It does not take very much exposure for a normal human being to feel the fire in Beethoven's music, whether he likes it or not. That fire heated me, and I wanted it.

We had no record player at the Holm farm, and though I was thoroughly spoiled, my parents resisted my whining for one of the gadgets. I found a come­on ad in the Atlantic Monthly for the RCA Victor Record Club: "Join for a year, no obligation to buy, and we'll send you the 7­LP set of all nine Beethoven Symphonies conducted by Arturo Toscanini, a $35.00 value. Free!" I scribbled the card and sent it off. A few weeks later, when the big square box arrived, my mother interrogated me. "What's this?" "A good deal. Free. No obligations." "How will you play them?" "Well, I was thinking..." Down we went to Peterson's music in Marshall for a cheap, portable three­speed player. I also conned the two Schirmer volumes of Beethoven's sonatas out of them.

For years, I went to sleep facing the fierce mustache and icy stare of old Toscanini. I still own the records, and though they are a little scratched by age and wear, I play them whenever I want to hear the real Beethoven. They are among the great treasures of my life, pearls of incalculable price, got free.

But of what use, one might well ask, is Beethoven to a boy in rural Minnesota? What can he possibly give to someone growing up in the world of winter, pigs, soybeans, turkeys, and Wal­Marts?

Beethoven's first gift is energy and paying attention to the world. You can neither doze, daydream, nor chitchat during his music. He interferes with the daily dullness of your life. Telemann or Vivaldi may help your digestion, sometimes even Mozart, but Beethoven will give you an ulcer. He wants your undivided attention and he will damn well get it. This is the human intelligence at work, saying something. Sometimes it will be lovely, but sometimes not, depending on where the argument (or the thematic material) leads. The passive Midwestern "It was OK, I guess, kind of different" will not do. He wants your energy and your brains, or nothing. He does not "share"; he demands. On the other hand, he gives you goose bumps, stiffens your spine, and lights a roaring fire in your belly.

Second, he teaches discipline. His music is not accomplished without hard labor and hard thinking. Mozart may have warbled away with the ease of genius, but Beethoven grunts and sweats for every bar. You can feel it in the smallest piece. He is the singer­laureate of blue collar life, of manual work, of fence­fixing and hole­digging. Alfred Einstein, the German critic, says Beethoven's music is full of "shirt­sleeve vulgarity." You can take him to Ghent or Taunton, but not to the Marshall Country Club. He won't behave well.

Third, he teaches us humor. For all the misery of his private life, Beethoven is never more the thorough classicist than in his comic view of art and of the world. His music is a kind of comedic meat grinder that digests all the pretense and foolishness around him ­ Diabelli's waltz, the Ninth tune, Italian operatic flourishes ­ and spits them out again as divine laughter.

Fourth, he creates in music, as Ezra Pound said of literature, news that stays news. Listen to him a hundred times running and he will have more to tell you. He is bottomless. He cannot bore you (though he may irritate you) because he was himself not bored. He was obsessed, as we all are at our best. The smallest bagatelle will occupy you for 25 years if you pay attention to it, and you will still not reach the end of its mysteries. Beethoven has more to do with the world of the hog barn and the Wal­Mart than I imagined as a boy. There is no part of your life that he does not intend to bother if you let him in the house. His legendary bad temper will teach you to be short with blather, time wasting, passive sleepiness, public hypocrisy, mealy­mouthed pieties, cant, and social pretense. He will teach you to hate the waste of war, to buy less, to expect more decency and intelligence from your fellow humans. He expects you to be a better citizen. He demands that you love God without misusing your affection as a blunt instrument. But best of all, he brings you, as he shouts in his setting of Schiller's poem, joy, true joy. He was not wrong when he said, at the bottom of the most miserable year of his almost continuously miserable life: "Whoever truly knows and hears my music can never know unhappiness again." He was one of us, Ludwig, and we are proud to share the earth with him, even the western prairies. MM

Bill Holm wrote a longer version of this essay for a performance of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony at Southwest State University.