Beethoven wrote his first concertos, all for piano, essentially for his own use in performance. With the third, which he premiered as soloist on April 5, 1803, together with his first two symphonies and his oratorio Christus am Ölberge, the vocabulary and syntax of his Mozartian inheritance as a concerto composer was yielding to a more independent conception, to more varied and dramatic ways of setting up the solo-orchestra relationship. The position of the Third Piano Concerto after the first two is roughly analogous to that of the Second Symphony after the First, but in the concerto genre the spirit of Mozart was inevitably stronger and more vivid than in the symphony. Certainly the Third, as Brahms observed, is haunted by the image of Mozart’s C minor concerto. Through his brother Carl, Beethoven offered the Third to the publisher André in November 1803.1 By the time it actually appeared in print, with a dedication to Prince Louis Ferdinand of Prussia (himself an excellent pianist and sometime composer), it was the summer of the following year. By now Beethoven was occupied with the Eroica and with initial work on Leonore, as well as preliminary sketches for the “Waldstein” Sonata.
The New Symphonie concertante: The Triple Concerto
Beethoven returned to the concerto later in 1804 and in 1805, while he was in the midst of Leonore and the “Appassionata.”2 The result was a curiously passive work, the Triple Concerto for Piano, Violin, and Cello in C major, Opus 56. Dubbed by Plantinga “an interlude in the French manner,” it is a comfortable, rambling composition that aims to please but not stir its audiences, a work of easy surface qualities but no depth. We can readily connect the Triple Concerto with the symphonie concertante that had prospered in France and in French-influenced centers such as Bonn and Mannheim in the later eighteenth century, and which stayed alive until about 1810.3 Beethoven had left unfinished the Romance in E minor for flute, bassoon, piano, and orchestra that he had sketched in 1786–87, and in 1802 he had tried to work out a “Concertante” in D major for piano trio soloists, the same combination as the Triple Concerto, in anticipation of a projected concert in the spring of that year. But the concert never came off and the “Concertante” remained a fragmentary torso, though it more than casually prefigures aspects of the Triple Concerto, including an “alla polacca” finale.4
It is surely right to associate these works with Beethoven’s interest in current French traditions. He saw in postrevolutionary France that music could contribute to national pride so much more meaningfully than it could in Germany, where national feelings were rising but the sense of common identity was muted because the country was still a loose patchwork of smaller states. He admired what he knew of works by Cherubini and Méhul, and his strong turn toward French opera was reflected in his choice of Leonore as a subject. His encounters with French performers, especially string players, had also borne results. His dream of a potential career in France lingered on long after his angry reaction in 1804 to Napoleon’s coronation. Ries predicted to Simrock in August and again in October of 1803 that within a year and a half Beethoven “will go to Paris, which makes me extremely sorry.”5 Some years later he nearly accepted the invitation from Jerome Bonaparte, and he toyed further with thoughts of a move to Paris that never came off.
The Triple Concerto may have been written for the violinist Georg August Seidler and the cellist Anton Kraft, that is “old Kraft,” the father of the cellist Nikolaus Kraft. According to Schindler the original pianist was the Archduke Rudolph, but this hardly seems probable, even though Beethoven may have met the talented sixteen-year-old archduke at Lobkowitz’s at about this time.6 The intended pianist was, more likely, Beethoven himself.
Even in a symphonie concertante, the use of the piano trio as collective soloist was new. Having written three excellent piano trios and a more routine clarinet trio, Beethoven was able to transfer the total ensemble to the concerto with considerable ease, even if the musical material he settled on ranged from pleasant to banal. In sheer quality the Triple Concerto has always been regarded as marginal. Its key scheme mirrors that of the First Piano Concerto, but it is nowhere near as original. The Triple, in C major, has a long and discursive first movement, a singing Largo in A-flat major, and a rousing but ponderous Rondo alla Polacca finale. The work has a “certain indistinctness of expression and a kind of sponginess of construction”7 to a degree not found even in the Second Piano Concerto, which Beethoven himself admitted was not one of his best. Here he was probably seeking popular appeal by keeping the thematic material simple and sequential and by limiting any form of elaboration. The work represents the easier, discursive side of Beethoven about 1804–5, with none of the intensity of the “Waldstein” and “Appassionata” Sonatas. In its Biedermeier mood and character, the Triple resembles the easy-going Andante favori that Beethoven cut away from the “Waldstein” precisely in order to sustain its taut consistency all the way through.
Nevertheless some original elements do crop up. Far from letting the piano dominate, as in a trio, Beethoven opts for the cello as the main solo instrument. It is the cello that starts off the first solo exposition in the work, presents the first new theme exploited by the solo complex, and, in its treble singing register, is the first solo voice to be heard in both the second and third movements.
After Haydn’s early cello concertos and some virtuosic vehicles by Luigi Boccherini, Joseph Reicha, Anton Kraft, and others, the field lay fallow. Mozart wrote no cello concertos, nor did the later Haydn.8 Since Beethoven himself was not moved to write one, despite his having virtually created the true cello sonata, the Triple is as close as we can come to a Beethoven cello concerto. The expanded range accorded the cello, its prominence against and with the violin, and its strong and active independence in all registers—all these foreshadow the new freedom in handling the instrument that Beethoven achieved three to four years later in his Opus 70 trios, the Cello Sonata Opus 69, and the “Archduke” Trio. The violin part in the concerto is somewhat underwritten when compared with the cello part, which successfully fulfills its leading roles both as a lyrical bass and an upper-range melodic voice.
Yet despite a few good passages, such as the A-flat-major segment in the first movement—for Tovey a “purple patch,” for Leon Plantinga a “beautiful and memorable” phrase—the concerto lacks strength. Such moments are too rare to give the whole work a place in the higher scheme of things, and though it is far from being as blatant a concession to popularity as Beethoven was to commit in later years, it lags behind his other concertos in quality of thought.
Nothing like this can be said of the Fourth Piano Concerto, in every respect a masterpiece of 1805–6. The earliest concept sketch for the opening theme of the first movement appears in the Eroica sketchbook, which includes notations from 1804. The main work on the concerto was put off until after Leonore, in late 1805 and 1806. By July 1806 Beethoven told Breitkopf & Härtel that his brother Carl would come to Leipzig with the scores in hand of the piano reduction of Leonore, the oratorio Christus, “and a new piano concerto.” Beethoven played the solo part at his famous Akademie of December 22, 1808, along with the Fifth and Sixth symphonies, parts of the C major Mass, and the Choral Fantasy.9 By that time the concerto had been in print for about four months, and its success with the public was immediate and lasting.
With this work the history of the piano concerto entered a new phase. At long last Beethoven had brought all his artistic powers to bear on the concerto, now exhibiting the fullest consistency of thought, feeling, beauty, and sensitivity. G major is a key he often associated with lightness and grace, as in the Piano Sonatas Opus 14 No. 2 and Opus 79, the Quartet Opus 18 No. 2, and the Violin Sonata Opus 31 No. 3. He never used it as primary key for a symphony, a later quartet, or a later piano sonata, and the only important middle-to-late work in this key is the idyllic Violin Sonata Opus 96 of 1812.
Although the Third Concerto has its moments of abruptness and surprise, the Fourth sustains a plateau of quiet beauty from beginning to end. If Mozart can be said to stand even distantly behind it, it is the Mozart of The Magic Flute, whose two vocal quintets sustain similar feelings of joy and wonder, and whose triumphal and utopian Allegro ending seems to be echoed in the ending of this concerto. Here, in its last, soft phrase, the solo piano soars into its highest octave over quiet pizzicato chords in the strings, then the horns join pianissimo, then flute and oboe, as a crescendo prepares for the forte resumption of the main motif (*W 26).
The opening is notable for beginning with the piano alone. Mozart’s Piano Concerto, K. 271, had done almost the same, but Beethoven’s first phrase, besides establishing the central role of the soloist from the beginning, is of a higher expressive order.10 With this pensive, quiet phrase, which leads from its opening chord through pulsating repetitions to a pause on the dominant, the piano solo casts an unforgettable spell over the whole movement and, in a way, over the entire work. If we look back, we can see that Beethoven had begun many earlier works with quiet gestures. Indeed, opening a cyclic work with a theme or motif in piano was quite common with him—witness the First Piano Concerto and Piano Sonatas Opp. 27 Nos. 1 and 2, 31 No. 2, 53, and 57). But the piano dolce determines the quality of this opening gesture and in combination with the quasi-improvisatory feeling of the phrase produces its atmospheric effect.
From the opening gambit the rest of the movement follows. The orchestra replies to the soloist’s gesture with a new version of the opening figure in the surprising key of B major, thus deviating from G major and giving the prominent upper-line B of the first theme its first harmonization as a tonic. After this striking opening, the first orchestral exposition flows forward, the remainder growing with controlled energy from the tonal contrast of G major and B major, a contrast that makes itself felt throughout the work. Beethoven’s high art of transformation is especially evident in the gradual process by which a descending-fourth figure that ends the opening solo finds its way to new rhythmic forms. In the first instance, the orchestral strings regain G major in the opening passage; the figure appears later as a forte figure in the orchestra, the fortissimo theme further on, and elsewhere to the end of the movement, crowning the whole at the return in the solo piano as the movement gathers energy in readiness to end (*W 27).11
The slow movement has been associated with the legend of Orpheus, originally, by the nineteenth-century theorist Adolf Bernhard Marx, as Orpheus confronting the shades of Hell and later as Orpheus taming the wild beasts with his lyre, a portrayal wrongly attributed to Liszt by Tovey. There is no evidence whatsoever that this programmatic interpretation, which has been taken to extreme lengths by some writers, stems from Beethoven.12 What is important, however, is Beethoven’s way of setting up the movement as a literal dialogue between piano and strings. Each phase of the movement consists of a statement by the strings that is answered by the piano solo, with the strings at first gruff and resolute, the piano soft and yielding, using the softening una corda pedal throughout the movement, as directed in the score. The solo piano, figuratively turning the other cheek, reduces by stages the strings’ aggressive statements, and gradually overcomes the opposing forces by a succession of dreamlike phrases, so that later in the movement the piano completely dominates, the strings are reduced to single pizzicato strokes, and the soloist can embark on an elaborate written-out cadenza that eventually prepares the final structural cadence on the tonic, E minor. There remains only a memory of the original orchestral statement, now in pianissimo, to close the movement, once more with the piano having the last poignant word.
The quasi-improvisatory quality of the piano part associates it with the tradition of the operatic arioso and with the eighteenth-century accompanied recitative—that is, operatic recitative accompanied not merely by a harpsichord but by the orchestra, most often strings. This device had been reserved in opera seria for moments of high dramatic importance—as when the Countess in Figaro comes to the bitter realization that she has lost her husband’s love to her servant and prepares to sing “Dove sono i bei momenti, di dolcezza e di piacer?” (“Where are the beautiful moments of sweetness and pleasure?”); or in Don Giovanni, when Donna Anna compels Don Ottavio to swear to restore her honor. On the other hand this movement is not, strictly speaking, an operatic recitative transposed to an instrumental work. When he wanted to, Beethoven wrote recitatives, as he did in his Piano Sonata Opus 31 No. 2, and in later works. What we have here, rather, is more like a dramatic scena for solo piano and orchestra transplanted into the concerto genre and presented in a single pithy movement, with the orchestra reduced to strings alone. In this scena, entreaty is met at first by obdurate refusal.
Each of Mozart’s earlier Italian operas always included at least one aria that was set for strings alone. Idomeneo had two: Electra’s aria “Idol mio” and Arbace’s “Se cola ne’ fati.” In his fully mature operas—the ones Beethoven would have known—he reduced the number to one. Figaro has Barbarina’s mock-pathetic Cavatina as she laments over her lost pin; and in Don Giovanni we find “Ah fuggi il traditor,” in which the half-mad Donna Elvira intercepts the innocent Zerlina and urges her in no uncertain terms to flee from Don Giovanni before it is too late. Donna Elvira’s quasi-Handelian aria, often called “archaic” by commentators, has a succession of concentrated dotted rhythmic figures to which the figures in Beethoven’s string parts in this concerto movement are distantly related.13 The rhetorical character of the movement, like no other in Beethoven, invites association with traditions, and one of these may well have been that of the expressive aria with strings from Mozart’s late Italian works. This is not to suggest still another “hidden program” for the movement or for the concerto as a whole, but it is, rather, to hint at the associations that such a movement evokes.
That Beethoven was interested in blending the operatic into the instrumental sphere is manifest in many of his works, not only those, mainly in his late period, that use instrumental recitatives but also those in which aria types and aria forms emerge. But he also blended the concerto principle overtly with other genres, as in the “Kreutzer” Sonata. We should remember that the gentle opening of the Fourth Piano Concerto brings the first phrase by the piano solo, then the answering phrase, with a harmonic contradiction, by the strings alone. Thus the beginning of the whole concerto foreshadows the opposition of forces that is worked out so dramatically and rhetorically in the slow movement—as if the piano were, in its way, an operatic soloist, and the work were a special kind of music drama.
The finale reconciles all earlier oppositions. This G-major rondo, Vivace, offers still another striking beginning—this one in C major, from which it makes its way back quickly to the tonic, G major, but not without having thus set up its own quiet tonal opposition, between C and G, that can generate later action. This lightly touched “off-tonic” opening creates a structural ambiguity that demands eventual resolution—will C or G predominate?—but the movement runs its course quite far before the inevitable answer is discovered: G, the true tonic, will triumph.
At a crucial moment in the second act of Leonore/Fidelio, deep in Florestan’s dungeon, the jailer Rocco and the disguised heroine Leonore dig the grave in which the starving prisoner is to be buried, when Florestan suddenly awakens. Leonore, almost speechless with hope, recognizes her husband. Florestan pleads for water. Rocco, moved by his plight, offers to give him a little wine, whereupon the great A-major trio begins, with a three-note unison figure in the strings (E–D–B) that comes down to the tonic, A, where Florestan, weakened as he is, opens the ensemble with a beautiful melodic phrase set to his words of thanks: “Euch werde Lohn in bessern Welten” (“You will be rewarded in better worlds”). This melody, saved for the first moment of emotional and physical tenderness between the reunited husband and wife, is an unforgettable expression of quiet serenity and love. And it is exactly this quality that Beethoven brings to his Violin Concerto, often noted for the ideal tranquility of its first two movements, the vivid spirit of its finale, and the sense of emotional cogency and connectedness that binds the work together. Although the Leonore trio is not a direct thematic source for the concerto, its striking opening figure, which recurs in various places throughout the opera—often in connection with Florestan’s dream of survival—also recurs as a thematic fingerprint in this concerto as well as certain other works (*W 28).14
Although the concerto arose from Beethoven’s contact with Franz Clement, an Austrian violinist who had come to prominence in the 1790s, Beethoven had been preparing to write a big violin concerto for some time. His first effort was an unfinished C Major Violin Concerto, WoO 5, dating probably from the early Vienna years. Then came the two Romances for Violin and Orchestra, Opp. 40 and 50, written around 1800 or a little later. What the Germans called “Romanze” was a type of slow movement in alla breve (the second movement of Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik is the most notable), while its counterpart, the “Romance” for violin and orchestra, was a French subgenre used for slow movements by Viotti and his followers. Beethoven’s two Romances have all the smoothness and polish of their French models.
Further evidence for the genesis of the D Major Violin Concerto is hard to come by: most likely the work was sketched extensively in a now-lost sketchbook of 1806–7 that probably also contained material for the Fourth Piano Concerto, the Fourth Symphony, and Coriolanus. Beethoven must have worked on it in the later months of 1806, since Clement was able to play its first performance at a benefit concert on December 23 of that year, but Czerny reports that Beethoven, despite frantic efforts, had barely finished the piece two days before the performance. Beethoven might have done most of his basic compositional work on it in five or six weeks during November and December 1806.15 The autograph, which bears the date 1806, contains several layers of writing for the solo part, though whether its readings were fixed up for the December 1806 premiere or, possibly, its publication in August 1808, is impossible to say. Because of these complications the text of the work has undergone extensive scrutiny and correction in modern times, largely because of problems that arose from haste and misunderstandings on the part of early copyists, along with Beethoven’s habitually rushed proofreading.
Then there is the well-known transcription of the work with a solo piano substituting for the violin. The keyboard version was contracted for by Clementi in April 1807, intended for publication in London, but it came out in Vienna in 1808 at the same time as the violin version and did not appear in London until 1810. The important question is whether Beethoven himself made the arrangement, as he was supposed to have done according to his contract with Clementi. The keyboard version has been judged to range in quality “from satisfactory to incompetent” and “more heavily weighted toward the latter.”16 The exception is the first-movement cadenza—a brilliant showpiece for solo piano with tympani that finds space for a stirring march in A major. That this march vividly recalls the march from Leonore/Fidelio reinforces the notion that the opera, in both its lyricism and its flashes of military music, heavily influenced this concerto. So strong is the cadenza that its retranscription for the violin version of the concerto—the only version known to concert audiences—is a potential eye-opener for listeners accustomed to the cadenzas by Joachim, Kreisler, and other virtuoso violinists, or by twentieth-century composers such as Alfred Schnittke.17
It is striking that Beethoven undertook a violin concerto of this character directly after the Fourth Piano Concerto. Both works create a feeling of spaciousness in their musical unfolding, in which ideas take time to develop and to fulfill their potential. This results in part from the considerable length of Beethoven’s concerto first movements, in which room is needed for separate orchestral and solo expositions, for the intertwining of the two protagonists in the development, and for further interactions in the recapitulation and coda. But this spaciousness is also a consequence of the thematic ideas themselves. The five tympani strokes that open the first movement and the symmetrical first theme that follows in the winds set up a question: Do the tympani beats constitute a part of the main theme, a prologue figure, a motif that will reappear, or all of these? This question becomes increasingly urgent as the movement develops: witness the D
repetition of the tympani beats, now in the orchestral violins, rasping against the smooth linear flow of the D-major theme and only much later recalled and confirmed in ways that give it meaning.18
Listeners have never failed to feel the serenity of the slow movement, above all at that moment when its chain of variations is altered and reframed by what sounds to some like a new theme after the third variation and to others like a beautifully elaborated variant of the first theme.19 The last movement stands as perhaps the best of Beethoven’s rondo finales in 6/8 meter, a time-honored form and meter for concerto finales of which he would have known dozens of examples. These would have included Mozart’s 6/8 rondo finales in every branch of his concerto writing, among them all the horn concertos and many of his piano concertos. We saw that Mozart’s rondo theme from his B-flat Major Concerto, K. 595, was in Beethoven’s mind when he copied it—transposed to E-flat major and written in 3/4 instead of 6/8—in the Eroica sketchbook. Mozart took the tradition of 6/8 rondos all the way to the rousing third movement of the Clarinet Concerto, K. 622, written in 1791. Beethoven had written a handful of 6/8 rondo finales in early works, always marking them “Rondo,” as well as a few pathbreaking duple-meter examples, as in the “Pathétique” and “Waldstein” Sonatas. In later works he still wrote such finales, often blending rondo with sonata form in various and complex ways and thus inheriting and advancing the “sonata-rondo” tradition—but he never marked them “Rondo” again. This omission suggests that he passed beyond the traditional patterns of thinking that made such a form designation possible.
In the Violin Concerto rondo, the energy of the opening D-major theme is nicely contrasted with the quiet placidity of the G-minor episode, midway through the movement, that harks back distantly to Osmin’s plaintive G-minor 6/8 lament in Mozart’s Entführung aus dem Serail. Many touches of the purest middle-period Beethoven emerge as the movement proceeds, and, after a cadenza, the coda finds room for a striking harmonic move to A-flat major, from which it swings back to D major with the greatest of ease.
As late as the finale of the enigmatic F Minor Quartet Opus 95 Beethoven was still writing a 6/8 sonata-rondo finale of this type and of comparable richness. The 6/8 meter and poignant character of the Opus 95 finale, along with its thematic material, help explain why the movement has been linked to Mozart’s G minor Quintet, where the 6/8 finale in G major brings serenity after turbulence. But in Beethoven’s finale the 6/8 main body of the movement prolongs the darkness of F minor until the bright F-major coda in 2/2 sweeps it away.
The title of the “Emperor” Concerto, first of all, is spurious in that Beethoven had nothing to do with it.20 And yet it carries weight: its evocation of grandeur, of the heroic, perhaps of the image of Napoleon through its connections with the Eroica (in the same key and with more than a few resemblances) fits well with important features of this work, especially compared with the restrained emotional worlds of the Fourth Concerto and the Violin Concerto. Whatever else went into the making of this new E-flat Piano Concerto in 1809, it looks as if Beethoven determined to fill out his larger body of concertos with a work on the grand scale that shared elements of the heroic model. Continuing to use the three-movement plan that is normal for the concerto, he conceives for it a long and highly developed first movement, a profound and searching slow movement, and a powerful 6/8 finale that resolves all aesthetic and structural questions raised by the intensely contrasting earlier movements. A recent parallel in three movements had been the “Ghost” Trio, Opus 70 No. 1, written a year earlier, in which the slow movement, as here, had been the profound heart of the work.
In Beethoven’s “Emperor,” concerto and symphony virtually merge. Whereas in the Fourth Concerto trumpets and tympani enter the scene only in the finale, here the full orchestral tutti with brass and drums fills the sound space at the very beginning and remains prominent to the end. The winds and brass, especially paired horns, play a central role in defining the orchestral fabric and in supplying contrasts for the solo piano. In the slow movement, a subtle hymnlike Adagio, soft and dark colors pervade. The strings are muted throughout, brass and tympani are silent, and the interplay of strings and winds with one another and with the complex figuration patterns of the solo piano recall the slow movement of the Violin Concerto. Then the finale, emerging at the end of the Adagio through premonitions of its basic rondo theme, bursts out fortissimo to open the 6/8 Allegro as the finale uncoils a rising arpeggiated theme firmly in E-flat major, reminiscent in its character, syncopations, and offbeat rhythms of the Scherzo of the Fourth Symphony.
The heroic aspects of this work inevitably evoke images of the military traditions that had been associated with concertos well before Beethoven and certainly continued into his time. Particularly because this concerto was written in 1809, when the French were bombarding and invading the city, the work has seemed to some a reflection of the intensified military crises of that year—and in a broader sense, of the heightened consciousness of war that had been afflicting Europe for many years, indeed throughout Beethoven’s mature lifetime. The association is plausible, since, as Plantinga points out, the Fifth Concerto “bristles with musical topoi of a military cast and with modes of expression we easily identify as ‘heroic.’”21
The same is true of those other occasions on which Beethoven seems to enlarge the meanings of his musical forms and genres by finding ways to let them address specific issues that are of deep human importance as the world knows them: tragic heroism and death, as in the funeral march in the Eroica and in Coriolanus; love and the contemplation of the beautiful, as in some of his major-mode slow movements, including the Adagio of the “Archduke Trio”; and fear and the otherworldly, as in the minor-mode slow movement of the quartet Opus 59 No. 1 and the “Ghost” Trio. That he can mingle softer feelings of intimacy with the strong and the powerful had always been clear even within movements of the “heroic” works, as in the second group themes in the first movements of the Third and Fifth symphonies and the melting second theme in Coriolanus. He certainly does so in this concerto, above all in the first movement. The first great paragraphs give us a group of powerful orchestral chords, respectively on the tonic, subdominant, and dominant seventh (thus forming a classic progression that requires resolution to the tonic), each interrupted by a vast, written-out cadenza for the solo piano, and all forming a prologue to the first theme of the exposition. This first idea opens a procession of themes, including one of haunting expressivity but brief duration, characterized by a gradually descending melodic line, diminuendo, well into the movement (*W 29).22
This descending theme enters above the dotted rhythms associated with the first theme and continues in the first violins while the cellos and basses propound the first theme’s characteristic head motif—exactly parallel to the entrance of the lyrical second theme in the first movement of the Fifth Symphony. From here on the movement negotiates a vast trajectory in which the solo piano grapples with immensities, matching the strength of the orchestra with virtuosic figuration patterns of its own, above all a series of flying octaves in both hands in the development section.
In works such as the Eroica and the “Emperor” Concerto Theodor Adorno felt “exaltation”—“an expression of pride that one is allowed to be present at such an event, to be its witness.” But he also saw the problem presented by works of such character in the modern world of the divided consciousness, which cannot fully sustain such unmitigated idealism. As he puts the quandary, “How far this is the effect of the composition—a joy which rivets the listener’s attention to the dialectical logic—and how far the expression creates an illusion of such joy, rests on a knife’s edge.”23 The separation of effect from expression, where the latter entails a genuine belief in the capacity of music to carry philosophical freight, is of the essence in the divided, self-conscious, modernist outlook that Adorno brought to bear on Beethoven, on music, and on art as a whole. To his pessimism there is no final response except that provided by listeners and musicians who seem to arise in every new generation and regard works such as the Eroica and the “Emperor” Concerto as among their most significant personal experiences. Listeners accept them not as antiquated expressions of a political idealism that has been cruelly banished by history, but as evocations of the human possibilities that might be realized in a better world. And by attending to the inner as well as the outer aspects of such works, such listeners still believe in the courage and beauty that they convey.