18. Personal characteristics.

Beethoven left an indelible impression on all those who encountered him in the years of his maturity, and even for his contemporaries there were certain features of his life – his idiosyncratic working methods, for example, his mournful isolation through deafness, and the nobility of his total dedication to his art – that endowed him as an almost mythical figure. The course subsequently taken by a romantic image of the composer in the years after his death is discussed in §19 below. Here something must be said of the realities from which the myths drew their strength.

He was neither good-looking nor equipped with more than a very rudimentary education; it was by the force of his character that he produced such a powerful effect on those around him. This, notoriously, had its thorny side. As a young man he was already known to be difficult, impatient and mistrustful, an ‘unlicked bear’. A basic problem, it seems, was his ineptness at reading his own motives and interpreting those of others; thus misunderstandings were frequent, which his hot temper magnified into quarrels, even fisticuffs. But typically these were followed by reconciliations and scenes of penitence or remorse. What his capricious and at times outrageous behaviour could not dim was the enormous appeal of his personality. He fascinated and endeared himself to men and women of many sorts, who continued to value his friendship no matter how rough a ride he gave them. This magnetic quality was most in evidence in his earlier years, but even near the end of his life, when he was often wretchedly ill and his deafness was impenetrable, there was competition for the privilege of rendering him services, and devoted friends were never far off.

In his relationships certain recurrent patterns can be observed. His male friendships fell into two broad types. There were the warm and intimate ones with companions such as Wegeler, Amenda and Stephan von Breuning, and perhaps also Franz von Brunsvik and Ignaz von Gleichenstein, men with whom he felt he could share his most private feelings and aspirations. Some considerable way behind came his relations with many others who were valued more for their disinterested usefulness to Beethoven than for any depth of shared emotion. Chief of these was the amiable bachelor Zmeskall; the two Lichnowksy brothers can also be counted among them, and in later years his factotum Schindler and perhaps the young Karl Holz, for whom however Beethoven also entertained some genuinely warm feelings. Most of the first select class of true friends were unmarried at the time of Beethoven’s greatest intimacy with them. It is noteworthy, too, that both Wegeler and Amenda, the two with whom he maintained a serene relationship for the longest time, were in distant countries for most of his life; the friendship with Breuning, who remained in Vienna, was interrupted by a breach that lasted many years.

Beethoven’s relations with women have been discussed much more fully than his friendships with men; they form the subject of a large but mainly speculative and sometimes very silly literature. He was certainly highly susceptible to feminine beauty and charm. The reliable Wegeler reported that ‘he was never without a love, and most of them were from the upper ranks’. Of his attachments in Bonn little is known beyond a name or two, but in his early years in Vienna – again according to Wegeler – he was always involved in love affairs and ‘made some conquests that many an Adonis would have found difficult if not impossible’. What these affairs amounted to is another matter. No doubt there were some trivial sexual adventures, but it is hard to avoid the impression that he also spent much time in a showy pursuit of women who could not, or would not, return his affection, and the very fact that most of them were ‘from the upper ranks’ meant that there was usually an insuperable barrier of social class to prevent the relationship from going too far. Though Beethoven always professed his desire for a true union of hearts, many of the women that he admired were contentedly married or were already committed to another man. Thus he was usually doomed to get nowhere – as perhaps, unconsciously, he intended. Something of the same pattern can be seen in the two or three relationships with women, described earlier, that involved Beethoven most deeply. To judge from the course that they took it seems plain that he shrank from a total involvement with a woman, and that he came to regard the household that he established with his nephew as in some ways a substitute for marriage and family.

That his life was in many respects lonely, therefore, comes as no surprise. It is of course the overwhelming fact of his deafness that makes his personal history so poignantly different from that of other musicians. Its effect on his career was the long-term one of confirming the direction in which his interests were probably already turning; it obliged him at all events to commit himself almost entirely to composing, and to renounce any thoughts he may have had of pursuing fortune as a travelling virtuoso. But the impact of deafness on his social life was sharper and more immediate. It sank him in deep depression and led him to shun company for a time. In fact the years from 1800 to 1802, in which he brought himself to face the likelihood that his handicap would be permanent, were marked by a profound personal crisis, the resolution of which set the pattern for much of the rest of his life. Forced to recognize more and more that he was to be cut off from a part of human experience, he succeeded in coming to terms with an unusual and essentially solitary style of life. No doubt this reinforced his conviction, manifest even before the onset of deafness, that some of the rules of normal social behaviour did not apply to him.

There are many anecdotes of his peculiarities in this respect. Several concern his attitude to his superiors in rank, and to authority in general. Doubtless only too aware that he depended on aristocratic families for his financial support, he resolutely declined after his departure from Bonn to ‘play the courtier’ or to show the deference and obedience normally expected from musicians in circles of the nobility. He was often most unwilling, for instance, to perform on the piano if called on unexpectedly by his hosts to do so; sometimes he refused outright, and even left the soirée in a temper. He would also break off playing if people showed their inattention by chattering. The formal court etiquette that surrounded the Archduke Rudolph was especially irksome to him, and in the end it was Rudolph who surrendered by giving orders that the rules were not to be applied to Beethoven. Even in matters of dress Beethoven seems to have been unwilling to show the conformity expected of him, though in his earlier years in Vienna he was often smartly turned out.

This impatience with discipline and authority had more than one aspect. Temperamentally he was utterly unable to adopt a submissive attitude, and even in music he found it distasteful to accept the direction of living teachers (such as Haydn) or dead theoreticians. Moreover, as a child of his time, he was swayed by the ideals of the French Revolution; they must have dominated his student days, although a certain ambivalence can be detected in his attitude to them, as well as to the man who for a time embodied them, Napoleon. In his brusque dismissal of the conventions of an aristocratic society, in fact, Beethoven was less of the egalitarian than the élitist. He had little use for the common run of humanity, regarding himself as an artist – he was fond of the rather grand term ‘Tondichter’ (‘poet in sound’) – and, as such, at least the equal of anyone raised to eminence by birth or wealth. He accorded the greatest respect to other artists, particularly writers, and was puzzled and disappointed when he discovered that Goethe, whom he admired above all other poets, behaved over-deferentially to royal personages: was not Goethe as great as they were?

In matters of religion his views, as might be expected, were idiosyncratic and somewhat incoherent. It was not a subject that he discussed much with others. He was brought up in the tolerant Catholicism of the late 18th century, but the formal side of religion held little interest for him, though he went to some trouble while composing the Missa solemnis to ensure that he fully understood the words of the Mass. The deity of his faith was a personal God, a universal father to whom he constantly turned for consolation and forgiveness. That much is clear from the many private confessions and prayers scattered throughout his papers. Among philosophical books he was moved by the moral reflections of Kant. Perhaps more surprisingly, he found certain oriental writings on the immaterial nature of God sympathetic to him, and he copied out a number of their texts. He even framed some ancient Egyptian inscriptions on the nature of the deity and kept them on his writing-desk.

He also felt the presence of God in the beauty of nature, and sought to worship him in the countryside, having been greatly influenced by Christian Sturm’s Betrachtungen der Werke Gottes in der Natur. Beethoven’s love of the country was an enduring characteristic. He left Vienna for some months almost every summer and settled in one of the outlying villages such as Mödling or Heiligenstadt, or in the spa of Baden somewhat further afield. There he would take long, solitary walks in the woods and find refreshment of spirit. ‘No-one’, he wrote to Therese Malfatti in 1810, ‘can love the country as much as I do. For surely woods, trees and rocks produce the echo which man desires to hear’.

When on his walks he would usually carry a bundle of folded music paper, and pause from time to time to make entries in it with a pencil. This activity was regarded by his contemporaries as a harmless eccentricity. They laughed too at his singular behaviour in restaurants, where he would sometimes sit for hours sunk in thought and then offer to pay for a meal that he had not eaten. Beethoven was certainly often strangely unaware of his physical surroundings and preoccupied with his own thoughts – even in Bonn the word ‘raptus’ had been jokingly applied to his fits of emotional inaccessibility – and the squalor of his rooms was such that only he could tolerate it.

Yet in relation to the thing about which he cared most – composing, and presenting his works to the public – Beethoven could hardly be said to be ill-organized. He had a regular domestic routine, rising early, making coffee by grinding a precise number of coffee-beans, and then working at his desk until two or three o’clock, when he had a meal. The morning’s work was interrupted, though also in a sense maintained, by two or three short excursions out of doors, during which he continued to make sketches on music paper. Several of these ‘pocket’ sketchbooks have survived, together with a much larger number of ‘desk’ sketchbooks in which Beethoven worked when at home. The significance of these volumes, with page after page of seemingly illegible entries, was not understood by his contemporaries, who regarded his devotion to them as yet one more sign of his eccentricity. Only later did it come to be recognized that the sketchbooks provide a unique documentation, although a somewhat fragmentary and at times enigmatic one, of his creative processes.

When a work had been completed it was Beethoven’s concern to find a publisher for it. The importance that he attached to publishers throughout his life is shown by the extent and range of his correspondence with them – for he contrived to persuade himself that his livelihood depended on selling his music to them, though he was in fact maintained largely by aristocratic subventions. At that time all a composer could expect was a lump sum for the sale of a work. Royalties were unknown. Nor was there any international copyright; within his own country a publisher usually enjoyed some protection for the works he had bought, but they could be freely copied (pirated) abroad. Thus it was a composer’s concern to obtain the largest sum for each composition. In the case of Beethoven, whose later works involved many months or even years of labour, there was every inducement to compare the offers of various publishers and to play them off against each other – a form of behaviour that some modern critics, alerted no doubt by Beethoven’s shrill protestations of commercial probity, have found unattractive.

One plan that interested him was that of publishing a work simultaneously in more than one country – something that Haydn had done with success. The advantage was that a composer could count on receiving two or more fees, and was thus able to settle for a lower sum from each publisher. From the publisher’s point of view little was lost by sharing a work with a foreign publisher, since in practice the market of each country was more or less independent. In spite of the many practical difficulties of delivering manuscripts and synchronizing publication, Beethoven succeeded in getting a fair number of his compositions published by two or more firms in different countries at about the same time.

Beethoven’s chief publishers may be briefly listed, together with the dates at which they were most active in publishing him: Artaria & Co., Vienna (1795–8), and two of Artaria’s former partners, Tranquillo Mollo (1798–1801) and Giovanni Cappi (1802); Hoffmeister & Kühnel, Leipzig (1801–4); Bureau des Arts et d’Industrie, Vienna (1802–8); Breitkopf & Härtel, Leipzig (1802–3, 1809–12); Steiner & Co., Vienna (1815–17); A.M. Schlesinger, Berlin, and M. Schlesinger, Paris (1821–3 and 1827); Schott, Mainz (1825–7). Other publishers, such as Simrock of Bonn, occasionally issued important works. In the English market one firm predominated: that of Muzio Clementi (1810–23), who secured the English rights to a large number of works by direct dealings with Beethoven, and brought them out at the same time as the Viennese, Leipzig or Paris editions. Since these English editions were produced independently of the continental ones, each is potentially important for establishing an authentic text. George Thomson of Edinburgh also deserves a word or two. A civil servant and musical amateur who devoted much of his life to collecting national (and particularly Scottish) folksongs, he had already published several volumes of melodies with accompaniments by Pleyel, Kozeluch and Haydn before he approached Beethoven in 1803 with the request that he should write six sonatas introducing Scottish melodies. Although nothing came of this suggestion or other similar ones, Beethoven did in the end undertake to write piano trio accompaniments to a great quantity of Scottish, Welsh and Irish melodies submitted by Thomson. The work was carried out between 1809 and 1820, a period that included some otherwise barren years. In 1818 and 1819 Beethoven also wrote for Thomson some simple variations for flute and piano on national melodies (opp.105, 107: see fig.7).

Physically Beethoven was of no more than average height, but his stocky frame conveyed a sense of great muscular strength. He had broad shoulders and a short neck. His pockmarked face, with its wide nose and bushy eyebrows, was described by some as ugly and was certainly remote from the conventional good looks of the time, although it was recognized as having a quality of nobility about it. In youth his hair was coal-black and his complexion swarthy; in middle age, partly as a result of ill-health, his hair became grey and his face rather florid. What impressed those who met him was the intensity of the gaze from his deep-set eyes, and the enormous animation of his melancholy features and indeed of the whole of his restless body. This vitality is not captured in most of the portraits and sketches made in his lifetime. The best representation is probably the 1814 engraving by Blasius Höfel (based on a pencil drawing by Louis Letronne, but touched up from the life; fig.13 above). The bust by Franz Klein (fig.5 above) is based on a life-mask of 1812, so the features have claims to authenticity; and the sketches by Lyser showing Beethoven walking in the street, though not authenticated, also carry conviction (fig.16 above). The idealized portraits and busts of more recent years must be regarded as part of the Beethoven cult; they owe nothing to literal or even to poetic truth.

Beethoven, Ludwig van