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20 BEETHOVEN_’GHOST’ & ‘ARCHDUKE’ TRIOS Is this idea of Beethoven as a monolithic composer bound up with the way his music is taught? David Grimal: There’s a whole ideology centred on the ‘Beethoven machine’, Beethoven the ‘rhythmician’. This aesthetic, which views Beethoven as a composer of vertical and architectural music, has been widely diffused by string quartets, and especially byWalter Levin, the founder and leader of the LaSalle Quartet, who was a great teacher of chamber music and trained just about every modern string quartet. Levin championed a very powerful ideology associating Beethoven with the invention of the metronome, the notion that his music is essentially motoric. That approachwas then picked up and amplified by devotees of period instruments andhistorically informedperformance: they began toplay Beethoven’s symphonies in a very rhythmic manner, sometimes almost like techno. That’s still the tendency of many orchestras I collaboratewith today, themotoric reflex, the use of force. I’m obliged to tell them every time: ‘Beethoven came after Haydn, not after Karajan.’ I see here the vestiges of a formof propaganda that exploited this music, associated with the fantasy of the ‘superman’.