This passage of March 7, 1997 is a bit muddled, but I was reaching at something--I'm not sure what. I might have been a bit frustrated with pomposity masquerading as creativity.

I think your comments about Beethoven and the Ninth are intriguing given that Beethoven has never really been one of “my” composers. I’ve played a lot of Beethoven, of course (all pianists do) but he has never been one of the composers I really seek out. I’m not sure if there are any Beethoven works that I really love, for example. There are plenty that I’ve played and studied and all that. But the lust for power is very much there in his writing, that’s for sure. There is a bit of chicken-and-egg aspect to the music as well: we tend to identify the artist as great when the artist is highly revolutionary, an applecart upsetter, a man set apart from the world and the general run of humanity. That’s the Beethoven influence since he was the first truly self-conscious artist who set himself apart from the world, told the world that they must see it his way. But I wonder if that has been a false prophet in some ways. I have always been highly uncomfortable with the notion of the artist as revolutionary simply because none of the great ones ever are. It is perhaps a byproduct of my own musical life—centered within the confines of an institution rather than confronting the world directly—but I tend to think of the artist in much the same terms as an 18th century or earlier artist might think of himself—as a fine craftsman, one who creates fine things, but not as some Godlike omnipotence who must stand apart from the world and thumb his nose at convention.

Part of the problem there is that Beethoven didn’t really thumb his nose very much. He made a great big show of doing that, but even a superficial analysis of his music makes it abundantly clear that there is nothing radical or new in Beethoven, but a strongly individualistic continuation of the Viennese Classical style. So the view of the artist as revolutionary is, to my way of thinking, seriously flawed from the onset. The uber-artist himself wasn’t particularly revolutionary. So where does that lead the rest of the self-proclaimed artists?

Which is a natural segue into one inevitable outcome of this sort of thinking: the lowest common denominator, the “performance artist.” What on earth ever brought this nonsense about, anyway? The airs these people put on. You would think they actually had talent at something. Instead, they are “performance artists” because they don’t have the talent to pursue one of the real arts: they aren’t good actors, singers, dancers, musicians, painters, anything. So they combine a lot of these various crafts and hope that variety will take the place of quality. It doesn’t. I get a certain pleasure out of noting that no “performance artist” ever seems to rise much above the level of the community theater. Community-sponsored “arts festivals” are their natural abode. You find performance artists at the Yerba Buena Center, not at the Opera House or Davies.

It represents some kind of grandiose, if vague, notion of Art with a capital ‘A’. Not a way of thinking to which I aspire; what on earth is this Art with a capital ‘A’, anyway? Oscar Wilde had a lot of fun talking about it, but he never made any sense outside of some vague aesthetic. Besides, Oscar Wilde would have been a “performance artist” in our more hectic, big-money age; I really doubt his oh-so-precious sensibility could survive in today’s entertainment/media world. The performance artist aspires to something high and lofty, something filled with inner meaning, fire and music. I wish I knew what the hell it was they were talking about. I’m just a trained professional musician. I don’t know about all this grandiose ‘art’ stuff they keep babbling on about.