Life of Beethoven

by Ludwig Nohl

But, all of a sudden, his humor left him. He refused to receive any visitors. “Samothracians, come not here; bring no one to me,” he wrote to Schindler, from the scene of his quiet life in the country. What had never happened before, even when he was in the highest stages of intellectual exaltation, now came to pass: he repeatedly returned from his wanderings through the woods and fields without his hat. “There is nothing higher than to approach nearer to the Deity than other men, and from such proximity to spread the rays of the Deity among the human race.” In these words, directed to the Archduke Rudolph, he summed up his views of his art and what he wished to accomplish in it. It was everything to him—a language, consolation, admonition, light and prophecy.

This we learn most clearly from the Ninth Symphony, which he finished at this time, in Baden.

From the dark abyss of nothing arises the Will, infinite Will: and with it the struggles and the sorrow of life. But it is no longer personal sorrow—for what is personal sorrow compared with the sorrow of the world as known to a great mind, experienced by a great heart?—it is the struggle for a higher existence which we “mortals have to engage in against the infinite spirit.” “Many a time did I curse my Creator because he has made his creatures the victims of the merest accidents.” Cries of anguish and anger like this—the cries of great souls whose broad vision is narrowed by the world, and whose powerful will is hampered—find utterance here. “I shall take fate by the jaws,” he says again, and how immense is the struggle as well as the consciousness of a higher, inalienable possession, which lives as a promise in the breasts of all! Such blows, murmurs, prayers, longings, such despair; and then, again, such strength and courage after trial, had never before been expressed in music. In the Ninth Symphony, we hear the voices of the powers which through all ages have been the makers of history; of the powers which preserve and renovate the life of humanity; and so the Will, the Intellect, man, after a terrible effort and concentration of self, stands firmly before us, bold and clear-eyed—for Will is the world itself.

But when we see the man Beethoven, we find him divided against himself. We have often heard him say that he found the world detestable; and we shall again hear him express his opinion on that subject plainly enough, in this his work.

In the second movement, which he himself calls only allegro vivace, and which, indeed, is no scherzo, not even a Beethoven-like one, but rather a painting, we have a dramatic picture of the earthly world in the whirl of its pleasures, from the most ingenuous joy of mere existence—such as he himself frequently experienced in such fullness that he leaped over chairs and tables—to the raging, uncontrollable Bacchanalian intoxication of enjoyment. But we have in it also a fresco painting of the “dear calmness of life,” of joy in the existing, of exultation and jubilation as well as of the demoniacal in sensuous life and pleasure. But what nutriment and satisfaction this splendid symphony affords to a noble mind! It carries such a man from the arms of pleasure to “the stars,” from art to nature, from appearance to reality.

This ideal kingdom of the quiet, sublime order of the world, which calms our minds and senses, and expresses our infinite longings, is heard in the adagio of the work. And when, in an incomparably poetical union to the quiet course of the stars and to the eternally ordered course of things, the longing, perturbed human heart is contrasted by a second melody, with a wealth of inner beauty never before imagined, we at last see the soul, so to speak, disappear entirely before itself, dissolved in the sublimity of the All. The steps of time, expressed by the rhythm of the final chords, sound like the death knell of the human heart. Its wants and wishes are silenced in the presence of such sublimity, and sink to naught.

But the world is man, is the heart, and wants to live, to live! And so here the final echo is still the longing, sounding tones of human feeling.

Beethoven himself tells us the rest of the development of this powerful tragedy, and thus confirms the explanation of it we have given, as well as the persistence of ultimate truth in his own heart; for in it we find—after the almost raging cry of all earthly existence in the orchestral storm of the beginning of the finale, which was even then called a “feast of scorn at all that is styled human joy”—in the sketches, as text to the powerful recitatives of the contra-bassos: “No, this confusion reminds us of our despairing condition. This is a magnificent day. Let us celebrate it with song.” And then follows the theme of the first movement: “O no, it is not this; it is something else that I am craving.” “The will and consciousness of man are at variance the one with the other, and the cause of man’s despairing situation.” Next comes the motive for the scherzo: “Nor is it this thing either; it is but merriness and small talk”—the trifles of sensuous pleasure. Next comes the theme of the adagio: “Nor is it this thing either,” and thereupon the words: “I myself shall sing—music must console us, music must cheer us;” and then the melody, Freude schoener Goetterfunken, is heard, expressive of the newly-won peace of the soul, descriptive of human character in the full beauty of its simplicity and innocence restored. Beethoven knew from what depths of human nature music was born, and what its ultimate meaning to mankind is.

We are made to experience this more fully still by the continuation of the finale which represents the solution of the conflict of this tragedy of life. For the “joy” that is here sung plainly springs from its only pure and lasting source, from the feeling of all-embracing love—that feeling which, as religion, fills the heart. The Ihr stuerzt nieder, Millionen is the foundation, the germ (to express it in the language of music of double counterpoint) of the Seid umschlungen, Millionen, and then the whole sings of joy as the transfiguration of the earthly world by eternal love. The will can accomplish nothing greater than to sacrifice itself for the good of the whole. To our great artist, the greatest and most wonderful phenomenon in the world was not the conqueror but the overcomer of the world; and he knew that this spirit of love cannot die.

This is celebrated by the finale as the last consequence of the “struggle with fate,” of man’s life-struggle. Is it claiming too much to say that out of the spirit of this music a “new civilization” and an existence more worthy of human beings might be developed, since it leads us back to the foundation and source of civilization and human existence—to religion? Beethoven was one of those great minds who have added to the intellectual possessions of our race in regions which extend far beyond the merely beautiful in art. When we bear this in mind, we can understand why he wanted to write a tenth symphony as the counterpart and final representation of these highest conceptions of the nature and goal of our race. This tenth symphony he intended should transfigure the merely humanly beautiful of the antique world in the light of the refined humanity of modern ideas—the earthly in the light of the heavenly. And we may understand, too, what we are told of himself, that as soon as cheerfulness beamed in his countenance, it shed about him all the charms of childlike innocence. “When he smiled,” we are told, “people believed not only in him, but in humanity.” Occasionally there would blossom on his lips a smile which those who saw could find no other word to describe but “heavenly.” So full was his heart of hearts of the highest treasure of humanity.