Two hundred years after Beethoven’s death, his ghost still haunts. “I haven’t forgiven myself for not being Beethoven” lamented Billy Joel, who has worked Beethoven’s themes into his own music. We still hear his themes everywhere from advertising to movies. The ghost we are celebrating is not his trio by that name, but his Geist, or spirit, in the 200th year of his death. A rough contemporary of Hegel’s, Beethoven expresses Hegel’s Weltgeist (world spirit) and Hegel’s merging of dialectic opposites: passion with logic; science with art; craving with wisdom -into a unified, all-encompassing whole. For Beethoven, “Music is indeed the mediator between the spiritual and the sensual life.” Beethoven expresses Hegel’s dialectic ideal through the most fundamental art form -music- and makes it directly accessible to the listener. Perhaps the most well-known example is Symphony No. 9: the choral finale expresses a non-pious yet universal human fellowship as its culmination. His music proposes that art, like philosophy, is the living expression of humanity’s striving for self-awareness. “Music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy. Music is the electrical soil in which the spirit lives, thinks and invents.” Beethoven’s words certainly ring true to anyone who has had to plow through Hegel’s writings, with its dense digressions and extended arguments. They will agree that it is Beethoven, not Hegel, who expresses the Weltgeist completely -in a musical language that anyone can understand. This season and the next pay homage to him. New World Trio is in residence at St. John’s Episcopal Church.

New World Trio receives support from the Richard P. Garmany Fund at the Greater Hartford Gives Foundation and the Department of Economic and Community Development, Connecticut Office of the Arts, which receives support from the National Endowment for the Arts. Become a donor to the 2026/27 season.