Make Mine Bernstein

New Zealand Listener, Volume 37, Issue 951, 1 November 1957, Page 22

Make Mine Bernstein

"TT will be generally admitted," remarks E. M. Forster at ‘the opening of a chapter of Howard’s End, "that Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony is the most sublime noise that has ever penetrated the ear of man." When I first read this, it seemed excessive; now, after hearing Leonard Bernstein’s justly

famous lecture on the first movement, I feel it to be the truth. The symphony seems to me to celebrate the triumph of the will, of human dignity finally supreme over the worst that can confront it. Bernstein’s lecture showed us the enormous labour that Beethoven accomplished before the symphony as we know it was completed. Every bar, it seemed, was challenged by that sublimely restless intelligence, weighed, measured, and if found wanting, discarded. Twenty versions of some short passages can be found in the original score, some sounding perfectly acceptable and true to the work, yet clearly in relation to the final text, insufficient. He took, it seems, over eight years to complete the work to his satisfaction, where Mozart might have taken as many days to write a symphony. Yet who would dare to say that one was greater than the other? Of Mozart the man, we can tell little from the music; of Beethoven we feel, and in this work, supremely, the struggle of a giant and victorious mind. I recommend this masterly lecture to all those for whom music is more than a background jig.

B. E. G.

M.