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Report from Car
San Francisco’s KDFC has just made known its listeners’ “top classical pick of 2009.”
Their pick? Why, the Beethoven 9—just like the listenership of every other classical radio station in the world.
What is an ‘Ode to Joy,’ anyway? What was Schiller communicating? Was he so confused as to feel romantic about romance? (Or romanticism, really.) Refuse the title’s tendency to roll collected off of the tongue and demand that it make sense and it refuses. A Paean to Pleasure? A Celebration of the General Goodness? No, friend, not these sounds.
I met a woman in a first class cabin, where the climate favors people who observing your iPod and presuming sympatico will, unbidden, quote Beethoven 9 at you as their favorite piece of classical music. “Well, it is romantic, really.” “Oh, I know—very moving.”
“Don’t you find it sort of thick?” How do I mean? “The tone poem at the end. Isn’t it sort of laden, and besides which, what is the meaning of oratorio to joy, as though it were an internally coherent, self-starting condition?” “I don’t know; I don’t speak German. But it is my favorite melody.”
“Too much timpani, though,” she added; whereupon warm cookies began to be served, and the question turned to why Mahler, if he so wanted to succeed his model, did not compose a march to warm cookies, or something like that.
(Sent from BlackBerry.)
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