Symphony No. 5 Second Movement

It is really the irony of the softer passages of the second movement that seem to get me. But what use is the praise of art with just another phrase of irony? A turn, a turn again.

Symphony number five of Beethoven is loaded. Everyone knows it, it is cliche and itself beyond reproach when played well, and with the right sentiment, and when the mood is right, especially the second movement, exhausted from one's day. There is something to the exhaustion itself which is sumptuous and true if one can allow one's mood to unfold into this.

I think of Oppermann frequently in the context of this musical passage. The fustian (and the Justian?) of the first movement is drained away and one retires to the drawing room for some humor, but also some complexity, the value of a single post-card showing a map of the known world: and a phrase: what will be said of this earthly civilization? The contentions of opinion are garnered back and forth, but it is not merely the opinion, rather the phrase of tension and play between the members of the discussion, the passage between instruments, the appropriate aging, the appropriate and sufficiently elegant intoxicants serve to amplify the images of a moment.

We can complain that all this talk of "kultur" somehow is rankling. The height of bourgeois sentimentality, an arcadian image of young scholars at school, behind which the cynical operations of power are at play: knowledge is power in the seemingly lost and purposeless abuse that manifests as meaningless corpulent information in the information age... pure self-indulgence and nothing more.

But the phrases! May we say that in one moment there is room for kind "gentlemen" to teach us something of their humor, their dry wit in the face of an impossible, intolerable and painful existence? Is there something to be said of "Being" outside of the crudities of all our corporate hidden agendas? Can we speak with those string passages? -even as we face the brutal regimen of our technological everyday, a sudden gelassenheit that prefigures the physiognomy of human existence?

now is enough
now is enough.