It’s very, very rare for a movie to make me cry, but at midnight I cried while watching this film about the premiere of the Eroica:
Of course, this BBC production is dramatised: the musicians play the symphony that revolutionised European music at first sight of the score (in the real world, among the musicians I have known, only the German émigré to Mexico, Gerhart Münch, could play a score at first sight on the piano). BBC dramatisation aside, one of the YouTube commenters said:
I feel sorry for the vast majority of the youth today who will likely never come to know, love and appreciate the colossal genius of not only Beethoven, but most of the great composers.
I feel exactly the same way. In fact, this very year I visited the site of the premiere of Beethoven’s Third Symphony and took this photo. To understand why the film moved me, here is what I wrote in the final book of my autobiography, Lágrimas (Tears), about an experience in my adolescence (at that time I had a turntable in my bedroom):
When I heard the Eroica Symphony, from the very first bars I realised that I was listening to truly extraordinary music of the highest quality! The great power of the Allegro con Brio was a complete surprise, as well as a watershed moment in the development of my spirit; and the cover of my father’s record, showing Michelangelo’s Moses in my bedroom in Palenque Street, couldn’t have been more apt.
I had discovered Beethoven—another dimension in music! But in those days I also had my first confrontation with the anti-artistic ways of the film industry.
The last sentence refers to the deep disappointments I faced even then, in my early teens, when I realised that Hollywood didn’t always have art as its ultimate goal.
To understand Hitler and National Socialism the new generations must know, love and appreciate the colossal genius of the great composers. I had it easy because both my parents were professional musicians (my father’s last work for a large orchestra was premiered posthumously on 25 February 2018, at the Palacio de Bellas Artes).
If anyone understands what we have been calling psychogenesis, banning degenerate music—as the Third Reich did—and educating Aryan children with classical music, is as important as prohibiting sexual dissipation among adolescents and young women.