Some observations may finally be acceptable touching Beethoven’s general
culture to which the thoughts of the reader must naturally have been
directed by the excerpts from his writings set forth in the preceding
pages. His own words betray the fact that he was not privileged to enjoy
a thorough school-training and was thus compelled to the end of his days
to make good the deficiencies in his learning. As a lad at Bonn he had
attended the so-called Tirocinium, a sort of preparatory school for the
Gymnasium, and acquired a small knowledge of Latin. Later he made great
efforts to acquire French, a language essential to intercourse in the
upper circles of society. He never established intimate relations
with the rules of German. He used small initials for substantives, or
capitalized verbs and adjectives according as they appeared important
to him. His punctuation was arbitrary; generally he drew a perpendicular
line between his words, letting it suffice for a comma or period as
the case might be (a proceeding which adds not a little to the
embarrassments of him who seeks to translate his sometimes mystical
utterances).
It is said that a man’s bookcase bears evidence of his education and
intellectual interests. Beethoven also had books,--not many, but a
characteristic collection. From his faithful friend and voluntary
servant Schindler we have a report on this subject. Of the books
of which he was possessed at the time of his death there have been
preserved four volumes of translations of Shakespeare’s works, Homer’s
“Odyssey” in the translation of J. H. Voss, Sturm’s “Observations”
(several times referred to in the preceding pages), and Goethe’s
“West-ostlicher Divan.” These books are frequently marked and annotated
in lead pencil, thus bearing witness to the subjects which interested
Beethoven. From them, and volumes which he had borrowed, many passages
were copied by him into his daily journal. Besides these books Schindler
mentions Homer’s “Iliad,” Goethe’s poems, “Wilhelm Melster” and “Faust,”
Schiller’s dramas and poems, Tiedge’s “Urania,” volumes of poems by
Matthisson and Seume, and Nina d’Aubigny’s “Letters to Natalia on
Singing,”--a book to which Beethoven attached great value. These books
have disappeared, as well as others which Beethoven valued. We do
not know what became of the volumes of Plato, Aristotle, Plutarch and
Xenophon, or the writings of Pliny, Euripides, Quintilian, Ovid, Horace,
Ossian, Milton and Thomson, traces of which are found in Beethoven’s
utterances.
The catalogue made for the auction sale of his posthumous effects on
September 7, 1827, included forty-four works of which the censorship
seized five as prohibited writings, namely, Seume’s “Foot Journey to
Syracuse,” the Apocrypha, Kotzebue’s “On the Nobility,” W.E.
Muller’s “Paris in its Zenith” (1816), and “Views on Religion and
Ecclesiasticism.” Burney’s “General History of Music” was also in his
library, the gift, probably of an English admirer.
In his later years Beethoven was obliged to use the oft-quoted
“conversation-books” in his intercourse with friends and strangers
alike who wrote down their questions. Of these little books Schindler
preserved no less than 134, which are now in the Royal Library in
Berlin. Naturally Beethoven answered the written questions orally as a
rule. An idea of Beethoven’s opinions can occasionally be gathered from
the context of the questions, but frequently we are left in the dark.
Beethoven’s own characterization of his deafness as “singular” is
significant. Often, even in his later years, he was able to hear a
little and for a time. One might almost speak of a periodical visitation
of the “demon.” In his biography Marx gives the following description
of the malady: “As early as 1816 it is found that he is incapable
of conducting his own works; in 1824 he could not hear the storm
of applause from a great audience; but in 1822 he still improvises
marvelously in social circles; in 1826 he studies their parts in the
Ninth Symphony and Solemn Mass with Sontag and Ungher, and in 1825 he
listens critically to a performance of the quartet in A-minor, op. 132.”
It is to be assumed that in such urgent cases his willpower temporarily
gave new tension to the gradually atrophying aural nerves (it is said
that he was still able to hear single or a few voices with his left
ear but could not apprehend masses), but this was not the case in less
important moments, as the conversation-books prove. In these books a few
answers are also written down, naturally enough in cases not intended
for the ears of strangers. At various times Beethoven kept a diary in
which he entered his most intimate thoughts, especially those designed
for his own encouragement. Many of these appear in the preceding pages.
In these instances more than in any others his expressions are obscure,
detached and, through indifference, faulty in construction. For the
greater part they are remarks thrown upon the paper in great haste.