The Real Beethoven

...From a few letters and documents of Beethoven's middle years (reproduced in Alexander Wheelock Thayer's Life), J. W. N. Sullivan in Beethoven: His Spiritual Development adduced a brilliant hypothesis explaining the works of the middle period...

...It offers a wholly reliable text: The editor swept aside all past editorial work and, taking nothing on trust, traced each letter to its original and made a careful copy of it...

...What they did was simply to cast off prejudice, examine all the relevant evidence (particularly the letters), and connect the various details of Beethoven's life around certain thematic centers, such as his relations with his family, his attitude toward women, and his conspicuous personality traits...

...in his actual relations with women he invariably withdrew as soon as he realized that his feelings were reciprocated...

...Thayer suffered violent headaches every time he sought to work on the final volume of his biography...

...In their effort to present all the facts, the Sterbas examined every sort of primary material, not only the letters but the conversation books and the testimony of Beethoven's friends and contemporaries...

...And, finally, the translation is a model of self-effacing accuracy, brisk, forthright and redolent of Beethoven's ethos...

...This work completely demolished the traditional image of the composer as a sort of noble savage and artist-hero by substituting for the mythic figure a distressingly real picture of Beethoven the man...

...ON MUSIC By Albert Goldman The Real Beethoven When the definitive edition of Beethoven's correspondence was published not long ago, many reviewers were quick to point out its abundant merits...

...Beethoven and his Nephew concentrates on this gruesome episode, which ended in Karl's attempted suicide and Beethoven's fatal illness...

...Eventually they discovered that much of the evidence had been tampered with by Beethoven's admirers...

...In the Sterbas' study we encounter again all the familiar traits of the master's personality: eccentricity, humor, penuriousness, outbursts of righteous indignation, intolerance of authority, colossal pride, frustrated love...

...Just eight years ago the whole subject of Beethoven's life and personality, long stultified by generations of uncritical hero-worshippers, was thrown open to fresh investigation by a remarkable book entitled Beethoven and his Nephew (Pantheon, 1954...

...Generally speaking, none of the usual inducements prompt us to read Beethoven's correspondence...

...One does not sit down and read such a work as one reads a collection of literary (or even literate) letters...

...The final phase of Beethoven's life consisted of a half-mad attempt to wrest control of his nephew Karl from the boy's mother...

...Sullivan was dependent on Thayer, and Thayer never completed his monumental biography of Beethoven, perhaps because he could not reconcile his idealized conception of the composer with the sordid facts of Beethoven's involvement with his nephew...

...Surely, their publication at this time requires some justification...

...Thus, despite its passionate language, the "Immortal Beloved" letter is really an effort to persuade the unknown woman to give up her love for the composer and to console herself with the thought that he will always love her (the letter was probably never even sent...

...Now, with the extremely suggestive findings of the Sterbas, and the full and accurate documentation provided by The Beethoven Letters, we are at last in a position to pick up where Sullivan broke down...

...The Letters of Beethoven (Collected, translated and edited by Emily Anderson...

...but, taken as a whole, their evidence is misleading...

...A slim anthology of the kind to be found in any German book store would satisfy the demand for the "essence" of Beethoven's thought...

...In addition, all the previously puzzling expressions and allusions, to say nothing of the problems created by Beethoven's unreadable handwriting, are cleared up in thorough but unobtrusive annotations...

...three volumes, illustrated, 1,490 pp., St Martin's Press...

...For the connection between Beethoven's personality and Beethoven's music is extremely close...

...during the same period he wrote, without difficulty, two books on other subjects...

...Fantasy felt with the force of reality engenders myth, and Beethoven's personal mythos is the subject of his music...

...By sheer force of factual evidence, the Sterbas demonstrate that Beethoven was excited only by the idea of love...

...There are, to be sure, a few interesting passages on music, as there are several documents of obvious biographic importance: the "Immortal Beloved" letter and the "Heiliginstadt Testament," for example...

...The letters remain the only faithful witnesses to the life and character of Beethoven...

...Nor does one dip into it at random for a visit with the composer, as one is able to take up with pleasure the vivacious and chatty letters of Mozart...

...And the new perspective is revolutionary...

...The authors, Editha and Richard Sterba, were Viennese psychoanalysts, professionally educated in music, but their achievement owed relatively little to the principles of psychoanalysis and nothing at all to their critical judgment of Beethoven's music...

...Beethoven's love life, for example, has been a theme of biographic interperative fantasy for over a century...

...Some day, I suspect, the letters may reveal even more...

...There is, moreover, much to indicate that Beethoven was generally extremely suspicious and hostile toward women...

...Schindler could not destroy the letters, however...

...But he failed to associate successfully the experiences of Beethoven's last years with the character of his last works...

...Of 400 books, 247 were destroyed by Beethoven's bigoted famulus, Anton Schindler, who feared they would give the wrong —that is, the right—impression of his "hero...

...But none of the reviewers honestly dealt with the one embarrassing problem posed by this notable publishing event: the question of its interest to the general reader...

...Oddly enough, the incentive has recently been provided, though none of the reviewers mentioned it...

...No one who has read the Sterbas' book will ever forget the terrible image it contains of the great Beethoven living constantly in a kind of emotional squalor, his imagination periodically inflamed by fantasies of a paranoic order in which he figured as the noble and innocent victim of base and evil persecutors...

...By focusing on a few of the composer's statements and ignoring every other sort of evidence, the impression has been created that Beethoven was highly susceptible to feminine allurements but tragically frustrated in his desire for marriage by his deafness and his anomolous position in society...

...We can begin to weave together the events, the fantasies and the compositions of Beethoven's final period in a critical synthesis that will make the obscurity of the "late quartets" something more like a vision...

...And no one who knows Beethoven's music could fail to connect these dreadful distortions of reality with the mythopoetic content of his compositions—allowing, of course, for the idealization of fantasy in art...

...For the first time in the history of Beethoven biography, one understands it all...

...What is more, the final involvement clearly emerges as the culmination of a life-long neurosis which completely frustrated Beethoven's sexual emotions and eventually perverted them into a fantastic effort to substitute himself for the mother of an adolescent boy...

...They were scattered over Europe, and it has taken almost a century and a half to gather them together...

...The conversation books, for instance, are precious records of the deaf master's colloquies with various interlocutors...

...When they are read without predjudice and with the proper sensitivity to psychological implications, they reveal—even in their apparent triviality—a character and a story of character dissolution that is without parallel in the history of the arts...

...But this material is already accessible in many books on Beethoven...

...The Sterbas also turned up an astonishing amount of evidence in Beethoven's relations with handsome young men that would seem to imply repressed homosexual desires...

...But we see these traits from the back side, so to speak, as the emanations of a highly disturbed and slowly deteriorating personality...

...Here are three substantial volumes of "letters," containing for the most part only crudely written notes on matters of no moment— sometimes no more than a line or two stating that the composer will meet his correspondent at a quarterpast-six in the tavern around the corner—interlarded with stilted addresses to patrons, publishers and legal counsel...

...Clearly then some fresh motive must be advanced if this really splendid edition is to be commended to readers who are not specialists...

...40.00 the set) is the first "complete" edition in any language: 1,570 letters, including 232 never before published in a collected edition...

...There is no intellectual content, none of those revealing statements of intention or explanations of technique such as is found in, say, Wagner's letters to Liszt...