![]() There are already so many names on the list, all of them, arguably, with reason. Her poem makes her point plain: had it been her purpose (it was not), his would be another name to add to a list of the cancelled. Through this work, Beethoven acted like a rapist, so the cultural musicologists said. Elsewhere, I revisit Adrienne Rich’s reflection on the protracted endurance of dissonance in The Ninth Symphony of Beethoven Understood at Last as a Sexual Message. Nietzsche starts as musically verbatim as possible, quoting The Ninth Symphony, the choral ode, all to go on to play with the spur, the thorn, the edge of dissonance. Not the Beethoven of The Creatures of Prometheus, although the little vignette Nietzsche pays for out of pocket, commissioning Prometheus unbound, liberated from his manacles shattered and broken on the rocks, can make us wonder, coupled with Goethe’s creative verses, the titan stealing the human-forming thunder of Genesis, moulded from clay and all. He tells us - via Schiller, who wrote the words, but also via Schiller’s theory of ancient tragedy - that the Dionysian is Beethoven. Nietzsche tells us in a book, starting with the very first section through to the end of The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music. If one could think the Dionysian in music, what would that be like? What would that sound like? Better still: who would that be? In memoriam: Michael Lee Aday: 1947-2022.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |