Vie des hommes illustres, Beethoven

TENTH CAHIER OF THE FOURTH SERIES

ROMAIN ROLLAND

LIVES OF ILLUSTRIOUS MEN

BEETHOVEN

CAHIERS DE LA QUINZAINE

appearing twenty times per year

PARIS

8, rue de la Sorbonne, ground floor

To learn what the Cahiers de la Quinzaine are, one need only send a money order for three francs fifty to Mr. Andre Bourgeois, administrator of the cahiers, 8, rue de la Sorbonne, ground floor, Paris, fifth arrondissement. One will receive as samples six cahiers from the second, third, and fourth series.

We put this cahier into commerce; we sell it for two francs.

Lives of Illustrious Men

The air is heavy around us. Old Europe grows numb in a weighty and foul atmosphere. A materialism without grandeur weighs upon thought and hinders the action of governments and individuals. The world is dying of asphyxiation in its prudent and vile selfishness. The world is suffocating. — Let us reopen the windows. Let the free air in. Let us breathe the breath of heroes.

Life is hard. It is a daily combat for those who do not resign themselves to mediocrity of soul, and a sad combat most often, without grandeur, without happiness, fought in solitude and silence. Oppressed by poverty, by the harsh cares of the household, by the crushing and stupid tasks in which strength is wasted uselessly, without hope, without a ray of joy, most are separated from one another and do not even have the consolation of being able to reach out to their brothers in misfortune, who are unaware of them, and whom they are unaware of. They must count only on themselves; and there are moments when the strongest falter under their burden. They call for a help, a friend.

It is to come to their aid that I undertake to gather around them the heroic Friends, the great souls who suffered for the good. These Lives of Illustrious Men are not addressed to the pride of the ambitious; they are dedicated to the unhappy. And who is not, deep down? To those who suffer, let us offer the balm of sacred suffering. We are not alone in the struggle. The night of the world is lit by divine lights. Even today, near us, we have just seen two of the purest flames shine: the flame of Justice and that of Liberty: Colonel Picquart, and the people of the Boers. If they did not succeed in burning through the thick darkness, they showed us the way in a flash of lightning. Let us walk in their footsteps, in the footsteps of all those who fought like them, isolated, scattered in all countries and in all centuries. Let us abolish the barriers of time. Let us resurrect the people of heroes.

I do not call heroes those who triumphed by thought or by force. I call heroes only those who were great by the heart. As one of the greatest among them said, the one whose life we tell here: “I recognize no other sign of superiority than goodness.” Where the character is not great, there is no great man, there is not even a great artist, nor a great man of action; there are only hollow idols for the vile multitude: time destroys them together. We care little for success. The point is to be great, and not to appear so.

The life of those whose history we try to write here was almost always a long martyrdom. Whether a tragic destiny wished to forge their soul on the anvil of physical and moral suffering, of poverty and sickness; or whether their life was ravaged and their heart torn by the sight of the nameless sufferings and shames with which their brothers were tortured, they ate the daily bread of trial; and if they were great by energy, it is because they were also great by misfortune. Let those who are unhappy not complain too much: the best of humanity are with them. Let us nourish ourselves on their valor; and if we are too weak, let us rest our heads for a moment on their knees. They will console us. From these sacred souls flows a torrent of serene strength and mighty goodness. Without even needing to question their works or listen to their voice, we shall read in their eyes, in the history of their life, that never is life greater, more fruitful — and happier — than in sorrow.

At the head of this heroic legion, let us give the first place to the strong and pure Beethoven. He himself wished, amid his sufferings, that his example might be a support for other wretches, “and that the unhappy man might console himself in finding an unhappy one like himself who, despite all the obstacles of nature, had done everything in his power to become a man worthy of the name.” Having reached, through years of struggle and superhuman effort, the point of vanquishing his sorrow and accomplishing his task, which was, as he said, to breathe a little courage into poor humanity, this victorious Prometheus answered a friend who invoked God: “O man, help yourself!”

Let us be inspired by his proud word. Let us rekindle by his example the faith of man in life and in man.

Romain Rolland

Beethoven

He was short and stocky, with a powerful neck and an athletic frame. A broad face, of brick-red color, except toward the end of his life, when the complexion became sickly and yellowish, especially in winter, when he stayed shut in, far from the fields. A powerful and lumpy forehead. Extremely black hair, extraordinarily thick, in which it seemed the comb had never passed, bristling on all sides, “the serpents of Medusa.” His eyes burned with a prodigious force that seized all who saw him; but most were wrong about their shade. As they blazed with a savage light in a brown and tragic face, they were generally thought to be black; they were not, but blue-gray. Small and very deeply set, they would open brusquely in passion or anger, and then, rolling in their orbits, they reflected all his thoughts with a marvelous truth. Often they turned toward the sky with a melancholy gaze. The nose was short and square, broad, a lion’s muzzle. A delicate mouth, but whose lower lip tended to jut out over the other. Fearsome jaws, which could have cracked nuts. A deep dimple in the chin, on the right side, gave a strange asymmetry to the face. “He had a good smile,” says Moscheles, “and in conversation, an air often amiable and encouraging. On the other hand, his laugh was disagreeable, violent, and grimacing, moreover short” — the laugh of a man who is not accustomed to joy. His habitual expression was melancholy, “an incurable sadness.” Rellstab, in 1825, says that he needs all his strength to keep from weeping, on seeing “those gentle eyes and their piercing pain.” Braun von Braunthal, a year later, meets him at a beer hall; he sits in a corner, smoking a long pipe, and his eyes are closed, as he does more and more as he approaches death. A friend speaks to him. He smiles sadly, pulls from his pocket one of his little conversation notebooks; and in the shrill voice that the deaf often take, he tells him to write down what he wishes to ask. — His face was transfigured, whether in his fits of sudden inspiration that seized him unawares, even in the street, and that struck passersby with astonishment, or when he was surprised at the piano. “The muscles of his face jutted out, his veins swelled; the wild eyes became twice as terrible; the mouth trembled; he looked like an enchanter vanquished by the demons he had evoked.” Like a figure of Shakespeare; Julius Benedict says: “King Lear.”

Ludwig van Beethoven was born on December 16, 1770, at Bonn, near Cologne, in the miserable garret of a poor house. He was of Flemish origin. His father was an unintelligent and drunken tenor. His mother was a servant, daughter of a cook, and the widow of a valet from her first marriage.

A harsh childhood, lacking the family warmth that surrounded Mozart, more fortunate. From the start, life revealed itself to him as a sad and brutal struggle. His father wished to exploit his musical gifts and exhibit him as a little prodigy. At four years old, he nailed him for hours before his “harpsichord,” or locked him up with a violin, and overwhelmed him with work. It was a near thing that he did not disgust him forever with art. Violence had to be used for Beethoven to learn music. His youth was saddened by material worries, the care of earning his bread, tasks assumed too early. At eleven, he was part of the theater orchestra; at thirteen, he was organist. In 1787, he lost his mother, whom he adored. “She was so good, so worthy of love, my best friend! Oh! who was happier than I, when I could pronounce the sweet name of mother, and she could hear it?” She had died of consumption; and Beethoven believed himself afflicted with the same illness; he suffered constantly; and to his ailment was joined a melancholy more cruel than the illness itself. At seventeen, he was head of the family, charged with the education of his two brothers; he had the shame of having to solicit his father’s retirement, the drunkard being incapable of running the household: it was to the son that the father’s pension was handed over, to prevent him from squandering it.

These sorrows left in him a deep impression. He did however find an affectionate support in a family of Bonn that always remained dear to him, the Breuning family. The charming “Lorchen,” Eleonore de Breuning, was two years younger than he. He taught her music and she introduced him to poetry. She was his childhood companion; and perhaps there was between them a rather tender feeling. Eleonore later married Doctor Wegeler, who was one of Beethoven’s best friends; and until the last day, there never ceased to reign among them a peaceful and pure friendship.

However sad Beethoven’s childhood may have been, he always retained for it, for the places where it passed, a tender and melancholy memory. Forced to leave Bonn and to spend almost his whole life in Vienna, in the great frivolous city and its sad suburbs, he never forgot the valley of the Rhine, and the great august and paternal river, unser Vater Rhein, as he called it, “our father the Rhine,” so living, indeed, almost human, like a gigantic soul through which pass innumerable thoughts and forces — nowhere more beautiful, more powerful, and more gentle than in delightful Bonn, whose shaded and flowered slopes it bathes with a caressing violence. There Beethoven lived his first twenty years; there were formed the dreams of his adolescent heart. To this country, his heart remained eternally faithful; until his last moment, he dreamed of seeing it again, without ever succeeding. “My homeland, the beautiful country where I saw the light of day, always as beautiful, as clear before my eyes as when I left it.”

In November 1792, Beethoven came to settle in Vienna, the musical metropolis of Germany. The Revolution had broken out; it was beginning to submerge Europe. Beethoven left Bonn just as the war entered it. On the road to Vienna, he crossed the Hessian armies marching against France. But in vain he tried to sing the enemies of the Revolution: the Revolution conquered the world, and Beethoven. From 1798, despite the tension of relations between Austria and France, Beethoven entered into intimate relations with the French, with the embassy, with General Bernadotte who had just arrived in Vienna. In these conversations began to form in him the republican sentiments whose powerful development is seen in the rest of his life.

A drawing that Stainhauser made of him at this time gives a fairly good image of what he was then. Beethoven seems younger than his age, thin, straight, stiffened in his high cravat, his gaze defiant and taut. He knows what he is worth; he believes in his strength. In 1796, he notes in his notebook: “Courage! Despite all the failings of the body, my genius will triumph… Twenty-five years! here they are! this very year the man must reveal himself entirely.”

Writing to Wegeler of all his successes, the first thought that comes to his mind is this: “For example, I see a friend in need: if my purse does not allow me to come to his aid at once, I have only to sit down at my work table; and in a short time, I have got him out of trouble… You see how charming that is.” And a little further, he says: “My art must devote itself to the good of the poor.”

Sorrow had already knocked at his door; it had installed itself in him, never to leave. Between 1796 and 1800, deafness began its ravages. His ears buzzed night and day; he was undermined by intestinal pains. His hearing grew progressively weaker. For several years, he confessed it to no one, not even to his dearest friends; he avoided society, so that his infirmity would not be noticed; he kept this terrible secret to himself alone. But in 1801, he could no longer keep silent; he confided it with despair to two of his friends: Doctor Wegeler and Pastor Amenda:

“My dear, my good, my affectionate Amenda… how often I wish you near me! Your Beethoven is profoundly unhappy. Know that the noblest part of me, my hearing, has greatly declined. Already, at the time when we were together, I felt symptoms of the illness, and I hid it; but it has always grown worse since… Shall I be cured? I hope so naturally, but very little; such illnesses are the most incurable. How sadly I must live, avoiding all that I love and all that is dear to me, and that in a world so wretched, so selfish! Sad resignation in which I must take refuge! No doubt I have resolved to rise above all these ills; but how will that be possible for me?…”

And to Wegeler: “I lead a miserable life. For two years I have avoided all society, because it is not possible for me to converse with people: I am deaf. If I had some other profession, it would still be possible; but in mine, this is a terrible situation. What would my enemies say of it, whose number is not small! At the theater, I must place myself quite close to the orchestra, to understand the actor. I do not hear the high sounds of instruments and voices if I stand a little far. When people speak softly, I barely hear, and on the other hand, when they shout, it is intolerable to me… Many times I have cursed my existence… Plutarch has led me to resignation. I wish, if it is at all possible, to defy my fate; but there are moments of my life when I am the most miserable creature of God… Resignation! what a sad refuge! and yet it is the only one left to me!”

This tragic sadness is expressed in some works of this period: the Sonata Pathetique, op. 13 (1799), above all in the largo of the third Piano Sonata, op. 10 (1798). A strange thing that it is not everywhere imprinted, that so many works still: the cheerful Septet (1800), the limpid First Symphony (in C major, 1800), reflect a youthful nonchalance. No doubt it is because it takes time for the soul to grow accustomed to sorrow. It has such a need for joy that when it does not have it, it must create it.

To his physical sufferings were added troubles of another order. Wegeler says that he never knew Beethoven without a passion carried to paroxysm. These loves seem always to have been of a great purity. There is no connection between passion and pleasure. Beethoven had something of the Puritan in his soul; licentious conversations and thoughts horrified him; he had intransigent ideas about the sanctity of love.

In 1801, the object of his passion was, it would seem, Giulietta Guicciardi, whom he immortalized by the dedication of his famous Sonata called the Moonlight, op. 27 (1802). “I live in a gentler way, he writes to Wegeler, and I mingle more with people… This change, the charm of a dear girl has accomplished it; she loves me, and I love her. These are the first happy moments I have had in two years.” He paid dearly for them. First, this love made him feel more keenly the misery of his infirmity. Then Giulietta was coquettish, childish, selfish; she made Beethoven cruelly suffer, and in November 1803 she married Count Gallenberg. Such passions devastate the soul. It was the only moment of Beethoven’s life when he seems to have been on the point of succumbing. He went through a desperate crisis, which a letter reveals to us: the Testament of Heiligenstadt, to his brothers, with this indication: “To be read and executed after my death.” It is a cry of revolt and piercing sorrow. One cannot hear it without being penetrated by pity. He was then very near to putting an end to his life. Only his inflexible moral sense stopped him. His last hopes of healing vanished. “Even the high courage that sustained me has vanished. O Providence, let me see one single pure day of joy! For so long the deep sound of true joy has been a stranger to me. When, oh when, my God, shall I meet it again?… Never? — No, that would be too cruel! —”

This seems a cry of agony; and yet Beethoven will live twenty-five more years. His powerful nature could not resign itself to succumbing under trial. “My physical strength grows more than ever with my intellectual strength. My youth, yes, I feel it, is only beginning. Every day brings me nearer to the goal that I glimpse without being able to define it. Oh! if I were delivered of this malady, I would embrace the world! No rest! — I know none other than sleep; and I am unhappy enough at having to give it more time than before. Let me only be half delivered from my malady: and then… No, I will not endure it. I will seize fate by the throat. It shall not succeed in bending me entirely. — Oh! it is so beautiful, to live life a thousand times!”

This love, this suffering, this will, these alternations of dejection and pride, these interior tragedies are found again in the great works written in 1802: the Sonata with Funeral March, op. 26, the Sonata quasi una fantasia, and the Sonata called the Moonlight, op. 27, the Second Sonata op. 31, with its dramatic recitatives which seem a grandiose and desolate monologue; the Sonata in C minor for violin, op. 30, dedicated to the Emperor Alexander; the Kreutzer Sonata, op. 47; the six heroic and poignant religious songs on words by Gellert, op. 48. The Second Symphony, which dates from 1803, reflects his youthful love more; and one feels that his will is decidedly getting the upper hand. An irresistible force sweeps away the sad thoughts. A bubbling up of life lifts the finale. Beethoven wants to be happy; he will not consent to believe his misfortune irremediable: he wants healing, he wants love; he overflows with hope.

In several of these works, one is struck by the energy and insistence of the marching and combat rhythms. This Roman revolutionary, nourished on Plutarch, dreamed of a heroic Republic, founded by the god of Victory: the First Consul; and one after another, he forged the Heroic Symphony: Bonaparte (1804), the Iliad of the Empire, and the finale of the Symphony in C minor (1805-1808), the epic of Glory. The first truly revolutionary music: the soul of the age lives again in it with the intensity and purity that great events have in great solitary souls.

It is known that the Heroic Symphony was written for and about Bonaparte, and that the first manuscript still bears the title: Buonaparte. In the meantime, Beethoven learned of Napoleon’s coronation. He flew into a fury: “So he is nothing but an ordinary man!” he cried; and in his indignation, he tore up the dedication and wrote this title, at once vengeful and touching: “Heroic Symphony… to celebrate the memory of a great Man.”

Beethoven abruptly interrupted the Symphony in C minor to write in a single burst, without his usual sketches, the Fourth Symphony. Happiness had appeared to him. In May 1806, he became engaged to Therese de Brunswick. She had loved him for a long time — since, as a little girl, she took piano lessons with him, in the first days of his stay in Vienna.

[The biography continues through Beethoven’s middle and late periods, his growing deafness, his struggles with his nephew Karl, the composition of the late quartets and the Ninth Symphony, and his death on March 26, 1827.]