Master works
CHARLES REED
Beethoven: The Biography of a Genius George R. Marek (William Kimber 84s) Beethoven: The Last Decade Martin Cooper (out, 90s) Ludwig van Beethoven edited by Joseph Schmidt-Gorg and Hans Schmidt (Pall Mall 160s) Mr Marek was born in Vienna, where Beethoven passed most of his life, settled in the us as a youth fifty years ago and writes English that bears no trace of Cen- tral Europe. We knew him for his 'lives' of Puccini and Richard Strauss. He is going to be remembered more for his Beethoven, a bi-centenary memorial to the master and also a monument to his tenacity, grasp and skill as a researcher, book-builder and narra- tor. His foreword makes the point that no Beethoven biography in English has appeared since 1943. In the ordinary way there wouldn't be much in this. There was always Alexander W. Thayer to fall back on. Everybody flies to, leans on and, with the odd reservation, reveres Thayer (he, too, was American), whose tomes remain, after half a century, 'the great source book . . . and mainstay of the .biographical canon'. The words are Mr Marek's. What remained, then, for his own 700 pages?
Well, in the first place a certain amount of post-Thayer material. Example: Beet- hoven's love letters to the young widow Josephine Brunsvik, 'my adored Josephine'. These came out in 1957. One of hers to him sighs . . . if you could love me in a less sensual way . . . ' (I do not find n-ouch take-up nowadays for a neo-Freudian theory circulated in the 1950s that Beethoven was queer.) For other material Mr Marek loosed a research team on Austria. Their scrabblings in archives and libraries had a fairish yield, Joseph Carl Rosenbaum's manuscript diaries being a minor plum. Phrenologist and (as second vocation) opera-singer's husband. Rosenbaum was the man who, two days after Haydn's funeral, dug up the body, removed the head (it was awfully smelly) and kept it at home for eleven years before being found out. At the fashionable 1814 Fidelio run in Vienna, Milder, the Leonora, began her duet with Florestan four times at one performance and walked out with- out finishing it at another. Thus Rosen- baum, at any rate. No slave to source material, even when it's a scoop. Mr Marek hints that his phrenologist may have been fibbing to butter up a wife who couldn't abide other singers' successes.
Passing in readably minute review fifteen of the women in Beethoven's sentimental life—which, when not boiling over, was always on the simmer—Mr Marek puts up Dorothea von Ertmann as the likeliest con- tender in the Immortal Beloved stakes. An impassioned letter (unposted? returned?) addressed to the unidentified In was found posthumously among Beethoven's papers. Who was she? In the hope of an answer, desk detectives, as Mr Marek happily calls them. have been turning up carpets for a century and a half. Frau von Ertmann, pretty, ten years younger than he and a fine pianist. is known to have been a close friend of Beethoven's. In tentatively nomi- nating her as the In. Mr Marek relies inter alia on his dig-up of police registers. Under a Metternich clamp-down, strangers reach- ing any town had to register with the police without delay. He establishes that Frau von Ertmann registered at Karlsbad early in July 1812 and comes close to proving that the In letter was addressed to Karlsbad on a date that fits.
Among the strengths of this book are the adroitness with which Mr Marek has knit these new or newish strands into Thayer's staple and the good sense, lucidity and live- liness with which he has interpreted or delineated much (including the shifting social and historical backgrounds) that cried out for reassessment.
Mr Cooper's survey and revaluation are based on at least equal scholarship and mastery of sources. The latter takes in poli- tical trends and crumbling or up-and- coming ideologies which, in one way or another. spurred Beethoven the man even if they didn't breed or colour the works with which Mr Cooper is mainly con- cerned, i.e. the late string quartets. the Missa Solemnis and the Ninth Symphony. Mr Cooper's approach is a thought more subjective than Mr Marek's. He opens with breast-beating. confessing that, when a fledgling critic, he likened the Adagio of the Ninth to a wet Sunday afternoon and was disobliging in a similar vein about the master's work all round.
This packed, fervent and shrewd pano- rama of Beethoven's last years—years of vast musical creation and appalling tor- ment through illness, deafness, volcanic emotionalism and black despondency— amounts to recantation and makes amends for dismissive flippancies during what Ernest Newman called the Twaddling 'Twenties. Against 'abstractionism' and the 'significant form' theses that then ruled the fashionable roost, he reasserts most eloquently that there is 'something moral in the very essence' of late Beethoven. and. without making a hobby horse of it. reverts frequently to this notion in his analyses of Beethoven's output from Op. 101 onwards. As a youngster I coined the thought that the Ninth was a Fifth Gospel. Stravinsky's Clironiques de Ina vie and a course of Thomism won me over to the view that music is about music and nothing more. Yet a dozen movements, including the 'wet Sunday afternoon' Adagio, often have me wavering and wondering. Can this be music about ethics as well as about music? The issue is still with us. Mr Cooper is to be thanked for reopening it so resolutely..
The Pall Mall Press production weighs five pounds at a guess. its format is out- size 'coffee table', and there are fascinat- ing plates (in colour mostly) on all of its 260 Pages or facing them. Here again, how- ever, the scholars have had their day The otirinal German text, translated, we are told, by the editorial staff of DOG Records,
consists of two biographical essays and thirteen analytical ones on the music as divided into various forms and media. The authors are musicologists connected with the famous Beethoven-Archiv, Bonn, of which Herr Schmidt-Giirg. the joint editor, is director. A sumptuous job. But there's no flummery.
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