Peter Goldstein laments:

>I realize this may be just a phase, and in a couple of years I'll be
>back loving Beethoven.  But right now he's a bore--and a loud
>and pretentious one at that.
>
>So--is there anyone out there who has ever felt this?

Not with Beethoven - he still has, as Peter once thought, "the dramatic
power, the emotional depth, the grandeur, the intellectual rigor" as far
as I'm concerned.  There was a period of some years when, for a few months
and for reasons I can't explain, I just couldn't listen to Brahms (somebody
please pass Mimi the smelling salts!) and found him thick, laboured and
meandering.  Then I'd snap out of it and wonder how on earth I could have
felt like that, and mervelled anew at, say, the slow movement of the 4th
symphony.  Then some months later, I'd go off him again.  However, in
recent years, I've dug deep into the piano music and the chamber music,
and find new aspects of a composer I'm surprised to find is one of my
very favourites - I can't imagine him falling out of favour again.

However, there are a few individual works that I either never much cared
for in the first place or have heard once too often.  In the first category
are, for example, Mozart's Flute and Harp Concerto and Franck's Symphony.
In the second - Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto and Scheherezade.  Then there
are some warhorses I'd be happy never to hear again - Bolero heads this
list.

Someone - I think it was Virgil Thomson - once advocated no performances
of the Beethoven symphonies for a year to give us the chance to rediscover
them.  But this is to ignore the fact that - possibly every day - someone
is hearing Beethoven 5 for the first time, as all of us listers once did.

Richard Pennycuick
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