Beethoven and His Forerunners

by Daniel Gregory Mason

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.