“What a humiliation when one stood beside me and heard a flute in the distance and I heard nothing, or someone heard the shepherd singing and again I heard nothing, such incidents brought me to the verge of despair, but little more and I would have put an end to my life - only art it was that withheld me, ah it seemed impossible to leave the world until I had produced all that I felt called upon me to produce…”     - Ludwig van Beethoven, from the Heiligenstadt Testament, 1802

I think this explains, far better than I ever could, why playing Beethoven - doing him justice, or at least coming as close as one can - feels like a matter of life-or-death.

Or perhaps even his words are unecessary: the force of his personality, the intensity of his need to say what must be said — these are made plain in his music.

My Beethoven CD was released earlier this month. Just my most recent attempt, in a series which I hope will last a lifetime, to come to terms with the most life-affirming, yet unfathomable music I know to exist.

(A further attempt to explain what this music means to me can be found here.)

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 17th, 2007 at 9:28 pm and is filed under Blog, Writing about music, Recording, Beethoven. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.