“Is it time to cancel Ludwig van Beethoven?,” writes Jacob Heilbrunn in Monday’s (11/2) Washington Post. “A chorus of critics has emerged to bemoan his fame. It began when Nate Sloan and Charlie Harding declared in September in Vox, ‘Wealthy white men … embraced Beethoven and turned his symphony into a symbol of their superiority and importance. For some in other groups—women, LGBTQ+ people, people of color—Beethoven’s [fifth] symphony may be predominantly a reminder of classical music’s history of exclusion …’ Now, in Slate, Chris White, an assistant professor of music theory at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, admonishes classical music buffs to adopt ‘fullnaming’ and to stop calling Beethoven by his last name. This alarming practice … simply fortifies ‘centuries of systematic prejudice, exclusion, sexism, and racism.’… The truth is that Beethoven represents anything but white privilege or elitism.… His beliefs were as radical as his music…. An admirer of the French Revolution, Beethoven espoused the values of the Enlightenment, cherishing virtue, reason and universal brotherhood…. Beethoven had aristocratic patrons in Vienna, preeminently Prince Karl Lichnowsky. But Beethoven never truckled to the aristocracy.… Nowhere did Beethoven’s passion for liberty express itself more powerfully, of course, than in his music.”
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