Noble and True
The Life of Beethoven By Alexander Thayer. (Centaur Press, 3 vols., 4 gns.) MOZART was one of the three greatest composers who ever lived. He also—at (for him) a quite advanced age—wrote schoolboyishly indecent letters to his girl cousin; was often irritable; never suffered fools gladly; and may possibly, in the last harried years, have indulged in petty infideli- ties. In short Mozart had, mixed up with prodigious human strengths, an average share of human weaknesses. That this should ever have been considered odd, as it once was, is the oddest oddity of all, for the core of Mozart's music, whether theatrical or 'absolute,' is its compas- sionate humanity; and if he hadn't known him- self all that it means to be human—if he hadn't been Papageno as well as Sarastro, the Count as well as Figaro—he could never have achieved, out of human imperfection, the artist's vision of perfection. Since the story of any artist's life is inseparable from the evolution of his art, the most valuable book on Mozart is probably that of Alfred Einstein, which shows complemen-
tary insight in dealing both with the man and with the music. But though Professor Schenk, in his new biography, doesn't discuss the music, he writes of Mozart as one who loves and under- stands his music intimately : so he is able to use the additional space at his disposal to present a portrait of Mozart based on letters and first- hand commentary, which is convincing and credible. It is not, perhaps, so vivid that we can say, that's what it would have been like to meet Mozart; but we can believe that the man Profes- sor Schenk shows us might have created Mozart's music. This Mozart was not a 'musical' prodigy whose musicianship existed apart from his humanity; if the boy Mozart fainted at the sound of a trumpet, the young man Mozart was reduced to" a state of nervous prostration, unable to eat or sleep, after a meeting with a friend who had contracted syphilis. Professor Schenk is particu- larly successful in revealing the difficult, ambiguous but on the whole rewarding relation- ship between Mozart as child and adolescent and his engaging though in some ways insensitive father. If his account of Mozart's later years has less edge, that is probably because so much of the composer's humanity was, by that time, going into his music. It must also. of course, have gone into his more intimate private relation- ships about which, in the nature of things, we can know little. Constanze remains a shadowy figure : though Professor Schenk convinces us that Mozart loved her, and that should be enough for any woman's posthumous reputation.
For Mozart music was a testament of humanity; for Beethoven it was unequivocally an instrument of moral good : and nineteenth- century commentators can hardly be blamed for seizing on this identification of the artist's sublimity with his pusumed virtue. Unfortu- nately it cannot be disguised that Beethoven's conduct, as a human being, was not merely, like Mozart's, at times apparently frivolous and irresponsible, but was often downright vicious. Yet ought we, again, to find this surprising? Beethoven's music resolved the tensions that made him, in life, an 'unlicked bear.' In it he appeased the furies that drove him; and if the tensions hadn't been so painful the inner serenity he finally achieved wouldn't have been so pro- foundly illuminating. Although Beethoven's egomania was partly a self-love that involved hate of the world outside, he had more self to love than most of us : so the abnegation, the new humility, he attained at the end speaks to us as the highest and deepest experience of which humanity is capable. It is possible to deplore the chaotic, even squalid nature of his love affairs, while understanding that the squalor arose partly from the fact that the women whose love he needed were scared of him. It is certainly possible to believe that he treated his family with patho- logical venom and to guess that this was because he was really in love with his nephew (whom he saw, narcissistically, as an image of himself?). Yet surely, if we'd known him—assuming we were outside his circle of obsessive involvements ---he'd have seemed neither a dedicated saint nor a snarling misanthrope He'd have seemed a man driven by demons, yet capable of visions of paradise; to have known him would have been at once a terror and a privilege, just as it is a terror and a: privilege to experience his music.
Thayer was born in 1817, at the time when Beethoven was embarking on that last cycle of terrifying and paradisal works. He began to write the biography twenty years after Beethoven's death, basing it on information supplied by people who had known the composer. It remains of crucial importance—the main source for our knowledge of Beethoven's life—and it is good to have it available again, at a reasonable price. Yet after thirty years' struggle Thayer failed to com- plete his book; and 11.:. failed because he could not accept Beethoven on his own terms—which were also those of his music. We must be grate- ful for what Thayer oilers; and should add, in justice, that despite the innumerable books that have been written about Beethoven since Thayer's Life, no one has adequately completed his labours. Perhaps it can't be done, just as one can't conceive of an adequate biography of the creator of King Lear, even if the facts were avail- able. Beethoven's truth is so immeasurably more terrible than Thayer's 'noble' image of it. It is also immeasurably more sublime.
WILFRID MELLERS
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