Ludwig van Beethoven was born on this day 250 years ago. It was customary to baptize babies the day after they were born and since his baptismal record in Bonn shows December 17th as the date, it’s safe to assume his birth date is December 16, 1770.
The inexpressible depth of all music, by virtue of which it floats past us as a paradise quite familiar and yet eternally remote, and is so easy to understand and yet so inexplicable, is due to the fact that it reproduces all the emotions of our innermost being, but entirely without reality and remote from its pain. In the same way, the seriousness essential to it and wholly excluding the ludicrous from its direct and peculiar province is to be explained from the fact that its object is not the representation, in regard to which deception and ridiculousness alone are possible, but that this object is directly the will; and this is essentially the most serious of all things, as being that on which all depends.– Schopenhauer (1788-1860)
All art constantly aspires to the conditions of music.— Walter Pater (1839-1894)
https://www.dw.com/en/why-beethoven-snubbed-princes-and-put-his-music-first/a-19544501
Beethoven once stopped playing when an aristocrat was talking in the front row: “I’m not playing for such pigs.” (Für solche Schweine spiel ich nicht.)
Being an Artist takes courage, it’s work and you have to risk being misunderstood.
All contents copyright (C) 2010 Katherine Hilden. All rights reserved.
artamaze by Katherine Hilden 