Indispensability The title of this blog – “An Indispensable Person” – might be considered controversial. That’s because any number of very smart people would argue that there is, in fact, so such thing as an “indispensable person.” According to both Presidents Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt: “There is no indispensable man.” Said President John F. Kennedy: “Nobody’s indispensable.” Observed the redoubtable Charles de Gaulle (1890-1970): “The graveyards are full of indispensable men.” And there we have it: there is a school of thought that states without equivocation that “No one, absolutely no one, no matter how anyone has painted someone’s existence or value, is indispensable.” It’s a school of thought that I do not attend. That’s because based on my reading of history, there are indeed certain individuals without whom certain positive historical ends could not have been achieved. Here are four obvious examples. James Thomas Flexner entitled his superb biography of George Washington The Indispensable Man (Plume, 1974; currently published by Back Bay Books). Flexner was correct in so titling his book, because George Washington (1732-1799) was, in fact, an indispensable person. Without his leadership and indomitable will, the American Revolution would have quickly unraveled and been lost. […]
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Robert Greenberg
Historian, Composer, Pianist, Speaker, Author
Archive for Carl Czerny
We mark the death on July 15, 1857 – 162 years ago today – of the Austrian composer, pianist and teacher Carl Czerny. What would we do without him? Indeed. Excepting Ferdinand Ries (who was, like Czerny, a student of Beethoven’s), no one has left us more numerous and more accurate first-hand accounts of Beethoven than Czerny. He was a great pianist and perhaps the greatest pianist who never played in public. (I would qualify that statement, because as a young man Czerny did indeed play in public a handful of times; for example, Beethoven entrusted the 21-year-old Czerny with the first public performance in Vienna of his Piano Concerto No. 5 in E-flat major, the “Emperor”, on February 12, 1812. But in fact, Czerny hated the pressure of performing in public, hated travelling, and felt that “my playing lacked the type of brilliant, calculated charlantry that is usually part of a travelling virtuoso’s essential equipment.” So he stayed home in Vienna, where he performed in private, composed, and taught.) He was, very likely, the single most important piano teacher of the nineteenth century. According to the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians he was “a central figure in […]
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