Beethoven went to Vienna to earn his living as entertainer to the dilettante aristocracy of that pleasure-loving city. He was eccentric, self-absorbed, possessed by his visions, never happy except when he was composing, or out in the country where he could give free rein to his delight in nature. It was his fate to teach music to the children of the rich, and to play for grown-up rich children in their salons. They were accustomed to chatter while men of genius attempted to entertain them; but Beethoven thought his playing was of importance, and when they failed to keep silence he struck his fist upon the piano keys, and sprang up, exclaiming: “I will not play for such swine!”
A terrible calamity befell him, the worst that a musician could imagine—he began to grow deaf. At the age of thirty he could no longer hear a musical note. That seemed the ruin of his life; his enemies jeered, saying that he poured out his preposterous compositions because he did not know how horrible they sounded. Also Beethoven suffered from near-sightedness, caused by smallpox in childhood. His health at times gave way entirely, and he contemplated suicide. “My art alone deterred me,” he wrote.
He was, like Milton, a Puritan, though he did not use the word. He had an ideal of love, and did not squander himself in casual intrigues. His profession brought him into intimacy with the ladies of the great world; they would be overwhelmed by his genius, but then they would think it over, and realize what it would mean to marry a social inferior—and a deaf one at that. One brilliant young lady tortured the great man’s heart, and then went off and married a count. So Beethoven withdrew into himself, becoming more eccentric, more irritable, and more passionate and terrifying in his compositions. Said Weber when he heard the Third Symphony: “Beethoven is now quite mad.”
The composer’s life was one long struggle with poverty and debt. There were wealthy noblemen in Vienna who appreciated his genius, and wanted him to stay and play for them; they subscribed an income for him, but then forgot to pay it, and left him to struggle along. To be sure, he was none too easy with his patrons; he went to stay with one, and the good man persisted in taking off his hat every time he laid eyes on Beethoven. The composer, who abhorred ceremony, ran away.
Beethoven was a reader of Plutarch, and held the ideals of the old Roman republic; he believed in universal suffrage, and in liberty, and had no hesitation in voicing his convictions to anyone. He hailed Napoleon as a defender of liberty, and dedicated his “Eroica” symphony to him. Later on, when Napoleon accepted a crown, Beethoven changed this dedication, “To the memory of a great man.” He dedicated another symphony to a French general, the conqueror of the Bastille; and you can imagine how reactionary Vienna welcomed that.
After the defeat of Napoleon, the monarchs entered into what they called the “Holy Alliance,” to rivet Catholic absolutism upon the continent forever. Vienna became the center of world reaction, and dungeon and torture were the fate of men who raised their voices for human rights. Here was Beethoven, old, deaf, and poverty-stricken; but he never yielded an inch of his principles. “Words are bound in chains,” he said, “but sounds are still free.” He poured his feelings into his wonderful Ninth Symphony, which occasioned such a tornado of applause that the police considered it necessary to interfere.
Here, you see, was no maker of pretty sounds for the entertainment of the rich; here was a great mind, one who read and thought for himself, and understood not merely dancing and mating, but the nature of organized society. In a time of universal subservience and fawning he clenched his hands and behaved like a democrat. When his brother, full of the pride of a newly rich bourgeois, presented him with a card inscribed, “Johann van Beethoven, Land Proprietor,” the composer scrawled under it, “Ludwig van Beethoven, Brain Proprietor.”
There is a story of his meeting with the poet Goethe. As we shall see, Goethe had made his way by conforming to the customs of a court; he was now sixty-three years of age, stiff to the rest of the world, but pliable to the nobility. Beethoven was forty-two, willing to be humble to a poet of genius, but not to rank and arrogance. They met in the open air, in a park where there were many people; and suddenly came word that the duke and the empress were coming. The people formed two lines, and stood, hats in hand, to do homage; and Goethe took his place among them. Beethoven was furious; he remonstrated with the poet in vain, then he jammed his hat down over his head and strode toward the duke and empress, and they were the ones who did homage to him. Goethe never forgot this scene, and he did not care to listen to Beethoven’s music, because he said he found it “disturbing.”
We are told by our “art for art’s sake” dilettanti that art has nothing to do with moral questions. Let them take their answer from the father of modern music, the greatest genius who has used that lofty art. No higher authority could be found; and his words were these: “I recognize no sign of superiority in mankind other than goodness.” By that principle he lived, and by it he wrote; his art is overwhelmingly ethical, and if we were to tear up every record of his life, every word in the way of title or dedication or inscription upon his compositions, if we had nothing but the musical notes of his sonatas and symphonies, we should get precisely the same impressions; we should know that we were in the presence of a titanic conflict of the human will against the forces of fate, the blind cruelties of nature and the deliberate cruelties of class. We might not know that this man became deaf at the height of his powers; we might have no definite image to attach to the terrible hammer strokes of the Fifth Symphony; but we should know that here is torture, here is defeat and despair crying out, here is loveliness broken to pieces, trampled, crushed out of life; here also is man, clenching his hands and setting his teeth in grim resolve, proclaiming the supremacy of his own spirit, and rising to heights of power, in which he makes his joy out of the very materials of his torment. Some friend in Beethoven’s presence called upon God; and the composer answered with the motto of his life: “O man, help thyself!”