Missa Solemnis

Listening to the London Symphony and their choir last night, something about Beethoven became clear to me: that he is serious about degree of loudness as a scale, as a compositional dimension.  I realized this after becoming frustrated with it.  If loudness is a secondary or crude quality of music - and it usually is - then Beethoven's constant alterations in loudness come across as a cheap trick, overwrought, or just ugly.  But Beethoven means to treat loudness more seriously, more dynamically, and if you can make that shift as a listener, the beauty and craft are there to hear. What we do now with reprocessing of sound - of electronic manipulation - is a further elaboration of the same.