A full-size statue of Beethoven once stood behind the Boston Symphony. Toni Sellars and Mindy Pechenuk on how deep this music ran in 19th-century America — and who spent the next century getting it out.
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A full-size statue of Beethoven once stood behind the Boston Symphony. Toni Sellars and Mindy Pechenuk on how deep this music ran in 19th-century America — and who spent the next century getting it out.
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Toni Sellars and Mindy Pechenuk on Beethoven's revolution — and why a deaf man breaking every rule in music is the most political story you'll hear this week.
This is the latest in an ongoing Saturday Class series on classical culture as the indispensable ground of American statecraft.
Toni Sellars opens every one of her classes with that question. Her answer comes from Lyndon LaRouche:
“Man is supposed to be an immortal creature who is going to die. So during your life, where do you find the passion that will help you take actions that will save mankind from self-destruction? That is music. That is art.”
— Lyndon LaRouche
Beethoven, she argues, is the highest expression of that passion we have — which is exactly why he has been pushed out of American life. And the way to know him is not through biography. It is through the music, and through what he wrote in his own hand.
Born in Bonn in 1770 into a family of court musicians — his grandfather the court music director, his father a tenor. Those first twenty years were brutal. An alcoholic father who had never made the breakthroughs he wanted for himself imposed them on his son, forcing ten, twelve, fourteen hours a day at the keyboard, hoping to produce another Mozart. A friend of the father's would come by in the middle of the night, pull the boy out of bed, and make him play for another ten hours.
He first visited Vienna at 17 and moved there permanently in 1792, at 22. Vienna then was a gritty medieval city without plumbing. He stayed 34 years, until he died. Thayer's biography lists the addresses: he moved sixty times.
In 1805 he watched French troops occupy the city — a war where men were killed in front of you in the street. That is the year of Fidelio, his only opera, and an intensely political one. Four years later Napoleon's forces surrounded Vienna and shelled it for days. Beethoven, already losing his hearing, is said to have taken shelter in his brother's basement. He kept composing.
The hearing loss began in his late twenties, and by his forties he was completely deaf. Consider what that means. Your mission in life is to produce music, and for the last long stretch of it you cannot hear a note of what you write. The music was in his mind.
In 1802 it became clear to him that the deafness could not be treated and would only get worse. He went to a cottage outside the city and wrote what we now call the Heiligenstadt Testament — the document in which he sets down how close he came to taking his own life.
“Perhaps I shall get better, perhaps not. I am ready… It was only my art that held me back. It seemed to me impossible to leave the world until I had brought forth all that I felt was within me.”
— Beethoven, Heiligenstadt Testament, 1802
In the same document, writing to his brother Carl:
“I recommend virtue to your children. It alone, not money, can make them happy. I speak from experience. This is what upheld me in my times of misery. Thanks to it, and to my art, I did not end my life in suicide.”
Two more lines from his own hand tell you more than any biography. Asked to inscribe a portrait for Lenz von Breuning:
“Truth exists for the wise, beauty for the susceptible heart. They belong together. They are complementary.”
And to a poor young girl named Emilie who wrote asking how one becomes an artist:
“Do not only practice your art, but force your way into its secrets. Only art and science can raise men to the divine.”
Around 1800 a pianist named Daniel Steibelt came to Vienna specifically to take Beethoven down. The format was the improvisation contest: you are handed a theme cold and you build twenty minutes of music out of it on the spot. Steibelt threw his music on the floor, played something enormously dramatic, and got the room.
Beethoven — who was not competitive, but was being insulted — walked up, picked one page of Steibelt's own music off the floor, turned it upside down, and improvised on it for twenty minutes.
Whether or not it was the same theme, as the story goes, the theme Beethoven was working that year runs through The Creatures of Prometheus, the Eroica Variations (Op. 35), a set of contredanses, and the Third Symphony.
Prometheus was not incidental to him. Beethoven saw Prometheus as the artist who brought the fire of reason to free humanity from ignorance. We took the name for the same reason.
At the keyboard, Tony Papert played the two sounds you are not supposed to write: the tritone — what the old theorists called diabolus in musica, the devil's interval — and chromatic half-steps stacked against each other. In the Eroica Variations, Beethoven writes them for measures on end.
Dissonance creates tension, and musicians write it on purpose. Life has tensions, and the job is to resolve them and move forward. That is the whole point: Beethoven is not breaking rules for sport. He is demonstrating that the rules were never where the music lived.
“Music doesn't lie in the notes, in laws of composition. It lies in the motive and the intent. You must capture their mind, not their ears.”
— Lyndon LaRouche
Mindy Pechenuk picks it up with a fact this country has been made to forget. For most of the 19th century, America was saturated with Beethoven.
“In Beethoven, music becomes the voice of the infinite… Beethoven stands alone, not merely as a musician. He is a prophet, a seer, a revealer of the deepest truths of the human soul.”
— John Sullivan Dwight, Dwight's Journal of Music
“Deafness — the heaviest of afflictions where a musician is concerned — could not silence Beethoven's soul. It only drove his genius deeper inward, where he found treasures of beauty and power unknown to those who hear with the outward ear.”
— Thomas Starr King, essay on music, 1858
In Henschel's Boston, a full-size seated statue of Beethoven stood behind the orchestra — permanently, until it was eventually moved to the conservatory. That is how close to the center of American life this music once sat.
Mindy's conclusion is the pivot of the whole class: “This is what they had to deploy against — because it was in our country, and there were young people studying to be like Beethoven.”
Which brings the class to Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937), the Italian communist whose Prison Notebooks are the working manual of today's Democratic Socialists. Mindy did not have to go hunting for the connection. She got an email from the DSA in Oakland with Gramsci quoted at the top of it.
“The supremacy of a social group manifests itself in two ways: as domination, and as intellectual and moral leadership.”
— Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks
Gramsci's argument was that the ruling class holds power through cultural institutions, so the revolution must build its own counter-hegemony. Translated: you cannot have a communist revolution unless you first get a country to hate its own culture.
That is the through-line. The 1960s rock-drug-sex counterculture was not the end of the operation, it was the opening. Look at how far it has gone — and then look at the demographic collapse behind it: fewer marriages, fewer children, fewer families, in America and across the world. It was never only about the music. It is about identity, and culture is the question of man in the image of God. That is the target.
The economics is the same fight. Mindy pointed to JD Vance's argument that this administration is finished with Milton Friedman, laissez-faire, and free trade, and is going back to Alexander Hamilton. Her measure of the difference between the two men is one sentence: Friedman said his faith was not in God. Hamilton's was — as was that of every one of the founders.
Then the class goes into the music itself: the opening of the String Quartet in A minor, Op. 132 — one of the late quartets Beethoven worked on from 1824 to 1826.
The germ is four notes in the cello. G♯ to A, then F to E. A half-step up, then a half-step down. The viola takes it inverted. Then the second violin. Then the first violin: D♯ to E, C to B. Eight measures, four voices, one idea turned inside out.
Years ago LaRouche put the question to Mindy and others working on music: what did Beethoven actually do here? The answer is that he broke out of the twenty-four major and minor keys and handed us roughly forty-eight — every mode, in both directions.
The move underneath it is through-composition. You do not build a composition out of intervals the way you build a wall out of bricks. You derive the meaning of the interval from the composition as a whole. G♯ to A is a half-step on the page. In Beethoven's mind it is not a distance at all.
“The notes you see on the score don't tell you what the composition is. They are the footprints of a creative discovery.”
— Mindy Pechenuk
Then listen to what he does with the tritones cross-voiced through the movement — F to B, D♯ to A, F♯ to C, D to G♯. On paper it should be unbearable. It isn't. Beethoven turns what should be dissonance into consonance: what you hear is tension held, not noise. Most performers of the late quartets get this exactly backwards and try to make them sound dissonant.
“In Beethoven, the truth of a composition is not that it arrives through development at a final resolution, but that its resolution looks back upon the process by which the progress was realized.”
— Lyndon LaRouche
Which is why the first movement ends the way it does. After all that development, the first violin simply alternates on a single E while the other three voices settle out of B major into A minor. He has earned the right to state it that plainly — and your mind replays the entire journey.
Mindy's closing image: when we first tried to fly a plane through the sound barrier, the planes came apart. Getting through required a new physics — not a better plane. Beethoven did the same thing to music. He did not write harder pieces inside the twenty-four-key domain. He discovered a higher one.
The political parallel she draws is Trump. His is a generative mind: he starts from a vision — man in the image of God, the American System, the end of globalism and of empire — and everything else is a voice inside one composition. The Middle East and the Abraham Accords and the Board of Peace, Iran, Lebanon, the Saudis, the tariffs, the rebuilding of American industrial production that is the material basis of having a family at all. You are free to like this piece and not that piece. But you cannot understand any of it one movement at a time.
And if man can intervene in the universe and change it — which is why we are not still rubbing two sticks together — then what does that say about the universe, about man, and about the One who made him? Mindy's answer is the assignment: our responsibility is to intervene.
Beethoven was completely deaf. He should have walked away. He didn't.
The class assigns homework, and this week's is not optional if you want the argument to land. Youtube copyright enforcement kept most of it off the broadcast, so listen to these all the way through:
Play the Liszt last, and play it on purpose. Mindy put it in the class as a control — hear what happens when a composer takes Beethoven's gestalt and flattens it back into intervals of distance. “When you hear the whole piece, you'll realize what an attack that was on Beethoven's revolution.”
Watch the full class — then send it to the person in your life who thinks culture is downstream of politics. It is the other way around.
—Promethean Action Editorial Staff
PS: The 2026 midterms will determine whether President Trump's agenda survives and accelerates — or gets reversed and crushed.
Our Midterm Bootcamp is a semi-monthly training series equipping activists, candidates, and grassroots leaders with the ideas and messaging to win. Sign up and check your email for the next session's Zoom link.
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