I just saw Leonard Bernstein’s Omnibus lecture on Beethoven’s Symphony no. 5 in C minor, Op. 67 (listen to it here). The lecture was very moving, to say the least. Bernstein took Beethoven’s initial rejected drafts of the symphony and played them, mistakes and all, commenting on the probable reasons why Beethoven discarded certain notes and instruments. It was the story of how Beethoven perfected this masterpiece.
It might seem funny when someone who keeps writing about failure and creating crap (eg. me) suddenly brings up perfection. But perfection is only a logical followup to our initial crappy attempts at making anything. When we’re ready to take our “failed” drafts from our drawers, that’s the time to fix it, rework it, and make it perfect.
And that takes a lot of work. Even for Beethoven.
Many of us assume that when we hear the symphony today, it sounds so simple and right that it must’ve spilled out of Beethoven in one steady gush - but not at all. Beethoven left pages and pages of discarded material… enough to fill a whole book. He rejected, he rewote, he tore up, he crossed out. He sometimes altered passages as much as twenty times.
-Leonard Bernstein
Writing this symphony took Beethoven eight years. (By this time, he was almost blind and he had been deaf for a while.) Judging from the discarded sketches that Bernstein showed, it seemed like Beethoven’s process was laborious and messy. He was never satisfied of passages that were simply adequate or logical. This piece had to be perfect. All of them had to be.
Imagine a lifetime of this struggle… Always probing and rejecting, and this constant dedication to perfection, to the principle of inevitability… For reasons unknown to him, or to anybody else for that matter, he will give away his life and his energies just to make sure that one note follows another with complete inevitability.
-Leonard Bernstein
What are we waiting for? Let’s take out that failed first draft and turn it into a perfect symphony.
I wonder how it will turn out in eight years.
Screencapture from Omnibus: Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5
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