beethoven himself is supposed to
have said on learning of Napoleon's death that he had written the music for
that occasion eighteen years before.

Walter Meyer