John Smyth:
>There might be something to all this vanity stuff. I read in a book
>about Romanticism that the disappearance of God from culture, (because
>of the rise of the philosophy of materialism, Newtonian physics, etc.),
>created a need for "supermen," seemingly super human people who could
>do the impossible and the miraculous, to replace God. Super virtuosos
>fit the bill, and of course one has to be a little vain to be god-like,
>not to mention the music some wrote for themselves.
Actually, there's a difference between attitudes toward music and
musicians, and music and musicians themselves.
>Are not cadenzas complete vanity?
No, they're not. They're entertainment, a rhetorical strategy in the
course of a movement, and perhaps several other things besides. Beethoven
and Mozart wrote cadenzas, after all. According to at least one poster,
Beethoven, who wrote cadenzas, was not vain and arrogant -- although I
myself would say that Beethoven was at least proud. The *fact* of the
inclusion of a cadenza has no psychological meaning at all. The cadenza
itself may.
Steve Schwartz
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