(Reported by Schindler as Beethoven’s view on pianoforte instruction.
He hated a staccato style of playing and dubbed it “finger dancing” and
“throwing the hands in the air.”)
[PG Editor’s Note: #79 was skipped in the 1905 edition—error?]
ON HIS OWN WORKS
80. “I haven’t a single friend; I must live alone. But well I know that God is nearer to me than to the others of my art; I associate with Him without fear, I have always recognized and understood Him, and I have no fear for my music,—it can meet no evil fate. Those who understand it must become free from all the miseries that the others drag with them.”
(To Bettina von Arnim. [Bettina’s letter to Goethe, May 28, 1810.])
81. “The variations will prove a little difficult to play, particularly the trills in the coda; but let that not frighten you. It is so disposed that you need play only the trills, omitting the other notes because they are also in the violin part. I would never have written a thing of this kind had I not often noticed here and there in Vienna a man who after I had improvised of an evening would write down some of my peculiarities and make boast of them next day. Foreseeing that these things would soon appear in print I made up my mind to anticipate them. Another purpose which I had was to embarrass the local pianoforte masters. Many of them are my mortal enemies, and I wanted to have my revenge in this way, for I knew in advance that the variations would be put before them, and that they would make exhibitions of themselves.”
(Vienna, November 2, 1793, to Eleonore von Breuning, in dedicating to
her the variations in F major, “Se vuol ballare.” [The pianist whom
Beethoven accuses of stealing his thunder was Abbe Gelinek.])
82. “The time in which I wrote my sonatas (the first ones of the second period) was more poetical than the present (1823); such hints were therefore unnecessary. Every one at that time felt in the Largo of the third sonata in D (op. 10) the pictured soulstate of a melancholy being, with all the nuances of light and shade which occur in a delineation of melancholy and its phases, without requiring a key in the shape of a superscription; and everybody then saw in the two sonatas (op. 14) the picture of a contest between two principles, or a dialogue between two persons, because it was so obvious.”
(In answer to Schindler’s question why he had not indicated the poetical
conceits underlying his sonatas by superscriptions or titles.)