IV
It is in vain, however, that one looks for a parallel between the life and the work of the master. In everyday matters he was impatient, abrupt and often careless; while in his art his patience was such as to become even a slow brooding, an infinite care. His life was often distracted and melancholy; his music is never distracted or melancholy, except in so far as great art can be melancholy with a nobly tragic, universal depth of sadness. In political matters a revolutionist and in social life a rebel, in his art he accepted forms as he found them, expanding them, indeed, but not discarding them. Audacious and impassioned not only in private conduct but in his extempore playing, in his writing he was cautious and selective beyond all belief. The sketch books are a curious and interesting witness to the slow and tentative processes of his mind. More than fifty of these—books of coarse music paper of two hundred or more pages, sixteen staves to the page—were found among his effects after death and sold. One of these books was constantly with him, on his walks, by his bedside, or when travelling, and in them he wrote down his musical ideas as they came, rewrote and elaborated them until they reached the form he desired. They are, as Grove points out, perhaps the most remarkable relic that any artist or literary man has left behind him. In them can be traced the germs of his themes from crude or often trivial beginning, growing under his hand spontaneously, as it seemed, into the distinguished and artistic designs of his completed work. A dozen or a score attempts at the same theme can often be found, and ‘the more they are elaborated, the more spontaneous they become.’ In these books it can also be seen how he often worked upon four or five different compositions at the same time; how he sometimes kept in mind a theme or an idea for years before finally using it, and how extraordinary was the fertility of his genius. Nottebohm, the author of ‘Beethoveniana,’ says: ‘Had he carried out all the symphonies which are begun in these books, we should have at least fifty.’ Thus we see his method of work, and the stages through which his compositions passed. ‘He took a story out of his own life, the life of a friend, a play of Goethe or Shakespeare—and he labored, eternally altering and improving, until at last every phrase expressed just the emotions he himself felt. The exhibition of his themes, as expressed in the sketch books, show how passionately and patiently he worked.’
Although he certainly sometimes allowed his music to be affected by outside events, as has been traced, for example, in the Eroica Symphony, yet in most instances his work seems to be independent of the outward experiences of his life. One of the most striking examples of the detachment of his artistic from his everyday life is in connection with the Second Symphony, written in 1802, the year in which he wrote, also, the celebrated ‘Heiligenstadt Will.’ This document was prompted by his despair over his bad health, frequent unhappiness on account of his brothers, and his deafness, which was now pronounced incurable. In it he says:
‘During the last six years I have been in a wretched condition—I am compelled to live as an exile. If I approach near to people, a feeling of hot anxiety comes over me lest my condition should be noticed. At times I was on the point of putting an end to my life—art alone restrained my hand. Oh, it seemed as if I could not quit this earth until I had produced all I felt within me, and so I continued this wretched life—wretched, indeed, with so sensitive a body that a somewhat sudden change can throw me from the best into the worst state. Lasting, I hope, will be my resolution to bear up until it pleases the inexorable Parcæ to break the thread. My prayer is that your life may be better, less troubled by cares, than mine. Recommend to your children virtue; it alone can bring happiness, not money. So let it be. I joyfully hasten to meet death. O Providence, let me have just one pure day of joy; so long is it since true joy filled my heart. Oh, when, Divine Being, shall I be able once again to feel it in the temple of Nature and of men.’
Such was his expression of grief at the time when the nature of his malady became known to him; and who can doubt its depth and sincerity? In it the man speaks from the heart; but in the same year also the Second Symphony was written, and in this the artist speaks. What a wonderful difference! ‘The scherzo is as proudly gay in its capricious fantasy as the andante is completely happy and tranquil; for everything is smiling in this symphony, the warlike spirit of the allegro is entirely free from violence; one can only find there the grateful fervor of a noble heart in which are still preserved unblemished the loveliest illusions of life.’[56]
There seem to be two periods—one from 1808 to 1811, during his love affair with Therese Malfatti, and again after his brother’s death in 1815—when outward circumstances prevailed against the artist and rendered him comparatively silent. Unable to loosen the grip of personal emotion, during these periods he wrote little of importance. ‘During all the rest of his agitated and tormented life nothing, neither the constant series of passionate and brief loves, nor constant bodily sickness, trouble about money, trouble about friends, relations, and the unspeakable nephew, meant anything vital to his deeper self. The nephew helped to kill him, but could not color a note of his music.’[57] If, as in the case of the ‘Eroica,’ music was sometimes the reflection of present emotion, it was still oftener, as in the case just cited, his magic against it, his shelter from grief, the rock-wall with which he shut out the woes of life.