The great redeemer

Assailed on all sides by cultural vacuity, we are more than ever in need of the life lessons of Beethoven, argues Michael Henderson

We do not, as a rule, meet all our loves at once. Those things which mean so much to us in our emotional maturity did not always strike us as special presences. Indeed, we may have been suspicious of, or felt hostility towards, some of the supreme works of art, and the minds that created them: many an indentured Wagnerian had first to leap through the magic fire of his initially forbidding music dramas.

Last week, therefore, as I sat in the drawing-room of a house in central London, and watched Gábor Takács-Nagy, founder of the Takács Quartet, supervise another superb ensemble, the Belcea, as they played through Beethoven’s Op. 135, his last work for four instruments, it was with a sense of gratitude and wonder. This was a master-class in the truest sense, five magnificent musicians honouring the greatest of all composers, and from a personal viewpoint it represented the closing of a circle.