The title of this panel may, and I suppose is meant to, be taken variously: as the question of the role of the arts, or of an individual art, within or as an expression of a political or cultural revolution; as the question of revolution within an individual art, or within the conception of art in general; or as posing the question whether there is some illuminating relationship to be discerned between these dimensions of revolution. For example, given that the title has been assigned as part of a festival concentrated on the figure of Beethoven, does it make sense-would it be illuminating-to say that Beethoven's celebration or desire to capture the significance of the French Revolution or its aftermath required or resulted in a revolutionary discovery within his musical thinking, within what he asked of his art? And/or that what he asked of his art determined or conditioned his finding it possible or necessary to respond to that event of his world. An analogous reversible question of sense in relation to the French Revolution may be raised concerning two other giants of accomplishment born the same year as Beethoven, who turned nineteen the year the Bastille was stormed and were approaching thirty when Napoleon (a year older than they) became consul. I am thinking of Friederich Hegel and William Wordsworth. What would we have to understand in order to understand such claims of a revolution in response to a revolution? Do we, for example, understand the differences we must have in mind to speak of certain developments within the history of science, within philosophy, and within the individual arts all as revolutions, or even as revolutionary? Suppose that speaking seriously means speaking of such events as on a par with the consequential events amounting to a political revolution within a nation. But Hannah Arendt, in her book On Revolution, argues that we have not grasped essential articulations of the concept even in this primary or serious application. The fun-