Re: Obscurity...

It is considered polite to quote the text to which you are responding.
Is there some reason that you refuse to do this?

In article <1138259168.157277.125140@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, John K. Graham <dialhead@xxxxxxxx> wrote:

: How is it you are so sure Beethoven did not care what affect his music
: had on others?

He certainly knew that his later works were going to be misunderstood.
His late quartets seem to have been written for himself than as "public"
works (and IIRC, he was only commissioned to write three). It's true that
when he revised _Fidelio_, he made some comment about how one writes more
prettily when one writes for the gallery, as opposed to his comments when
the original version bombed. There's also a story (possibly apocryphal)
that he responded to the complaint about the difficulty of one of his
works by saying "The Spirit speaks to me, and all he can think about is
his fiddle!"

: Mahler, I can somewhat understand, being married to that tyrant Alma -

You should go back and reread your own comments -- you were speaking
disparagingly of composers who didn't care what others thought of their
music, and Mahler does not seem to have modified his artistic goals just
because his music was by and large not very popular during his own lifetime.

: yet anyone who thinks Beethoven only wrote for the money
: would be revealing much more about themselves than about Beethoven.

I never said that, nor can I think of anything that I said that could be
construed to imply it.

: Besides Beethoven's numerous personal issues, he was also too moral and
: proud to accept recognition or money from those he did not respect, and
: his respect came with a price.

You should read a good biography of Beethoven -- one that mentions his
not infrequent shady dealings with publishers (e.g. selling the same
piece to more than one), his occasional willingness to accept medals from
the supposedly non-respectable aristocracy, and his occasional willingness
to grovel for commissions.

: He was not interested in the least
: things of a trivial. material nature, and yet was frugal and full of
: self-discipline to the point of counting precisely 57 coffee beans each
: morning for his coffee.

What does that have to do with the issue of whether or not he cared about
the popularity of his music?

: You are as welcome to yourown opinion, as I am to disagree with it, and
: I am far from frivilous in begging to differ with you. However,
: pettiness leads nowhere, and I find it interesting that the larger
: issue of a composer leaving a legacy according to tradition is somehow
: overlooked. Or is it?

Well, you seem to have overlooked my comments about Ives, which sort of
implies that you may have actually had a clue about the point I was making.

-----
Richard Schultz schultr@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Department of Chemistry, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan, Israel
Opinions expressed are mine alone, and not those of Bar-Ilan University
-----
"You don't even have a clue about which clue you're missing."
.

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