Ludwig Nohl

“ He then writes:
“May all my life be sacrificed to the sublime. May it be a sanctuary of art.... Let me live, even if I have to have recourse to ‘assistance,’ and such means can be found. Let the ear apparatus be perfected if possible, and then travel! This you owe to man and the Almighty. Only thus can you develop what is locked up within you. The court of a prince, a little orchestra to write music for, and to produce it, for the honor of the Almighty, the Eternal, the Infinite. Thus may my last years pass away, and to future humanity....” ”

“ Ninth Symphony, we hear the voices of the powers which through all ages have been the makers of history; of the powers which preserve and renovate the life of humanity; and so the Will, the Intellect, man, after a terrible effort and concentration of self, stands firmly before us, bold and clear-eyed—for Will is the world itself.
But when we see the man Beethoven, we find him divided against himself. ”

“ The Ihr stuerzt nieder, Millionen is the foundation, the germ (to express it in the language of music of double counterpoint) of the Seid umschlungen, Millionen, and then the whole sings of joy as the transfiguration of the earthly world by eternal love. The will can accomplish nothing greater than to sacrifice itself for the good of the whole. To our great artist, the greatest and most wonderful phenomenon in the world was not the conqueror but the overcomer of the world ”

“ Their tones sound to him like the voice of man’s heart of hearts, the joys and sorrows of which Beethoven has laid bare to us. We feel convinced, when we hear them, that the person who in them speaks to us has, in very deed, something to tell us, something of our own life; because he lived and felt more deeply than we what we all live and feel, and loved and suffered what we all love and suffer, more deeply than any other child of dust. ”

“ You will be all the more composed, since you know how faithful I am to you. Another can never possess my heart—never! Why, O God, must a man be so widely separated from the object of his love? And yet the life I now live in Vienna is so wretched! Your love makes me, at once, the happiest and the most unfortunate of men. At my present age, there should be some uniformity in my life ”

“ In his heart of hearts, Beethoven feels that fate has knocked at his door, only because in his following the dictates of force and action, he has sinned against nature, and that all will is only transitoriness and self-deception. The adagio expresses subjection to a higher will. The consciousness of this highest act of the will, to sacrifice one’s self and yet to preserve one’s freedom, gave birth to the song of jubilation in the finale which tells not of the joy and sorrow of one heart only; it lifts the freedom which has been praised and sought for into the higher region of moral will. ”

“ And, indeed, the events in Beethoven’s life became calculated more and more to liberate him, heart and soul, from this world, and the whole composition of the quartets appears like a preparation [174] for the moment when the mind, released from existence here, feels united with a higher being. But it is not a painfully happy longing for death that here finds expression. It is the heartfelt, certain and joyful feeling of something really eternal and holy that speaks to us in the language of a new dispensation. ”

“ Even the brute creation is not insensible to its power. Yet, at its best, music is a haughty, exclusive being, and not without reason are training, practice, talent, and the development of that talent, required for the understanding of her secrets. “One wishes to be heard with the intellect, by one’s equals; emotion becomes only women, but music should strike fire from the mind of a man.” In some such strain as this, Beethoven himself once spoke, and we know how slowly the works of the great symphonist found a hearing and recognition from the general public. ”

“ Napoleon appeared as Germany’s hereditary [105] foe, and the whole people, from the highest noble to the meanest peasant rose up, as one man, to fight the battle of freedom. The march is, after all, only the dance of war, and Beethoven gathered into one picture of instrumentation, the glad tramp of warlike hosts, the rhythm of trampling steeds, the waving of standards and the sound of trumpets, with a luminousness such as the world had never witnessed before. The poet needs only see the eddy created by a mill-wheel to paint the vapor and foam of Charybdis. ”

“ And what a success the performance was!
In one of the accounts of it that have come down to us, we read: “Never in my life did I hear such tempestuous and at the same time such hearty applause. At one place—where the kettle-drums so boldly take up the rhythmic motive alone—the second movement of the symphony was totally interrupted by the applause; the tears stood in the eyes of the performers; Beethoven, however, contrived to wield the baton until Umlauf called his attention to the action of the audience by a motion of his hand. ”

“ But although no more than an episode, Beethoven could here have mastered his feelings only by the full consciousness he now possessed of the duty he owed to his genius. As Liszt says, le genie oblige, and Beethoven felt that it was a duty genius owed to mankind to sacrifice mere ambition and even the heartfelt happiness that is born of love. The day before Guilietta’s wedding, he wrote to Macco, the painter: “You paint, and I shall compose music. In this way, we shall be immortal; yes, perhaps live forever.” ”

“ We must bear these great plans and labors of Beethoven in mind if we would rightly understand his subsequent life—if we would comprehend how, in the desolate and distracted existence he was compelled henceforth to lead, he did not become a victim of torpidity, but that, on the contrary, the elasticity of his genius grew greater and greater, and that his creations gained both in depth and perfection. ”

“ And when, in an incomparably poetical union to the quiet course of the stars and to the eternally ordered course of things, the longing, perturbed human heart is contrasted by a second melody, with a wealth of inner beauty never before imagined, we at last see the soul, so to speak, disappear entirely before itself, dissolved in the sublimity of the All. The steps of time, expressed by the rhythm of the final chords, sound like the death knell of the human heart. Its wants and wishes are silenced in the presence of such sublimity, and sink to naught. ”

“ The first movement of the Eroica describes the most varied events in the life of such a hero with a fullness of episode almost destructive of its form. In its climax, the real work of the hero is seen; the old order of things is heard crumbling and falling to pieces in its powerful and terrific syncopations and dissonant chords, to make place for a new existence, one more worthy of human beings. But, at the close of the movement, the victorious hero exultingly yokes the new order of things to his chariot. This is history, the world’s history in tones ”

“ In his twenty-third year, Mozart could point to three hundred works which he had composed, among them the poetical sonatas of his youth. How little of sunshine and leisure must there have been in a life which, spite of its extraordinary intellectual wealth and activity, reaped so little fruit! And even if we fix the date when the three trios op. 1, were composed in this period, when Beethoven was for the first time taught the meaning of the world and history, by the stormy movements of the last decade of the last century ”

“ He forgets even his daily food. O! Goethe, no Emperor or King is as conscious of his power and of the fact that all power proceeds from him, as is this man Beethoven.” And Goethe, who “loved to contemplate and fix in memory the picture of real genius,” who well knew “that his intellect was even greater than his genius, and who frequently throws from himself a luminousness like that of lightning, so that we can scarcely tell, as we sit in the darkness, from what side the day may break,” invited him to Carlsbad, whither he was wont to go every year. ”

“ The duties of life and the tasks of the artist he discharged with equal fidelity. His life was the foundation on which the superstructure of his works rose. His greatness as a man was the source of his greatness as an artist. The mere story of his life, given here in outline, reveals to us the internal springs of his artistic creations, and we must perforce admit, that the history of Beethoven’s life is a part of the history of the higher intellectual life of our time and of humanity. ”

“ The golden age of music in Vienna had not passed away when Beethoven came to that city. Not the court, but the wealthy nobility, and a great many circles of the cultured found in music the very soul of their intellectual life and of a nobler existence. ”

“ In the second movement, which he himself calls only allegro vivace, and which, indeed, is no scherzo, not even a Beethoven-like one, but rather a painting, we have a dramatic picture of the earthly world in the whirl of its pleasures, from the most ingenuous joy of mere existence—such as he himself frequently experienced in such fullness that he leaped over chairs and tables—to the raging, uncontrollable Bacchanalian intoxication of enjoyment. ”

“ His affection for his nephew had assumed, in consequence of one continual irritation of his feelings, the nature of a passion which tormented the boy to death, but which, like every passion, brought no happiness to Beethoven himself. The first movement of this quartet in A minor is a psychological picture—a poem of the passions—the consuming character of which can be explained only by this very condition of the artist’s own soul. And how Beethoven’s creations always came from his own great soul, that soul so fully capable of every shade of feeling and excitement! ”

“ In its composition, we find united that warmth of heart and that intellectual in sight so peculiarly Beethoven’s own, and which he so beautifully embodied in his art. On the golden background of his enthusiasm for “nobler and better things,” the sweet face of Leonore stands out in bold relief as the perfect type of human beauty.
Beethoven borrowed the tones of the Eroica from the elevating nature of humanitarian ideas transferred to the region of public life. [69] The hero enters, touching with giant hands the foundations of human existence, which he wants to ameliorate by renewing them. ”

“ The very multitude of Beethoven’s ideas, and the height to which his intellect had soared, showed him that he was far from having reached perfection in the artistic representation of those ideas. His readiness of execution and his wonderful power of improvisation, even now, assured him victory wherever he went. But the small number of compositions which he wrote at this time, in Bonn, is sufficient proof that he did not feel sure of himself as a composer. And yet he had now reached an age at which Mozart was celebrated as a composer of operas. ”

“ There is little in the world of art, in which the nature of the religious appears so fully in its substance and essence without showing itself at any time otherwise than purely human, and therefore imperishable—never clothed in an accidental and perishable garb. This explains how a people not noted for any musical genius, but who are able to understand the spirit and meaning of music, the English, whom Beethoven himself esteemed so highly, considered his music “so religious.” ”

“ There is a oneness of spirit in this instrumental fresco painting of a hero who strives and suffers for the sake of what is most precious to man, and in Beethoven’s only opera, the Fidelio, which made the latter the natural successor of the Eroica. Florestan dared “boldly to tell the truth,” and this, his entering the lists for right and freedom, incites his faithful wife, Leonore, to a truly heroic deed. Disguised in male attire, she enters the prison, and, just in the nick of time, casts herself between her beloved husband and his murderer. ”

“ But as Beethoven first felt the weight and the power of resistance of Germany after the battles of Aspern and Wagram, he now depicted (after Napoleon had taken the Emperor’s daughter to wife and seemed predestined to become the despot of all Europe) , in the scherzo and finale of the seventh symphony, better than ever before, the jubilation of the victorious nation, with all its popular feasts and games. Yet, in the melancholy second part, with its monotonous beats on the dominante, we think we hear the gloomy rhythm of a funeral march. ”

“ Countess Giulietta was in her sixteenth year, and as good as betrothed to Count Gallenberg, a musician and composer of ballet music. He was, however, in such pecuniary straits that Beethoven had, on one occasion, to come to his assistance through a friend. The young girl did not give any serious thought to a union with the Count, although he belonged to her own social circle. The attractions of a genuine love had more charms for her. This same true, genuine love possessed Beethoven’s soul. He writes to his friend Wegeler:
“I feel that my youth is only now beginning. ”