MUSIC (More)

The best art is not the only art, but it can be uniquely ennobling and it ought to be available to everyone. If that smacks of a belief in educational "improvement", I plead guilty as charged. I think musical taste and public values need improving. This would be a lot easier if the BBC was willing to put classical music or theatre on its main channels, as it once did. But those days are gone, sadly.
Better reverence than irreverence. Lenin once explained that he could not listen to the Appassionata sonata too often because, wonderful and immortal though it was, the sonata might make him falter in his task of smashing his enemies' heads without mercy. Doesn't that sum up why the world is so much better off with Beethoven than with bolshevism?
There are few things I know with any confidence. One is that, in these piano sonatas, Beethoven went further towards expressing the vast scope of the human spirit in sound than anyone before or since. The last movement of the final sonata takes that process as far as even he was able. Both it and the edifice of 32 sonatas on which it rests are Beethoven's imperishable achievement. And yet, in an immensely significant way, the achievement belongs to us all.