Tormentor Trump’s ominous lurking casts a shadow over joyful America

There’s a scene near the end of the Beethoven biopic “Immortal Beloved” where joy emerges not so much as a final coda but as an emotional lifeline, a brief escape from harsh reality. By the time he wrote Ode to Joy, the fourth and final movement of his Ninth Symphony, Beethoven was functionally (…)