ArtsBeat

The widespread grief surrounding the death of Michael Jackson has a dimension of shock about it. Sure, he died suddenly. But his fans behave as if they never expected to lose him, ever.

In The News' PopStand blog yesterday, Lauri Githens Hatch adopted a kind of desperation when she observed that more "gut-socking" losses were ahead: Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, Keith Richards, Mick Jagger, Eric Clapton, and many more.

Well, yeah! That is unfortunately the truth. Any classical music listener could have told you that.

In the classical music world we have been losing people for centuries!

Speaking of which, I have seen several people likening Jackson to Mozart. That seems to be because Mozart was a child prodigy, he died too young, and he holds the position, and I am not going to argue, of being the official World's Greatest Musician Ever.

I think it's more accurate, and more fun, to compare Jackson to Beethoven.

Think about it. Beethoven had a father who kicked him around. He woke young Ludwig up in the middle of the night and made him practice. If you want to get technical, there was also that touch of racial ambiguity. For a black person, Michael Jackson was very white. For a white person, Beethoven was very dark.

The coincidences multiply. Beethoven was in and out of court because of custody issues involving his young nephew. Michael Jackson was in and out of court because of issued involving kids who stayed overnight at Neverland. And here is a good one: Beethoven had a falling out with a black musician — the great violinist George Bridgetower — over a woman. That situation was eerily echoed in the song "The Girl Is Mine," which had Michael Jackson and Paul McCartney sparring over the same thing.

OK, obviously now I am being tongue in cheek. But here is a serious parallel:

By the time Beethoven died —  age 57, not much older than Michael Jackson —  his music was considered old hat and out of fashion. That changed when the word got out that he was dying. There was a sudden, massive outpouring of grief.

It came time for his funeral procession, pictured above. The number of people who turned out, lining the streets of Vienna on that March day in 1827? Twenty thousand. Just like Michael Jackson.

See? Nothing new under the sun.

-- Mary Kunz Goldman