Sweet sounds, oh, beautiful music, do not cease!
Reject me not into the world again.
With you alone is excellence and peace,
Mankind made plausible, his purpose plain.
Enchanted in your air benign and shrewd,
With limbs a-sprawl and empty faces pale,
The spiteful and the stingy and the rude
Sleep like the scullions in the fairy-tale.
This moment is the best the world can give:
The tranquil blossom on the tortured stem.
Reject me not, sweet sounds; oh, let me live,
Till Doom espy my towers and scatter them,
A city spell-bound under the aging sun.
Music my rampart, and my only one.
- On Hearing a Symphony of Beethoven
- One of the most significant facts, for the understanding of Beethoven, is that his work shows an organic development up until the very end… The greatest music Beethoven ever wrote is to be found in the last string quartets, and the music of every decade before the final period was greater than its predecessor. (Shakespeare, Newton, and Beethoven: Or, Patterns of Creativity, a talk by Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar)