Oh, look. There’s that Ulysses book. I like stuff about the Greeks. But that book’s too thick.
That’s the Iliad.
Have you read it?
Yeah.
What did you think?
It was OK.
The couple wandering the aisles of a local used bookstore and commenting loudly on whatever crossed their minds at the moment may well win the Crass Couple of the Year Award. They were neither book lovers nor shoppers. They were strollers, millennials in the very worst sense of the word—complacent, ignorant, self-confident.
Fortunately they strolled out of the store and peace again descended.
They got me thinking. (About other than some people’s apparent need to trumpet their doltishness in public, that is.) In their callowness, shallowness, and obtuseness, that obnoxious couple highlighted the biggest barrier standing between most people and great works of art, particularly music: the ignorant notion that a quick glance at or casual listen through anything is enough to back up a critical verdict. You can’t make an informed decision via breezy acquaintance. Only with steadfastness, intrepidity, and patience will the great works unfold themselves.
There was a time in my life when I didn’t know the Beethoven symphonies. By that I don’t mean that I hadn’t analyzed them or written commentaries on them. I mean that I didn’t know them at all. I had heard the first four notes of the Fifth and maybe a bit beyond that, but as I emerged from puberty, that was just about the sum total of my familiarity. Fortunately I found the opportunity to delve in more fully via Bruno Walter’s autumnal cycle with the Columbia Symphony Orchestra in its bargain-basement reprint on the Odyssey label. The pressings were execrable but the performances were gold-standard and remain so to this day. One can prefer this or that approach, this or that conductor or orchestra, even this or that record label, but the Walter/Columbia have proven themselves to be remarkably durable since their birth in late 1950s Hollywood.
Critical to my development was the set’s modest price. I could actually afford it on my constrained teenage finances. Thus those benchmark performances were mine. I could zoom in and listen as much as I wanted. Go over individual movements until my ears fell off. Really get to know them, at least from listening. The time was coming when the scores themselves would prove even more valuable, but I wasn’t there yet. Not at fifteen. I just needed to get to know the Beethoven symphonies.
That isn’t to say that I mastered them—who ever has and who ever will?—but after some time I could at least identify just about any movement of the Nine with some confidence. It was a beginning, but only just. I had gone a bit deeper with some; I had imprinted them in my head, therefore I didn’t need my RCA Victor record player to relive those movements. I could play them for myself, with fair overall accuracy. (But I was still a neophyte in terms of recognizing orchestral subtleties and couldn’t have identified the individual instruments worth a dang, save obvious ones like the strings or timpani.) I was still a stumbling novice, but I had at least stepped through the monastery door.
All those years later, I still have those Walter/Columbia recordings, although I prefer the lovely recent remasterings from Sony’s Bruno Walter Edition over those tinny Odyssey LPs. It’s a sign of the hold that set had on my imagination that I kept that distinctly tattered box even when I dumped the lion’s share of my LPs during the 1990s. Nowadays I have a ton of alternate performances of each symphony, some dating all the way back to the earliest days of recording. I’ve analyzed many of the symphonies. I’ve written program notes and other commentary about them. I’ve taught them to various classes. And they remain fascinating. Their potential cannot be exhausted.
The Beethoven symphonies, just like any number of other great works of art, are never “OK.” If they were “OK” they wouldn’t be great works of art. They certainly wouldn’t have persisted for two centuries—much less the two millennia of the Homeric epics—if they were just OK. Last night’s episode of Law and Order: SVU could be OK, I suppose. As could the after-lunch latté from Starbucks.
But never the Beethoven symphonies. They are many things, to be sure. But they most emphatically are never, ever OK.