BEETHOVEN
One of the most fascinating, and at the same time, the most baffling
problem of the biographer, is to determine just what proportion of
the characteristics of a great man are inherited from his ancestors,
and what proportion take their origin in himself as an individual,
to what degree his personality is merely a resultant or résumé of
various qualities converging from many points into a fresh focus, and
to what degree it is a unique creation, without traceable precedents
or ascertainable causes. It is always possible to concoct a given
character, however striking or unusual, by a judicious selection
of ancestral traits; if we will but search far enough back, any
man’s ancestors will make up quite an adequate representation of
the entire human race, so that each of his qualities need only be
observed, noted, and traced to the particular great-grandfather or
great-great-grandmother who happened to manifest it previously; and
we can thus cleverly explain and label the oddest individual. The
real difficulty is to explain how he happened to inherit just these
qualities and no others, why he is, in a word, just this self instead
of some other self, equally derivable but totally different. This
difficulty has brought the whole subject of heredity into disfavor
with some students; and it is certain that in the present state of our
knowledge the study of the individual must precede and guide the study
of his origins. Nevertheless, there are cases in which the essential
qualities are so unmistakably inherited that the most illuminating way
to approach an individual is through a study of his ancestors.
Such a case is Beethoven’s. A French writer, M. Teodor de Wyzewa,
in a book called “Beethoven et Wagner,” has made so masterly, so
discriminating an analysis of Beethoven’s parents and grandparents,
that no one can read it without a strong conviction of the important
part played by heredity in the formation of this extraordinarily
unique, peculiar, and well-defined character. No man ever existed who
was more intensely individual than Beethoven; yet many of the traits
which in him were so marvelously blended, and which in the blending
produced so novel a flavor, were undoubtedly derived from earlier, and
quite undistinguished, members of his family.
Beethoven’s grandfather, Ludwig van Beethoven, born at Antwerp in
1712, was of an old Flemish family of marked national character.
He early removed to Bonn, the seat of the Elector of Cologne, as a
court-musician, and in 1761 became court music-director, a position
which he held with zeal and ability until his death in 1773. “He was,”
says M. de Wyzewa, “a man of middle stature, sinewy and thick-set,
with strongly-marked features, clear eyes, and an extreme vivacity of
manner. Great energy and a high sense of duty were combined, in him,
with a practical good sense and a dignity of demeanor that earned for
him, in the city he had entered poor and unknown, universal respect.
His musical knowledge and ability were considerable; and although he
was not an original composer, he had frequently to make arrangements
of music for performance by his choir. He was a man of strong family
and patriotic sentiment, and established in Bonn quite a colony of
Flemish, his brother and cousins.”
Beethoven’s grandmother, on the other hand born Maria-Josepha Poll,
developed early in her married life a passion for drink which finally
obliged her husband to send her to a convent where she remained,
without contact with the family, until her death. It is probable that
this unfortunate tendency was but a symptom of morbid weakness of the
nervous system, beyond the control of her will--a fact, as we shall
see, interesting in its possible bearing or the interpretation of her
grandson’s idiosyncrasies.
In 1740 was born to this ill-assorted couple a son, Johann van
Beethoven, the father of the composer. M. de Wyzewa treats him
summarily: “His character, like his intelligence can be described in
one word--he was a perfect nullity”; adding, however, that he was not
a bad man, as some of the anecdotes regarding his conduct toward his
son seem to indicate:--“He was merely idle, common, and foolish.” For
the rest, he was a tenor singer in the court chapel, and he passed his
leisure in taverns and billiard-rooms.
Beethoven’s mother was a woman of tender sensibilities and affections,
condemned to a life of unhappiness by the worthless character of her
husband. Her whole life was devoted to the education of her son Ludwig,
who wrote of her: “She has been to me a good and loving mother, and my
best friend.” She was of delicate health, and died of consumption when
Beethoven was but seventeen.
This was the curiously assorted set of ancestors from which Beethoven
seems to have drawn his more prominent traits. If, to begin with, we
eliminate the father, who, as M. de Wyzewa remarks, was an “absolute
nullity,” and “merely the intermediary between his son and his father,
the Flemish music-director,” we shall find that from the latter,
his grandfather, Beethoven derived the foundation of his sturdy,
self-respecting, and independent moral character, that from his mother
he got the emotional sensibility that was so oddly mingled with it,
and that from his afflicted grandmother, Maria-Josepha Poll, he
inherited a weakness of the nervous system, an irritability and morbid
sensitiveness, that gave to his intense individualism a tinge of the
eccentric and the pathological. Without doubt the most important
factor in this heredity was that which came from the grandfather; and
although M. de Wyzewa is perhaps led by his racial sympathies to assign
an undue importance to this Flemish element, yet what he has to say
of it is most suggestive. Pointing out the obvious fact that purely
German composers, as well as poets and painters, are naturally disposed
to vagueness, sentimentality, and cloudy symbolism, he remarks that
nothing of the sort appears in Beethoven, “whose effort was constantly
toward the most precise and positive expression”; that he eliminated
all the artifices of mere ornament, in the interests of “a rigorous
presentation of infinitely graduated emotions”; and that he “progressed
steadily toward simplification of means combined with complication
of effect.” He shows how Beethoven owed to his Flemish blood, in the
first place, his remarkable accuracy and delicacy of sensation; in the
second place, his wisdom and solid common sense, his “_esprit lucide,
raisonable, marchant toujours droit aux choses necessaires_”; in the
third place, his largeness of nature, grandeur of imagination, robust
sanity, and heroic joy, justly likened to similar qualities in Rubens;
and finally, his moral earnestness, that “energy of soul which in his
youth sustained him in the midst of miseries and disappointments of all
sorts, and which later enabled him to persist in his work in spite of
sickness, neglect, and poverty.”
Of Beethoven’s mother M. de Wyzewa says, “Poor Marie-Madeleine, with
her pale complexion and her blonde hair, was not in vain a woman
‘_souffrante et sensible_,’ since from her came her son’s faculty of
living in the emotions, of seeing all the world colored with sentiment
and passion.” This emotional tendency, the writer thinks, the Flemish
blood could not have given; and “it was to the unusual union of this
profound German sensibility with the Flemish accuracy and keenness of
mind that Beethoven owed his power to delineate with extraordinary
precision the most intimate and tender sentiments.” With a final
suggestion, tentatively advanced, that the weaknesses of Beethoven’s
character, his changeable humor, his sudden fits of temper, his
unaccountable alternations of gaiety and discouragement, may have been
due to a nervous malady traceable to the grandmother, Maria-Josepha
Poll, this masterly study of Beethoven’s antecedents, from which,
whether we entirely accept its conclusions or not, we cannot fail to
gain illumination, comes to a close.[37]
Ludwig van Beethoven, the second of seven children of Johann and
Maria-Magdalena Beethoven, was born at Bonn on the Rhine, on
December 16 or 17, 1770. Inheriting the musical talent of his father
and grandfather, he early showed so much ability that his father,
stimulated by the stories of the wondrous precocity of Mozart,
decided to make him into a boy prodigy. Ludwig was put hard at work,
at the age of four, learning to play the piano, the violin, and the
organ, and to compose; and though he had by no means the facility of
Mozart, he progressed so well that at thirteen he was made “cembalist”
[accompanist] in the court band of the Elector of Cologne, whose seat
was at that time in Bonn. The first public mention of Beethoven occurs
in an article entitled “An Account of the Elector of Cologne’s Chapel
at Bonn,” written in 1783, and runs as follows:
“Ludwig van Beethoven is a promising boy of eleven. [Johann van
Beethoven had evidently trimmed his son’s age to suit his own idea of
what a self-respecting prodigy’s should be.] He plays the piano with
fluency and force, reads well at sight, and has mastered the greater
part of Sebastian Bach’s ‘Well-Tempered Clavichord.’ Any one acquainted
with this collection of Preludes and Fugues in every key will
understand what this means. His teacher has given him instruction in
Thorough Bass, and is now practicing him in composition. This youthful
genius deserves assistance, that he may be enabled to travel; if he
continues as he has begun, he will certainly become a second Wolfgang
Amadeus Mozart.”
The Elector of Cologne seems to have acted upon the suggestion of the
last sentence. In 1786 he sent Beethoven for a short visit to Vienna,
the Mecca of all musicians. Here he had the privilege of playing
before the great Mozart himself, who, becoming deeply interested in
his masterly improvisation, turned to the company with the remark:
“Look after him. He will some day make a great name in the world.”
The visit so auspiciously begun was unfortunately cut short by the
death of Beethoven’s mother, and he returned to Bonn to assume the
responsibilities of his inefficient father in caring for his brothers
and sisters. He now entered on a depressing and long-continued drudgery
of teaching, which he seems to have endured courageously. His sterling
character, as well as his genius, began to attract the attention of
many of the wealthy nobles of Bonn, patrons of art; so that difficult
as was this period of his life, it laid a solid foundation for his
subsequent fortunes.
Ludwig Nohl, in his “Beethoven Depicted by His Contemporaries,” gives
an interesting sketch of Beethoven as he appeared at about this time to
a young lady, afterwards Frau von Barnhard, who met him at the musical
soirées of Prince Lichnowsky and Herr von Klüpfell. “Beethoven,”
says Nohl, “thought so highly of the talents of this young girl that
for several years he sent her regularly a copy of his new pianoforte
compositions, as soon as they were printed. Unfortunately not one of
the friendly or joking little letters, with which he accompanied his
gifts, has been preserved: so many handsome Russian officers frequented
Herr Klüpfell’s that the ugly Beethoven made no impression on the young
lady.
“Herr Klüpfell was very musical, and Beethoven went a great deal to
his house, and often played the piano for hours, but always ‘without
notes.’ To do this was then thought marvelous, and delighted every one.
One day a well-known composer played one of his new compositions. When
he began, Beethoven was sitting on the sofa; but he soon began to walk
about, turn over music at the piano, and not to pay the least attention
to the performance. Herr Klüpfell was annoyed, and commissioned a
friend to tell him that his conduct was unbecoming, that a young and
unknown man ought to show respect towards a senior composer of merit.
From that moment Beethoven never set foot in Klüpfell’s house.
“Frau von Barnhard has a lively recollection of the young man’s wayward
peculiarities. She says: ‘When he visited us, he generally put his head
in at the door before entering, to see if there were anyone present
he did not like. He was short and insignificant-looking, with a red
face covered with pock marks. His hair was quite dark. His dress
was very common, quite a contrast to the elegant attire customary
in those days, especially in our circles. I remember quite well how
Haydn and Salieri used to sit on the sofa at one side of the little
music-room, both most carefully attired in the former mode with wigs,
shoes, and silk stockings, while Beethoven came negligently dressed
in the freer fashion of the Upper Rhine. Haydn and Salieri were then
famous, while Beethoven excited no interest. He spoke with a strong
provincial accent; his manner of expression was slightly vulgar; his
general bearing showed no signs of culture, and his behaviour was very
unmannerly. He was proud, and I have known him refuse to play, even
when Countess Thun, Prince Lichnowsky’s mother, a very eccentric woman,
had fallen on her knees before him as he lay on the sofa, to beg him
to.’”
This passage gives us a glimpse of the Vienna of the early nineteenth
century, the Vienna of Beethoven’s young manhood; and it is interesting
to note how favorable an environment, on the whole, this capital of the
musical world was for the great composer. If the middle classes were
not yet sufficiently educated in music to support many public concerts,
there was at least among the aristocracy, who were rich, hospitable,
and music-loving, plenty of generous patronage for rising composers.
Many of the noble families maintained private orchestras, and paid
liberally for new compositions. Haydn, as we have seen, spent most of
his life in the service of the Esterhazys, and Mozart, although without
a regular patron after his rupture with the Archbishop of Salzburg,
wrote many of his works for royal or noble amateurs. Beethoven was even
more generously supported. His removal from Bonn to Vienna, in 1792,
was made at the expense of the Elector of Cologne; and after he was
once settled there he received constant help from Rudolph, Archduke of
Austria, from Princes Lobkowitz, Lichnowsky, and Kinsky, and from many
others. Moreover, profiting much by Haydn’s and Mozart’s pioneer work
in popularizing the higher forms of secular music, he was able to sell
all his works to publishers at good prices, thereby supplementing his
income from patrons. By 1800 his worldly situation was secure; in that
year he wrote to a friend: “Lichnowsky last year settled 600 florins
on me, which, together with the good sale of my works, enables me to
live free from care as to my maintenance. All that I now write I can
dispose of five times over, and be well paid into the bargain.”
There were, however, in Beethoven’s situation, trying elements which
gravely harassed and handicapped him. In the first place, he was as
unfortunate in his family as he was fortunate in his friends. In his
case, “the closest kin were most unkind.” Even after the death of his
shiftless and drunken father, in 1792, there were still two brothers,
Carl and Johann, who remained throughout his life his evil geniuses.
Almost incredible is their indifference to him, their utter failure
to appreciate his noble nature. When he was prosperous they borrowed
money from him, and even stole jewelry; when he was poor and neglected
they refused him the slightest favors. Carl left to him the care of
his worthless son, who proved the greatest trial of his life. Johann,
by withholding his closed carriage for a necessary winter journey,
directly contributed to the illness that ended in his death. This
utter lack of common sympathy had the most poisonous effect on his
sensitive, affectionate nature. It saddened, depressed, and embittered
him.
A second cruel disadvantage was the malady of deafness which began
to afflict Beethoven in 1798, and by the end of 1801 became serious.
At first there was merely buzzing and singing in the ears; then came
insensibility to tones of high pitch, such as the higher register of
the flute and the overtones in human speech; and finally such a serious
deafness that he had to give up playing in public and conducting,
and to carry on conversation by means of an ear-trumpet or paper and
pencil. Formidable to his musical work as was such an impediment,
it was even more baneful in its effect on his relations with men,
and so upon his disposition. As far as his work was concerned, it
had its compensations, in so far as it increased his isolation, his
concentration on the marvelously complex and subtle involutions of
his musical ideas. It insulated him from distractions, and freed him
to explore with single mind the labyrinths of his imagination. But
on his social and emotional life deafness wrought sad havoc--all the
sadder because the tendencies it reinforced were already too strong in
Beethoven’s intense and proud nature.
Beethoven had, in a peculiar degree, both the merits and the defects of
the individualist. Not even Thoreau was more resolved to follow only
the dictates of his own genius, to find his code of action within, in
the impulses of his own heart and mind, rather than without, in the
conventions, habits, and customs which guide the ordinary man. Like
all idealists, he believed in the beauty and rightness of the whole
world of human feeling, revealed to him by his naïve consciousness,
not trimmed to suit prejudice or partial views of what is proper and
admissible. Gifted with an emotional nature of rare richness and
intensity, and with an intellect capable of dealing directly with
experience on its own account, he lived the life and thought the
thoughts that seemed good to him, quite indifferent to accepted views
which happened to run counter. Thus his sincerity necessarily led him
into an unconventionality, an indifference to established ways of
acting, feeling, and thinking, which, when circumstances pushed him
still further away from the common human life, easily passed over into
morbid eccentricity.
His unconventionality appears in all his actions and opinions, from
the most trivial to the most momentous. Take, for instance, to begin
with, the matter of personal appearance, dress, and demeanor. What
an altogether unusual man it was that Carl Czerny, as a boy of ten,
in 1801, was taken to visit! “We mounted,” says Czerny, “five or
six stories high to Beethoven’s apartment, and were announced by a
rather dirty-looking servant. In a very desolate room, with papers and
articles of dress strewn in all directions, bare walls, a few chests,
hardly a chair except the ricketty one standing by the piano, there
was a party of six or eight people. Beethoven was dressed in a jacket
and trousers of long, dark goat’s hair, which at once reminded me of
the description of Robinson Crusoe I had just been reading. He had a
shock of jet black hair, (cut _à la Titus_), standing straight upright.
A beard of several days’ growth made his naturally dark face still
blacker. I noticed also, with a child’s quick observation, that he had
cotton wool, which seemed to have been dipped in some yellow fluid,
in both ears. His hands were covered with hair, and the fingers very
broad, especially at the tips.” The oddity in dress observed by Czerny
was habitual with Beethoven. “In the summer of 1813,” says Schindler,
“he had neither a decent coat nor a whole shirt.” His habit of dabbling
his hands in water, while following out a musical thought, until he was
thoroughly wet, cannot have improved his clothes. Nor did his carriage
set them off: he was extremely awkward with his body--could not dance
in time, and generally cut himself when he shaved, which, however, he
did infrequently.
Very marked was his unconventionality in social relations. So
profound was his sense of personal worth and of the fatuity of
arbitrary class-distinctions that no aristocrat ever regarded his
birth and breeding, no plutocrat ever regarded his wealth, with more
intense pride than Beethoven felt in his democratic independence
and self-sufficiency. That was a characteristic answer he made the
court, in one of his numerous lawsuits, when asked if the “van” in
his name indicated nobility. “_My_ nobility,” he said, “is here and
here”--pointing to his head and heart. When he was offered a Prussian
order, as a recognition of his artistic achievements, he preferred
a payment of fifty ducats, and took the opportunity to express his
contempt for some people’s “longing and snapping after ribands.” When
his brother Johann, a stupid but prosperous worldling, sent him a New
Year’s card signed “Johann van Beethoven, Land-owner,” he returned
it with the added inscription: “Ludwig van Beethoven, Brain-owner.”
But this wholesome self-respect, the result of a faith in himself and
a discrimination between essences and accidents too rare among men,
sometimes became exaggerated by passion into an impatient, egotistical
pride less pleasant to note. When the court just mentioned, for
example, refused, on the ground of his being a commoner, to hear his
case, he was so angry that he threatened to leave the country--a
reaction as childish as it was futile. On receiving, late in life, an
honorary diploma from the Society of Friends of Music in the Austrian
Empire, his impulse was to return it, because he had not been earlier
recognized. Nor was he inclined to forgive readily a fancied slight
to his dignity; he was always getting embroiled with his friends on
account of some insult he read into their conduct. He was indeed too
often the slave, instead of the master, of his own sensitiveness, and
though his point of view as an individualist was higher than that
of the herd, it had its own peculiar limitations. This is clearly
illustrated by the following passage in one of his letters: “Kings
and princes can indeed create professors and privy-councillors, and
confer titles and decorations, but they cannot make great men--spirits
that soar above the base turmoil of this world. When two persons like
Goethe and myself meet, these grandees cannot fail to perceive what
such as we consider great. Yesterday, on our way home, we met the whole
imperial family; we saw them coming some way off, when Goethe withdrew
his arm from mine, in order to stand aside; and say what I would, I
could not prevail on him to make another step in advance. I pressed
down my hat more firmly on my head, buttoned up my great-coat, and,
crossing my arms behind me, I made my way through the thickest portion
of the crowd. Princes and courtiers formed a lane for me; Archduke
Rudolph took off his hat, and the Empress bowed to me first. These
great ones of the earth _know me_. To my infinite amusement, I saw
the procession defile past Goethe, who stood aside with his hat off,
bowing profoundly. I afterward took him sharply to task for this.” In
the sort of pride manifested by Beethoven on this occasion, there is
an element of the hysterical; had his sense of humor been applied to
himself as well as to his companion, he would have been “infinitely
amused” to behold himself, with his hat pressed firmly on his head
and his great-coat buttoned up, demanding for the aristocracy of
genius that very servility which he despised when it was shown to the
aristocracy of rank. It was Beethoven himself this time who, misled by
an overweening pride, was hankering after the accident when he already
possessed the essence.
Examined by and large, however, Beethoven does not often disappoint
us by failing to make that distinction between the nucleus of reality
and its swathings and accompaniments, which lay at the foundation of
his greatness. Nowhere were his instinct for the real and his contempt
for the superfluous more active than in his thoughts on religion, the
deepest and most serious topic on which a man can think. Sturdily
ignoring, all his life, the trappings of ritual, and the narrow
preciseness, as it seemed to him, of creeds and theologies, he as
resolutely clung to the essence of religion, the belief in a universal,
inclusive consciousness, and in the importance to it of right human
effort. On the practical side his religion was eminently positive,
efficient, sane; it prompted him to full development of his genius,
without neglect of the responsibilities of ordinary life. Of the
metaphysical side it is a sufficient description to say that there lay
constantly on his desk, copied by his own hand, these sentences:
“I am that which is.”
“I am all that is, that was, and that shall be. No mortal man has
lifted my veil.”
“He is alone by Himself, and to Him alone do all things owe their
being.”
Combined with the mental originality, the habit of deciding all
questions for himself and as if they had never before received
solutions, which made Beethoven so pronounced a non-conformist in all
matters from his toilet to his religion, was a physical peculiarity
that underlay much of what was grotesque about him. This was the
nervous irritability inherited from his grandmother. His moodiness,
his sudden alternations of depressed and excited states, his bursts
of uncontrollable anger, his wild pranks and practical jokes, were
almost beyond doubt the result of an unstable nervous system. So
restless was he that he was continually changing his lodgings; once it
was because there was not enough sun, again because he disliked the
water, another time because his landlord insisted on making him deep
obeisances; in the later part of his life, when his habits were well
known, he had difficulty in finding rooms anywhere in Vienna. He put
little restraint upon his tongue; Schindler says that “the propriety
of repressing offensive remarks was a thing that never entered his
thoughts.” After hearing a concerto of Ries, he wrote a furious letter
to a musical paper, enjoining Ries no longer to call himself his pupil.
This his friends persuaded him not to send. He was so impatient that
he often took the medicines intended for an entire day in two doses;
so absent-minded that he often forgot them altogether. A badly cooked
stew he threw at the waiter, eggs that were not fresh at the cook. To
a lady who had asked for a lock of his hair he sent, at the suggestion
of a friend, a lock cut from a goat’s beard; and when the joke was
discovered he apologized to the lady, but cut off all intercourse with
the friend. An English observer wrote that “One unlucky question, one
ill-judged piece of advice, was sufficient to estrange him from you
forever.” Even on his best friends and his patrons, he wreaked his
ill-humors. When Prince Lobkowitz, to whom he owed much, had been so
unfortunate as to offend him, he went into his court-yard, shook his
fist at the house, and cried “Lobkowitz donkey, Lobkowitz donkey.” It
is not hard to see why casual acquaintances, who knew nothing of the
noble qualities behind his stormy and perverse exterior, frequently
thought him mad.
Nor will it be difficult, after this brief summary of Beethoven’s
fundamental traits, to understand the formidable effect that
deafness, coming upon him slowly but relentlessly in early manhood,
when intellectual achievement and social and personal happiness
seemed equally attainable, exercised upon his character. Naturally
self-dependent, deafness made him self-absorbed; naturally proud,
it made him so sensitive to imagined slights, so suspicious of even
his best friends, that he would at times refuse all intercourse with
people; naturally taking keenest joy in intellectual activity, this
physical disability forced him, while gradually renouncing social
pleasures, to throw himself with ever greater concentration and
completer devotion into his work. All these effects of his deafness
are clearly discernible in the letters written about 1800. “I can with
truth say,” he writes in that year, “that my life is very wretched; for
nearly two years past I have avoided all society, because I find it
impossible to say to people, _I am deaf_!” “Plutarch,” he continues,
“led me to resignation. I shall strive if possible to set Fate at
defiance, although there must be moments in my life when I cannot fail
to be the most unhappy of God’s creatures.... Resignation!--what a
miserable refuge! and yet it is my sole remaining one.” And still later
in the same letter: “I live wholly in my music, and scarcely is one
work finished when another is begun; indeed, I am now often at work on
three or four things at the same time.”
Many such passages occur in the letters of this period, but in none
does the pathetic mingling of almost despairing wretchedness with
a noble courage that will not despair become so striking as in the
remarkable document known as “Beethoven’s Will,” written to his
brothers in the fall of 1802. The summer had been a trying one, and
at the end of it Beethoven, apparently half expecting and a little
desiring death, yet dreading its interruption of his beloved work,
uttered this cry of pain, which deserves to be quoted almost entire:
HEILIGENSTADT, Oct. 6, 1802.
TO MY BROTHERS CARL AND JOHANN BEETHOVEN.
O! you who think or declare me to be hostile, morose, and
misanthropical, how unjust you are, and how little you know the secret
cause of what appears thus to you! My heart and mind were ever from
childhood prone to the most tender feelings of affection, and I was
always disposed to accomplish something great. But you must remember
that six years ago I was attacked by an incurable malady, treated by
unskilful physicians, deluded from year to year by the hope of relief,
and at length forced to the conviction of a _lasting affliction_
(the cure of which may go on for years, and perhaps after all prove
impracticable).
Born with a passionate and excitable temperament, keenly susceptible
to the pleasures of society, I was yet obliged early in life to
isolate myself, and to pass my existence in solitude. If I at any time
resolved to surmount all this, oh! how cruelly was I again repelled
by the experience, sadder than ever, of my defective hearing!--and
yet I found it impossible to say to others: Speak louder; shout! for
I am deaf! Alas! how could I proclaim the deficiency of a sense which
ought to have been more perfect with me than with other men,--a sense
which I once possessed in the highest perfection; to an extent,
indeed, that few of my profession ever enjoyed! Alas, I cannot do
this! Forgive me therefore when you see me withdraw from you with whom
I would so gladly mingle. My misfortune is doubly severe from causing
me to be misunderstood.... Such things brought me to the verge of
desperation, and well-nigh caused me to put an end to my life. _Art!
art_ alone, deterred me. Ah! how could I possibly quit the world
before bringing forth all that I felt it was my vocation to produce?
And thus I spared this miserable life--so utterly miserable that any
sudden change may reduce me at any moment from my best condition
into the worst. It is decreed that I must now choose _Patience_ for
my guide! This I have done. I hope the resolve will not fail me
steadfastly to persevere till it may please the inexorable Fates to
cut the thread of my life.... I joyfully hasten to meet Death. If he
comes before I have had the opportunity of developing all my artistic
powers, then, notwithstanding my cruel fate, he will come too early
for me, and I should wish for him at a more distant period; but even
then I shall be content, for his advent will release me from a state
of endless suffering. Come when he may I shall meet him with courage.
Farewell! Do not quite forget me, even in death; I deserve this from
you, because during my life I so often thought of you, and wished to
make you happy. Amen.
LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN.
It is time, however, turning away from this painful contemplation of a
strong nature’s struggle with adverse fate, to examine that artistic
work in which its strength wrought more successfully, and to which
its weaknesses were less disastrous. Beethoven’s artistic life, as is
well known, has been divided into three periods: that of training and
assimilation, which lasted to about 1803, that of complete mastery and
mature creation, occupying about a decade, and that of exploration of
new, untravelled paths, lasting from 1813 to the end.[38] The division
is a convenient and natural one, as will become clear as we go on.
In the technique of his art, Beethoven was largely self-taught. It is
true that he had the privilege of some lessons with Haydn and with
the famous theoretician Albrechtsberger; but he was too restive under
strict surveillance, and too intolerant of hard-and-fast rules, to take
kindly to their instruction, and Albrechtsberger flatly said of him:
“He will never do anything according to rule; he has learnt nothing.”
The truth is, Beethoven was too busy with his own problems, the
problems of structure and expression, to pay the requisite attention
to the intricacies of counterpoint, which he never really mastered.
What he tried to do, however, he did thoroughly. All the works of his
first period, of which the most important are the pianoforte sonatas up
to the “Waldstein,” the first three pianoforte concertos, the String
Quartets, Opus 18, and the First and Second Symphonies, show him in
the 'prentice stage, learning to treat competently the sonata form and
the secular style inherited from Haydn and Mozart. The First Symphony,
in spite of its dignified proportions, is essentially an exercise in
acquisition. The Second, which is the most important single work of the
entire period, is, as Grove says, an advance rather “in dimensions and
style, and in the wonderful fire and force of the treatment, than in
any really new ideas, such as its author afterwards introduced.” It is
in the four movements prescribed by tradition, except that a Scherzo
is substituted for the minuet. Its phraseology and harmony recall
the older manner. The themes of the opening Allegro are built up out
of short, precise phrases, exactly balancing one another, as will be
vividly realized by anyone who will compare the first theme with the
corresponding subject in the Third Symphony, so much freer and more
ingenious in contour. The transitions are somewhat perfunctory. The
second subject appears regularly in the dominant key. The development,
in comparison with that of Beethoven’s later work, is mechanical,
obvious, trite. In every way he is still, in the Second Symphony,
sitting at the feet of his predecessors, learning patiently, minutely,
what they have to teach him. As Grove well says: “This symphony is
the culminating point of the old, pre-Revolution world, the world of
Haydn and Mozart; it was the farthest point to which Beethoven could go
before he burst into that wonderful new region into which no man before
had penetrated.”[39]
The indebtedness of the early Beethoven to his immediate forerunners,
and the untiring pains he took to learn his lesson thoroughly, call
for especial emphasis because so much has been said and written of
his originality, his disregard for conventions, his non-conforming,
revolutionary tendencies. He was indeed an anarch of outworn
conventions, but he was anything but an anarch of art. No man ever
recognized more cordially his inherited resources; no man was ever
less misled by a petty ideal of mere oddness, by a confusion of
idiosyncrasy with originality. Beethoven was a great individual because
he assimilated the strength of all humanity. His originality, like all
originality that has value, consisted in a fresh, sincere expression of
universal truths through the best technical means which were available
in his day. If any reader has a lingering doubt of Beethoven’s
faithfulness as a student, he needs but examine the Sketchbooks edited
by Nottebohm from the original manuscript note-books in which Beethoven
laboriously worked out his conceptions. Quite tireless was he in the
manipulation of a theme, over and over again, until it suited his
rigorous taste; truly wonderful is the ever-sensitive discrimination
with which he excised redundancies, softened crudities, enhanced
beauties, and refined texture, until at last the melody was as perfect,
as inevitable, as organic, as a sentence by Flaubert, Sir Thomas
Browne, or Cardinal Newman.
It was indeed precisely by these qualities of the conscientious artist
that Beethoven was chiefly enabled to push his work to a higher stage
of interest than his forerunners had attained. He went obediently as
far as they could lead him before attempting to push further alone. We
find, even in this Second Symphony, conceptions that Haydn and Mozart
could not have imagined; but these are worked out with a skill and
ingenuity like theirs in kind, if greater in degree. The most striking
and pervasive difference lies in the immensely increased closeness of
texture, intensity of meaning, logic, vigor, poignancy. All the strings
are tightened, and flabbiness, diffuseness, meaningless ornament
and filling are swept away. As Beethoven’s self-assurance, habit of
examining all conventions for himself, and relentless discrimination
of the essence from the accident, already noted, made him in society a
brief but pregnant talker, an eccentric but true man, so they made him
a forcible, concise, and logical musician. How ruthlessly he discards
the merely pretty, the sensuously tickling, the amiably vapid and
pointless! He wastes no energy in preamble, interlude, or peroration.
He puts in his outline in a few bold, right strokes, leaving much to
the intelligence of his hearers. Concentrating his whole mind on a
single thought, he follows it out relentlessly to the end, will not
be distracted or seduced into side-issues. He tolerates no superfluous
tones in his fabric, but makes it compact, close, rigorously thematic.
The expanses of the music stretch out broad and sequential, the
climaxes unfold deliberately, gather force and body like a rising sea.
Look through the long, complex development section of the Allegro of
the Second Symphony, and note its fine economy of means, its surprising
grandeur of effect; see how two or three motifs are made to flower out
into the most luxuriant forms, and how a page can be educed from a
measure. This is what is meant by thematic development, which no man
thoroughly understood before Beethoven.
This insistent coherence and sequaciousness is kept from becoming
tiresome or monotonous by the variety of the themes themselves and of
the modes adopted for developing them. Indeed, so consummately is the
fundamental progressiveness hidden under a variegated and ever-changing
surface that the casual observer is apt to be impressed chiefly by
the sudden novelties of effect, the unexpected alternations of loud
and soft, the collocation of contrasted rhythms, the prominence
given to distant tonalities by modulation, in Beethoven’s work, and
to realize its solidity and balance only after a more careful study.
Rhythmical variety alone in Beethoven is so perpetual and so ingenious
that a large treatise would hardly suffice to describe it. Short,
nervous phrases of half-a-measure length alternate with wide expanses
where for four or more measures there is not so much as a comma.[40]
Motifs longer or shorter than the measure are so adjusted as to make
up considerable passages in which the accent constantly changes.[41]
Diminutions and augmentations of motifs are deftly used.[42] In ways
too numerous to mention Beethoven introduces life into his work by
constant variation of rhythmic grouping.
As for harmonic variety, his daring was such as to scandalize all the
conservatives of his generation. The First Symphony opens with a
passage of which Grove writes: “That a composition professing to be
in the key of C should begin with a discord in the key of F, and by
the third bar be in that of G, was surely startling enough to ears
accustomed to the regular processes of that time.” The passage did
in fact meet with strong opposition from such critics as Preindl,
Abbé Stadler, and Dionys Weber. In the Second Symphony there are many
foretastes of the radical harmonic methods Beethoven later developed.
Returning to his Restatement section, for instance, in the first
movement, the key of which is D, he reaches the very remote key of
C-sharp major, which he emphasizes by a long reiteration of its tonic
chord, forte, lasting six full measures. Then, with a diminuendo,
a long C-sharp, in unison, is held until, by the addition of an A,
we are made to feel that this C-sharp has become a leading-note in
the original key of D, and so we are home again.[43] The coda of the
same movement contains one of those rapid, kaleidoscopic modulations
through many keys which Beethoven knows how to use so excitingly.
In eleven measures we are bundled through G, B-flat, A-minor, B-flat
again, C-minor, E-flat minor, F-sharp minor, and E, and after it all
find ourselves quite breathless, but safely home again in D. Many
similar passages of harmonic virtuosity are to be found in the Second
Symphony; and they show Beethoven feeling his way toward the wonderful
flexibility of his later harmonic style.
In his early thirties, then, at the close of his apprenticeship or
period of acquisition of resources and establishment of technique,
Beethoven had in the first place thoroughly assimilated the sonata-form
developed by his forerunners as the most convenient and natural medium
for the expression of the free, direct, and widely eclectic secular
spirit in music. He had, in the second place, raised this form to
higher potencies of beauty and expressiveness, by rigorous exclusion
of what was superfluous and inorganic in it, by purification of its
texture and strengthening of its essential structural features, and by
introduction into it, through the power of his genius for composition,
of more subtle and more thoroughgoing contrasts of rhythm, harmony,
and general expressive character. Still he was not content. His soaring
idealism demanded a still greater flexibility of form, as well as a
more intense and intimate utterance of feeling. “I am not satisfied,”
he wrote in 1802, “with my works up to the present time. From to-day
I mean to take a new road.” What that road was, what superstructure
he proceeded to build on so solid a foundation, we must now try to
determine.
FOOTNOTES:
[37] “Beethoven et Wagner. Essais d’Histoire et de Critique Musicales.”
Teodor de Wyzewa. Paris, 1898.
[38] For a full discussion of these “periods,” see Lenz’s “_Beethoven
et ses trois styles_.”
[39] The foregoing quotations from Grove are to be found in his
“Beethoven and His Nine Symphonies.”
[40] E. g. Second Symphony: Larghetto: passage immediately preceding
the Restatement section.
[41] E. g. Second Symphony: Larghetto: passage at the end of the second
subject. A motif of four sixteenth-notes in 3/8 measure.
[42] E. g. Second Symphony: Finale: passage of half-notes in coda
augmented later to whole notes.
[43] Compare what is said on page 207, of the harmonic device used by
Haydn to introduce the last entrance of the theme in the Finale of his
Fifth Salomon Symphony.