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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Archives for November 10, 2020

From my files: the permanent significance of Beethoven

November 10, 2020 by Terry Teachout

A Terry Teachout Reader, my self-anthology, came out sixteen years ago. I’ve published hundreds of pieces on various subjects since then, and I have no plans to put together a sequel to the Teachout Reader, so I’ve launched a series of occasional posts drawn from my fugitive essays, articles, and reviews. I hope you like this one, which came from a 2002 Commentary essay about Beethoven.

*  *  *

Late in his own life, Igor Stravinsky paid this extraordinary tribute to Beethoven’s late quartets:

These quartets are my highest articles of musical belief (which is a longer word for love, whatever else), as indispensable to the ways and meanings of art, as a musician of my era thinks of art and has tried to learn it, as temperature is to life.

It is startling that the giant of modernism who declared that music “is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all” should have written so passionately about the greatest works of a composer whose music is so palpably expressive of the deepest human concerns. But, then, Stravinsky’s best music, whatever he may have thought or wrote about it, is in fact as expressive of those same concerns as is Beethoven’s. The composer of Symphony of Psalms and the composer of the Ninth Symphony were in some fundamental sense speaking the same language.

This spiritual continuity—this unswerving faith in the universal power of beauty to relieve and transcend the earthly woes of mankind—is Beethoven’s message. Small wonder that its unabashed idealism should make postmodernists so uncomfortable. Disbelieving as they do in the possibility of truth and beauty, they therefore have no choice but to seek to explain away the Ninth Symphony, a universal masterpiece whose very existence is a definitive refutation of the nihilism that informs their view of the world.

The abolition of the Ninth Symphony is, to say the least, an ambitious critical project, and one may take leave to doubt that it will be completed any time soon. As Scott Burnham writes, “Perhaps when that happens, the Western world will truly have passed into another age.” But until that nightmare should come to pass, it seems far more likely that Beethoven will remain, as the New Grove still proclaims him to be, the most admired composer in the history of Western music—past, present and future.

Lookback: is criticism art?

November 10, 2020 by Terry Teachout

From 2005:

If you can write like Mencken or Shaw or Thomson, and if you have a personality as interesting as theirs, you don’t have to be “right” in order to be taken seriously as a critic. You are, in fact, an artist–a personal essayist whose subject matter is art.

Read the whole thing here.

Almanac: Shakespeare on insomnia

November 10, 2020 by Terry Teachout

O sleep, O gentle sleep,
Nature’s soft nurse, how have I frighted thee,
That thou no more wilt weigh my eyelids down
And steep my senses in forgetfulness?

William Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part II

Terry Teachout

Terry Teachout, who writes this blog, is the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal and the critic-at-large of Commentary. In addition to his Wall Street Journal drama column and his monthly essays … [Read More...]

About

About “About Last Night”

This is a blog about the arts in New York City and the rest of America, written by Terry Teachout. Terry is a critic, biographer, playwright, director, librettist, recovering musician, and inveterate blogger. In addition to theater, he writes here and elsewhere about all of the other arts--books, … [Read More...]

About My Plays and Opera Libretti

Billy and Me, my second play, received its world premiere on December 8, 2017, at Palm Beach Dramaworks in West Palm Beach, Fla. Satchmo at the Waldorf, my first play, closed off Broadway at the Westside Theatre on June 29, 2014, after 18 previews and 136 performances. That production was directed … [Read More...]

About My Podcast

Peter Marks, Elisabeth Vincentelli, and I are the panelists on “Three on the Aisle,” a bimonthly podcast from New York about theater in America. … [Read More...]

About My Books

My latest book is Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington, published in 2013 by Gotham Books in the U.S. and the Robson Press in England and now available in paperback. I have also written biographies of Louis Armstrong, George Balanchine, and H.L. Mencken, as well as a volume of my collected essays called A … [Read More...]

The Long Goodbye

To read all three installments of "The Long Goodbye," a multi-part posting about the experience of watching a parent die, go here. … [Read More...]

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