Could Beethoven be canceled? Norman Lebrecht affirms sure | Culture | EUROtoday

Is Beethoven’s music at risk? It is the worry that Norman Lebrecht (London, 76 years previous) expresses within the epilogue of his 2023 guide Why Beethoven? A phenomenon in 100 workswhich Alianza Música has simply printed in Spanish: “It has been requested that Beethoven be banned for being a man and white, that he be silenced to make room for repressed voices.” He continues with a less-than-encouraging prediction: “It won’t be long before some tenure-seeking academic with a cousin in public relations presents evidence that Beethoven had shares in a slave-trading company, made teenage singers of his Ninth Symphony was kissed on the mouth, he insulted minorities and exposed himself in a public place.” And he finishes it off by leaving the reader frankly anxious: “In reality, all of these statements are true, except one, as demonstrated by the book you have just read. In the current situation, the banning of Beethoven is as close as the appearance of a headline woke in The New York Times”.

All of this comes from some of the influential voices in English-language classical music criticism. Lebrecht is the proprietor of Slipped Disc, probably the most influential classical information portal, and the writer of a number of provocative books, equivalent to The fantasy of the instructor (Accent, 1997) and Who killed classical music? (Acento, 1998), the place he questions the cult of the determine of the conductor and divulges the business intricacies of classical music. He can also be an entertaining essayist and even a profitable novelist, along with his guide Genius and Anxiety: How the Jews Changed the World, 1847-1947 (Alianza, 2022) and his best-seller titled The Song of Forgotten Names which was tailored to the massive display in 2019. His intense exercise within the media has mixed journalistic columnism (of The Daily Telegraph to the journal The Critic) with radio applications (on BBC Radio 3) and, in Spain, he has been writing for nearly 30 years within the journal Scherzo.

Lebrecht is, above all, a “sloppy but entertaining muckraker “British”, according to the accurate description of the American musicologist Richard Taruskin. A brilliant “garbage remover” that has mixed a pretty narrative vein with frequent inaccuracies and a pure inclination in the direction of sensationalism. His editorial excesses pressured his monograph to be withdrawn from bookstores. Maestros, Masterpieces and Madness in 2007, following a defamation criticism by Klaus Heymann, founding father of the Naxos document label. And his hatred in the direction of the academicism that musicology represents has not stopped rising, as he demonstrated this month, in his column in The Criticthe place he calls the late Taruskin a “braggart” for questioning the veracity of Shostakovich’s memoirs printed by Solomon Volkov in 1979, a guide fully discredited for many years by most specialists and never a couple of critics.

This new monograph by Lebrecht on Beethoven is a sort of second a part of Why Mahler? How one man and ten symphonies modified the world (Alliance, 2011). If within the earlier guide I reviewed the spectacular fortune of Mahler’s music in distinction to the indifference he garnered in his time, now he proceeds in the other way with the distinctive case of Beethoven, a composer whose perennial success has not declined from his time to our personal. days. However, he affirms with none proof that all the pieces goes to alter due to a musicology that listens to the social actions of Me Too and Black Lives Matter. It is price clarifying that no musicologist has proposed “canceling” Beethoven, however somewhat addressing the dearth of variety in classical music and the necessity to develop programming with works by marginalized composers. Overcoming this conservatism with a extra numerous and inclusive repertoire has allowed, for instance, the rebirth of the African-American composer Florence Price. But that is detrimental for Lebrecht: “The United States National Symphony Orchestra can only perform a Beethoven cycle along with the works of two African-American composers, George Walker and William Grant Still, neither of whom would boast of being on its level,” he states in reference to the live performance cycle Beethoven & American Masters de la NSO de Washington.

If Lebrecht had learn Taruskin, as an alternative of insulting him, he would have understood the true cause for the survival of Beethoven’s music, one thing that he doesn’t make clear within the 400 pages of his guide. In the second quantity of his monumental Oxford History of Western Musicthe American musicologist explains that Beethoven’s music inaugurated the musical world we stay in at the moment. His compositions modified the nice for the grandiose as an inventive objective, which gave them a sacred facet with immense future repercussions. Great musical works, like nice work, started to be exhibited in public areas specifically designed for this objective. Thus, live performance halls had been born as museums or “temples of art” the place the general public doesn’t come to be entertained however to raise themselves. And the sound exegesis of those sacred texts has formed, over time, a sequence of nice interpretations that now we have treasured for the reason that starting of the twentieth century because of recordings. After Beethoven, practices so frequent till then in classical music equivalent to improvisation (at the moment associated to jazz) disappeared, and classical performers grew to become the good “readers” of written scores that they proceed to be at the moment.

This is exactly what the guide is devoted to: the writer selects 100 of those compositions or “sacred texts” by Beethoven, feedback on their particularities and highlights the recordings that he likes probably the most. The choice will not be chronological and is grouped by themes (Beethoven in love, Beethoven locked up, Beethoven in bother…). This construction permits the writer a nice succession of biographical feedback on the composer, anecdotes about his performers together with private experiences of Lebrecht himself. It begins in 1798 with the SPathetic onata to touch upon the patronage that allowed Beethoven to dedicate himself to composing and culminates with the Three equals (1812) that had been performed at his funeral. But Lebrecht peppers every story with lurid and sensational facets such because the peculiar sexual habits of Prince Lichnowsky or the rudimentary catheterization that Dr. Wawruch carried out on him in his final months. This obsession leads him to unusual contradictions, equivalent to stating that Beethoven by no means had sexual relations and, shortly after, elevating the speculation that he had a secret daughter with the Countess Josephine Brunsvik, whom he additionally makes his “immortal Beloved.”

Leaving apart all of the biographical concerns of Beethoven, woven with kind of creativeness and typically contrasted with Wikipedia, probably the most attention-grabbing feedback within the guide cope with the performers. Lebrecht has recognized most of the nice Beethoven conductors and instrumentalists of the final 40 years. His first-hand portraits of administrators such because the “holy madman” Klaus Tennstedt and the “peacemaker” Neville Marriner are very attention-grabbing. In truth, examine that seventh symphony It is the Beethoven work most programmed by giant orchestras and asks conductors equivalent to Iván Fischer, Simon Rattle, Riccardo Chailly, Franz Welser-Möst, Leonard Slatkin and Fabio Luisi because of this. He additionally consults their favourite recordings, as he does within the Violin Concerto with Gidon Kremer, and ended up choosing the fantastic stay recording by Ginette Neveu, in September 1949, a month earlier than she died in a aircraft crash on the age of thirty. There are many attention-grabbing suggestions and feedback on Beethoven recordings, amongst which Alicia de Larrocha and the Casals Quartet stand out as the one Spanish performances.

The most private (and honest) a part of the guide focuses on the Pastoral Symphony. Here the writer narrates the horrible relationship along with his stepmother, which led him to instinctively hate that composition and the Bruno Walter album that he performed at dwelling. But Lebrecht devotes particular curiosity to 2 well-known Beethovenian speculative themes with unequal success. On the one hand, it continues to take care of the weird story of the composer’s Spanish household roots, one thing that was denied in EL PAÍS three years in the past, after the dissemination of the baptismal document of his paternal grandmother who was born in Châtelet, a Belgian municipality close to town ​​of Charleroi. And, on the opposite, the dedication of the very well-known bagatelle For Elisewhich the writer turns into an episode of “theft, fraud, sex, Nazis, intentional deception and corruption.” In this case, Lebrecht supplies a brand new and really advanced idea, with the assistance of Michael Lorenz of the University of Vienna, the place he attributes the title of the work to a forgery to grant posterity to Elise Schachner, the granddaughter of the proprietor of the lacking autograph of the work. But it doesn’t take into accounts the newest contribution by Klaus Martin Kopitz, printed in 2020 in The Musical Timesthe place he retains alive the speculation that the work was devoted to the singer Elisabeth Röckel.

In brief, Beethoven stays virtually synonymous with what we name “classical music” at the moment, making it inconceivable to cancel it. In truth, James Mitchell’s article in Varsity, an unbiased publication from the University of Cambridge, in December 2020, which Lebrecht doesn’t cite on this guide, however on which he helps all his unfounded fears. Long stay Beethoven’s music, however hopefully inside an more and more numerous and inclusive repertoire.