Life of Beethoven

by Ludwig Nohl

A mighty seriousness overpowers him. The desolate horrors that surround him endow him with the power to understand more clearly the higher tasks of the mind in which his art had a living part. We see plainly that his nature tends more and more towards the one thing necessary—“All love is sympathy,” sympathy with the sorrows of the world, says the philosopher. And so while his vision takes an immense sweep over the field of existence, we see that an inexhaustible source of patient goodness and of the kindest and most heartfelt love, springs up within him. “From childhood up it was my greatest happiness to be able to work for others,” he once said; and again when the overture, op. 24, was reproduced: “I was very much praised on this account, etc. But what is that all to the great Master of Tones above—above—above! rightly the Most High, when here below it is used only for purposes of ridicule. Most high dwarfs!!!” We here listen to the sublime irony of his tones in op. 130, but also to the lustrous mildness of the adagio of op. 127, in which in the little movement in E major, the human soul itself, filled with the spirit of the Eternal, so to speak, opens its eyes and looks upward. “I am what is, I am all that is, that was and that will be. No mortal man has lifted my veil. He comes from Himself alone, and to this Only One all things owe their existence.” Beethoven wrote out this Egyptian saying in this summer of 1824, framed it and placed it on his writing table before him. He well knew what the really creative and preserving deity in human life is. That deity lived in his own most heartfelt thought and feeling. It was to him a continual source of bliss. It inspired his pen. To it he was indebted for the poetic creations which sprung unbidden from his brain.

The quartet in A minor, op. 132, belongs to the spring and summer of 1825. His journey to London had been postponed. Schindler gives as the reason of this, the “bad behavior of his dearly beloved nephew, which had become somewhat notorious.” How could his “son” be abandoned, thus unguarded, to “the poisonous breath of the dragon?” But as the invitation was renewed, the Tenth Symphony was again taken in hand, and from the sketches of it now made, we know all that is certain about it. It was intended to do no less than to add the “beautiful to the good,” to wed the spirit of Christianity to the beauty of the antique, or rather to transfigure the mere worldly beauty of the antique in the light of the superterrestrial. We find, indeed, a picture of this kind, a direct, intentional, higher picture of the world in the adagio, in modo lidico, in the second quartet. It is called the “Song of Thanksgiving of a Convalescent to the Deity,” and is a choral between the repetitions of which, ever richer and more heartfelt, the joyful pulsations of new life are expressed. Beethoven had been seriously sick during this spring. His affection for his nephew had assumed, in consequence of one continual irritation of his feelings, the nature of a passion which tormented the boy to death, but which, like every passion, brought no happiness to Beethoven himself. The first movement of this quartet in A minor is a psychological picture—a poem of the passions—the consuming character of which can be explained only by this very condition of the artist’s own soul. And how Beethoven’s creations always came from his own great soul, that soul so fully capable of every shade of feeling and excitement! The account left us by the young poet, Rellstab, written in the spring of 1825, gives us a perfect description of the state Beethoven was in at this time. He describes him “a man with a kindly look, but a look also of suffering.” Beethoven’s own letters confirm the correctness of this description. “In what part of me am I not wounded and torn?” he cries out to his nephew, whose frivolity had already begun to bear evil fruit. On another occasion he said: “O, trouble me no more. The man with the scythe will not respite me much longer.”

Notwithstanding this, however, or perhaps because of this extreme excitement of his whole nature, the summer of 1825 was very rich in productions. “Almost in spite of himself,” he had to write the quartet in C sharp minor (op. 131); after that in B flat major (op. 130). The last quartet also, that in F major, had its origin in that “inexhaustible fancy”—a fancy which always tended to the production of such works. Hence it is that the number of movements increases. The second has five; the third (B flat major), six; and the fourth (C sharp minor), seven—as if the old form of the suite, or the divertimento of the septet was to be repeated. But a moment’s comparison immediately shows the presence of the old organic articulation of the form of the sonata. These movements are in fact only transitions to, and connecting links between, two colossal movements. They increase the usual number of movements, although frequently nothing more than short sentences, and at times only a few measures. But the introductory movement and the finale in the quartet in A minor loom up like the pillars of Hercules, and determine the impassioned character and the dramatic style of the whole. Beethoven himself called it a piece of art worthy of him. The same may be said of op. 130, when the great fugue, op. 133, is considered a part of it, which in our day it should always be conceded to be. And how immensely great is this spirit when, in the quartet in C sharp minor, it awakes from the most profound contemplation of self to the contemplation of the world and its pain.—“Through sorrow, joy!”

We must refer the reader to the third volume of Beethoven’s Leben, published in Leipzig in 1877, for a detailed account of the desolation of our artist, produced by the narrow circle with which the restoration of Metternich and Gentz surrounded him, at a time when his own mind and feeling were expanding to greater dimensions than ever before. To the same source we must send him for a description of the full earnestness and greatness of this last period in the life of our artist. In that work was for the first time presented to the public, from original sources, and especially from the records of Beethoven’s written conversations, extant in the Berlin library, the comfortless—but at the same time, and spite of continual torment, intellectually exalted—picture of his character. “Words are interdicted. It is a fortunate thing that tones are yet free,” wrote Ch. Kuffner, the poet of the oratorio, Saul and David, to him at this time—a work in which he wished to give expression both to his own relation as a human being to his “David,” and to the wonder-working nature of his art. The execution of this plan was prevented only by death. The general demoralization which had invaded Vienna with the Congress made its effects felt directly in his own circle, through the agency of his nephew, and thus paved the way for disaster to himself. “Our age has need of vigorous minds to scourge these paltry, malicious, miserable wretches,” he cries out at this very time to his nephew, who had permitted himself to make merry, in a manner well calculated to irritate, at the expense of a genuine faijak—as Beethoven was wont now to call the good Viennese—the music-dealer Haslinger; and the matter had become public. But he adds to the above: “Much as my heart resists causing pain to a single human being.” And, indeed, his heart knew nothing of such anger or vengeance. It was always a real sympathizer with the sorrows born of human weakness—a sorrow which with him swelled to the dimensions of the world-sorrow itself. To this feeling his op. 130 in B flat major is indebted for its series of pictures, in which we see the world created, as it were, anew with a bold hand, with the ironic, smiling, melancholy, humorous, cheerful coloring of the several pieces—pieces which, indeed, are no mere sonata movements, but full pictures of life and of the soul. The cavatina overtops it as a piece of his own heart, which, as he admitted himself to K. Holz, always drew from him “fresh tears.”

“Imitate my virtues, not my faults,” he implores his “son.” Speaking of the rabble of domestics, he says: “I have had to suffer the whole week like a saint;” and, on another occasion, still more painfully: “May God be with, thee and me. It will be all over soon with thy faithful father.” His days, so strangely divided between the loftiest visions of the spirit and the meanest troubles of life, henceforth render him more and more indifferent to the latter. We find persons invade his circle whom otherwise he would never have permanently endured about him, and who frequently led him into minor sorts of dissipation even in public places. This reacted on the nephew, whose respect for the character of his “great uncle” could not long stand a course of action apparently like his own. But even now we see a picture in tones of which one of the faijaks, the government officer and dilettante, Holz, who copied it, writes to Beethoven himself: “When one can survey it thus calmly, new worlds come into being.” We have reference to the quartet in C sharp minor, op. 131. “With a look beaming with light, dripping with sorrow and joy,” young Dr. Rollett saw him at this time in beautiful Baden, and, indeed, this work, which he himself called the “greatest” of his quartets, discloses to us, in a manner different from the Ninth Symphony, the meaning of his own life, which he here himself, as Richard Wagner has said, displayed to us, a wild melody of pleasure and pain. But we now recognize more clearly that something “like a vulture is devouring his heart.” We, indeed, are drawing near to the catastrophe which led to his premature end.

As early as in the fall of 1825 he had witnessed “stormy scenes.” An uncontrollable love of gaming and a habit of loitering about the streets had led the young man into worse and worse courses, to falsehood and embezzlement. And when these were discovered, he secretly ran away from home. It was not long, however, before the loving weakness of his uncle called him back. The only effect of this was henceforth to condemn Beethoven himself to a slavish, too slavish life, one which would have been a torment even to an ordinary mortal, but which must have been doubly so to a passionate, great man who was deaf. The nephew found fault with his uncle, with his “reproaches” and “rows.” He accused him even of having led him into had company. He dreaded other reproaches still and was afraid of even personal violence. At last, one day in the summer of 1826, the uncle received the frightful news that his son had left his dwelling with a pair of pistols, and intended to take his own life. A long and terrible morning was spent searching for the unfortunate youth, who was finally led home, with a wound in his head, from Baden. “It’s done now. Torment me no longer with reproofs and complaints,” he writes; and his disposition and feeling may be inferred from the words found in his conversation leaves: “I have grown worse, because my uncle wanted to make me better;” and from these others: “He said it was not hatred, but a very different feeling, that moved him against you.”

The uncle, alas! understood these expressions better than those about him. These had only words of reproach for the reprobate deed. “Evidences of the deepest pain were plainly to be seen in his bent attitude. The man, firm and upright in all the movements of his body, was gone. A person of about seventy was before us—yielding, without a will, the sport of every breath of air.” So wrote Schindler. Beethoven called for the Bible “in the real language into which Luther had translated it.” A few days later, we find in his conversations the following memorandum: “On the death of Beethoven.” Did he mean his own death, or the death of the beloved boy with whom he had, so to speak, lost his own life? Be this as it may, he now sang the deepest song of his soul, and it was destined to be his dying song. We refer to the adagio in the last quartet, op. 135. His harp soon after this grew silent, and forever. Henceforth we have only projects or fragments of works. But he touched it once more, like King Gunther in the Edda, “seated among serpents,” the most venomous of which—the pangs of his own conscience—menaced him with death. Among the pictures in which he paints the meaning of a theme similar to that of this adagio (pieces thus independent of one another cannot rightly be called variations), there is one whose minor key and rhythm show it to be a funeral ceremony of touching sublimity. But whatever guilt he may have incurred he atoned for in his heart of hearts by love. Such is this picture. His soul is free. This the theme itself tells us, eloquently and distinctly. Here the soul, in melancholy stillness, revolves about its own primeval source, and towards the close plumes its wing for a happy, lofty flight, to regions it has longed to enter. The other pictures show us this full, certain and joyful possession of one’s self, and the last even seems to resolve the soul into its faculties when it floats about the Eternal Being in the most blissful happiness—a vision and condition which, of all the means of expression of the intellect, only music is able to describe, and which proves to us that, in the case of our artist, both fear and death had long been overcome.

And thus it comes that a movement with which there is none to be compared, one which to our feelings is the richest and most perfect of all movements, and, at the same time, of the most brilliant transparency, made its way into a work which otherwise shows no trace of the magnitude of this his last effort. For the finale is only a sham-play of those magic powers which our master so well knew how to conjure up, both in sublime horror and in saving joy.

But his physical condition was soon destined to be in keeping with the condition of his soul above described. When, indeed, Karl was convalescing as well as could be desired, and he had decided to follow the military calling, Beethoven’s friends noticed that, externally at least, he again looked fresh and cheerful. “He knew,” says Schindler, “how to rise superior to his fate, and his whole character bore an ‘antique dignity.’” But even now he told the old friend of his youth, Wegeler, that he intended “to produce only a few more great works, and then, like an old child, to close his earthly career somewhere among good men.” And, indeed, his whole inner nature seemed shattered. “What dost thou want? Why dost thou hang thy head? Is not the truest resignation sufficient for thee, even if thou art in want?” This one conversation with Karl tells us everything.

Besides, serious symptoms of disease appeared. A single blow, and his powerful, manly form was shattered like that of the meanest of mortals. And, indeed, that blow was struck with almost unexpected violence.