{"id":1222,"date":"2004-06-22T16:22:18","date_gmt":"2004-06-22T20:22:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=1222"},"modified":"2015-05-14T10:17:16","modified_gmt":"2015-05-14T14:17:16","slug":"odets-beethoven-vs-brahms-old-forms-new-forms","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=1222","title":{"rendered":"Odets: Beethoven vs. Brahms, old forms, new forms"},"content":{"rendered":"

Entry from Journal<\/i><\/p>\n

March 24, 1940<\/i><\/p>\n

You cannot live in old forms, or work in them, when your life has brought you ahead to a new point. Try better to keep a child in last year’s coat. It is simply an intolerable contradiction which must be resolved consciously in order to bring the life and\/or work up for a higher level of creativity. Otherwise the spirit dies a death and sterility is the only outcome.<\/p>\n

Beethoven is the only man or artist I can think of at the moment who never once faltered in this difficult task: he was a fanatic! He hacked and chopped, twisted and tortured, but he did not EXCLUDE a drop of his experience from his work; in each phase of his life he found the right form for an increasingly higher and deeper experience. That is Beethoven’s final lesson, if an artist may teach a lesson. Life is a series of rebirths, year after year more difficult, never to be refused, but always to be worked with, coped with, understood, used and used by, never going back, but always moving ahead and higher. Which is what Beethoven did. Easy words to write, these!<\/p>\n

Why is Brahms an inferior artist, all other things equal? Because his last period is given over to “resignation” and acceptance. he did not have that same passion of the HEART which was Beethoven’s. That is why any last Brahm’s work is child’s play compared to any last Beethoven work.<\/p>\n

Beethoven’s work, it must be said, represents the deepest expression of man’s faith in life which has ever been written by a man. No artist before or since has expressed so deeply the will to live and accept every fact of life, to be both figuratively and literally crucified for his belief that the way to conquer life is to live without ever once relenting or letting up in that living.<\/p>\n

It was Beethoven who understood the passion of Christ, not Bach, for he lived it and experienced it while Bach heard about it in a sort of secondhand way. What some writer once said is true: Bach sacrificed the Church, Beethoven sacrificed himself. His last quartets, a record of his sacrifice (or crucifixion), are more moving to the modern man than any page in the Bible.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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