When stopped for speeding Oscar Levant, the American pianist and composer explained, "You can’t possibly hear the last movement of Beethoven’s seventh Symphony and go slow!"
When it was premiered, the critics panned Beethoven’s Seventh, one review accusing Beethoven of being as drunk as the music itself when he composed it. I’ve lost count of the times I’ve listened to it – and it never lets me down – it always lifts. Wallace Stevens’ poem about wistful piano playing says something about the spirituality of music:
Just as my fingers on these keys
make music; so the selfsame sounds
On my spirit make music, too.
Music is feeling, then, not sound.
Today, driving back from Laura’s Teashop at Carmunnock, Classic FM played the whole of that last movement. To my knowledge I didn’t speed – but music like that is to me what a double espresso is to some of my pals!! There is a dynamic payload of energy in it that makes Oscar Levant’s mitigation plea perfectly plausible. How a deaf composer was able to celebrate and synchronise sound into such joyful, aggressive, in your face vitality I’ve no idea. Part of the miracle that is Beethoven at his best, I suppose. But for me, Beethoven clinches Wallace Stevens’ argument – when music touches deep in our spirits, "music is feeling, then, not sound."
And maybe Beethoven was remembering the critics when he said:
Music is the wine which inspires one to new generative processes, and I am Bacchus who presses out this glorious wine for mankind and makes them spiritually drunken.
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