当我是多年前的UC Berkeley音乐部门的研究生时，一个学生 - 一个作曲家 - 告诉我他的梦想。他在乐队演唱会的间歇性期间进入洗手间，那里贝多芬袭击了他，试图用哎呀刺穿他的耳膜。

我的朋友挣扎着寻求帮助，但贝多芬是可阻碍的。“你必须这样做，”他坚定地说。“这是你教育的一部分。”

I promise I’m not making this story up (and I can only assume my friend wasn’t either). But it feels a little too perfect to be quite believable, doesn’t it? After all, this dream encapsulates one of the major issues for classical music ever since Beethoven died in 1827. He inspires us, but he also overwhelms us.

For composers, he’s a daunting figure. (Brahms, explaining why he didn’t dare publish a symphony until he was in his 40s, famously wrote to a friend, “You have no idea how it feels to hear the footsteps of such a giant behind you!”) For listeners, he’s a perennial presence in the concert hall.

He just takes up too much space.

Now it’s 2020, and Beethoven is about to take up even more space than ever in our musical consciousness. Because it’s the 250th anniversary of his birth, every orchestra, every chamber group, every opera company and record label is about to flood the zone with Beethoven.

The San Francisco Symphony has pulled out the rubricBeethoven250- 除了名称之外的哈希特 - 对于它的贝多芬交响乐，协奏曲和室内音乐编程的游行。9月，旧金山歌剧正在做“Fidelio,”唯一的歌剧贝多芬写道。并且包含每个票据贝多芬的盒子套装甚至被设置为纸张 - 甚至明显的垃圾就像“惠灵顿的胜利”交响乐一样 - 已经沿着生产线缠绕。

然而，我并不相信Beethovenmania，因为今年将练习，真的增加了对作曲家的遗产的赞赏。对于一件事，最明显的是，所有贝多芬的饮食一直都没有明显不同于普通的音乐生活。（我之前引用，但不能抵抗重复，音乐家威廉·吉博尔斯的替代观察，即贝多芬周年纪念年是古典音乐的“白历史月”。）

“贝多芬年”是古典音乐的“白历史月”

— William Gibbons (@musicillogical)June 24, 2019

A second, related point is that whatever new revelations may come to light through deep immersion are going to be pretty marginal. This is music that has been raked over exhaustively for the past two centuries, sometimes to the exclusion of almost everything else. Permit me to doubt that anyone is going to rethink the repertoire, or even understand it any more profoundly, by hearing all nine symphonies, say, in a concentrated spurt.

That’s especially true, finally, because I don’t see much evidence that rethinking anything is on the agenda. Beethoven has been hailed as the GOAT since before his death, and that’s not about to change. The most urgent question up for debate amid the spate of anniversary programming seems to be “Beethoven: Awesome ortotallyawesome?”

Consider, as just one example, the Symphony’s current marketing campaign, which features members of the orchestra (violinist Chen Zhao and violist Christina King) in full Beethoven cosplay. The pictures are imaginative and hugely charming, but they also contribute to the air of hagiography that surrounds the whole enterprise.

So what’s the alternative?

音乐学家安德烈·摩尔（Andrea Moore）在12月的一个精彩的艰难意见片断in the Chicago Tribune, proposed a full-on moratorium. “Letting Beethoven’s music fall silent for the duration of his 250th anniversary year,” she wrote, “might give us a new way into hearing it live again.”

I like Moore’s thinking, but I recognize, as she does, that performing arts organizations and their audiences are unlikely to go along. It’s an aspirational position. In the meantime, a more modest goal might be to pursue the question of how we got into this situation in the first place.

How did Beethoven’s work — its harmonies, its rhetoric, its formal ideas — become such an exclusive model for what classical music should sound like? What are we going to do to give other models, both past and present, their due? How do we get past our Beethoven addiction?

These are questions that can be addressed both verbally and institutionally — through essays, books, program curation — but also within music itself. I’m thinking of pieces like Jörg Widmann’s Beethovenian jape“Con brio,”which the Symphony introduced to its repertoire in January, or John Adams’ majestic one-on-one with Beethoven, the string quartet concerto“Absolute Jest.”

Each of those pieces finds a major composer coming to terms with the imposing example of his predecessor — Widmann through gentle mockery, Adams through the even bolder and more delightful strategy of addressing Beethoven as his presumptive equal.

还有其他方法。Brahms, for instance, faced down the anxiety of writing his First Symphony by systematically undoing, redirecting and outstripping the innovations of Beethoven’s Ninth. Stravinsky wrote music that seemed to blandly deny Beethoven’s very existence, in the face of all the evidence.

对我来说，这些都是指向尚未充分处理的迫切问题的指针 - 没有找到关于贝多芬的遗产的新事物，而是如何在其适当的地方保持这种遗产。周年纪念年是完美的场合，可以设置这项任务。