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Part C
Directions:
Read the following text carefully and then translate the underlined
segments into Chinese. Your translation should be written on the ANSWER SHEET(10
points)
Music means different things to different people and sometimes even
different things to the same person at different moments of his life. It might
be poetic, philosophical, sensual, or mathematical, but in any case it must, in
my view, have something to do with the soul of the human being. Hence it is
metaphysical; but the means of expression is purely and exclusively physical:
sound. I believe it is precisely this permanent coexistence of metaphysical
message through physical means that is the strength of music.46) It is also the
reason why when we try to describe music with words, all we can do is articulate
our reactions to it, and not grasp music itself.
Beethoven’s importance in music has been principally defined by the
revolutionary nature of his compositions. He freed music from hitherto
prevailing conventions of harmony and structure. Sometimes I feel in his late
works a will to break all signs of continuity. The music is abrupt and seemingly
disconnected, as in the last piano sonata. In musical expression, he did not
feel restrained by the weight of convention. 47) By all accounts he was a
freethinking person, and a courageous one, and I find courage an essential
quality for the understanding, let alone the performance, of his works.
This courageous attitude in fact becomes a requirement for the performers
of Beethoven’s music. His compositions demand the performer to show courage, for
example in the use of dynamics. 48) Beethoven’s habit of increasing the volume
with an extreme intensity and then abruptly following it with a sudden soft
passage was only rarely used by composers before him.
Beethoven was a deeply political man in the broadest sense of the word. He
was not interested in daily politics, but concerned with questions of moral
behavior and the larger questions of right and wrong affecting the entire
society.49) Especially significant was his view of freedom, which, for him, was
associated with the rights and responsibilities of the individual: he advocated
freedom of thought and of personal expression.
Beethoven’s music tends to move from chaos to order as if order were an
imperative of human existence. For him, order does not result from forgetting or
ignoring the disorders that plague our existence; order is a necessary
development, an improvement that may lead to the Greek ideal of spiritual
elevation. It is not by chance that the Funeral March is not the last movement
of the Eroica Symphony, but the second, so that suffering does not have the last
word. 50) One could interpret much of the work of Beethoven by saying that
suffering is inevitable, but the courage to fight it renders life worth
living.
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