Greetings to the Celebration of
Schumann's 200th Birthday in Virginia
By Helga Zepp-LaRouche
June 2010
Helga Zepp-LaRouche |
Dear friends,
In many ways a dark age has already arrived, for many of our contemporaries the lofty ideas of the founding of the American Republic or the German Classical Period are completely unknown. A chronist wrote about the emotional depravity of the dark age in the 14th century: “And the people in this time died without sorrow and they married without joy.” Is it so far from that, when youth are shooting their classmates and speculators destroy by their action the means of livelihood for inumerous human beings “without sorrow”?
Lessing and Schiller were extremely conscious of this phenomena of emotional indifferentism and called the development of compassion, of agape, of “Empfindungsvermögen” the most urgent task of their time. How much more is this true for today!
There is no better way to accomplish that, than through great classical art, through classical music and poetry. A musical or poetical idea, when it is thoroughly composed, untill it is truly exhausted is not only the most individual mental act, and therefore liberates the composer or student of art from the dulling effect of popular taste, it also develops those finer lyrical qualities of the human soul, which are the precondition for the capacity of agape.
The poems of Heine and the composition of those poems by Schumann demonstrate that even in reactionary times, when the oligarchy deploys various forms of political Romanticism to keep the population in the cage of sense certainty, it is possible to lift peoples minds above such a state, through irony! It is the paradoxical quality of metaphor, that ambiguity that adds a dimension in the thinking, that enables the mind to free itself from the shackles of “sincere feeling”.
Beauty is a necessary condition for mankind, and therefore let us fight to reassert the classical idea of the unity of beauty, the good and the true. The outcome of this historical moment must be a classical renaissance, in which we leave the infantile stage of mankind behind us!
Helga Zepp-LaRouche
Schumann Concert Program and Video
Related pages:
Schumann Bicentennial Celebration Concert Program and Video
Schumann Bicentennial Celebration Concert Text and Translations (PDF)
200th Birthday Greeting to Robert Schumann by Harley Schlanger
The Musical Soul of Scientific Creativity: Rebecca Dirichlet’s Development of the Complex Domain (PDF 1.2 MB) by David Shavin
Robert and Clara Schumann, and their teacher Johann Sebastian Bach (PDF)
200 Year News Flash! Schumann Sighted at His Own Birthday Fest in Virginia! by Aaron Halevy (PDF)