Perhaps a Russian reader might want to check the translations. But the above leaves out Gorky's remarks. And the ff. translation gives a somewhat different tone. This is from http://www.aha.ru/%7Emausoleu/a_lenin/gorky_e.htm
Listening to Beethoven's sonatas played by Isai Dobrowein at the home of Y. P. Peshkova in Moscow one evening, Lenin remarked:
"I know of nothing better than the Appassionata and could listen to it every day. What astonishing, superhuman music! It always makes me proud, perhaps naively so, to think that people can work such miracles!"
Wrinkling up his eyes, he smiled rather sadly, adding:
"But I can't listen to music very often, it affects my nerves. I want to say sweet, silly things and pat the heads of people who, living in a filthy hell, can create such beauty. One can't pat anyone on the head nowadays, they might bite your hand off. They ought to be beaten on the head, beaten mercilessly, although ideally we are against doing any violence to people. Hm-what a hellishly difficult job!"
And putting the extract into its context of Gorky's obituary gives it yet another tone. Perhaps the worse one could say of it is Lenin's limited musical taste -- that there's nothing better than the Appassionata.
In another vein, what would one say about Furtwangler's Eroica of 1944? Could there be a more powerful performance of a piece at such complete odds with the milieu, part of whose audience would surely have made Beethoven's blood boil? Proof perhaps of Furtwangler's nazi sympathies... Perhaps Furtwangler should have been beating heads rather than the baton, as Toscanini might have said.
Or another, indeed Strauss' Metamorphoses does make one want to say silly things etc. when perhaps one should indeed be outraged...
kj khoo