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James Inverne

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James Inverne,

James Inverne

Opinion

When life resembles soap opera

August 21, 2014 12:23
2 min read

The thing about music, perhaps more than any other art form, is that not only is it unclear what it means at any given moment, it often loses its meaning the second the composer sets down his pen. Beethoven's Fifth Symphony – what is that? The clues we have are tenuous – most famously, one account has it that the composer described his famous four-note opening motif as "Fate knocking at the door." Most scholars agree that this witness was either making it up, or that Beethoven just said anything to avoid irritating questions. Not helpful. But if we can agree (can we?) that it is heroic, cleaving as it does to the straightforwardly macho C major key, what heroism did he mean?

You see the problem. Beethoven himself could be indecisive. His Eroica symphony, the Third, was composed as a hero-gram to Napoleon, then, after that particular dictator showed his true colours, Beethoven furiously scrubbed out the dedication in the score. As for the Fifth, well, both sides used it as a victory anthem during World War Two. What Beethoven intended, his truth, at that point ceased to matter.

That's how it is with the arts. In that I include the most slippery art form of all, news reporting. I realised with a jolt just how close the world of news reporting is to that of entertainment when, in the newsroom of a UK national newspaper, I once declined to write a big story on how "Andrew Lloyd Webber has lost it" on the basis that it wasn't true. "Come on, it's only news!" rejoined the news editor with a grin.

Entertainment is usually as much as anything about two things, from the point of view of its creators – audience numbers and drama. I increasingly believe that nearly everything is filtered at some point through those two factors. Add to that the natural bias of many news reporters for or against their subjects and you have something much closer to a work of theatrical art than to objective, detached reporting of the facts. Not to say that much of news reporting doesn't do a great service, but the point remains. Playschool also does society a great service.