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Date: | Tue, 12 Jan 1999 20:53:05 +0000 |
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I wrote:
>>Maybe Beethoven, but his deafness complicates things.
and Mary Esterheld invites speculation:
>What if Beethoven hadn't become deaf? Any thoughts about whether his music
>would have been better? worse? Would he have been more prolific?
It's difficult to believe that it wouldn't have made much difference.
I suppose all the late works would have turned out very different, or
he would have gone down very different creative pathways. Perhaps his
internal motivations to compose would have been greater. Or lesser.
I don't know and nor can anyone else. If the deaf Beethoven had lived
longer, possibly his musical thinking would have become withdrawn into
an interior, imaginative world and increasingly detached from practical
questions of performability or acceptability. If such a process had
happened I have no idea how we might, at the end of the 20th century,
feel about such works. Nor can I answer the "more prolific?" question.
I rejected Beethoven partly because of the impossibility of judging how
his deafness might have affected any work that he might have produced had
he lived longer. Also because, while not totally embracing Jonathan Ellis'
S-curve calculations, I have a feeling that Beethoven had done so much in
so many areas of music that perhaps he was approaching the end of his
creative potential. That's a totally subjective impression and I can't
substantiate it. I picked Mahler partly because I have the reverse feeling
about him - the 9th symphony, Das Lied von der Erde and the unfinished 10th
show a composer whose gifts were still developing, and possibly moving into
a totally new phase of growth. Couple that with all the changes that were
going on in the musical world as well as in broader cultural and political
areas, and I think you have a recipe for something quite extraordinary that
sadly never happened.
Ian Crisp
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