Reprising this awesome quotation from Romain Rolland on Beethoven’s response to his great obstacles:
The hammer is not all: the anvil also is necessary. Had destiny descended only upon some weakling, or on an imitation great man, and bent his back under this burden, there would have been no tragedy in it, only an everyday affair. But here destiny meets one of its own stature, who “seizes it by the throat,” who is at savage grips with it all the night till the dawn — the last dawn of all — and who, dead at last, lies with his two shoulders touching the earth, but in his death is carried victorious on his shield; one who out of his wretchedness has created a richness, out of his infirmity the magic wand that opens the rock.
Page 34 of Rolland’s 1927 Beethoven the Creator.
Related: My other posts on Ludwig van Beethoven. Thanks to Larry Abrams for the Rolland quotation.
Related: Newberry short commentaries on the great works in art history:
Beautiful. I never saw the ferocity and violence of his struggle as malevolent, but as a fight against malevolence that looked it squarely in the eye and never surrendered to it. He was raised Catholic yet I believe refused a confessor on his deathbed in spite of the urging of friends.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ZVdVuskkKU
On the question of whether Beethoven’s music was “malevolent,” professor George Walsh said to me “Yes, I can hear the lambs gnashing their teeth in the 6th Symphony.”
Hilarious, Marsha.