Why do some many of the comments about the variations of the opus 111 sound like walking on broken glass. If we have to look carefully around us to say Beethoven knew how to walk with a jaunt and a hip swing, no wonder we can't seem to get the music to click with the young. And so many of the comments reflect an initial reaction that the performer were "doing something to the music." Why? Because it made us see stars, lifted us up to a mystical joy that comes in the pit of the stomach, that "yeah, man!" feeling. It is like a hypochondriac afraid of being happy. There are 14,000 thousand quivering "that's my feeling." No one would hesitate to come right out and say the Appassionata is dark and emotional. It isn't whether the op. 111 is jazzy, it is which-ironically with the exception of the most maudlin and popular-so are almost all the sonatas. And his string quartets, from the very earliest, the sudden jumping for joy in the slow movement of the op. 18/2 which presages the slow movements of the op. 127 and 132 and the whole of the op. 135 with the exception of the slow movement. Serkin and his friends made a private tape of the 2nd piano concerto's Latin beat. Did they really think they, too, had discovered something new in the music? The Consecration of the House swings as does the Egmont and the King Stephen. It isn't we who are interpreting our rhythmic experiences back into Beethoven. Jazz, not syncopation, was there all the time. We just hadn't become hooked on these rhythms and so missed them like the schnook who can't get the beat and so he can't dance. That's why certain blacks assume Beethoven must have been one of them. Who else could write such pure swing in the middle of sedate Europe? It's jazz, real jazz, no one is pulling anything over on you. Andy Carlan