"It doesn't move me, it only amazes me."

Azzurro wrote:

"The collapse of the house is to be feared".

I challenge that... the sonata form is being put to a hard test

Goethe's phrase must, as always, be contextualized within the historical period and, only in that context, can it obviously find its raison d'être.

Goethe never loved Beethoven's music, preferring Mozart's by far because, like many of his contemporaries—and not just contemporaries—he did not understand it at all. Too futuristic—today we would use the term avant-garde: Rattalino considers Beethoven the first representative of musical Avant-Garde—that music was for ears accustomed to very different sounds.

The poet Bettina Brentano, a friend of Beethoven as well as the ward and lover of Goethe, wrote to the great poet on May 28, 1810: «(...) It is of Beethoven that I want to speak to you. When I am in his company, I forget the world and I also forget you. (...) I know I am not mistaken if I affirm what today perhaps no one will understand or want to believe, that in his interior evolution he advances far beyond all of humanity, and who knows if we will ever reach him.

To you I can confess: I believe in a divine enchantment as an element of the spiritual nature. Now this enchantment is exercised by Beethoven through his Art. When he speaks of it, he speaks of it as if it were a magical art (...) I was with him in a magnificent garden (...) Beethoven stopped in the sun, although it was very hot, and said to me: “Goethe's poems exert a great fascination on me, not only for their content, but also for their rhythm. That wonderful language of his which, almost like Jacob's ladder, guides us to a superior existence, raptures me into a musical atmosphere, through which composition comes spontaneously. From the center of inspiration, the melodic wave spreads freely in all directions. I follow it, I chase it with passion. It escapes me ahead and disappears into the weave of the most diverse motifs. But soon I re-grasp it with renewed passion, so as not to leave it again, and raptured in the joy of creation, I hundredfold its modulations, until finally the original musical thought triumphantly reaffirms itself in all its fullness. This is how a symphony is born. If music is the mediator between the life of the senses and that of the spirit (...) nothing better than music gives you the sensation that every work of the spirit contains within itself something eternal, infinite, ungraspable, and although production is always accompanied in me by the feeling of success, I still languish in the insatiable desire to begin again, like a child, from the beginning, as much as it seemed entirely complete with the last bar (...). Speak to Goethe of me and tell him to listen to my symphonies; then he will certainly agree with me in affirming that music alone can open for us the doors to a superior world of knowledge, of which man is but a part, but which he will never be able to fully explore (...)”.

But these words were to no avail, and even while acknowledging Beethoven as a "great one," he did not want—or did not know how to—recognize in the genius from Bonn the man who, by a strange kabbalistic fate, in 1770—the year of Beethoven's birth—was prophesied by Johann Gottfried Herder, the scholar, philosopher of history, and German theologian: "A man will come who will know how to unite purely human feelings with music, who will know how to adapt it to his sonic poems, at the service of expression and action; a man who will faithfully interpret the spirit of the German nation, but who at the same time will know how to rise above it within the scope of a wider human brotherhood, who will make all the people partakers of those conquests achieved by music on the level of pure spirit and already revealed to a few chosen ones".

In that same year, Goethe himself in Strasbourg hoped for the arrival of a man in whom he would greet the "German genius" and his new revelation in the artist who, endowed with the faculties "of easily modeling all images," of feeling "the nervous force of desires and pains" through struggle, suffering, and joy, would better than Prometheus bring "the happiness of the gods down to earth."

Today, Goethe's phrase about the Fifth no longer makes any sense. Today Beethoven has been completely assimilated, but this does not change the fact that even today, listening to him, one cannot fail to grasp that strong innovative vein that his music releases compared to its recent past, its present, and even its future."

Beethoven stopped in the sun, although it was very hot, and said to me:

«. . . If music is the mediator between the life of the senses and that of the spirit . . . »

Dear Daniele...

always with the necessary benefit of the doubt regarding the words reported by BB . . . I feel these words of Beethoven (not only those I have reported) to be very true
my "like" - I don't think you'll mind - you should share it with him!

thanks! see you soon