BOOKS

The Untruth about Beethoven

By W. H. AUDEN TT is always a joy to see any job done per- ' fectly. Miss Anderson set herself the task of collecting, deciphering and translating every scrap of Beethoven's correspondence* that is known to exist, down even to such an ort as :

To? (Ms. not traced. Item from sale catalogue of Henrici, no. XVII, item 21.) P.P.

Kindly inform me whether I can still obtain all the numbers of this year's volume of your review, to which I should like to subscribe.

She has collected them, scattered though they are all over the world; she has deciphered them, and everyone knows what Beethoven's hand- writing was like; and she has translated them into decent English, a formidable task because of Beethoven's passion for puns. Her explana- tory annotations are all a reader could ask for. I am delighted to discover from her, for example, that the famous story of Beethoven and Goethe meeting the Imperial Family in Teplitz—Goethe bowing and scraping, Beethoven keeping his hat on, crossing his arms and scowling—was a sheer invention of Bettina von Arnim's.

Macmillan, too, have done a perfect job of book production. Well, almost perfect, for I have two small complaints to make about the index. It never seems to occur to publishers, when a book is so big that it has to be published in more than one volume, how inconvenient and irritating it is for the reader who wants to look up a point not to be able to consult the index in the volume he happens to have in his hand. Surely, once the index is made, it would not greatly increase costs to print it in each volume. Secondly, in this particular index no typographi- cal- distinction is made between entries which mean a letter to someone and entries which mean a reference to him. For example, there are forty- four entries under the name Goethe, but, if one wants to find either of the two letters which Beethoven wrote to Goethe, one has to go through them all. These, though, are minor mat- ters. The type, the paper, the illustrations are lovely. Miss Anderson and Macmillan have done superbly well.

But . . .

It would have been very much better if three-quarters of this correspondence had been destroyed by its recipients immediately after reading it.

What follows is not a review but a sermon.

When we say that someone is a `born' letter- writer, we mean that, for him, a letter is as much a literary genre as a novel or a poem; he uses it to describe people and events, to make general reflections upon life, etcetera, and it is almost an accident who receives the letter; it may be his fiancée, but it is more likely to be either a relative, a friend of his own sex, or an older woman. Even if he refers to troubles and

*Tun LETTEas OF BEETHOVEN. Collected, trans- lated and edited by Emily Anderson in • three volumes. (Macmillan, 10 gns.)

sorrows of his own, he maintains artistic detach- ment; he remains master of the situation and talks about himself as if in the third person. Obvious examples are Horace Walpole, Gray, Byron, Sydney Smith and, aside from his letters to Fanny Brawne, Keats. It is right and proper that their correspondence should be published because of its artistic impartiality; the reader never feels he is intruding on their privacy, and at the same time he is greatly entertained.

Beethoven, unlike Mozart, had nobody to whom he wrote letters simply for the joy of writing them; if he writes one, there is always some reason which made the letter necessary. Moreover•, though, of course, many of his letters are `public' enough, he lacked a literary gift; his verbal humour is painfully ponderous, and when he is serious he suffers from the vices of Sturm and Drang literature. (He considered Ossian to be as great as Homer.) Oh, Wegeler, do not reject this hand which I am offering you in reconciliation, but place your hand in mine—Oh God—But I will say nothing more—I am coming to see you, to throw myself into your arms, and to plead for the prodigal friend; and you will return to me, to your penitent Beethoven who loves you and will never forget you.

In his whole correspondence I have found only one memorable sentence.

I am inclined to think that a hunt for folk- songs is better than a man-hunt of the heroes who arc so highly extolled.

Beethoven had humour and gaiety enough, but he could only express it in music: by far the most delightful things in his letters are the im- promptu canons he sometimes writes for his friends.

In the case of any great artist, we are legiti- mately interested in any comments he may have to make about his own work, that of others, or technical problems. On such matters Beethoven says surprisingly little. It is interesting to learn about the pianoforte of his time—

So far as the manner of playing it is con- cerned, the pianoforte is still the least studied and developed of instruments; often one thinks that one is merely listening to a harp

—and to hear that, when the metronome was in- vented, Beethoven wanted to abandon the con- ventional Italian tempo words, like allegro and adagio in favour of metronome numbers.

Again, the economics of art are always inter- esting. Beethoven is forever grumbling about how hard-up he is, but many composers have had it much worse. By 1800 he was receiving more commissions than he could cope with, music publishers were eagerly competing for rights to his works, and in the last part of his life he was in the receipt of quite a handsome pension, For all his references to himself as a `poor Austrian musical drudge,' he has to con- fess: . . , though admittedly, I am not rich, I have yet been enabled by means of my compositions to live for my art.

But what deserves to be read, because it is either entertaining or instructive, represents but a small fraction of his correspondence. A lot is not worth reading because there is nothing signifi- cant to be learned from it. Many of his letters to his publishers, for example, are filled with corrections of errors made by the copyist. These would be significant if the errors had actually got into the published scores and hence into perfor- mances: otherwise, all they tell us is that copy- ists make mistakes, a fact we already know.

The publication of letters which the average reader will skip because they bore him may be silly, but raises no moral problems. What, in my opinion, is immoral, is to publish the kind of letters which journalists call 'human documents,' meaning by this, letters which are to the writer's discredit, which reveal the flaws and weaknesses in his character and his private sufferings. If the decent side of us is bored and embarrassed by having to listen to other people's woes, this is not because we are hard-hearted, but because, usually, we are powerless to help. To be curious about suffering we cannot relieve—and, alas, we all are a bit—is schadenfreude and nothing else. Beethoven had the misfortune to suffer from paranoia which, of all neuroses, is perhaps the hardest to feel sympathy for, since its victim combines highly disagreeable behaviour with an intolerable self-righteousness. In many of his letters, Beethoven reminds one of Rolfe Corvo.

Stupid conceited ass of a fellow.

And am Ito exchange compliments with such a scoundrel who filches my money? Instead of that I ought to pull his ass's ears.

Slovenly copyist!

• Stupid fellow!

Correct the mistakes you have made through your ignorance, arrogance, conceit, stupidity. That is more fitting than to want to teach me. For to do• so is exactly as if the cow should want to teach Minerva.

(To Count Moritz Lichnowsky): I despise what is false—Don't visit me any more—There will be no concert.

One laughs at the first two or three, but after that one begins to be depressed. The servants of whose iniquities he was always complaining may have had their faults, but a man who can write to a friend when looking for a new man- servant—`If he is a bit hunchbacked I shouldn't mind, for then I should know at once the weak spot at which to attack him' is not fit to employ anybody. Nor did he deserve to have friends, for he was lacking in any sense of loyalty : he would write in terms of great affection to one and make a sneering remark about him to another. As for the whole ghastly business of his nephew Karl and his sister-in-law, one can only regret that the courts ever made him Karl's guardian.

We have, of course, no right to judge him—if one of us were a great composer afflicted with deafness and chronic indigestion, we might be- have much worse—but that does not make his behaviour any better, and what profit is it to us that we should learn ugly little secrets about another human being? One kind of reader will say to himself : 'If a great man can have weaknesses, why should I be ashamed of mine?' And another kind, next time he listens to the Missa Solemnis, will, say : 'Oh yes, his music sounds very noble, but we all know what he was really like.' The shamelessness of the popular press in our time is bad enough, but, at least, it does not pretend to be anything else. What is much more alarming is the shamelessness of educated serious persons like you and me who call our brand scholarship.