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Needless to say, I disagree, nor am I ashamed of the essay, but I have asked John Marks to respond to your posting.
Wasn't that John's point? :-)
John Atkinson
Editor, Stereophile
I know what my point was.
I also know that you have not grasped it.
But I don't know what your point is.
However, it's always nice to meet another LVB semi-agnostic.
You might be interested to learn that I received an email from someone who felt that that essay justified the price of his entire subscription.
Perhaps my next AWSI (assuming JA wishes to print another by me) should be about why certain people can't disagree about musical topics without getting extremely angry and questioning the basic humanity of people they disagree with.
Or perhaps you can write about that, and submit it.
John Marks
For what it's worth, I thought it was one of the most engaging pieces I've read in a long time. It got my dander up, but isn't that a sign of engagement? And it sent me back to the Kakadu Variations, and introduced me to "From Me What Flow What You Call Time," which I found precisely as you described it. Though I'm not sure it serves much of a purpose to use as a point of comparison one of Beethoven's weakest works (I gather it's an early piece to which he added a late period fugue, which I think is beyond brilliant).
On the other hand, I love the violin sonatas, most of which you dismissed. :-)
John Atkinson
Editor, Stereophile
I think that, especially for composers who wrote for a living, the question should not be "are there weaker compositions in the oeuvre," but "how much really great stuff did they write?" I don't think you'll hear many of the Mozart piano sonatas performed in concert, either, in my opinion for good reason -- but the few that you do hear are likely worth the price of admission.
I tend to agree (though I think you're underestimating the Mozart sonatas, which IMO Artur Schnabel aptly characterized as "too easy for children and too difficult for adults.") There's weak Bach as well. As you point out, composers who had to pay the rent didn't always have time to perfect their works, and they developed as artists as well.
They must be weak indeed, because I don't remember them at all, and I went through the complete Beethoven not long ago just in case there was anything I'd missed over the years. Not terribly much, as it turned out, other than some of the Scottish folksongs, but one was very special indeed -- the incidental music to Egmont. I was familiar only with the overture, and since I'd either never heard the rest of it hit me with the same extraordinary emotional force with which his music first hit me when I was younger. A reminder of how extraordinary he was, even if many of his works don't stand up as well upon repeated listenings as those of Bach and Mozart.
Dreadful, but I love Beethoven's response to a critic who panned it: "What I shit is better than anything you could ever think up!"