主题：【整理】梅岗城故事发表五十周年 -- 元亨利

Even for those who are tune-deaf(no pun intended), the mere mentioning of the name Beethoven will conjure up the image of an angry man fighting the fate. And of course, the symphonies--The Fifth and The Ninth, etc. And there is never a lack of books about Beethoven. Musical historian and critic Harvey Sachs has just put another one out on the shelf--

THE NINTH

Beethoven and the World in 1824

By Harvey Sachs

Illustrated. 225 pages. Random House. $26.

-----------------------------

For generations Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, with its choral finale espousing universal brotherhood, has been the work of choice to solemnize a peace treaty, open a new concert hall or foster communal bonding. Leonard Bernstein conducted the Ninth at an outdoor concert in Berlin to celebrate the fall of the Berlin Wall. Then again it was conducted profoundly by the great Wilhelm Furtwngler in Nazi Germany, leading orchestras and choruses purged of Jews.

Beethoven’s last symphony has been “used as a battle flag by liberals and conservatives, by democrats and autocrats, by Nazis, Communists and anarchists.”

Yet, as Mr. Sachs makes clear here, Beethoven’s Ninth, whatever ideas and ideals we charge or clutter it with, is also an ingenious composition by a towering master in his transcendent late period, a path-breaking work that defined its cultural era. Mr. Sachs, a historian and critic who is the author of valuable biographies of Toscanini and Rubinstein, convincingly relates the symphony to contemporaneous works by champions of Romanticism in other fields, including Byron, Pushkin, Delacroix, Stendhal and Heine.

Beethoven always said music was a higher calling than philosophy. Yet by this late stage of his life, he had long been cut off from natural social intercourse because of his deafness, isolation and orneriness. His pieces were not expressions of his life; they were his life, Mr. Sachs argues. Reading this book, you feel for the composer, trying to bond with others through an astonishing symphony.

纽时书评链接