Anniversaries Beethoven in a Time of War

Today is Beethoven's 200th birthday. In the year he turned 175, the Harvard Glee Club heard the most important address ever delivered at one of its annual banquets. Entitled "Amphion's Lyre," the speech was given by the late Lucien Price '07, talking without notes. Price, the author of many books, was for almost half a century the chief editorialist of the Boston Globe. Beethoven starts his third century in a year plagued by war. Below are the concluding paragraphs of Price's remarks spoken 25 years ago in another time racked by war:

... TOLSTOY found in Beethoven's Kreutzer Sonata a novel of homicidal sexuality: others find in it only the noblest aspirations of their own souls. In these higher voltages of the spirit one is creating at levels both above and below the consciously worded thought or the consciously planned act. The totality of him goes forth and exerts itself on the totality of other personalities. They will respond at that level to which they are attuned. Perhaps this is what we mean when we say that we are not influenced by what a man says, or even by what he does, but by what he is. What he is this totality of his being, expressed like music through his inner sonorities.

We live in a destructible world, yet somehow we must go on building. An ancient myth says that Amphion had a golden lyre, given him by Hermes, to whose strains the stones of Thebes rose one above another until the city walls were built. Not only must the city walls of world security, if possible, be built: some edifice of the spirit must be built also and built by us to house the soul of man in an epoch to come. That will be the labor of many brains and many hands, yet the spirit of man is not many but one, and its inner sonorities are a golden lyre which can cause the very stones to stir at the touch of Amphion, son of Zeus. For we are all sons of Zeus in that we are all created to be creators.

One summer in the 1930s. being in Europe, I went up to Finland to see Dr. [Jean] Sibelius. He was most gracious and we had long conversations. As you probably know, he lives about 25 miles outside of Helsinki at a place called Jarvenpaa. which means "Lake's End." One can go out from the capital by a little train in about an hour, or by motor car in less. His villa is built of logs and stands on a knoll among pines and silver birches overlooking the lake to the westward. At the foot of this knoll but still in the grove is an assemblage of heavy out-of-door wooden chairs around a table, all of them painted white, and down here one sunny afternoon late in August Mme. Sibelius had the coffee service carried.

The lake glittered under a westering sun and in the meadow close at hand peasants were reaping golden rye. In Finland the age of myth and legend is still just around the corner and doors stand open to the great winds which blow from the past out of the Kalevala, the Sagas and the Edda. Let me give you an idea of how close it is. That evening these same peasants were cooking their supper over a fire of twigs on a raised, open hearth. The hearth was like the one you see on the stage in Act I of Wagner's Die Walkiire.

Dr. Sibelius had put on his white suit and that broad brimmed, flat-crowned hat of tan felt which so often appears in his photographs. He was in high spirits and conversation was lively. It was about history, literature, music, philosophy, ethics, the demonic element in the creative process, and a good deal else which I have never felt at liberty to repeat. He also talked of Goethe, Byron, Wagner, Ibsen, Emerson, Brahms, of his own preference in working hours, of what to do when the spring refusesto flow, and about his relationship with his publishers.

Then of a sudden he was speaking of Beethoven, and of a sudden I realized that he was speaking of that andante cantabile, the slow movement of the B-flat Trio [Opus 97]. He stopped speaking and began to sing. It was as though the composer, impatient of words, had found speech an impertinence in the presence of such music. The conversation ceased while he sang the theme through to its end. Then he resumed:

"And it does not end... The variations go on until they seem to merge into a purple horizon, and vanish."

How often since then, in these dreary war-years, I have thought of him at Jarvenpaa, burdened with his share of his nation's and the world's grief.

But I have thought also that, knowing and loving that trio of Beethoven, and having composed perhaps as great music of his own, he too must know-and far better than you or I-that, although this world may be no great shakes, the future problematical, and no telling what may become of us, one thing is certain: so long as there is such music in the world, there is always something we can do about the worst that the world can do to us.

For eternal life is not a duration; it is an intensity.