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.