epiphanies

The other night I was watching the 1994 film Immortal Beloved with some friends. I’d seen it a couple of times before, but this time around a particular scene really struck a chord in me. In the scene, Herr Schindler is the sole spectator of a performance of a Beethoven sonata for piano & violin. All of a sudden, Beethoven comes up behind Schindler…

Ludwig van Beethoven: [in reference to "Violin Sonata in A Major, Op. 47" - "Kreutzer"... ] Do you like it?
Anton Felix Schindler: Shh!
Ludwig van Beethoven: I cannot hear them, but I know they are making a hash of it. What do you think? Music is… a dreadful thing. What is it? I don’t understand it. What does it mean?
Anton Felix Schindler: It – it exalts the soul.
Ludwig van Beethoven: Utter nonsense. If you hear a marching band, is your soul exalted? No, you march. If you hear a waltz, you dance. If you hear a mass, you take communion. It is the power of music to carry one directly into the mental state of the composer. The listener has no choice. It is like hypnotism. So, now… What was in my mind when I wrote this? Hmm? A man is trying to reach his lover. His carriage has broken down in the rain. The wheels stuck in the mud. She will only wait so long. This… is the sound of his agitation. “This is how it is… ,” the music is saying. “Not how you are used to being. Not how you are used to thinking. But like this.”

Interestingly, Beethoven is often referred to as the bridge between the classical period and the romantic period of Western music. But here we find no Romantic notions of the nature of music…note Beethoven’s quick denouncement of Schindler’s assertion that “It exalts the soul.”

I felt a bit like a Schindler the other day when I had lunch with an art history professor here at Wheaton. However, this professor is exceedingly more gracious than Herr Beethoven ever was. In my conversation with him, my romantic notions became all too apparent as he set forth his own understanding of art (in the broad sense)…that it’s a conversation between the artist and her world, and at best our creations provide epiphanies (“with a little e”) as to the reality of God’s reconciling the world to himself in Christ. But we must not downplay the creatureliness of our artistic expressions, because after all, we are creatures. Listening to a Beethoven piece will not reveal to you the identity of Jesus Christ as the Son of God, but that does not negate its significance. We are a relational people, and to listen to Beethoven, to view a Renoir, to read Dostoevsky – in these things we enter into conversation with fellow creatures in our respective contexts. Or as Herman Melville would say, we are all sons of Adam. We are made in the image of God, and though we forgot it and turned our backs on him, he did not forget us.

A favorite scene from the movie: the deaf Beethoven presses the side of his face to the piano in order to ‘hear’ the vibrations as he plays the Moonlight Sonata.

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