Ludwig van's fans
Noel Malcolm
REMEMBERING BEETHOVEN: THE ORIGINAL BIOGRAPHY by Franz Wegeler and Ferdinand Ries
Deutsch, £11.95, pp.200
No sooner had Beethoven died than the biographer and hagiographer vultures began to gather. Foremost among them was the dour and scrawny Anton Schind- ler, who actually looked rather like a vulture. He saw off most of the opposition, and persuaded many of Beethoven's friends to entrust their anecdotes to his safe keeping. Eventually his biography came out in 1840; all Beethovenians owe him a debt of gratitude, though modern scholars have been less grateful to learn that he destroyed many of the deaf com- poser's 'conversation books' (in order, it seems, to suppress the evidence that Beethoven was being treated for syphilis), and forged numerous entries in the ones which he preserved.
In 1838, however, two of Beethoven's oldest friends tired of waiting for Schindler and published their own little memoir of the maestro. One, Franz Wegeler, had known Beethoven in his teens and had kept up a sporadic correspondence with him for the rest of his life; the other, Ferdinand Ries, was a regular pupil (the only one, in fact) of the composer from 1801 to 1805, and later spent the main part of his career as a professional musician in London. (The origin of the Choral Sym- phony lies in a casual remark in a letter from Beethoven to Ries in London: 'What might the Philharmonic Society offer me for a symphony?' They offered £50, and the deal was on.) This little book by Wegeler and Ries is one of the classics of Beethoveniana, and it is astonishing that it has never appeared in English before. Of course, every subse- quent book on the composer has used it, so it will offer few surprises to the well-read. But one gains a great deal of the flavour of Beethoven's milieu by consuming, in its entirety, this artless confection of anec- dotes, observations and letters. It comes from a characteristic and appealingly pedestrian genre of instant musical biog- raphies, of which my favourite example is 'The Life of Moscheles, By His Wife'.
The secret of this kind of writing is its devotion to minor details: the names of unimportant composers and court musi- cians, and the addresses of obscure lodging-houses in the Viennese suburbs. When Beethoven visited Aschaffenburg, Wegeler tells us, he went to hear the pianist Sterkel, whose touch was 'very light and somewhat ladylike', and Beethoven quickly learned to imitate this style of playing. At first, this information seems recondite and remote: who has ever heard of Sterkel? But then one notes Wegeler's comment, 'Because he had not yet heard of any great or celebrated pianists, Beeth- oven knew nothing of the finer nuances of handling the instrument.' And then one realises that Beethoven lived, so to speak, more in a world of contingent detail than we do: in a pre-CD, pre-radio, pre-railway world, much depended on who was where when, who played what (and how), and who said what to whom.
'Auch kleine Dinge': as the song says, little, things also matter. So it is not just for dry, scholarly reasons that I am appalled by the cavalier way in which this edition makes no attempt to improve on the scholarship of Alfred Kalischer, who edited the text in 1906. Kalischer's ex- tremely dated notes are translated here, but nothing is added to them. 'There are some additional minor inaccuracies', says Mrs Badura-Skoda airily in her introduc- tion, 'which the learned reader may notice, but they are of no real importance'. This claim, if it were true, would be a pretty damning indictment of all the efforts of Beethoven scholarship over the last 82 years. But it is not.
Take, for example, the story of the Op. 29 Quintet. Ries claims that it was stolen and pirated by the publisher Artaria, whose edition turned out to be full of errors and missing bars because of the copyist's haste. Beethoven politely asked Artaria to send him all the copies for correction, and then ensured that the correct notes were inked is so messily that all the copies became unsaleable and the plates had to be melted down. It makes a good story. Unfortunately, almost every detail of it is untrue. This was partly noticed by Nottebohm in 1872, and fully demonstrated by MacArdle in 1948; but readers of this edition will remain in complete ignorance of the true facts.
Details have gone astray, too, in the translation. There are curiously few direct observations on the substance or style of Beethoven's music in the book, so it is worth getting them absolutely right. In a discussion of the slow movement to the Second Symphony, for example, this ver- sion refers to 'the melodic line'; but the original says 'die Stimmenfuehrung' , which means 'part-writing', the art of giving each part in a polyphonic texture a proper shape of its own. When Ries says that Beet- hoven's piano lessons paid special atten- tion to `Spruenge', he means 'leaps' — not just 'intervals', as this version has it. And so on.
We must still wait, in other words, for a proper edition of this important little book. Such an edition would make use, for example, of the collection of Ries' own correspondence recently edited by Cecil Hill (Bonn, 1982), and it might, by the way, help to promote the recent growth of interest in Ries' own finely crafted com- positions. 'He imitates me too much', said Beethoven, and as criticisms go, that is high praise.
For the moment, this edition is better than nothing; and all Beethovenians will enjoy the descriptions of the composer improvising, or knocking his inkwell into the piano, or throwing his dinner at the waiter, or trusting, Pecuchet-like, a friend who informed him of a newly invented `lantern for the blind', or — most poignant of all — growing 'extremely quiet and gloomy' on a walk in the woods, when Ries remarked on the sound of a shepherd's flute nearby, and Beethoven discovered that he could not hear it. All the details in this book can be enjoyed. Not all, alas, can be trusted.
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