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Harvey Sachs is well known for his books on Arturo Toscanini, Artur Rubinstein, and music in Fascist Italy, among other subjects.1 In a wistful aside early in this book he writes:
I am not an authentic musicologist. I state this fact neither ashamedly nor proudly, but simply to give you an inkling of what lies ahead ... When asked what my profession is, I usually say, for the sake of expedience, 'writer and music historian' but 'daydreamer, appreciator, and curiosity addict' would be a more accurate definition (pp. 5ff).
In a postlude he remembers being transfixed in childhood by recordings and that 'Beethoven seemed to speak to me more clearly, more directly, than anyone else' (p. 196). And in a highly personal confession he writes:
at the outset of my adult life, when the government of my native country demanded that I participate in a war that I considered unjust, cruel, stupid, and tinged with racism, Beethoven and his resilient, universalizing music, which seemed to transcend all human tendencies towards disunity but also, simultaneously, toward mindless obedience - toward following the multitude to do evil - were among the main influences that made me decide to emigrate rather than do what was expected of me (p. 198).
This passage, though retrospective, sets the stage. His dual subjects are the Ninth Symphony as a reflection of Beethoven's political beliefs, and 1824 as the year of its first performance. With that year as a focal point he envisages a group of far-flung contemporary writers and artists whose works Sachs regards as, equally, messages of liberation and reflections of 'Romanticism's rear-guard action against repression' (p. 110). These other artists are Byron, Pushkin, Delacroix and Heine, each briefly surveyed. It turns out, not surprisingly, that Sachs' claims of connection between the Ninth Symphony and works by these contemporaries are based simply on the general proposition that all of them believed in 'freedom of the mind and spirit' (p. 95). He readily admits that 'to a hypothetical observer who, in 1824, had heard of Beethoven ... and the other major figures ... the points of contact among them would have seemed tenuous, perhaps even nonexistent. But from a twenty-first century perspective, the connection...