THE HOUSE WHERE BEETHOVEN WAS BORN.
If we play consecutively three or four Sonates by Haydn or by Mozart, what is almost invariably the result?
In each case we like the first one and probably the second one; at the third we begin to feel bored, and at the fourth we shut up the book. And yet how lovely they all are! Haydn takes us to play with the children; Mozart introduces us to the ballroom. But Haydn did not spend his life’s days on a merry-go-round, and Mozart was not perpetually paying compliments. Quite the contrary. Haydn, as we know, never had any children, and that disagreeable wife of his left little happiness for his home. As for Mozart—well, Mozart had a charming wife, but he was so pitifully poor that one winter’s morning, when the snow lay thick on the ground outside, a friendly neighbour, calling in to see how the young couple were getting on, found them dancing a waltz on the bare boards of their scantily furnished room. They had no fire, and this was the only means that they could devise for keeping themselves warm.
When Mozart went on a journey, he wrote the prettiest love-letters to his Stanzerl. Here is a bit of one of them:—“Dear little wife! If I only had a letter from you! If I were to tell you all that I do with your dear likeness, how you would laugh! For instance, when I take it out of its case, I say ‘God greet thee, Stanzerl, God greet thee, thou rascal, shuttlecock, pointy-nose, nick-nack, bit and sup!’ And when I put it back, I let it slip in very slowly, saying, with each little push, ‘Now—now—now!’ and at the last, quickly—‘Good night, little mouse, sleep well!’” There is nothing in all Mozart’s music the least little bit like that. And why?
Mozart’s music is strictly classical and anti-romantic. His character is stamped upon it, as the character of Haydn is stamped upon his music, but his circumstances, the events of his daily life, have no part in it, and whether he had been rich or poor, successful or despairing, his music would have been exactly the same.
With Beethoven quite the reverse is the case. If it were possible to play the whole volume of Beethoven’s Sonates at one sitting, the last thing player or listener could complain of would be the monotony which culminates in boredom.
There would be Beethoven tender, Beethoven sublime, Beethoven ferocious, Beethoven serene, and as many more Beethovens as there are adjectives in the dictionary. And this is the secret of Beethoven’s popularity.
For the musician there is the perfect form, the exquisite mode of expression; for the amateur there is the man, with all the hopes and fears and aspirations which he shares with his fellow man.
Beethoven wrote the most meagre of letters, but every emotion that swayed him found utterance in his music, and this it is which gives to his music the quality known as Romanticism.
Many definitions have been given of the terms classical and romantic, but the clearest and cleverest definition that I have met is that given by the French writer, Monsieur Brunetière,—“Classicism makes the impersonality of a work of art one of the conditions of its perfection, while Romanticism means Individualism.” In other words, classicism confines itself to the thing done; romanticism is more interested in the doer of that thing.