Down with genius!

Last night Sandy Baillie played all five Beethoven Cello Sonatas at the National Academy of Music. What a phenomenal musician! He plays with incredibly expressive and emotional freedom, negotiating the dramatic extremes of the music with ease; rarely have I seen an instrumentalist so completely in accord with his instrument. The sonatas don't chart a consistent path through the composer's life - there are two Haydnesque sonatas at the beginning, two glowing and radiant sonatas at the end, and the glorious A major in the middle. Hearing them together brings home to me the path of Beethoven from craftsman to genius 'for all time'. Several people I talked to after the performance commented on the 'superiority' of the last sonatas. This sort of talk drives me nuts; when people say about the late works that the composer 'journeys into the soul' or 'takes us closer to heaven', the implication is that as a 'mere' craftsman, experimenting within the accepted style and forms of the time, Beethoven was an inferior composer compared with the more 'modern'-style genius of the later years. I remember Australian composer Peter Sculthorpe saying last year at a function I attended that he'd be happy if we just ditched all of his earlier music totally. I think that in some ways it is this 'enduring artworks for all time' attitude that has helped to freeze classical music in time, setting a 'canon of great works' in stone and keeping us locked in the 19th century...