"Filled with this animating trust, I venture to draw near to Thee with these youthful efforts. Accept them as a pure offering of childish reverence, and look down graciously, Most Exalted! upon them and their young author,
"LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN."
"These Sonatas," says a most competent critic,[B] "for a boy's work, are, indeed, remarkable. They are bonâ fide compositions. There is no vagueness about them…. He has ideas positive and well pronounced, and he proceeds to develope them in a manner at once spontaneous and logical…. Verily the boy possessed the vital secret of the Sonata form; he had seized its organic principle."
[Footnote B: J.S. Dwight.]
Ludwig has become an author! His talents are known and appreciated everywhere in Bonn. He is the pet of the musical circle in which he moves,—in danger of being spoiled. Yet now, when the character is forming, and those habits, feelings, tastes are becoming developed and fixed, which are to go with him through life, he can look to his father neither for example nor counsel. He idolizes his mother; but she is oppressed with the cares of a family, suffering through the improvidence and bad habits of its head, and though she had been otherwise situated, the widow of Laym, the Elector's valet, could hardly be the proper person to fit the young artist for future intercourse with the higher ranks of society.
In the large, handsome brick house still standing opposite the minster in Bonn, on the east side of the public square, where now stands the statue of Beethoven, dwelt the widow and children of Hofrath von Breuning. Easy in their circumstances, highly educated, of literary habits, and familiar with polite life, the family was among the first in the city. The four children were not far from Beethoven's age; Eleonore, the daughter, and Lenz, the third son, were young enough to become his pupils. In this family it was Ludwig's good fortune to become a favorite, and "here," says Wegeler, who afterward married Eleonore, "he made his first acquaintance with German literature, especially with the poets, and here first had opportunity to gain the cultivation necessary for social life."
He was soon treated by the Von Breunings as a son and brother, passing not only most of his days, but many of his nights, at their house, and sometimes spending his vacations with them at their country-seat in Kerpen,—a small town on the great road from Cologne to Aix la Chapelle. With them he felt free and unrestrained, and everything tended at the same time to his happiness and his intellectual development. Nor was music neglected. The members of the family were all musical, and Stephen, the eldest son, sometimes played in the Electoral Orchestra.
No person possessed so strong an influence upon the oft-times stubborn and wilful boy as the Frau von Breuning. She best knew how to bring him back to the performance of his duty, when neglectful of his pupils; and when she, with gentle force, had made him cross the square to the house of the Austrian ambassador, Count Westfall, to give the promised lesson, and saw him, after hesitating for a time at the door, suddenly fly back, unable to overcome his dislike to lesson-giving, she would bear patiently with him, merely shrugging her shoulders and remarking, "To-day he has his raptus again!" The poverty at home and his love for his mother alone enabled him ever to master this aversion.
To the Breunings, then, we are indebted for that love of Plutarch, Homer, Shakspeare, Goethe, and whatever gives us noble pictures of that greatness of character which we term "heroic," that enabled the future composer to stir up within us all the finest and noblest emotions, as with the wand of a magician. The boy had an inborn love of the beautiful, the tender, the majestic, the sublime, in nature, in art, and in literature,—together with a strong sense of the humorous and even comic. With the Breunings all these qualities were cultivated and in the right direction. To them the musical world owes a vast debt of gratitude.
Beethoven was no exception to the rule, that only a great man can be a great artist. True, in his later years his correspondence shows at times an ignorance of the rules of grammar and orthography; but it also proves, what may be determined from a thousand other indications, that he was a deep thinker, and that he had a mind of no small degree of cultivation, as it certainly was one of great intellectual power. Had he devoted his life to any other profession than music,—to law, theology, science, or letters,—he would have attained high eminence, and enrolled himself among the great.