Then, brothers, it came. O bliss, bliss and heaven, oh it was gorgeousness and georgeosity made flesh. The trombones crunched redgold under my bed, and behind my gulliver the trumpets three-wise, silver-flamed and there by the door the timps rolling through my guts and out again, crunched like candy thunder. It was like a bird of rarest spun heaven metal or like silvery wine flowing in a space ship, gravity all nonsense now. As I slooshied, I knew such lovely pictures. There were veeks and ptitsas laying on the ground screaming for mercy and I was smecking all over my rot and grinding my boot into their tortured litsos and there were naked devotchkas ripped and creeching against walls and I plunging like a shlaga into them. — from A Clockwork Orange

The spirit of Beethoven is the Faustian: the beautiful emerging from the tormented, warlike and aggressive human soul that wants to make beautiful by imposing itself on life.

It’s an impulse balanced by a detailed understanding of both life, and humans. It’s as if the human is a computer, intaking life, and returning to life an answer it needs: an enhancement of beauty through exactly placed effort.

Like a partial redesign in each interaction.

Some will attribute this spirit to specific groups, times or ideologies, but the fact remains that it is what motivates all of us who want more out of life. We want more beauty, and to that end, we struggle. We are never satisfied. We do not want comfort, we want greatness.

Metal has this contemplative spirit. Unlike rock music, which focuses on the karmic drama of the individual, it focuses on the whole of life as a large design made by blind watchmakers. It is a spirit of freedom from mental neurosis, a lack of fascination with the karmic, and a focus on order and beauty.

It is a form of worship for life; metal is perhaps the most religious popular music gets. It inherits the spirit of Ludwig van Beethoven and others like him, which is one where stillness of the soul is only found in Faustian rage for order.