Sublime: 7. Of things in nature and art: Affecting the mind with a sense of overwhelming grandeur or irresistible power; calculated to inspire awe, deep reverence, or lofty emotion, by reason of its beauty, vastness, or grandeur.
Today’s example is Beethoven’s 9th Symphony (Ode to Joy) with a clip from Immortal Beloved that captures its spirit pretty well. We live in an age of the ridiculous, the vulgar, and the petty. Seek out and cling to the sublime.
It’s all about the sublime. The loss of taste for the sublime is most of what’s wrong with all the arts today, imho.
I dragged my sick self to Humanities class one evening after a 12-hour shift at work, which consisted mostly of tossing 70-pound boxes in a 30-degree warehouse. Beyond all commonsense I went to class, and my prof just happened to show Immortal Beloved – he rewound the Ode to Joy scene twice. I can’t remember much of the rest of the film, could have been the fever or the NyQuil, but I’ll never forget that scene.
Thanks for posting this, Floyd. “Sublime” is one of those words I know how to use, but I didn’t really know its definition. Now I know.
I find Leonard Bernstein more pompous than I can bear, but he did do one very cool thing: at the big super-colossal celebratory 1989 performance of Beethoven’s 9th, which was to commemorate the Wall at last coming down and the two halves of Germany finally, finally being reunited, Bernstein substituted the word “freiheit” in place of “freude,” thus changing it from an ode to joy, to an ode to freedom. The moment after the first bass solo, when the entire chorus repeats that word “FREIHEIT!” at full bellow, is pretty damn electrifying (it’s in the first of the three links I’ve listed below).
Also, leave us not forget that the mighty Scherzo of the 9th Symphony was for years the theme song for the Huntley-Brinkley Report news program, which we used to watch in our house instead of that damn Walter Cronkite and his suspicious mustache.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6K4635W4roY
and
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-GbesR5AEM
and
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIsXmOHo7EA
After watching Floyd’s embedded clip from “Immortal Beloved,” I am reminded of a “Peanuts” strip. I found this following recap in an Amazon viewer reviewof a Beethoven-related video: “The October 27th [1955] strip has Charlie Brown reading to Schroeder how: “At the conclusion of the symphony the audience stood up and cheered. Beethoven, however, because of his deafness could not hear them, and because his back was to the audience could not see them. With Tears in her eyes one of the singers led Beethoven to the edge of the stage where he could see the cheering people.” At this point Schroeder buries his face in his hands and emits a heartbroken “SOB.”
I remember that strip because I had never seen a deliberately non-funny Peanuts strip before, and the fact was that I had the same feeling about it as Schroeder.
Beethoven was a weird character, not the easiest of men to get along with. But his two olympian symphonies, the 5th and the 9th, are hands-down the greatest artistic expressions ever created depicting man’s willingness to stand tall in defiance of the entire Cosmos, and give it the middle finger.
Why did Schroeder call Beethoven a son-of-a-bitch?
Heh!
The one that stuck in my mind was where Lucy was reading from a similar book to Schroeder: “This rejection depressed Beethoven deeply, and he was unhappy for a long time.”
To which Schroeder replied, “How can anyone be Beethoven and not be happy?”
A question for the ages.
This comment belongs further down. I have no idea why it ended up up here.
“It is the nature of Truth to hide in garbage.”
—Philip K. Dick