Article image
Article image
Article image
Article image
Article image
Article image
Article image
Article image
Article image
Article image
Article image
Article image
Article image
Article image
Article image
Article image
Article image
Article image
Article image
Article image
Article image
Article image
Article image
Article image

The Story of a Life that Remains an Inspiration BEETHOVEN

IUST over a-century has passed Bl since the death of this fighter, stormer, and wonder-worker who forged his dreams and disappointments into immortal ee} music. Posterity approaches his work only with bowed head. But it may follow his life with open eyes; Beethoven, B.. inspired, the conqueror. . ‘" One may be too curious about the life work of a great artist, he may be too critical. But there is a case for informing ourselves about ‘Beethoven’s personality. The poet can convey in words all we need to know about his opinions. The musician does not tell us how he viewed life; what he expresses is at most the emotion which he felt, as he pondered and struggled. Yet Beethoven had strong opinions. It was a daring thing for a composer writing within reach of the Austrian police to dedicate a symphony to Napoleon. Not only did Beethoven write the .. Eroica in honour of the First Consul; ‘Ne tore up his dedication when his hero proclaimed himself Emperor. His ‘opinions, then, had some bearing on his music; a political enthusiasm stimulated the first of his works which deserves to be called not merely beautiful but great. . There is another reason which drives lovers of Beethoven’s music to study his fa Rew articte crow cn vicihly as we

survey ‘their work in the order of its composition. The development of his technique is not a sufficient explanation, certainly in that respect he never ceased to invent. HE is constantly winning freedom within the traditional forms and rules, which at last he*bursts and breaks, modulating from one key to another with increasing subtlety and audacity, and discovering fresh colours in his orchestral instruments. So much, in some measure, one may say of every original artist. But in Beethoven’s one feels that the man is growing as noticeably as the composer. If he had died in 1804, his early work would have ranked him in quality, though not in quantity, with Haydn and Mozart. The world had heard few symphonies as lovely and interesting as his First and Second. Yet when he came to his Third (the Eroica) _we feel that something has happened to this composer. By taking thought he has added many cubits to his stature. For the first time we call him not only a great artist but a great man. The early works were beautiful patterns of sound, but this symphony reflects the experience of a man who by suffering and struggle had won his right to hope.and believe. . Ludwig von Beethoven was born in 1770 at Bonn, amid the beauties of the Rhine Valley. His grandfather, a Fleming, was a chorister in the service of the Archbishop-Elector, an enlightened yRthen of music, and rosé to be conductor of his concerts. His who sang..in the same choir, had a narrower mind and a harsher character, and his drunken habits brought the family to squalid poverty.. . To his mother, of whom we know too little, Beethoven was deeply attached, but she died before he was eighteen. The father, who wished to exploit Ludwig as an infant-prodigy, neglected =.

his general education, kept him hard at work at fiddle and piano, and published his: childish compositions with falsified dates. ‘ His growth, when one compares him with Mozart, was slow; yet at seventeen, on a brief visit to Vienna, he won high praise from that brilliant genius. He was well grounded in Bach, played the organ as well as the piano, and gained valuable experience as viola-player in the. Elector’s orchestra. . HILE still in his teens he was obliged to take over from his drunken father the responsibility for the household. Encouraged by Haydn, during a visit to Bonn, he sought his fortune, in 1792, in the ‘imperial city of Vienna, at this time the musical capital of Europe. Here he took lessons in composition from Haydn, but the self-willed, though hard-working pupil was too -tactless to retain a teacher’s regard. As a pianist, however, he made his way rapidly, chiefly by his gift of improvisation. At his concerts someone would suggest a theme, and on this, abandoning himself to a fury of creation, he would pour forth variations which astonished his hearers as much by their prodigal invention as: by the sure architecture of their form. But he was not at this time a popujar figure in musical society. His con-

temporaries describe him as an ugly, but sturdy little man, with a shock of insurgent black hair, His manners were awkward, his accent provincial, To awkward manners, a provincial accent, and slovenly dress, he added a prickly and defiant independence. Mozart had worn a livery, and dined in the servants’ hall of his patron. ; No man ever dared to treat Beethoven as less than an equal | Throughout life he was a democrat, formed by the French Revolution. A bust of the regicide, Brutus, stood on his bureau. When his brother, John, a war-profiteer, described himself on his visiting card as "land-owner," Beethoven retaliated by, scribbling under his own name "brain-owner." On a visit to Goethe he horrified that courtier of genius by remaining covered and erect when they met the Imperial Family on the road. To the Archduke Karl, the of the European coalition against France, he wrote a dignified letter exhorting him to lead. a movement for peace. His religious opinions were .as unorthodox as his politics. No one who listens to the sublime choruses of the Ninth Symphony, or to the Convalescent’s Hymn of Thanksgiving in the A Minor, Quartet (Op. 131) can doubt that he was, emotionally, a deeply religious man. But his faith was pantheistic, and on one occasion the police even thought of prosecuting him for blasphemy based on some rash words spoken in a cafe. At thirty, this young man had achieved success. Good judges considered him the first pianist of the day, and his compositions were spreading his fame as far as London. To our ears, these early works seem to place him in the school of Haydn and Mozar but his contemporaries, even at thmes the (Continued om page é

A Broadcast from 4YA

Beethoven , y (Continued from page 1.)

great Haydn himself, thought them daring. Haydn,. after all, belonged to the age of Sterne and. Goldsmith; Beethoven to that of Byron and Goethe. But this. successful man was deeply unhappy.. .At the age of 26 the first symptoms of deafness appeared. It is _ probable that, the: disease began ‘in infancy, and it may have been congenital. Inexorably, though gradually, the curse ""erept upon lim, and.neither physicians nor’ quacks’ could’ relieve it. Partly from pride; partly from concern for his professional reputation, he concealed it ‘even from his friends, and though ne ' suffered agony from _ loneliness, shunned society, until the world ca | to think him a misanthrope and a. / Yet his was an affectionate and sociable nature, capable.of gaiety as boisterous as his scherzos, Tones he could always hear better than words. He played in public for the last time in 1814, but in his later years his attempts. to conduct brought humiliaitng disaster, and'on the rare occasions when he played for friends, his fingers in the quieter passages would run over the keys and give no audible sound. The world could now reach him only by writing in the notebook which he always carried. : ‘ ‘At his last concert, in 1825, the great audience, listening for the first time to the Ninth Symphony, . abandoned itself to a tempest of applause. His friends had- to. turn him round to see the clapping,-°:. -This curse,- the most terrible which’ could visit a musician, was thirty years the central fact of his life. The man reached: greatness by defying it. In 1802, ‘after a summer spent in vain in the rural quiet of. Heiligenstadt, his hopes of a cure faded. In his will he described. the despair and isolation of these years. ' Cut off fiom friendship and love, only his music remained, .and for how long would -he be-able to create inaudible beauty? He even meditated suicide. Gradually his will asserted itself; he would fight; he would live to create. TWe-ceases about this time to. be ashamed of his ‘affliction, and returns to society and finds that his work has gained. It is this victory which explains the sudden growth of power of which one is aware in the Eroica. It was dedicated to Napoleon, but, does it not sing the new ideal of ism? The death. which the FunerMM\ March celebrates is not that literal death of the body which the registrar records. -It is rather the spiritual tomb which a hero must escape. As one listens to the gay Scherzo and the triumphant Finale which follows it, instinctively one’s inner voice repeats: "And the third day He rose again." From this year onward, this theme inspires all Beethoven’s greater work. Occasionally one hears a note of resignation, but much more often of triumph. No man has written music of such abandoned. gaiety. But there is the force of a-titanic will in these terrific hymns: to’ joy...They are not, like Mozart’s, the outpourings of a} child of nature. . One is the witness of ° inner struggles in most of his loveliest creations; in the Fifth Symphony, and ' aven in the Seventh, in the Violin Concerto, and even in the "Emperor" Con(Coneluded:on page 29.) |

The Life of Beethoven ' (Continued from pag. 2.)

certo, and most audibly one hears them in the third of the "Razoumowsky" quartets. If Beethoven inspires veneration as well as admiration, it is because one divines the depths and complexity of the experience behind those shapely and harmonious patterns of sound. This music of the mature middle period had an amplitude of scale, a dignity, and also an emotional complexity to which, as yet, the world had been a stranger. There are few external events to record during this middle period, which stretches, more or less, from the Third Symphony to the Highth (1804-1816). His life was devoted to incessant creation, varied only by his few concerts and by still rarer visits to Berlin or Budapest. There were two Beethovens, the creator and his keeper. This keeper was painfully inefficient. He lived an untidy, irregular existence in rooms that were a litter of papers, broken chairs, and unfinished meals. He was unbusiness like over : .oney, could not manage servants, and changed his lodgings almost every year. The most one can say for him is that he had the sense to take his charge into the country through the long summer months. . There, in solitude, amid the lovely scenery which lies so near Vienna, Beethoven revelled in the woods, washed himself in the brooks from the dust of his battles, and heard as rhythm the contours of the hills. Most of his themes came to him out of doors. The keeper may have been a tragic man, at the sight of whose face, set in a mould of hopeless suffering, his friends could hardly refrain from tears. The creator could lose himself, a man intoxicated with joy, in his inner world of inaudible sound. Peasants would watch him in the fields, gesticulating madly, shouting, singing, beating time, and then stopping -to jot down his themes in a notebook, Their cattle would stampede at the strange apparition, but it was deaf to their indignant shouts. The accounts of Beethoven’s manner in conducting give the same impression of complete absorption in his music. To indicate a diminuendo, he would sink down until he disappeared behind the desk; for a crescendo he would rise very gradually, until at fortissimo he leapt into the air, shouting a strange, inarticulate cry. It is probable that no human being has lived for so many hours of every day in an inner world of sound. It became for him the real world, and of this sorld he was the emperor and the master, Two sources of inspiration Beethoven had outside his music. First, there was his love of nature, legible most

clearly in the Pastoral Symphony. One is surprised by his naive imitation of the brook and the birds, and one is tempted to say to him what Robert Bridges said to the nightingales: ‘Beautiful must be the mountains whence ye come.’ And then one recollects that long years had passed since he had heard the shout of a cuckoo or the rhythm of a brook. "Nay, barren are those mountains and spent the streams; Our song is the voice of desire, that haunts our dreams. The other inspiration was love. But it was rather the hope of love that inspired him than any actual experience. One woman whom he loved wrote of his "virginal purity." He desired marriage but always some impediment, his deafness, his poverty, his humble birth, or perhaps his modesty, stood in the way. Some brief happiness he may have had with the Countess Julia Guicciardi, and he wrote the Moonlight Sonata under: its influence, but this pretty young woman preferred to marry a title. To the Countess Theresa of Brunswick, "the immortal beloved" of his letters, he came nearer, at least in affectionate friendship, but though in some sense she loved him, they did not marry. To this attachment we owe the radiant Fourth Symphony, with its excited Finale, which seems to describe the entry of need and startling beauty into his life. His craving for love went unsatisfied to the end, and the saddest chapter is that which tells of his guardianship of his nephew, Karl, On this worthless youth, who wasted his own time and his uncle’s slender earnings on billiards and women, and failed in every profession which he tried to enter, Beethoven lavished the pent-uz affections of his lonely life. Karl could not stand the emotional strain of the relationship and made a half-hearted attempt at suicide. Amid these shadows, lonely, embarrassed, and impoverished, in wretched health, and harassed by the worry and tragedy of Karl, Beethoven wrote the sublimest works of his career. For his third period includes the Ninth Symphony, the solemn Mass in D, and the five late string quartets. He was at last ready to say all that was in him, and with turbulent majesty, this man, who had travelled through all the circles of hell, wrote to Schiller’s words his final Hymn to Joy. Who can doubt that the entire symphony was for Beethoven a revela-

tion of the méaning of life; a celebration of the joy, which by love, but alae by struggle, an emancipated humanity may: attain? That music has this power of revelation he once declared to ‘Bettina Brentano, Goethe’s fascinating friend, though she may have polished the phrases which she professes to report. "Music," he told her, "is a higher ree velation than all wisdom and philosophy"; indeed, it is "the one incorporeal entrance into the higher world of knowledge." More intimately still, in the late quartets, one hears this revelation of an artist who "associated with God without fear." Unintelligible to his contemporaries, they are difficult even for us. As one grows familiar with them (for all of them are now ayailable on the gramophone) the puzzle: vanishes, but only when one ‘realises that they are a thing never before attempted in the art of sound. This is the music of the inner life, and one compares it to Shakespeare’s Sonnets, lt was not written outwards for an audience, but"solely, as Beethoven tells us, for himself, At. first, the movements seem disconnected; an outbreak of riotous fun is followed by a cry of despair which might be a penitentiary psalm. Byidently he is conversing with himself (especially in Op. 180 and Op, 181), surveying life as he has lived it, testing his familiar theme of "hero« ism," and drawing from it, but only after defiant warfare, the assurance of triumph. This was the work, not of an aged but of a deeply experienced man, subtler in technique and richer in ine vention than all that had gone before, His mind teemed with projects, but the neglected body was worn out. On a journey in mid-winter, after a trying visit to his brother John, he caught a chill, which struck inwards and developed dropsy. The pain and loneliness of a long illness were relieved only by the generous act of the London Philharmonic Society, which sent him, as an advance, a cheque for £100. It served for his funeral. Amid a tempest, in March 1827, Beethoven died, The life-long hymn to joy was ended as a stranger closed his eyes. (With acknowledgments to "Radio Times." )

This article text was automatically generated and may include errors. View the full page to see article in its original form.I whakaputaina aunoatia ēnei kuputuhi tuhinga, e kitea ai pea ētahi hapa i roto. Tirohia te whārangi katoa kia kitea te āhuatanga taketake o te tuhinga.
Permanent link to this item
Hononga pūmau ki tēnei tūemi

https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/periodicals/RADREC19310320.2.4

Bibliographic details
Ngā taipitopito pukapuka

Radio Record, Volume IV, Issue 36, 20 March 1931, Page 3

Word count
Tapeke kupu
2,769

The Story of a Life that Remains an Inspiration BEETHOVEN Radio Record, Volume IV, Issue 36, 20 March 1931, Page 3

The Story of a Life that Remains an Inspiration BEETHOVEN Radio Record, Volume IV, Issue 36, 20 March 1931, Page 3

Log in or create a Papers Past website account

Use your Papers Past website account to correct newspaper text.

By creating and using this account you agree to our terms of use.

Log in with RealMe®

If you’ve used a RealMe login somewhere else, you can use it here too. If you don’t already have a username and password, just click Log in and you can choose to create one.


Log in again to continue your work

Your session has expired.

Log in again with RealMe®


Alert