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The Work--One Life

The Work--One Life REVIEW Review The Work—One Life KLAUS KROPFINGER Lewis Lockwood. Beethoven: The Music and the Life. New York: Norton, 2003. 604, xix pp. “We are living today in an Age of Entertainment shaped and controlled by the media in which time is shattered with all the hype, speed, and moral delinquency needed to reduce anything to trivia, as you may have seen in the television commercial featuring car wreck dummies singing the ‘Ode of Joy,’ suggesting that if we cannot rise to the artistic levels of Beethoven and Schiller, perhaps we can bring them down to ours.”1 These lines by William Gaddis point emphatically at those tendencies and forces against which an author has to make a stand, who in our time shoulders the task of writing extensively—if not exhaustively—about an artist of such enormous dimension as Ludwig van Beethoven. One must stand against the omnipresent, multifaceted, leveled, and leveling reception that tends to transform great art into commodities suitable for television and truly long-distance listening, commodities appropriate to represent the “average taste.” High art— which Beethoven himself named “difficult” and, because of this, “beautiful, good, great”2— is slathered with a sauce of dull taste to suite the requirements http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png 19th-Century Music University of California Press

The Work--One Life

19th-Century Music , Volume 27 (3) – Apr 1, 2004

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Publisher
University of California Press
Copyright
Copyright © by the University of California Press
Subject
Book Review
ISSN
0148-2076
eISSN
1533-8606
DOI
10.1525/ncm.2004.27.3.287
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

REVIEW Review The Work—One Life KLAUS KROPFINGER Lewis Lockwood. Beethoven: The Music and the Life. New York: Norton, 2003. 604, xix pp. “We are living today in an Age of Entertainment shaped and controlled by the media in which time is shattered with all the hype, speed, and moral delinquency needed to reduce anything to trivia, as you may have seen in the television commercial featuring car wreck dummies singing the ‘Ode of Joy,’ suggesting that if we cannot rise to the artistic levels of Beethoven and Schiller, perhaps we can bring them down to ours.”1 These lines by William Gaddis point emphatically at those tendencies and forces against which an author has to make a stand, who in our time shoulders the task of writing extensively—if not exhaustively—about an artist of such enormous dimension as Ludwig van Beethoven. One must stand against the omnipresent, multifaceted, leveled, and leveling reception that tends to transform great art into commodities suitable for television and truly long-distance listening, commodities appropriate to represent the “average taste.” High art— which Beethoven himself named “difficult” and, because of this, “beautiful, good, great”2— is slathered with a sauce of dull taste to suite the requirements

Journal

19th-Century MusicUniversity of California Press

Published: Apr 1, 2004

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