BACKLASH

With regard to Mark Swed’s article “Beethoven in Toto” (Jan. 25), it is beyond me that any responsible newspaper would allow a writer to offer essays without evidence to support his major theses.

Swed declares that there have been three (count ‘em, three) backlashes to the music of Beethoven since the inception of the LP era. But nowhere does he give us any supporting documentation regarding these backlashes. If there was a wave of genuine disgust with the composer, then I think it is the journalist’s duty to tell the reader who was disgusted. Was there a Gallup poll that I missed? Or was the disgust leveled by Swed himself?

Next we are told that with so many LPs available during the ‘50s and ‘60s, composers felt that Beethoven’s “omnipresence” smothered their creativity. Again, no support. Why not acknowledge that somehow a few talented composers managed to emerge from Beethoven’s alleged shadow during the LP and/or CD (second backlash!) eras: Samuel Barber, Leonard Bernstein, Nadia Boulanger, Pierre Boulez, Benjamin Britten, Aaron Copland, Alberto Ginastera, Morton Gould, Howard Hanson, Roy Harris, Ernst Krenek, Gyorgy Ligeti, Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, Gian Carlo Menotti, Olivier Messiaen, Darius Milhaud, Thea Musgrave, Luigi Nono, Carl Orff, Krzysztof Penderecki, Walter Piston, Ned Rorem, William Schuman, Roger Sessions, Dmitri Shostakovich, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Igor Stravinsky, not to mention a couple of Swed’s favorites, Toru Takemitsu and Iannis Xenakis!

Finally, we are warned of a third backlash, even though, in his own words, Swed tells us that Beethoven remains “ever popular.” How can we have a backlash if the composer’s popularity is at an all-time high?

MARK J. MARGOLIS

Santa Monica

I am not a musicologist but a general music lover. Contra Swed, I find much of Beethoven’s “juvenilia” and music he “wrote for hire” quite interesting. According to the notes to the “Complete Beethoven Edition’s” folk-song arrangement volume that Swed so disdains, most of this allegedly hack work was never published in Beethoven’s lifetime because it was deemed too difficult musically for a popular, amateur audience.

Conductor Arthur Nikisch was born in 1855, 28 years after Beethoven’s death, not 23, as Swed asserts. And how the Fifth Symphony could be considered “still fresh music” when Nikisch recorded it in 1913 (105 years after its premiere) is something known only to Swed.

MARK RINGER

Long Beach