If you have seen the BBC’s movie, Eroica, you should go to YouTube and watch it. In brief, it portrays the first public presentation of Beethoven’s new symphony at the palace of Prince Lobkowitz. The music itself is conducted by Sir John Eliot Gardner with a 23-piece orchestra using period instruments as it was originally performed. Of course the music is awe-inspiring and it is interesting to see how the wealthy aristocrats walked around the room to listen to the band. What is most interesting, however, is to watch the various characters reaction to the music.
Recall that the French Revolution had just completed its bloodiest phase and that Napoleon had been sweeping through Europe–not a good time to be the establishment. The important thing is that, contrary to the historicist critique of current academia, Beethoven was moving out of his cultural context, beyond even what he himself had originally entitled the piece, “Bonaparte,” into what we call the Romantic Era. The radical intellectual shift in perspective required of by this new work is reflected differently in each of the characters, but is best expressed by Haydn who comments that Beethoven had made the heroic artist himself the center of his art and that thereafter nothing would be the same.
This undercuts the entire post-modern, “contemporary” paradigm that makes us slaves to our current social construction of reality. Moderns were in the thrall of reason; Postmoderns and Contemporary Artists are in the thrall of anti-reason, which is not the same thing as emotion because anti-reason argues that reason itself is suspect. Eroica points to the radical error of the post-modern/ contemporary paradigm by its very existence because Beethoven consciously stood outside his own cultural context and pointed to an entirely new age by changing the then current artistic paradigm. He did this by expanding the definition of beauty; this doesn’t sound terribly revolutionary, but revolutionary it was because it changed the point of reference.
Eroica‘s revolution in beauty is a great place to note that when the artist concerns him or herself with beauty, as Beethoven did in Eroica, they are not concerned with mere prettiness. Beauty has power, and breadth and the divine in it; discord is an element of beauty because discord is the nature of life.
Blog No. 60, Eroica
If you have seen the BBC’s movie, Eroica, you should go to YouTube and watch it. In brief, it portrays the first public presentation of Beethoven’s new symphony at the palace of Prince Lobkowitz. The music itself is conducted by Sir John Eliot Gardner with a 23-piece orchestra using period instruments as it was originally performed. Of course the music is awe-inspiring and it is interesting to see how the wealthy aristocrats walked around the room to listen to the band. What is most interesting, however, is to watch the various characters reaction to the music.
Recall that the French Revolution had just completed its bloodiest phase and that Napoleon had been sweeping through Europe–not a good time to be the establishment. The important thing is that, contrary to the historicist critique of current academia, Beethoven was moving out of his cultural context, beyond even what he himself had originally entitled the piece, “Bonaparte,” into what we call the Romantic Era. The radical intellectual shift in perspective required of by this new work is reflected differently in each of the characters, but is best expressed by Haydn who comments that Beethoven had made the heroic artist himself the center of his art and that thereafter nothing would be the same.
This undercuts the entire post-modern, “contemporary” paradigm that makes us slaves to our current social construction of reality. Moderns were in the thrall of reason; Postmoderns and Contemporary Artists are in the thrall of anti-reason, which is not the same thing as emotion because anti-reason argues that reason itself is suspect. Eroica points to the radical error of the post-modern/ contemporary paradigm by its very existence because Beethoven consciously stood outside his own cultural context and pointed to an entirely new age by changing the then current artistic paradigm. He did this by expanding the definition of beauty; this doesn’t sound terribly revolutionary, but revolutionary it was because it changed the point of reference.
Eroica‘s revolution in beauty is a great place to note that when the artist concerns him or herself with beauty, as Beethoven did in Eroica, they are not concerned with mere prettiness. Beauty has power, and breadth and the divine in it; discord is an element of beauty because discord is the nature of life.