A Search for Timelessness

A Search for Timelessness: Richard Wagner’s and Sarah Brightman’s reception of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony

Bo-Feng Wang

(National Taiwan University) Writing the introduction to Thomas Mann’s classic Death in Venice, a new translation by Michael Henry Heim, Michael Cunningham begins with: “All novels are translations, even in their original languages.”1 When propelled to compose a piece of literature, the writer is at first struck by a “cloud” of initial feelings or impulses generated from his life experience. These feelings contain their own innate “mysteries” that, when being interpreted in tones or words, will never be precisely decoded. The writer and the reader as well both try so hard to get closer to the heart of the “secret” of human feelings, searching for what is inherently concealed in the expression itself. However, the deeper one digs in, the more of oneself is to be revealed. An individual interpretation relies highly on its interpreter’s educational background and his personal definitions of every single phrase. It is rather subjective and actually clings closer to the “secret” of the interpreter’s own life rather than which of the novel. Similarly, when the composer composes a piece of music, he is experiencing the “purely human feelings” directly. The process undergoes “beneath the level of active consciousness” where the composer can actually sense whatever belongs to the “mystery” itself- it’s “something about being alive and being mortal and that that something, when we try to express it, inevitably eludes us." But, however “eluding” it may be, the composer would never give up marking the “mystery” by means of all his compositions. And, what he has left, on top of all his musical works, is not only the unlimited freedom to interpret these works but the valuable opportunity for us listeners to understand more of ourselves. Hearing Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, one can hardly ignore its strongly rhythmic characteristic. The rhythm is...