April 1, 2019
MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey
What do Beethoven and the Duke of Wellington Have to Say to Our Age?
Friends,
Something
a bit different today.
Readers of these installments of MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey will know that I often write
about the arts, in particular about film and about the great traditions of
Western classical music—but also on our heritage of native folk and country
music. Thus, over the past few years I’ve written about the great twentieth
century German conductor Wilhelm Furtwangler (arguably the finest musical director
ever), and composers Richard Strauss and Anton Bruckner. And more recently I authored
a kind of appreciation memorializing the life’s work of the late Roy Clark of
the Grand Ole’ Opry and the wonderful television program, “Hee Haw.”
I do not see any contradiction at all in recognizing our
inheritance in classical music and in country and folk music, or in Gregorian and polyphonic
chant and in the great inherited hymnody that our ancestors have left
to us as a cultural trust. These forms come to us organically, inspired by the
beliefs, legends, great deeds, songs, and literary works of the peoples of the
various nations of Christendom. Just as it was with the traditional German
chorales that inspired many of the great masterpieces of Johann Sebastian Bach,
it was the lore, epics and folk history of old Europe that continued to give
life to the continent’s music and art.
Where would Tchaikovsky, or any of the other great Russian composers, have
been without Pushkin having collected and organized the great legends of
Russian history? How many composers have been inspired by Shakespeare or Homer,
or by stories of the saints and warriors that our ancestors honored?
Recently, I came upon a new study of the life of the
composer Ludwig van Beethoven, a study that attempts to revise some of the
commonly-held misconceptions about that composer, that somehow he was wrapped
up in the secular ideals of the eighteenth century Enlightenment and even its anti-religious,
or certainly anti-Catholic ideas.
Written by Nicholas Junkai Chong (Columbia University, 2016),
the work is a PhD dissertation which is titled Beethoven’s Catholicism: A Reconsideration [https://academiccommons.columbia.edu/doi/10.7916/D8RJ4JMK ] and it makes a number of
significant points, among which that Beethoven was much closer in many of his views
to the post-Napoleonic traditionalist Restoration than many other chroniclers
have admitted. Indeed, we
remember the story of his original dedication of the his famous “Eroica”
symphony (no. 3) to Napoleon, whom he had thought would “liberate” Europe, but
then tore that dedication up, instead dedicating the work to Prince Lobkowicz,
his patron, certainly no liberal. But that is just one instance, and there are
others, including long passages from his letters, his Tagebuch [“Diary”] and the Heiligenstadt
Testament, and books that he read by contemporary (and orthodox)
theologians, that indicate that his early enthusiasm for the ideals of “liberte’”
and egalite’” were tempered by an abiding faith that eventually triumphed over
many of his earlier illusions. And to this we must add his solid loyalty to the
Habsburg Empire and its Kaiser.
With this in mind, I pass on my latest essay
published by THE REMNANT.
Friday, March 29, 2019
Ludwig
van Beethoven, “Wellington’s Victory,” and the Crisis of Our Time
Written by Dr. Boyd D. Cathey
This past December
16, 2018, was a special anniversary, a significant one in the continuum of our
Western Christian civilization, but one that went largely unnoticed or
uncommemorated by the vast majority of our fellow citizens….but should not be
forgotten.
On that date, 248
years ago in 1770, the great musician and composer Ludwig van Beethoven was
born in the city of Cologne (Koln) in the Rhineland in what is now the Federal
Republic of Germany, then part of the Holy Roman Empire. Traveling to Vienna as
a young man, he spent much of his life there as one of the greatest composers
of music of all time. His compositions and his persona continue to resound
through the ages—as long as there is a Western and Christian culture to admire
and celebrate.
Biographies of
Beethoven abound, and I will not spend time recounting facts and events that
are easily obtainable via the Internet or in hundreds of books written about
him.
What I wish to do is
simply emphasize the importance of cultural giants like Beethoven who have made
precious contributions to our Western Christian heritage, a heritage that is
critically threatened in our time by demonic and Gnostic demiurges who seek
nothing less than the complete perversion of two millennia of Christian culture
which brought together the salvific Gift of the Hebrews, the philosophy of
ancient Greece, and the classical traditions of Rome.
Beethoven was an
integral part of that continuum. And like so many others who have contributed
to our inherited corpus of art, music, architecture, literature, and folklore,
he stands above the ages athwart the disintegration and the frenzied assaults
on what the poet William Butler Yeats called (in his poem, “The Second Coming”)
the “rocking cradle” of Bethlehem—that “rocking cradle” of the Christ from
which our culture proceeds.
Just as the
post-Marxist and Progressivist academics and mobs and their allies in our
cowardly political and media elites wish to put all reminders of our past—those
monuments and symbols—whether Confederate or colonial, in remote museums,
safely away from the inquiring eyes of most of our citizens, so, too, those
epigones of Evil, those cultural vandals who would destroy our inheritance,
wish to lock up our sacred traditions of music, literature, and the arts away
from our population for whom that inheritance is a birthright. Or, separate
them and make them practically inaccessible. Or, far worse, “re-interpret” them
using new templates based entirely on “race” and “gender”—thus, “women’s
studies” which views literature and music through the lens of “masculine
oppression” and “toxic masculinity” throughout the ages.
In December 1940, at
the end of a live national Saturday matinee broadcast of the Metropolitan
Opera’s production of Gaetano Donizetti’s La Fille du Regiment, as
author Paul Jackson (in his volume, Saturday Afternoons at the Old Met)
recounts, the famous soprano Lily Pons advanced to the front of the stage, and
holding a French flag aloft, sang “La Marseillaise.” The audience erupted in
emotional enthusiasm…not just there in New York, but across the entire nation
where as many as forty million listeners tuned in and heard her salute to a
defeated France. Forty million Americans in every state and territory
(out of around 130 million citizens) were united not only in remembering fallen
France, but by and in a culture and musical tradition they all shared, and,
even if not devotees of opera, which they at least understood to be part of their
precious cultural patrimony.
Today that unity no
longer exists. It has been rent asunder by the very guardians of that cultural
inheritance, those entrusted with its care and transmission, who have succumbed
to the Dark Lord and the enticements that emit from the foulest voices and most
fetid enemies of our civilization.
It was the Roman poet
Juvenal two millennia ago in his Satires who wrote, “Quis
custodiet ipsos custodes?,” which translated means: “Who is
guarding us against the guardians?” Today we must ask the same questions: Who
is guarding us against the cabal of our Intelligence Agencies which now serve
as instruments of the Deep State?—Who is guarding us against a political class
bought and paid for by globalists who have no loyalty to country or to faith,
but rather only to their secularized vision of a global Godless Utopia?—Who is
guarding us against the academic elites who control our educational system and
pollute the minds of our children?—Who is guarding us against the feculent
pollution of our cultural and artistic heritage?
In
recent months millions of Frenchmen have demonstrated against the pro-European
Union statist and anti-Christian government of Emmanuel Macron, who was
supposed to be the “new leader” of a united Europe (replacing perhaps the
discredited Angela Merkel). Indeed, did we not hear those vaunted Fox
All-Stars, the cream of Neoconservative “opinion,” Jonah Goldberg and Marc
Thiessen, endorse Macron when he was challenged by Marine Le Pen in the past
French national election? Le Pen, you see, was a “Make France Great Again” type
person—too much like Trump—too much a “populist,” or to use Goldberg’s
hackneyed catch-all epithet for anyone who opposes his globalist lunacy, just
maybe a “fascist?”
These
Neoconservatives are nothing more than a wing of the same Army of the Night
that seeks to undo our civilization. Just consider how they—from Goldberg, the
late Charles Krauthammer, Bill Kristol, to so many others—have “evolved” on
such issues as feminism, racism, same sex marriage, and transgenderism, not to
mention their own frenzied secular designs to impose a universal egalitarianism
on the rest of the world, whether those other peoples desire it or not: a New
World Order, without God and His Church, without Grace, and without, most
assuredly, Hope.
After
an initial enthusiasm for and flirtation with what he thought Napoleon might
bring to Europe, Beethoven later in his life became a strong supporter of the
Habsburg monarchy…and an avowed foe of the Napoleonic destruction of the Old
Order. He understood what that meant, just as the Blessed Pius IX after the
Revolution of 1848 understood the deleterious effects of liberalism and its
fanatical desire to destroy Christian civilization.
In
1813 to celebrate the great victory of the Marquess (later Duke) of Wellington
over the armies of Napoleon at the Battle of Vitoria in Spain (June 21, 1813),
Beethoven composed a wonderful little ceremonial piece—“Wellington’s Victory”—a
kind of short visually evocative symphonic poem depicting that momentous battle
that freed Spain from Napoleonic tyranny. In it he interpolated both French and
British airs and songs, including a rousing version of “Rule, Britannia!” (The
Brits were on the “good” side back then.) It stands as a musical symbol of both
the cultural response that Christian Europe then offered to “the great thief of
Europe” as well as a paean to military triumph over the forces of Revolution.
Today
both Europe and the United States appear prostrate before the even more
frenzied offspring of those 19th century revolutionaries who
largely dominate our politics and educational system, who have despoiled our
artistic heritage, and who have infiltrated and occupied the highest offices in
the Church.
For us, then, my wish
is that in 2019 we seize upon the signs of Hope—those growing signs of
contradiction against Modernism and Progressivism—and, like our ancestors, like
Wellington and, yes, like a Beethoven with the scales removed from his eyes,
raise up the banners of Christ the King.
While advancing once
more beneath His Cross, we intone the Laudes Regiae: “Christus
vincit! Christus regnat! Christus imperat!” And we could not do much better
than letting “Wellington’s Victory” become our symphonic clarion call of
militant crusade against our powerful enemies who seek nothing less than the
extinction of our culture, our faith and us.
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