God created earth and heaven beethoven biography

December marks the th anniversary of the birth of Ludwig van Beethoven, one of Europe’s greatest composers, a musician of a revolutionary era who revolutionised music. Why should socialists be interested? The answer is twofold. Firstly, the need for music and the ability to produce and enjoy it, is an essential element in human nature: every human society known to our history has produced some characteristic musical style.

Secondly, the confinement of classical musical education to the children of the elite and the middle class, and the termination of musical education or the reduced opportunity for under-privileged children to enjoy many kinds of “art-music”, is an expression of profound deprivation, rooted in capitalist alienation, exploitation and oppression.

Thirdly, art is not merely a “mirror” of the world, but a practical intervention into it. Music, like the other arts, tells us truths about the world through its impact on our emotional life. As the Russian revolutionary a

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Trial, Triumph, and the Art of the Possible: The Remarkable Story Behind Beethoven&#;s &#;Ode to Joy&#;

“Day by day I am approaching the goal which I apprehend but cannot describe,” Ludwig van Beethoven (December 16, –March 26, ) wrote to his boyhood friend, rallying his own resilience as he began losing his hearing. A year later, shortly after completing his Second Symphony, he sent his brothers a stunning letter about the joy of suffering overcome, in which he resolved:

Ah! how could I possibly quit the world before bringing forth all that I felt it was my vocation to produce?

That year, he began &#; though he did not yet know it, as we never do &#; the long gestation of what would become not only his greatest creative and spiritual triumph, not only a turning point in the history of music that revolutionized the symphony and planted the seed of the pop song, but an eternal masterwork of the supreme human art: making meaning out of chaos, beauty out of sorrow.