A friend of mine who goes by the handle MusicologyDuck alerted me to a listicle with a title I found impossible to ignore:
Since this list appears on a general life advice site rather than one focused on, say, musical composition, I anticipated that I’d find factual inaccuracies that would necessitate a list of corrections, as I did earlier for
a listicle of Mozart myths. What I found instead was information that wasn’t quite
factually wrong but lacked crucial historical context and was twisted to serve an anachronistic agenda.
 |
People who received ACTUAL lessons from Beethoven (above):
Carl Czerny, Ferdinand Ries, Josephine Brunsvik |
These “lessons from Beethoven” have much in common with the
sanitized composer biographies for children that I’ve previously criticized. Instead of presenting Beethoven as a moral role model for leading a virtuous life, however, this list offers the composer’s life as a model for a successful career. In the process, the complex, contradictory life of a real person is distilled to twenty-five aphorisms that cherry-pick events for anachronistic support of current economic practices.
