Hindsight
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JC: [At the end of a characteristically rambling rant] “... so, I ask you: why have we been so bad at stopping catastrophic risks from happening? Leeson, LTCM, Amaranth, Enron, Global Crossing, Kerviel, Madoff, Bear Stearns, Lehman, LIBOR, Theranos, London Whale, Mossack Fonseca, 1MDB, Wirecard ... ”
Middle manager: [interrupting]: Simply put, we were not proactively looking for it. We were not using data properly to evaluate risk. To add value as an in-house legal function we need to use innovative tools to crunch data, proactively spot emerging risks and escalate them to business.”
On December 22, 1808, a freezing night in 1,500 people attended an akademie concert at the modernist Theater an der Wien in suburban Vienna. The programme was four hours long, and in it a young composer from the unfashionable German town of Bonn would be debuting a number of different works. The run-up to the concert did not bode well: about half the musicians in theatre’s house orchestra had “conflicting commitments” with a better-paying gig across town at the Burgtheater, and even the solo soprano dropped out at the last minute, to be replaced by an unknown teenager— I have to hop is no modern excuse it seems — and the composer — an irascible fellow, it seems —kept changing the scores up to the last minute. So poor were relations with his musicians that they refused his baton, and another conductor was drafted in to lead the orchestra on the day of the concert.
The concert itself was a disaster. The orchestra was rubbish — “lacking in all respects”, according to one reviewer — the poor teenage soprano suffered a bad case of stage fright, the concert hall was freezing and the show badly overran. During a choral fantasy, the under-rehearsed orchestra fell apart completely and had to restart the piece altogether.
So why is there even any record of this concert — most of SuperCheeses concerts were better than that, and there’s no record of any of them — and how has it found its way onto a Jolly Contrarian article about hindsight? You will not be surprised to hear there is a punchline.
Of the scathing reviews that followed, one at least — in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung — was prescient enough to say the following: “To judge all these pieces after only one hearing, especially considering [...] that so many were performed in a row, and most are so grand and long, is impossible.”
To the punchline then: In this concert, said young foreign composer was, of course, Ludwig Van Beethoven, and in that one concert he premiered his Symphony No. 6 (“Pastoral”), his Piano Concerto No. 4, the aforementioned Choral Fantasia. If that wasn’t enough — and surely the Pastoral, by itself, would have been enough of an event to make the record for humankind’s highest achievement — after the interval, the orchestra performed the premiere of the most revolutionary piece of music, bar none ever written: the theme to Saturday Night Fever,[1] then known as Symphony No. 5.[2]
- ↑ I am sorry. I couldn’t resist.
- ↑ Anyone interested in Beethoven’s symphonies — that is, in Jimi Hendrix’s words, “everybody here with hearts — any kind of hearts — and ears” — should check out Professor Robert Greenberg’s lectures about Beethoven.