Beethoven: man, composer and revolutionary | Art marxist.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from marxist.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
A DISEASED Cedar of Lebanon that has stood overlooking Drybridge Street for 250 years has been given a new lease of life and was formally declared ‘open’ by the Lord Lieutenant Brigadier Robert Aitken CBE on Sunday (May 7).
This essay is part of a series on cultural, scientific and esoteric matters.
by michael roberts
It is the 250
th anniversary of the birth of Ludwig Beethoven, who was born either on 16 or 17 December 1770; nobody was quite sure, including Beethoven himself. Beethoven is considered the most musically revolutionary of ‘classical’ composers. And in my view, that was no accident of history because Beethoven was a man of his time.
He was born at the time of what has been called the ‘enlightenment’, when European thought broke from a subservience to religion and monarchy and raised the banner of free thinking, science and democracy – and there were the first glimmerings of a new economic order based of ‘free trade and competition’. Adam Smith published his seminal work, The Wealth of Nations, when Beethoven was six years old. And the American war of independence took place, in which the formerly British settlers broke from the British monarchy, with the financial and