Matthew Guerrieri on duh duh duh DUM

In The First Four Notes: Beethoven's Fifth and the Human Imagination (Knopf), Matthew Guerrieri, music critic for the Boston Globe , calls the iconic duh duh duh DUM opening "short enough to remember and portentous enough to be memorable." In The First Four Notes: Beethoven's Fifth and the Human Imagination (Knopf), Matthew Guerrieri, music critic for the Boston Globe, calls the iconic duh duh duh DUM opening "short enough to remember and portentous enough to be memorable."Beethoven's deafness was like Mozart's beginning as a child prodigy — the biographical fact that has been merged with every discussion of their work's significance. But you say that Beethoven wasn't completely deaf in 1808 when he wrote his Fifth Symphony. Why has that myth persisted? Beethoven was the most famous composer during a time when the German Romantics decided that music picks up where language leav...