Atlanta Symphony Orchestra ... Tuesday, March 27, 1984

Abstract

""This elegant and heart-felt sonnet by Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892- 1950) is an American poet's testimony to the penetrating impact of the music of Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827). What seems remark- able about the poem is that it imparts not only the response of the poet--and so many other music lovers--but, somewhat presumptuously perhaps, the attitude of Beethoven himself. It is easy to imagine the great German composer being in whole-hearted agreement with these lines of verse written a century after his death. The language of the poetry, moreover, is rich in suggestion and imagery: to the tragic isolation brought on by Beethoven's deafness, to the city-under-seige metaphor and social idealism inspired by the French Revolution, to the Romantic concept of art and the artist largely defined by Beethoven's example."--page 18.