Einstein and Beethoven

An interesting anecdote that recently came across my desk…

After his colleagues updated, as a seventy-fifth birthday gift, the music system they had given him five years earlier, Einstein began repeatedly to play an RCA recording of Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis. It was an unusual choice for two reasons. He tended to regard Beethoven, who was not his favorite composer, as “too personal, almost naked.” Also, his religious instincts did not usually include these sorts of trappings. “I am a deeply religious nonbeliever,” he noted to a friend who had sent him birthday greetings. “This is a somewhat new kind of religion.”

- From Walter Isaacson’s Einstein: His Life and Universe (Simon and Schuster, 2007)

…tracks well with Beethoven’s comment on composing Missa Solemnis:

My chief aim was to awaken and permanently instill religious feelings not only into the singers but also into the listeners.

November 23, 2009 | Filed Under Quotes | Leave a Comment

Food for thought

A delicious, home-cooked meal I enjoyed last month in Paris, compliments of Anita Nelson I’m reflecting today on some inspiring and (I believe) interrelated comments from Beethoven, Ruth Pitter, C. S. Lewis and Aldous Huxley, dealing with music, beauty and the human experience. Other than to point out how central these thoughts are in my own love of music, there’s not much I could hope to add in the way of interpretation — and really, I don’t think that’s needed anyway. So, I’ll just lay them out here and hope that readers of this blog will enjoy ruminating on them as well.

First, an experience relayed by British poet Ruth Pitter, in a BBC broadcast titled Hunting the Unicorn (more info here):

“I was sitting in front of a cottage door one day in spring long ago, a few bushes and flowers round me, bird gathering nesting material, trees of the forest at a little distance. A poor place, nothing glamorous about it. And suddenly, everything assumed a different aspect, its true aspect. For a moment it seemed to me that truth appeared in its overwhelming splendor. The secret was out, the explanation given, something that had seemed like total freedom, total power, total bliss – good with no bad as its opposite, an absolute that had no opposite. This thing, so unlike our feeble nature, had suddenly cut across one’s life and vanished. What is this thing? Is it, could it be, after all, a hint of something more real than this life? A message from reality, perhaps a particle of reality itself? If so, no wonder we hunt it so unceasingly, and never stop desiring it and pining for it.”

From Beethoven:

“Music is the mediator between the spiritual and sensual life.”

From C. S. Lewis in The Weight of Glory:

“The things — the beauty, the memory of our own past — are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself, they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.”

Lastly, from English writer Aldous Huxley (Yes, I know, Huxley’s an odd figure to quote alongside C. S. Lewis in this way. Incidentally, the two writers died on the same day in 1963):

“After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is Music.”

January 22, 2009 | Filed Under Faith, Quotes | Leave a Comment

One of my favorite quotes

“It is my belief that music is great if, at some moment, the listener catches ‘a glimpse of eternity through the window of time’… This, to my mind, is the only true justification for art. All else is of secondary importance.”

- Einojuhani Rautavaara

Einojuhani, Rautavaara (b. 1928) I so appreciate this statement by Finnish composer Einojuhani Rautavaara, and thought it worth sharing. At the deepest level, my interest in music is ultimately rather narrow, and I think this statement by Rautavaara expresses it well.