Beethoven: Impressions by his Contemporaries

"It’s mainly accounts by people who met him who are remembering him, some shortly after they met him, some looking back after many years, having met him when they were children. It’s the most wonderfully vivid, evocative collection of personal accounts. It brings him to life and shows him in many facets—actually many more facets than we would find depicted in any other media. There’s quite a consistent picture. Together the accounts build up an impression and he’s someone you really feel you know by the end of it. I think he had a great deal of integrity; I get the impression that he showed that integrity to most of the people he met in one way or another. He had some spectacular fall-outs and yet, at the same time, he could also be very, very kind and generous. He didn’t really know the meaning of money. He was pretty bad at keeping track of it. He’s also definitely very eccentric. There’s a wonderful account of him taking a bath in his flat in Vienna and then just jumping out of the bath to go and open the window and wondering why everyone outside was pointing and laughing. Everyone says his apartments were total tips. He was not a tidy housekeeper at all, although he did like his baths. There are all sorts of wonderful stories. He got through servants at quite a rate because he was bad-tempered and he was deaf. At one point, he fired a rather long-standing housekeeper and decided he was going to do all the cooking himself and he invited some friends to dinner and they all sat around the table trying to be terribly polite when he served up a completely inedible fish soup. You don’t think of Beethoven as someone about whom there are funny stories, but there really are. He was totally dedicated to his art, but I don’t actually think he was mad at all. I think he’s one of the saner individuals that you’ll find in musical history. He was very aware of the world around him, even if he had some difficulties engaging with it because of his deafness. He read avidly, he enjoyed political discussions and he was very on the ball, really—more so than he’s sometimes been given credit for. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter He recognized the strength of his own genius as well. There’s no false modesty about him. He thoroughly disliked the divisions of society that he was faced with. In a way I feel that he weaponized positivity: even when he was at his lowest ebb in his personal life and his despair at his deafness, he would still embrace the joy of living. There’s as much joie de vivre and as much love for life in him as there is despair. The two things really offset each other. Well, his family was very difficult. So that was a continual battle for him. But among his friends and his musician colleagues, people absolutely did love him and were incredibly loyal and devoted to him. Later in his life—people say Beethoven did this or said that in ‘old age’, but he died when he was 56—young people absolutely adored him. The young musicians who came into his life in his last few years were very devoted to him and very concerned about him. He was kind to them and they were devoted in return. They were really good friends to him. So, yes, I think he did inspire a great deal of love and there were even young girls with crushes on him. He’s not this kind of ogre that posterity has made out of him. I have the impression—and this will come out in Immortal —that he only really had one totally devoted love affair, which was probably only consummated once, the ‘Immortal Beloved’ incident. Basically, he had been pretty much in love with Josephine from the time he first met her in 1799 right through to the end of his life. She was the big one. “These are absolutely gorgeous poems, very beautifully written..it’s an absolute masterpiece. I love it to pieces” In the interim, he did at one point court her first cousin, Julie Guicciardi. Julie was a terrible flirt. He dedicated the Moonlight Sonata to her, but that might be more because her piano was one of the best in Vienna and he wanted to try some special effects on it. At various points he wanted to settle down. He needed stability and he wanted to get married. He courted Therese Malfatti, the daughter of a merchant—Beethoven became friendly with her uncle, who was a doctor and who later treated Beethoven himself—but she turned him down as well. He was 42 and she was 18, so you can’t really blame her. He did court a lot of women without much success, but also without a great deal of conviction, I think, because really his heart belonged to Josephine. There are a couple of different theories about this. She may have been. There’s also a theory that the dedicatee of ‘Für Elise’ was actually Elisabeth Röckel, who married the composer, Johann Hummel, and she was someone he liked very much and was very drawn to, but she married another composer instead. No one is absolutely sure. One of the incredible things about Beethoven is that although he’s probably the most famous composer in history, there’s still so much we don’t really know."