Ludwig van Beethoven was born at Bonn, in 1770. It is a singular fact
that at an early age he showed the deepest distaste for music, unlike
the other great composers, who evinced their bent from their earliest
years. His father was obliged to whip him severely before he would
consent to sit down at the harpsichord; and it was not till he was
past ten that his genuine interest in music showed itself. His first
compositions displayed his genius. Mozart heard him play them, and said,
"Mind, you will hear that boy talked of." Haydn, too, met Beethoven for
the first and only time when the former was on his way to England,
and recognized his remarkable powers. He gave him a few lessons in
composition, and was after that anxious to claim the young Titan as a
pupil.
"Yes," growled Beethoven, who for some queer reason never liked Haydn,
"I had some lessons of him, indeed, but I was not his disciple. I never
learned anything from him."
Beethoven made a profound impression even as a youth on all who
knew him. Aside from the palpable marks of his power, there was
an indomitable _hauteur_, a mysterious, self-wrapped air as of one
constantly communing with the invisible, an unconscious assertion of
mastery about him, which strongly impressed the imagination.
At the very outset of his career, when life promised all fair and bright
things to him, two comrades linked themselves to him, and ever after
that refused to give him up--grim poverty and still grimmer disease.
About the same time that he lost a fixed salary through the death of
his friend the Elector of Cologne, he began to grow deaf. Early in
1800, walking one day in the woods with his devoted friend and pupil,
Ferdinand Ries, he disclosed the sad secret to him that the whole joyous
world of sound was being gradually closed up to him; the charm of the
human voice, the notes of the woodland birds, the sweet babblings of
Nature, jargon to others, but intelligible to genius, the full-born
splendors of _heard_ music--all, all were fast receding from his grasp.
Beethoven was extraordinarily sensitive to the influences of Nature.
Before his disease became serious he writes: "I wander about here with
music-paper among the hills, and dales, and valleys, and scribble a good
deal. No man on earth can love the country as I do." But one of Nature's
most delightful modes of speech to man was soon to be utterly lost to
him. At last he became so deaf that the most stunning crash of thunder
or the _fortissimo_ of the full orchestra were to him as if they were
not. His bitter, heartrending cry of agony, when he became convinced
that the misfortune was irremediable, is full of eloquent despair: "As
autumn leaves wither and fall, so are my hopes blighted. Almost as I
came, I depart. Even the lofty courage, which so often animated me in
the lovely days of summer, is gone forever. O Providence! vouchsafe me
one day of pure felicity! How long have I been estranged from the glad
echo of true joy! When, O my God! when shall I feel it again in the
temple of Nature and man? Never!"
And the small-souled, mole-eyed gossips and critics called him hard,
churlish, and cynical--him, for whom the richest thing in Nature's
splendid dower had been obliterated, except a soul, which never in its
deepest sufferings lost its noble faith in God and man, or allowed its
indomitable courage to be one whit weakened. That there were periods
of utterly rayless despair and gloom we may guess; but not for long did
Beethoven's great nature cower before its evil genius.