Haydn at Mozart's death

[Rod]

Originally posted by SR:

I think if you looked at the number of performances done worldwide each opera season of Fidelio vs any of the top 4 Mozart operas you'd find your opinion in the minority.

I agree.

Originally posted by SR:

Doesn't make you wrong,

I agree

Originally posted by SR:
Just why would you even bother comparing works by Mozart to Beethoven since you don't care for Mozart anyway. How do you arrive at a number of 10:1 quality difference ?

Regards

Steve

Another poster invited the comparison. 10 seemed as good a number as any at the time.



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"If I were but of noble birth..." - Rod Corkin

[Gurn Blanston]

Originally posted by lysander:


... The fact is that it was Beethoven that took the symphonic form to unparalleled heights, way above the level attained by Mozart...

In Quixote-like fashion, I plunge ahead...
You cannot compare Mozart's symphonies to Beethoven's. Mozart was 8 years in the grave when B published his first symphony. Mozart's last (K 551) was published in August 1788. You can only (and why would you want to?) compare Mozart to people who were writing symphonies in 1788 then, and the only name that springs to mind is Haydn. In 1788, Haydn wrote 2 symphonies, Nos. 90 & 91. They are very fine works too, but neither of them is The Jupiter, I assure you. You can only compare B with those who were writing in his time, and there is obviously no comparison. In the mid 1820's, Schubert wrote his last 4 symphonies, and as good as they are, they can't match Beethoven. I don't think even an ardent Schubertian would claim that the Great C Major is the peer of the Greatest d minor! This argument should satisfy any rational person (and I don't single you out here, there are actually some irrational types out here, it would seem). I adore Mozart's music, I am passionately fond of Beethoven's, and there are 3 or 4 others who are close behind. Why compare them? Just enjoy the music! ;-)) That's my opinion, I may be wrong.
Regards,
Gurn

[spaceray]

I can only agree whole heartedly with every word of this post Gurn and I wish I had said it myself!

[lysander]

Originally posted by Gurn Blanston:
In Quixote-like fashion, I plunge ahead...
You cannot compare Mozart's symphonies to Beethoven's. Mozart was 8 years in the grave when B published his first symphony. Mozart's last (K 551) was published in August 1788. You can only (and why would you want to?) compare Mozart to people who were writing symphonies in 1788 then, and the only name that springs to mind is Haydn. In 1788, Haydn wrote 2 symphonies, Nos. 90 & 91. They are very fine works too, but neither of them is The Jupiter, I assure you. You can only compare B with those who were writing in his time, and there is obviously no comparison. In the mid 1820's, Schubert wrote his last 4 symphonies, and as good as they are, they can't match Beethoven. I don't think even an ardent Schubertian would claim that the Great C Major is the peer of the Greatest d minor! This argument should satisfy any rational person (and I don't single you out here, there are actually some irrational types out here, it would seem). I adore Mozart's music, I am passionately fond of Beethoven's, and there are 3 or 4 others who are close behind. Why compare them? Just enjoy the music! ;-)) That's my opinion, I may be wrong.
Regards,
Gurn

Hi Gurn,

I, like yourself, am uncomfortable with the idea of comparing and hope that I did not give that impression. Perhaps a better word would be, 'development'. Having said that Gurn, let us not forget there is such a thing in language as good, better, and best. Of course to be applied with extreme care in classical music.
But I would suggest it does have some validity.
Bruckner, for instance, has been called a genius without talent, meaning that his musical conception and themes were of a very high order, but his skill in orchastration in translating musical theory into reallity, was mediocre.
Beethoven's 9th symphony was the Ultima Thule of the symphony, and symphonic developmet thereafter, had nowhere else to go.
Beethoven's music skills are vastly superior to that of Bruckner, and that is without putting Bruckner down.
Wagner acknowledged that Beethoven was the master of the symphonic form.

I agree that the Jupiter is a magnificent late symphony of Mozart, with its dark colouring harmonies, deeply suggestive of Mozart's inner turmoils and fears for the future.
My husband and I very much adore listening to Mozart and Beethoven. But I make no apologies for being more passionate about Beethoven,, his music speaks the language of my soul.

Like you said Gurn, lets just listen and enjoy the greats!



[This message has been edited by lysander (edited June 12, 2003).]

[Peter]

[QUOTE]Originally posted by Gurn Blanston:
In Quixote-like fashion, I plunge ahead...
You cannot compare Mozart's symphonies to Beethoven's. Mozart was 8 years in the grave when B published his first symphony. Mozart's last (K 551) was published in August 1788. You can only (and why would you want to?) compare Mozart to people who were writing symphonies in 1788 then, and the only name that springs to mind is Haydn. In 1788, Haydn wrote 2 symphonies, Nos. 90 & 91. They are very fine works too, but neither of them is The Jupiter, I assure you. You can only compare B with those who were writing in his time, and there is obviously no comparison. In the mid 1820's, Schubert wrote his last 4 symphonies, and as good as they are, they can't match Beethoven. I don't think even an ardent Schubertian would claim that the Great C Major is the peer of the Greatest d minor!


I don't agree with this date thing! A work of art should stand or fall on its own merits regardless of dates or comparisons. For example Mozart's 'Jupiter', Haydn's no.103, Schubert's 9th, Brahms' 4th are all 'great' symphonies - it's just that Beethoven's 9th is in a class of its own.


I adore Mozart's music, I am passionately fond of Beethoven's, and there are 3 or 4 others who are close behind. Why compare them? Just enjoy the music!

This I entirely agree with!


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'Man know thyself'

[Gurn Blanston]

[quote]Originally posted by Peter:

I don't agree with this date thing! A work of art should stand or fall on its own merits regardless of dates or comparisons. For example Mozart's 'Jupiter', Haydn's no.103, Schubert's 9th, Brahms' 4th are all 'great' symphonies - it's just that Beethoven's 9th is in a class of its own.

This I entirely agree with!

Peter,
I mention the date thing for a very specific reason. It is much too easy to look back over 200 years of history and pick out the highlights, because we have the advantage o knowing how things turned out. However, putting yourself in Mozart's shoes for a minute (an intellectual stretch for anyone, to forget what you know about the future!), he had no idea whatsoever about B's existence, or specifically the turn that was to come in symphonic form a few years after his death. All he knew was that Haydn was writing a pretty good symphony, so using that as a general model, he put his own ideas to work and came out with what, I hope we can agree, was the symphonic model of 1788. Beethoven however, not only had all of Mozart's output available to him as food for thought, but he also had the subsequent London Symphonies of Haydn to think about too. Anyone who thinks that something as great as a symphony is written in a vacuum without reference to what has come before is only fooling him/herself. If Mozart had lived until 1815, for example, do you think that he would not have written greater symphonies than he did earlier? Notice I am not saying greater than B!!! But as the 2 greatest composers of their time, I think they would have pushed each other ever forward. Mozart's disastrous passing took away this opportunity from us (and probably didn't do much for him either;-)) to hear what may have been, but it is simply not reasonable to compare things from 2 different time periods. Apples and oranges.
Regards,
Gurn

[lysander]

The intellectual and musical climate of a composer is the intellectual musical climate of that composer.
No more and no less. It is the environment, the medium in which works take shape. Composers at the start of their career really who are finding a musical voice and vocabulary tend to follow in the footsteps of their great predecessors.
Beethoven's first Symphony can be characterized in many senses as Mozart's last symphony, Brahm's first symphony, whilst not a continuation of B's 9th, Nothing could be of course, it is overwhelmingly Beethovenesque.
I just don't buy into the theory, that if Mozart and Beethoven indeed had lived longer they would have significantly influenced one another. By the time they might have been in that position, these towering geniuses were far too, in a sense, set in their musical ways and had developed their musical individuality to such lengths that the achievements of one would have been pretty much of academic interest to the other, although nonetheless fascinating, I am sure, for both of them, as they beheld the unfolding genius of the other. The point is that the preoccupation with dates is irrelevant.
To put it crudely, Mozart didn't have it in him to write the Eroica, or the Pastorale yet alone the 9th. In the same way Beethoven did not have it in him to write the marriage of Figaro. Whilst Beethoven was dazzled by Mozart operatic skills and his complex surefooted orchestration, he had nothing but contempt for the ridiculous story lines of Mozart's opera's.
Yes, the climate does influence a composer,
but I subscribe to the great man theory of history, which is that, great genius's like Caesar, Shakespeare and Beethoven have a greatly more profound impact on the course of human history, and indeed our future than what are called the hisorical economic and social forces.
That is not to underestimate the importance of a movement like the French revolution, which is still felt today, and which Beethoven was profoundly aware of the significance of.



[This message has been edited by lysander (edited June 12, 2003).]

[Chaszz]

Originally posted by lysander:


...Yes, the climate does influence a composer, but I subscribe to the great man theory of history, which is that, great genius's like Caesar, Shakespeare and Beethoven have a greatly more profound impact on the course of human history, and indeed our future than what are called the hisorical economic and social forces.
That is not to underestimate the importance of a movement like the French revolution, which is still felt today, and which Beethoven was profoundly aware of the significance of.

[This message has been edited by lysander (edited June 12, 2003).]

I disagree and I think each of these three men was conditioned by his time. Caesar would have been a great general in any era. But he would not have achieved his larger accomplishment (perhaps a negative rather than positive one) of bringing the Roman Republic to an end and paving the way for the Empire, had he not lived at a specific time when others before him had rocked the foundations of the state and brought about a series of ever-greater crises: the Gracchi brothers, Marius, Sulla and Pompey.

Shakespeare would also have been great anytime, but perhaps not as supremely great as he was because his mind and spirit fit so perfectly into the Renaissance.

Likewise Beethoven would have always been a great composer, but I don't think he would have have changed music in the directions he did were it not for Romanticism. We've been down this road before, and I agree that B. is not a Romantic composer in the formal harmonic sense, as Peter says. But I think the overwhelming thrust of his work is inseparable from the Romantic climate. And
further evidence for this, which has not been mentioned in this Romantic/Classical debate before, is that all the Romantic composers idolized him, but did not go back to classicism on that account. They took his underlying spirit and ran into the future with it. Can anyone name a later 19th C. composer in the Classical style who achieved what the Romantics did in that century? And who was their god?

So I see all of these as great men who were channeled in certain directions largely because of their times. I see history as sweeping them with it rather than the other way around. And perhaps, only perhaps, a supreme genius goes from merely very great to supreme because his personality is so in tune with the temper of his time. For example, perhaps Brahms, whom probably we all (with one exception) think is a great composer, but not a supreme genius, would have gotten closer if he had not lived in the Romantic era.

Chaszz


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"People become civilised, not in proportion to their willingness to believe, but in proportion to their readiness to doubt."

[Peter]

Originally posted by Gurn Blanston:
Peter,
I mention the date thing for a very specific reason. It is much too easy to look back over 200 years of history and pick out the highlights, because we have the advantage o knowing how things turned out. However, putting yourself in Mozart's shoes for a minute (an intellectual stretch for anyone, to forget what you know about the future!), he had no idea whatsoever about B's existence, or specifically the turn that was to come in symphonic form a few years after his death. All he knew was that Haydn was writing a pretty good symphony, so using that as a general model, he put his own ideas to work and came out with what, I hope we can agree, was the symphonic model of 1788. Beethoven however, not only had all of Mozart's output available to him as food for thought, but he also had the subsequent London Symphonies of Haydn to think about too. Anyone who thinks that something as great as a symphony is written in a vacuum without reference to what has come before is only fooling him/herself. If Mozart had lived until 1815, for example, do you think that he would not have written greater symphonies than he did earlier? Notice I am not saying greater than B!!! But as the 2 greatest composers of their time, I think they would have pushed each other ever forward. Mozart's disastrous passing took away this opportunity from us (and probably didn't do much for him either;-)) to hear what may have been, but it is simply not reasonable to compare things from 2 different time periods. Apples and oranges.
Regards,
Gurn

Yes I agree that composers do not work in a vacuum. My point is that Mozart's Prague symphony (for example) is a great work regardless of what went before or what came after. Yes it was obviously influenced by what came before, but it is no less a great work just because Beethoven later wrote the Eroica! Perhaps had he lived to hear the Eroica he may have been influenced by it, or possibly appalled! At any rate Mozart would have continued to develop as a composer without Beethoven. I agree with your last point, in fact we seem to be saying the same thing but for different reasons.

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'Man know thyself'

[lysander]

[QUOTE]Originally posted by Chaszz:
I disagree and I think each of these three men was conditioned by his time. Caesar would have been a great general in any era. But he would not have achieved his larger accomplishment (perhaps a negative rather than positive one) of bringing the Roman Republic to an end and paving the way for the Empire, had he not lived at a specific time when others before him had rocked the foundations of the state and brought about a series of ever-greater crises: the Gracchi brothers, Marius, Sulla and Pompey.

Shakespeare would also have been great anytime, but perhaps not as supremely great as he was because his mind and spirit fit so perfectly into the Renaissance.

Likewise Beethoven would have always been a great composer, but I don't think he would have have changed music in the directions he did were it not for Romanticism. We've been down this road before, and I agree that B. is not a Romantic composer in the formal harmonic sense, as Peter says. But I think the overwhelming thrust of his work is inseparable from the Romantic climate. And
further evidence for this, which has not been mentioned in this Romantic/Classical debate before, is that all the Romantic composers idolized him, but did not go back to classicism on that account. They took his underlying spirit and ran into the future with it. Can anyone name a later 19th C. composer in the Classical style who achieved what the Romantics did in that century? And who was their god?

So I see all of these as great men who were channeled in certain directions largely because of their times. I see history as sweeping them with it rather than the other way around. And perhaps, only perhaps, a supreme genius goes from merely very great to supreme because his personality is so in tune with the temper of his time. For example, perhaps Brahms, whom probably we all (with one exception) think is a great composer, but not a supreme genius, would have gotten closer if he had not lived in the Romantic era.

Chaszz


[/QUOTE

Oh dear, I was wondering how long it would be before we heard that dreadful word conditioning!. It reminds me of two things, the first thing is Pavlov and his dogs. Secondly, it reminds me of the great debate between the linguistics scholar, Chomsky, and the behaviouralist, Skinner.
The latter never got over the comprehensive demolition of his superficial and misleading theories about conditioning by Chomsky, who established, I should think for all time by any unbiased reader of his essay that human beings are infinitely and inherently creative and through what he calls generative grammer, human beings create both language in an inexhaustable supply and every intellectual faculty and thus transform themselves and the world around them.
Now sure, the environment has an effect, but it is often in the case of geniuses, far less that we think. Someone who has had a bad childhood may grow up to be a worse adult. But really, so called conditioning and psychotherapy is so much nonesense because it does not explain and cannot explain why someone who has had a bad childhood nevertheless, instead of turning out worse in adulthood infact betters themselves.
Just look at the later tragic years of Mozart and the extraordinary musical compositions that he produced. The same with Beethoven, whose later life was certainly no picnic, all positive people do these sorts of things, ie. they transform miserable personal circumstances into something greater than themselves and do not submit to the depressing, downward pull of bad influences of habits in or on their own character. The human spirit triumphs over adversity with people of character, and no amount of cod so called conditioning can account for that. As Chomsky showed, conditioning is a trivial non-provable and therefore unscientific theory, because you could say, someone is conditioned to do something good, or something bad,it is completely meaningless, and has no reference to any authentic and semantic context of words and language.
Looking at wider movements in history, I wonder whether they can be separated from the great men that shape them.
Can you seperate Robespierre and Napoleon from the French Revolution, Washington, Adams, etc. from the American Revolution, Galileo, Newton etc. from the scientific revolution, James Watt from the Industrial Revulotion. These men made these Revolutions and affected all of us.
So far as Caesar is concerned, I agree, he would have been great in any era, though perhaps in a different form. If Caesar had been Napoleon, we Brits would have been beaten at Waterloo, and even the iron Duke himself would have had a bad case of metal fatigue. I cannot imagine Caesar in the military in the 21st century, simply because of the presence of nuclear weapons and the fact that they rob warfare of any proportionality that the ancients regarded as essential to the conduct of war, and also undermine the whole idea of winners and losers, and Caesar always saw himself as a winner.
Alexander the great I suppose would have made a fantastic IT salesman with that wonderful sales pitch that he had, that opponents couldn't resist. Caesar's genius flourished in the chaotic period of the late Republic, and that allowed full rein for the display of his extraordinary talent, but I am sure he would have been a genius in any age at whatever he chose to do.
These are impoverished times, I agree in political terms, so these greats from the past would probably choose some other field like science or business.
Yes, there is a serendipity about things at times, Beethoven and Caesar were the right men in the right place at the right time, true. But that is a larger question about the workings of providence or fate, and which is ultimately unknowable and
beyond human ken, and has really nothing to do with the really quite demeanig and wrong-headed notions about conditioning and the social enviromnent, which the human spirit surmounts in any event.

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"The higher the great geniuses soar, the further out of reach of those who claim they are created for them"

~ Hector Berlioz ~




[This message has been edited by lysander (edited June 12, 2003).]

[Chaszz]

[QUOTE]Originally posted by lysander:
[Oh dear, I was wondering how long it would be before we heard that dreadful word conditioning!. It reminds me of two things, the first thing is Pavlov and his dogs. Secondly, it reminds me of the great debate between the linguistics scholar, Chomsky, and the behaviouralist, Skinner.
The latter never got over the comprehensive demolition of his superficial and misleading theories about conditioning by Chomsky, who established, I should think for all time by any unbiased reader of his essay that human beings are infinitely and inherently creative and through what he calls generative grammer, human beings create both language in an inexhaustable supply and every intellectual faculty and thus transform themselves and the world around them.

>> I was using 'conditioned by his time' in a
much more casual way, and never meant to bring in connotations of Skinner. You are beating a straw horse here. I would NEVER imply that a Beethoven could be conditioned like a laboratory dog! I meant it in the sense of 'influenced'.

As for Chomsky establishing anything for all time, no scientist's work is safe from later correction and refutation, even Newton, whose theory has been superseded by Einstein's. Chomsky's is more speculative and less subject to proof than Newton's by far, and is I believe disputed by several current branches of lingusitics and neurology.

As for the rest of your reply, we could
go back and forth for a long time on the question of whether history makes men or men make history. In my opinion it's some of each. I think the French Revolution would have happened either with or without Robespierre. Napoleon is a different story, and probably did change history, but maybe not so much in the long run, since a general European repressive reaction to the revolution, as happened after 1815, was probably inevitable.

Also the American Revolution had only one or two indispensables, Washington and perhaps Jefferson. If they were absent and it had failed, it would only have been delayed. There was too much widespread feeling and too many capable men. And France was only too ready to provide decisive help to dislodge England.

But getting to Beethoven, did he make history? I'm not saying that history made him, but it certainly influenced the course his genius took and what he produced. Once again, the Romantic movement and the parts of it that were closely tied to human rights and democracy were very important to him and what he composed (even though he did not write Romantic music in the harmonic sense, as Peter has pointed out twice). The same rights-of-man idealism led Byron, the quintessential Romantic poet, to go to Greece and fight for its liberation from the Turks.

How did Beethoven affect history? As I said before, the musicians who produced the lasting music of the next era were Romantics. I have no doubt there were some conservative composers who contiued writing in the classical style and who deplored the excesses of Romanticism quite as much as Rod does. And these composers would have, I'm sure, received apreciation from people like the critic Hanslick and the philosopher Schoepenhauer and legions of others, who thought Mozart was the ideal composer. But who of this group has survived in the concert hall? Probably none, while the Romantics are still flourishing there. And who was the Romantics' god? Beethoven. For his spirit, though, not his form. Had he really controlled history, the music would have been more classical. So here is a good example of both the chicken and the egg: Beethoven, a convinced classicist who could do no other than strongly foster Romanticism in music, which in maturity did not take the form he used.

Fianlly, what about his influence on general history? All of us know the Ninth Symphony finale has been played and sung at many milestones in the spread of human rights and democracy, such as at the fall of the Berlin wall. Yet did Beethoven CAUSE this two-century-long historic advance? Would it have failed to happen without him? Not even worth considering. In this sense he is history's handmaiden and helper, not its maker.

Chaszz

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"People become civilised, not in proportion to their willingness to believe, but in proportion to their readiness to doubt."




[This message has been edited by Chaszz (edited June 13, 2003).]

[lysander]

I agree with 'influence' and not condition.
The point about Chomsky, and this is really a fantastic illustration of the whole classic romantic debate that we have been having of late on this site, is that as far as I am aware, he was the first scholar to demonstrate that in the critical human faculty of language, we have an infinite abality to generate new sentences, but that is strictly based on a strata of 'given' grammer and rule governed behaviour. That is to say, our creativity is firmly based on set rules and fixed structures. What a brilliant characterization of classicism and romanticism in music. Beethoven was a classicist in form and structure, because he knew nothing else. That was the given, the material he had to work with and that he had learnt. Within those parameters then, there was the fantastic creativity.
I made this point some postings ago, in the quote from Sir Isiah Berlin.
Far from romanticism being chaotic, it was in fact, in poetry, music, art etc.
based on certain rules. Chomsky's view therefore, I think will take some challenging because it basically accords with the reallity of the sutuation, surely, and how human beings work.
The influence of Beethoven on the course of history has been, is, and will be profound and far reaching.
You quite rightly quote Byron, and the thing that Beethoven and the noble lord have in common, is that, and here again I agree with you, they are both quintessential romantic hero's, because their influence spilled over from their chosen artistic professions. Byron, of course, as you say, got himself caught up with the Greeks and Turks, but it is often difficult with Byron to separate the romantic ideal from reallity, but there again romanticism did always strike a pose, and Byron thought of himself as the great 'corsair' which was one of his poems.
Byron I think, accelerated the progress towards the nation state in Europe. But again I agree, it would have happened without him, but the process interestingly always throws up a leading individual character to guide it, like Garibaldi in Italy and Bismark in Germany.
Beethoven's influence, I think, has been infinitely greater, and here I am going to push the boat out. The defining characteristic historically of Beethoven, is trubulence and non-conformity. You only have to think of the terrible sense of crisis that is translated into his music, in the Symphonies born of the tumultuous events in Europe at that time.
Beethoven, perhaps through his deafness, became cut off from society, alone and unmarried. I do not think any artist has ever been as sensitive to his age and its philosophical and political climate as Beethoven, not even, I think Shakespeare, or Leonardo. The overwhelming concentration of the whole romantic movement is on the individual, the ego,and a cherished sense of self identity and worth.
The reverse side to this is an intolerance with other people and organized society and anything which gets in the way of me and the fullfilment of my dreams, desires, aspirations etc. We all know how boorish Beethoven could be with other people ( which is not to say he wasn't a caring person, he was, but that is not the philosophical point here) and the fact is, I suppose like all great artists, he prefered his own company and his own great thoughts. There was nothing new in this. But romanticism gave it a lurid and dangerous twist. In DH Lawrences novel, The Man Who Loved Islands, a man seeks greater and greater seclusion from society until at last he ends up on a Island on his own. This is a powerful metaphor for the whole romantic movement, and indeed, taking up your point about human rights, is the logical extention of what the whole of modern western society is obsessed with through promoting rights and not duties to society to its logical conclusion.
Beethoven is the greatest exemplar of romaticism, because he is such a sharply defined individual and he was the embodiment also of the strange solitary obsessions of the romantic hero.
The American constitution basically embodies this concern with human rights, which I think was inherited from the enlightenment and not romanticism, but the founding fathers, did they not, never worked out how to reconcile all these rights with an organic society, and instead created political institutions to fill the gap. In Europe, the greatest lonely romantic hero who pushed individualism to its furthest extent, intellectually at least, was Beethoven.
But these were and are muddy and dangerous waters. One of the strands in fascism has precisely been a rejection of the old order and the eulogising of the superman.
Beethoven would have been horrified of course, at the thought of what individual assertion of ones destiny or rights actually led to when it came up against the antithesis of the self in other people, but that does not in anyway lessen Beethoven's significance in a broad political sense.

During Beethoven's lifetime there were some extremely strange romantic German writers such as Novalis, Schiller (we have heard of him haven't we) and Kleist, who basically wandered around with a loaded revolver in his pocket, asking girls to enter into a suicide pact with him and who finally succeeded,( if that is the right word) in shooting himself and his lover.

The mad musiciam Stommb used to wander through the streets of Bonn with a conductor's baton in his right hand and a music roll in his left. He often visited the Fischers house, where he would conduct in silence from the ground floor.
Beethoven often laughed about him, and once said, "We can see by that how it goes with musicians; music has already made this one mad - what then may happen to us?"


The point is that when madness infected politics and was not simply the preserve of the lonely romantic hero, it had disastrous conscequences for the whole of Europe and indeed the world and still reverberates today. Whether we like it or not, society and therefore governmet have to have rules in order for human beings to organize themselves, and romanticism has been a poisoned chalice in politics from its obsession with human rights through to the elevation of the individual above the concerns and duties we all owe to one another.




[This message has been edited by lysander (edited June 16, 2003).]

[Chaszz]

Lysander,

I have a few things to say here but no time right now, will return to this in a day or two. In the meantime, you (and any others still slogging thru this debate with us) may be interested in an article which provides a fresh and different look at Napoleon at

http://www.claremont.org/writings/cr...03/hanson.html

..and, hang on, moderators, it DOES refer to Beethoven!

[This message has been edited by Chaszz (edited June 16, 2003).]

[Peter]

Originally posted by Chaszz:
Lysander,

I have a few things to say here but no time right now, will return to this in a day or two. In the meantime, you (and any others still slogging thru this debate with us) may be interested in an article which provides a fresh and different look at Napoleon at

http://www.claremont.org/writings/cr...03/hanson.html

..and, hang on, moderators, it DOES refer to Beethoven!

[This message has been edited by Chaszz (edited June 16, 2003).]

Well Beethoven's reaction to Napoleon was rather ambivalent as he was contemplating dedicating the Mass in C to Bonaparte as late as 1810. Interesting article but I'd question the motives and the timing.



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'Man know thyself'