Lex Fridman: evaluation

Transcript context

…Gary Oldman … Gary Oldman. Just a really… it’s a masterful celebration of Beethoven in an interesting kind of way through the perspective of a love letter that he’s written. But then I realized like… and this is early, this is many, many… this is a couple decades ago now, that, you know, he went deaf before he even started writing the Ninth Symphony, which is why they consider it to be one of the greatest compositions of all time, the greatest symphonies of all time. He went deaf, couldn’t hear anything before he even started writing it. And so there’s that famous story of him in that world premiere of having to be turned around because he can’t hear people applauding, so he has to be turned around to see that people are actually clapping. I mean, there’s just this whole tragic element. Plus, the meaning of the symphony that ends in this beautiful Ode to Joy, the symphony itself is a kind of… It starts with the chaos and conflict and ends with this celebration of peace and brotherly unity and a— I guess a call for that, a reaching for that, for that peace. And it’s a… and there’s a tragic element to it, again, connected to history, which is it was post Napoleonic Wars- … and before the American Civil War. So like, you’re in this, in this middle… this respite from war, calling for peace, not knowing that truly horrific wars are coming. So you have the American Civil War, and you have the, of course, the two World Wars coming. So this, all of it together, and the fact that he’s conducting deaf, and he wrote this whole thing deaf. I was reading a lot about his process, and he just edits and edits and edits and edits. So the fact that he had to edit in his head is just insane. I mean, it… Beethoven was sick all the time too. I mean, a lot of people were sick all the time. It was very common. What would motivate you to write music, this beautiful music that you can never actually hear except for in your head? Right? Like, why… The amount of time it takes to write a 35-minute, 40-minute piece, all the parts, you got to hear all the orchestration in your head. You’re editing, you’re doing all these things. Where do you get the motivation when you can’t hear the actual finished work? One, and people would say, “Well, he hears in his head.” But what kind of enjoyment is it? You wanna hear the orchestra… I mean, it’s really profound that he was inspired to do this. There’s a thing called the Heiligenstadt Testament that he wrote. It was a letter to his brothers from 1802. I think they found it in his desk after Beethoven died, and he felt a sense of shame and humiliation because of his hearing loss. And he said that he was afflicted with this thing where him of all people, that someone standing next to him could hear a flute that he could not hear, or a shepherd singing in the field that… And he could not hear this. And of all the people, why him? Where hearing played such an important part. Another person that would have had to have had perfect pitch, ’cause you could never do this- … if you didn’t have perfect pitch, which I think all of these great composers, for the most part. Brahms didn’t, from what I know, but all the rest of them, for sure, had perfect pitch. So they could hear these things in their head, and that’s how they composed.…

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