Part 1

Produced by Al Haines

[Frontispiece: _Painting by N. M. Price_.]

"Joy, thou heavenly spark of Godhead!"

A DAY WITH LUDWIG VON BEETHOVEN

BY MAY BYRON

HODDER & STOUGHTON

_In the same Series. Schubert. Mendelssohn._

A DAY WITH BEETHOVEN

At daybreak, on a summer morning, in the year 1815, a short, thick-set, sturdily-built man entered his sitting-room, and at once set to work to compose music. Not that he disturbed the slumbers of the other inhabitants by untimely noises upon the pianoforte: a course which, at three in the morning, might be resented by even the most enthusiastic admirer of his genius. No: he sat down at his table, with plenty of music paper, and addressed himself to his usual avocation of writing assiduously till noon or thereabouts.

The untidy, uncomfortable condition of his room did not distress Ludwig van Beethoven in the least. True, it was scattered all over with books and music; here the remains of last night's food, there an empty wine bottle; on the piano, the hasty sketch of some immortal work; on the floor, uncorrected proofs, business letters, orchestral scores, and MSS. in a chaotic pile.

But he thoroughly enjoyed casting a glance, from time to time, at the sunny scene without; at the vista towards the Belvedere Garden, the Danube, and the distant Carpathians,--the view for the sake of which he had taken up his lodgings at this house in the Sailer-stätte, Vienna. For if there was one thing which still could afford a unique and cloudless pleasure to this sensitive, unhappy man, it was Nature in all her varied forms of light and loveliness. Nature, that "never did betray the heart that loved her," still held out open arms of help and solace for the healing of his afflicted soul.

Beethoven, in his various migrations from lodging to lodging--and they were very numerous, and inspired by the most trivial causes--always endeavoured to select an airy, sunshiny spot, where he could at least feel the country air blowing to him, and so keep in touch with his beloved green fields. If the supply of sunshine proved insufficient, that was quite a valid reason for another removal. But his restless, sensitive mind was apt to magnify molehills into mountains, and the most trifling inconvenience into a serious obstacle to work. Work was his starting point, his course, his goal; work was his whole _raison-d'-être_, the very meaning and object of his existence.

It has been observed that if we would represent to ourselves a day in the life of Beethoven, one of the Master's own wonderful compositions would serve as the best counterpart. Wagner instances the great Quartet in C sharp minor as a notable instance of this allegoric music,--designating the rather long introductory _Adagio_, "than which, probably, nothing more melancholy has ever been expressed in tones, as the awaking of a day

'Which through its tardy course No single longing shall fulfil--not one!'

And yet the _Adagio_ is in itself a prayer, a period of conference with God, in faith, in eternal goodness." And it was in a state of mind which one may term unconsciously devotional, that the great composer now ascended into regions where few could follow him,--where, his senses deaf and blind to earthly sights and sounds, he could hold intercourse with a pure and celestial art. For Music contains, within its inexhaustible treasuries, not only all that we conceive of best, all those highest and most ennobling emotions which thrill us as at a touch of the Divine finger, but it also possesses all the characteristic beauties of other arts. The composer shares Form and Colour with the painter--a much more elastic variety of Form--and an incomparably wider use of Colour, in the magnificent paintbox of the orchestra. The composer's art, moreover, is not stationary at one fixed point--one moment, so to speak, seized and immortalised upon canvas: but has the fluidity and onward movement of actual life, passing with bewildering rapidity of transition from one phase of thought to another, even as life does. And the composer, while he shares with the great prose writer and the poet the power of expressing things marvellously well,--of uttering in beautifully poised and balanced rhythm the whole gamut of human emotion,--yet has a greater power than theirs. For he can put into a single phrase, with an exquisite intimacy of intuition, a meaning which could hardly be denoted in a hundred words: he can condense into a couple of bars the essence of a whole chapter.

The outward appearance was far from beautiful, which belied the really lofty heart of the great composer as he sat indefatigably at work. His thick, dark, upstanding hair, already turning grey, crowned a pitted, swarthy face; his looks were rugged, gloomy, forbidding; his chin bore evidence of the most superficial shaving; his hands were covered with thick black hair; his small, deeply set, fiery eyes alone redeemed him from ugliness. For the rest, he had cotton wool in his ears, and his rough, shabby, hairy clothes gave him a Crusoesque look, almost comic in its incongruity with his occupation.

The housekeeper brought in his breakfast: he paid no attention to her. He had punctiliously counted out sixty coffee-beans overnight, and handed them to her in readiness for the morning; but now, after he had dipped his pen in the coffee-cup instead of the ink some three or four times, he pushed away the discoloured mixture, and absently nibbled his crusty roll. He was composing a _Polonaise_, to be dedicated to the Empress of Russia, for which he was to receive fifty ducats. This seemed an absurdly small remuneration, but although Beethoven was "really forced" (to quote Richard Wagner) "to support himself from the proceeds of his musical labours," yet, as life had no allurements for him in the ordinary sense, he had less necessity laid on him to make much money; and "the more confident he became in the employment of his inner wealth, so much the more confidently did he make his demands outward; and he actually required from his benefactors, that they should no longer pay him for his compositions, but so provide for him that he might work altogether for himself, unconcerned as to the rest of the world. And it really happened--a thing unprecedented in the lives of musicians--that a few benevolent men of rank pledged themselves to keep Beethoven independent in the sense demanded."

So it was not with any misgivings that he set aside the score of the _Polonaise_, still unfinished, and turned to something which he justly regarded as holding promise of his best vocal work; that which is still, perhaps, the greatest love-song in the world--the unequalled _Adélaide_. Its words, though above the average of the German lyrist of that period, served merely as a peg upon which to hang the music.

"Lonely strays thy friend in April's garden, Lovely fairy lights around are gleaming Through the tremulous boughs of rosy blossom, Adélaide!

In the stream, and on the snowy mountain, In the dying day all gold-beclouded, In the starry fields, thy likeness lingers, Adélaide!

Evening breezes through the leaves are lisping, Silver May-bells in the grasses chiming, Waves are rustling, nightingales are fluting-- Adélaide!

Soon, O wonder! on my grave a floweret, From the ashes of my heart upspringing, Shall reveal, on every purple petal-- Adélaide!" (_Matthisson_.)

Beethoven had qualified himself for vocal writing to a degree which is rarely attempted by the instrumental composer. Although his father and grandfather had been vocalists, his own early studies had been in other branches of music; he knew little of the capabilities of the voice. So he took singing lessons from the Italian composer Salieri; and notwithstanding that his own voice was shrill and harsh, increasingly so as his deafness grew upon him, he was thus enabled to pour forth liquid and melodious phrases, such as those of _Adélaide_, which seem so absolutely adapted to the requirements of a singer that they could, so to speak, sing themselves.

"_Adélaide_," he said, "came entirely from my heart;" and therefore its pure ardour goes straight to the heart of the hearer. But he was not contented with his work, upon which he had already spent much time and thought. A frown gathered heavily upon his overhanging brows, as, humming the air and playing an imaginary accompaniment on the desk, he went over it again and again in the endeavour to "gild refined gold."

"The more one achieves in art," he grumbled, "the less contented is one with former works." And this, indeed, was characteristic of Ludwig van Beethoven: never to be satisfied with what he had accomplished, but to go on continually, as it were, from strength to strength. That "divine discontent which is at the root of all improvement," perpetually impelled him towards higher things, and made him at once haughtily conscious of his own powers, and yet the most modest and laborious of men.

In _Adélaide_, however, lay hidden more than the fluent outcome of his creative instinct. It remains the lovesong for all time--the last word of a noble and ennobling passion. Here--to pursue the simile of the C sharp minor quartet--a dream-image of the _Allegro_ awakened in charming reminiscence and played sweetly and sorrowfully with itself. For this rough, rugged, eccentric, bad-tempered musician was capable of reaching the austerest heights of love--those heights where renunciation sits eternally enthroned.

Love and Beethoven seem a singularly anomalous pair: yet from his youth onward love was the very mainspring of his unsullied life. It began, rooted in filial affection for his mother, of whom he wrote those touching words, "She was such a good, loving mother to me, and my best friend. Oh, no one could be more fortunate than I, when I was able to speak that sweet name 'Mother', and it was heard--and to whom shall I ever say it now?"--And it continued as a vague but fervent longing for some sweet unknown--some "not impossible She."

"Love, and love alone, is capable of bringing lasting happiness .... O God, let me find her--_her_--who will strengthen me in virtue and lawfully be mine."

So he sighed: but his hopes remained unfulfilled. "His intense longing for a home and for female companionship was never satisfied," and the extraordinary number of attachments by which his career was punctuated, and which were generally for women of superior rank to his own, were every one of them destined to be transitory and destitute of result. Magdalena Willmann, Giulietta Guicciardi, Bettine Brentano, Thérèse von Brunswick, Amalie Sebald, and many another charming phantom, passed, fugitively brilliant, across his horizon: and the domestic happiness for which Beethoven never ceased to crave, was never within measurable distance of his grasp.

But now he resolutely put away _Adélaide_ and its attendant wistful thoughts, and addressed himself to more severely intellectual work: the great B flat Sonata (Op. 106) which, like all his latter work, is orchestral in feeling and treatment.

"The Scherzo of the 'Moonlight' Sonata, wherein a troop of glimmering fairy forms come dancing through the midnight forest."

Beethoven was primarily and permanently a composer of sonatas; for "the great majority and most excellent of his instrumental compositions, the fundamental form of the sonata was the veil-like tissue through which he gazed into the realm of tones, or, also, through which, emerging from that realm, he made himself intelligible to us--while other forms, the mixed ones of vocal music especially, were, after all, only transitorily touched upon by him, as if by way of experiment." (Wagner.)

And one has only to reflect upon the magical and matchless beauty of his best-known work in sonata form, to be surrounded at once by a multitude of gorgeous memories. The opening movement of the "Pathétique," transfused with gloomy majesty; the _Scherzo_ of the "Moonlight" Sonata, wherein a troop of glimmering fairy forms come dancing through the midnight forest: the magnificent verve and vigour of the "Waldstein:" and that unapproachable _Andante_ of the "Appassionata," which some have declared they would wish to hear in dying, that the solemn glory of its pensive chords might companion them into the rest of God .... These, and innumerable other instances, each dear to the individual heart, identify Beethoven as the true lord of the Sonata.

The reader will doubtless feel some wonder that all this while the master was composing so rigorously at his desk, leaving the pianoforte untouched. But there were three very adequate reasons for this mode of action. First--that he was in the habit of writing everything, as he composed it, in notebooks; mostly out of doors in solitary rambles away from any instrument, where he would "hum to himself, and beat the air with an accompaniment of extraordinary vocal sounds." Secondly--that, being a consummate master of the science of music, and the best pianist, perhaps, of his day, he had no occasion to put to proof in actual performance, as the amateur does, the constructions of his fertile brain. Thirdly--and chiefly, and sorrowful to relate--when he had just been composing, his deafness for a while would deepen into stone-deafness: and "because of the inner world of harmony at work within his brain," said Bettine Brentano, "the external world seemed all confusion to him." Beethoven's greatest works, as years went on, were "conceived, produced and given complete to the world ... when not one of those wondrous succession of of phrases could by any possibility reach his ears:" when, in a "splendid isolation" beyond the average power to understand, he and Music dwelt alone in an inner shrine together. "Never has an earthly art created anything so serene as the symphonies in A, and F major, and all those works of the Master which date from the period of his complete deafness."

It is therefore open to doubt whether an affliction, which in an ordinary man would command our pity, was so much to be deprecated in the case of Ludwig van Beethoven as at first thoughts one might imagine. He was full of self-commiseration on its account: yet assuredly the compensations which were awarded him were such as never before fell to mortal man. By the entire exclusion of external sounds, and the entire concentration of his mind upon his work, which resulted, he was enabled to enter those unexplored altitudes whither none has followed, as none had preceded him. "He elevated music (which had been degraded, as regards its proper nature, to the rank of a merely diverting art), to the height of its sublime calling." And it must be remembered that his works were very much more remarkable, as offsprings of the early nineteenth century; than they now appear to us who are familiar with them,--to us, who are heirs of the progress of composition. For Music is the youngest of all the arts,--as compared to all others, a mere babe in arms, whose potentialities and possibilities are still but in the bud. And that Beethoven should stand where he does, on a pinnacle that none may deny, is one more proof of that isolation of genius which makes him twin with Shakespeare. These columnar intellects rise like obelisks in the midst of the ages: not to be accounted for by any rule of circumstance, or education, or heredity: and "What Beethoven's melodies produce, Shakespeare's spirit-shapes also project."

So absorbed was the master in the elaboration and evolution of his "tone-poem," that he did not see, much less hear, the timid entrance of a very shy young man. It was one Charles Neate, an English pianist, who had come, armed with a letter of introduction, to beseech the great Beethoven to receive him as a pupil for the piano.

The great Beethoven was for a moment inclined to be exceedingly bearish and inhospitable. To come on a morning when he was busy--to interrupt a man in the full flow of composition--these were unpardonable crimes! But soon his native kindliness prevailed--above all, when he discovered that his visitor was of "the noble English nation." For he held England and the English to be of an incomparable excellence: and his darling wish was to visit that favoured land, and to win a hearing there, and if possible secure an offer from some London publishing firm.

He, therefore, accepted the young man with unwonted graciousness and alacrity: looked through his compositions and gave him sound advice: and finally, thrusting away his own MSS., proposed that they two should take a little walk, to get a breath of fresh air before further operations. They passed out into the sunlit fields.

Never in all his life had Neate met a man so wholly taken up with nature, so enwrapt with the contemplation of trees, flowers, cloud, and sward. "Nature seemed his nourishment," Neate said afterwards. "He seemed to live upon and by her." The parable of the _Presto_ of the C sharp minor Quartet, here was openly fulfilled,--the master, rendered, from within, completely happy, cast a glance of indescribable serenity upon the outer world. There it once more stands before him as in the Pastoral Symphony: everything is rendered luminous to him by his inner happiness.

They seated themselves upon a grassy bank, and Beethoven discoursed freely of the things dearest to his heart: his keen desire to visit England, and his fear lest his deafness might prove a hopeless obstacle to this. Neate, speaking to him in slow German, close to his left ear, managed to make himself intelligible; while the master expressed his unbounded admiration for everything English, especially Shakespeare, who was his favourite poet.

"The outer world ... once more stands before him as in the Pastoral Symphony: everything is rendered luminous to him by his inner happiness."

Beethoven was, indeed, as has been observed, "precisely like Shakespeare in his bearing towards the formal laws of his art, and in his emancipation from and penetration of them." He stood, as has previously been shown, nearer in point of genius to Shakespeare than to any other man: and verified the truth of Schumann's dictum that "all arts are reducible to one," and are guided by the same fundamental rules.

After a brief but exhilarating ramble in the open air, Beethoven proposed that Neate should return to dinner with him, and after that should--perhaps--receive his first lesson. The young man was overwhelmed at such unexpected kindness and _camaraderie_ as he was receiving from the master, and gratefully accompanied him back to the city.

Before going to the Sailer-stätte, however, Beethoven turned into Steiner's, the music publisher's, which he was in the habit of frequenting about noon-day; where there was "nearly always a little crowd of composers, and a brisk interchange of musical opinion." (Hättenbrenner).

Beethoven was to-day in a genial and expansive frame of mind. Possibly the advent of a young Englishman had struck him as a good omen for the fulfilment of his cherished hopes towards English fame. He held forth at considerable length, upon all manner of subjects, from music to philosophy. "His criticisms were ingenuous, original, full of curious ideas" and boundless imagination. Finally, at the reiterated request of those he most favoured among the younger men, he reluctantly consented to play--to exemplify, as they cunningly put it, the opinions which he had been urging, and the laws he had been laying down.

Now, listeners on either side of a door--in or out--were, as it has been said, Beethoven's chief aversion. Pianoforte virtuoso as he was, fine performer on the organ, violin, and viola--anything that savoured of professional display was nauseous to him. "Music the art was for him the breath of life: music the profession, as generally understood," he relegated to the depths of distaste.

He sat down with a shrug of his square shoulders, and, crooking his fingers to such a degree that his hands almost hid them, continued for a moment his tirade against the prevalent methods of playing.

"How did the old composers who were pianists, play?" he asked of his audience. "They did not run up and down the keyboard with their carefully-practised passages--_putsch, putsch, putsch_!"--and he worked the runs in a caricatured passage on the pianoforte.

"When true virtuosi played, it was comprehensive, complete.... Good, thorough work one could look into and examine.... But I pronounce judgment on no one," he added hastily, and forthwith burst into the full splendour of the _Waldstein_ sonata.

His passion, his prodigious strength, amazed the Viennese, accustomed as they were to hear him, no less than the young Englishman, to whom he appeared a very prodigy of execution, as his broad, hairy, spatulate fingers, so unlike those of the typical pianist, flung themselves hither and thither upon the keys. He produced tones and effects which were hitherto undreamed of in the philosophy of the pianists of that period; and it was evident that this was no mere display of virtuosity, but that Beethoven had lost consciousness of all around him, and was simply giving vent to his own inspiration, as one possessed might do. And among the impressionable hearers, moved beyond self-control, soon not a dry eye was to be seen. Many broke into sobs; but when they would have crowded round the master, with the ultimate chord, to express in vehement gestures their boundless admiration, he rose with an almost shamefaced air, as though he had debased himself by this semi-poetic performance, and shuffled away, beckoning Neate to follow him.

The two dined alone in Beethoven's apartment in the Sailer-stätte, at his wonted time of two o'clock. The composer was not superior to creature comforts, and was very particular to have certain dishes on certain days. On Thursdays he invariably indulged in his favourite bread-soup, made with ten eggs. On Fridays he had a large haddock, with potatoes. A little Hungarian wine, or a glass of beer, sufficed him; but his favourite beverage was plenty of cold water. Water, in fact, was a necessity to him, and he rejoiced ecstatically in bathing, washing, splashing about in water; in pouring it recklessly over his hands and arms; water, internally or externally, may be said to have been his chief necessity of life.

Upon this especial occasion, the table--still littered with MSS.--was graced by Beethoven's favourite dish of macaroni and cheese, and a small dish of fish. Somewhat Spartan fare this for an Englishman; but Charles Neate was much too excited to care what he was eating.

Beethoven never composed in the afternoon, and very seldom in the evening. He had hardly sat still after dinner, smoking his long clay pipe, when--"Let us go out into the country," said he, suddenly springing up. Neate's possible piano lesson had vanished from his mind. He stuffed one or two extra note-books into his capacious pockets, and they started off--this time in a different direction.