This biography is distinguished
by succinctness and clarity of argument,
and is comfortably readable in style.
This is the third biography
of Beethoven I’ve read and each of the
three books might as well have been
about a completely different person.
Perhaps the reason for this is that
there is so much material that any biographer
picks and chooses what he wants and
can pretty well end up wherever he wants
to go. The text does not contain reference
citations but in his acknowledgments,
the author makes it clear that he is
up to the minute in the completeness
and integrity of his research, so perhaps
those other biographies I read were
simply outdated. At any rate this is
the best biography of
Beethoven I’ve ever read.
The author begins by
trying to explain, as have others —
including Bernstein and Copland — Beethoven’s
remarkable popularity. But I think all
these explanations miss the obvious.
Previous great composers such as Bach,
Handel, Haydn and Mozart had expressed
universals, the majesty and glory of
God, the majesty of kings, the order
of the universe, the desired order of
society. Personal emotions expressed
were restrained to simple joy, or simple
sadness, one at a time per movement.
Haydn’s great contribution was to add
genial quirkiness to this list. Beethoven
can describe the sometimes abrupt changeableness
of our moods, of fleeting thoughts.
This author makes the point clearly
that in addition to serious chronic
physical illness Beethoven suffered
from paranoid schizophrenia much of
the time, and his glory is also that
he is able to arouse the paranoid in
all of us. The insane delight of murdering
our enemies or achieving kingship over
kings, that is the message of Beethoven’s
Fifth Symphony. While most of
us have such feelings fleetingly, on
brief occasions, and the author lists
several such occasions, Beethoven endured
such feelings for years at a time, and
was able to sustain them in order to
produce many a ten minute sonata movement.
Of course, neither he nor we actually
murder our enemies, we make music instead,
and then go back to our daily struggle
feeling satisfied. That is the innovation
of the Romantic era. Previously art
expressed a consensus of noble emotions,
a sense of striving towards an ideal
situation. The Romantic era presented
human beings as we are, for better or
worse. This certainly did not preclude
Romantic composers such as Mendelssohn,
Liszt and Brahms from progressing towards
ideal feelings, but along the way even
they visited the particular and at least
once or twice each matched Beethoven
in gleeful conquering frenzy.
Beyond this, Beethoven
was an exemplary craftsman, generally
inferior to Brahms and Bach, but equally
incapable of spinning out the charming
banality of Mozart and Spohr. As a result,
like Villa-Lobos in our era, much of
Beethoven is ugly, because beauty was
never an excuse, beauty was never allowed
to cover over a lack of inspiration.
He struggled to find an authentic, inspired
response for each note, each phrase,
and this struggle to achieve, something
we all have to do in our daily lives,
is another appealing quality in his
music. It sounds like he worked at it,
like we have to work at what we do.
Mozart’s music, for all its beauty,
is disconcerting because it is obvious
how easy it was for him to write it,
and how impossible it is for us ordinary
mortals ever to do anything like that.
Bach and Mozart, as they expressed the
glory of God, became God, separate from
us, above us. Beethoven is always in
touch, never lets go of your hand.
Another author suggested
that Beethoven pretended to be insane
to avoid being arrested for Republican
sympathies, but Morris makes it clear
Beethoven was never in any danger, and
was perfectly capable of at once hating
both the mob and the effete snobbery
of the aristocracy while playing one
off against the other. At his most insane
moment, he was able to get the Emperor
himself to intercede to achieve Beethoven’s
final legal victory over Nephew Karl’s
mother. Morris never underestimates
Beethoven’s intelligence or cleverness
even when describing how Beethoven was
actually incapable of doing sums and
keeping track of his money. Like Bach,
Beethoven — constantly pleading poverty
— was one of the richest men of his
time and class. Like Wagner, money came
to him in huge amounts and was spent
with dizzying rapidity.
As I had long suspected,
Beethoven could never learn to dance.
He was too clumsy and had no physical
sense of rhythm. The phrases in Tchaikovsky’s
music we feel in our muscles, in the
weight of our bones. Beethoven is like
Ancient Egyptian architecture, columns
and lintels, static and unmoving. Even
his "apotheosis of the dance"
Seventh Symphony has beat, tempo,
but no rhythm. It is gorgeous of course,
but more like a computer program synthesizing
dance than a real dance, a description
but not the real thing.
Morris accepts as absolute
and final Maynard Solomon’s identification
of the "Immortal Beloved"
as Antonie Brentano. The reader should
be aware that there remain good arguments
against this identification and there
is at least one other fully qualified
candidate. All authorities agree that
the solution offered in the movie is
absurd and impossible. But I still like
it.
One frequently hears
that Beethoven had syphilis. While this
disease can now be clearly implicated
in contributing to the deaths of Schumann
and Schubert, Morris does not accept
it for Beethoven, and includes a careful
description of his many symptoms and
their possible causes.
It bears reflecting
that one of the effects of Beethoven’s
deafness is that his later piano sonatas
were conceived for an ideal instrument
that didn’t yet exist. Over the next
fifty years piano makers fit the instrument
to the music, rather than the other
way around, and Liszt and Beethoven
are very much responsible for the sound
of modern pianos and modern as well
as late Romantic piano music. It could
have gone another way, as anyone who
has heard a variety of older pianos
knows.
Morris’s language is
occasionally either vulgar or elite.
He descends into pop endocrinology by
saying "testosterone" when
he means "masculine". Would
he be as ready to refer to Tebaldi singing
"O Patria Mia" as "oestrogen"
music? On the other hand, does everybody
these days really know what is the "Slough
of Despond"? As a general rule
books these days are not edited capably.
It used to be the editor’s job to be
sure the language is one the expected
reader is comfortable with, and this
book, while not perfect, is certainly
no worse than most and better than many.
The author does not
waste time or break the thread of the
narrative by trying to describe in words
music which is easily available to be
heard. Consequently, those descriptions
of music he includes are only those
which are necessary and one doesn’t
want to skip over them.
This author has written
biographies of Ronald Reagan and Theodore
Roosevelt. The series "Eminent
Lives" also includes biographies
of George Balanchine, Ulysses Grant,
Thomas Jefferson and George Washington,
and will soon include Mohammed, Shakespeare,
de Toqueville, Machiavelli and Freud.
I cannot resist gleefully imagining
a cocktail party in heaven with all
these men together struggling to find
a single subject they all want to talk
about.
I have occasionally
in my reviews spoken disparagingly of
Beethoven’s music because I believe
that too many critics overly praise
his music and I feel a corrective is
necessary. But this book is not a bash,
and I do not recommend it because it
brings Beethoven down. On the contrary,
I came away from the book with a deepened
respect, sympathy and admiration for
Beethoven and an enhanced understanding
of his music. I came away from the book
wanting to hear the music and looking
forward to enjoying it. A musical biography
should reasonably expect to accomplish
at least that.
Paul Shoemaker
I came away from the
book wanting to hear the music and looking
forward to enjoying it. ... see Full
Review
