Friday, March 29, 2013

Beethoven: The Universal Composer (quotes)


I just finished reading Edmund Morris’s Beethoven: The Universal Composer. While there’s no doubt Beethoven was a musical genius, he was also kind-of a terrible person. Here are some quotes I took from that book:

The improvisations of a genius are of a different order, frightening in their proximity to madness: one has only to read about Nijinsky’s last dance, or watch films of Picasso at work. If the folly is not held at bay by structure, it can destroy.

The career of every artist is marked with great opportunities that for “various reasons” come to nothing.

In any case, Beethoven had much to learn from Haydn just by staying close and sharing the old composer’s professional life--browsing scores, discussing points of instrumentation, attending rehearsals, and exchanging the strange half-sung, half-mimed, almost wordless sentences that musicians alone understand.

To their watercolor notion of “composition” as something clear, pretty, and small scale, he was a dauber in oil, making slash strokes on canvases too big for the prince’s drawing room.

But the Revolution was now consummated, and to Beethoven’s more forward-looking listeners, especially young ones, the violence and bigness of his style matched the new aesthetics of force and “unbuttoned” emotion.

But the seeds of inspiration are planted in strange places, and flower, often after long delay, without conscious watering.

Courtliness and containment--the twin essential of High Classical style--were as much a part of Haydn’s musical personality as wildness was a part of Beethoven’s.

Writing them and suppressing them, he accepted loneliness as a precondition for the life of an artist.

The scholar-pianist Charles Rosen, who, with Lockwood, has done much in recent years to illuminate Beethoven’s standing in German intellectual history, quotes a remark by Friedrich von Schlegel to the effect that musicians tend to be more rational in their works than they are in their everyday lives.

Thus, Beethoven had been from the very start of his career a darling of the informed, the privilege, and the powerful. To claim, along with his mythifying biographers, that he simply punched his way up Parnassus is, in DeNora’s words, “to mystify genius” and to ignore the extent to which his success “was the product of social mediation.”

“O God! give me the strength to conquer myself, nothing at all must fetter me to life.”
-Beethoven
“So all is illusion--friendship, kingdom, empire, all is just a mist which a breath of wind can disperse and shape again in a different way!!” Beethoven wrote on April 8. He was actually trying, in his clumsy way, to be jocular about quite another matter, but the notion that no reality, outside that of artistic truth, could be trusted was ingrained in him.

He made clear that “freedom”--imagination operating beyond constraints--and “progress”--a constant originality of achievement--were impossible without scholarship.

Ten years before, at the premiere of Der glorreiche Augenblick, Beethoven had been the toast of European royalty. He was now, in perhaps the strangest turn of his career, a hero of the people. The Ninth Symphony’s success was extraordinary...

Friday, March 1, 2013

Quotes from old Notebooks #1

...the real success of any creative act is that it transcended reality not by bypassing it but by going through it.
-The Last Psychiatrist

Source: Frenzzgoa

If he wants to work on himself, he must destroy his peace. To have them both is in no way possible. A man must make a choice. But when choosing the result is very often deceit, that is to say, a man tries to deceive himself. In words he chooses work but in reality he does not want to lose his peace.

Such submission is the most difficult thing there can be for a man who thinks that he is capable of deciding anything.
-Ouspensky

Have patience, Candidate, as one who fears no failure, courts no success. Fix thy soul’s gaze upon the star whose ray thou art, the flaming star that shines within the lightless depths of ever-being.
-Blavatsky

How are we to know that the mind has become concentrated? Because the idea of time will vanish. The more time passes unnoticed the more concentrated we are... all time will have the tendency to come and stand in the one present. So the definition is given, when the past and present come and stand in one, the mind is said to be concentrated.
-Vivekananda

All of a sudden the progress will stop one day, and you will find yourself, as it were, stranded. Persevere. All progress proceeds by such rise and fall.
-Ram Dass

Only, you see, everywhere in the world people are actuated by something else than truth.
-Basil Maine

So you have no reason to claim credit from anyone for those attentions, since you showed them not because you wanted someone else’s company but because you could not bear your own.
-Seneca

It would be superfluous to mention any more who, though seeming to others the happiest of mortals, themselves bore true witness against themselves by their expressed hatred of every action of their lives. Yet they did not change themselves or anyone else by these complaints, for after their explosion of words their feelings reverted to normal.
-Seneca

But learning how to live takes a whole life, which may surprise you more, it takes a whole life to learn how to die. -Seneca
External goods are of trivial importance and without much influence in either direction: prosperity does not elevate the sage and adversity does not depress him. For he has always made the effort to rely as much as possible on himself and to derive all delight from himself.
-Seneca

That’s the problem with drinking, I thought, as I poured myself a drink. If something bad happens you drink in  an attempt to forget; if something good happens you drink in order to celebrate; and if nothing happens you drink to make something happen.
-Bukowski

Love is all right for those who can handle the psychic overload. It’s like trying to carry a full garbage can on your back over a rushing river of piss.
-Bukowski

It was almost disappointing because it seemed when stress and madness were eliminated from my daily life there wasn’t much left you could depend on.
-Bukowski

People with no morals often considered themselves more free, but mostly they lacked the ability to feel or to love. So they became swingers. The dead fucking the dead.
-Bukowski

It’s the old question of “Yes life’s not real” but you see a beautiful woman or something you can’t get away from wanting because it is there in front of you.
-Kerouac

Since beginningless time and into the never-ending future, men have loved women without telling them, and the lord has loved them without telling, and the void is not the void because there’s nothing to be empty of.
-Kerouac