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Harder to disagree with, though, is the impeccable balance throughout; the dignified restraint of his “Eroica”; the unruliness of his Seventh’s finale, exactly the bacchic romp on the verge of derailment that it should be.

“Darling, you’re the wildest loveliest piece of flesh walking. If little girls scream, it is only in a king of Bacchic ecstasy; the police are just jealous and want to convict such exceptional Samsonian excellence. I love you so.”

“I suppose in a certain way I was misled by accounts of the Pythia, the pneuma enthusiastikon, poisonous vapors and so forth. Those processes, though sketchy, are more well documented than Bacchic methods, and I thought for a while that the two must be related. Only after a long period of trial and error did it become evident that they were not, and that what we were missing was something, in all likelihood, quite simple. Which it was.”

“Only this. To receive the god, in this or any other mystery, one has to be in a state of euphemia, cultic purity. That is at the very center of Bacchic mystery. Even Plato speaks of it. Before the Divine can take over, the mortal self—the dust of us, the part that decays—must be made clean as possible.”

Beethoven doesn’t introduce the dynamic “fff” — an indicator more hyperbolic than practical — until the bacchic finale of the Seventh Symphony; and I really didn’t hear it until then, instead of the usual sites of super-loudness like the “Eroica” or the Fifth in most performances.