Beethoven: The Man Revealed

"I think that’s right. It’s a very good book and a very readable introduction to Beethoven’s life and work. It’s compulsively readable, which the lot of the bigger books are not. He really makes it jump off the page in a very immediate way. When people ask me to recommend a good, solid non-technical introductory book to Beethoven and his world, I always recommend that one. I think he really nails it. I think there was one major occasion when this was true, but possibly only one. I think it was the case when, at the turn of the century, he decided he was going to put away his old methods in order to find a new way of composing. The big, ground-breaking work in this part of his life, which is now usually known as the ‘heroic’ period, is the ‘Eroica Symphony’ and that was really the turning point. It started off as what we would now call a tone poem and it was going to be entitled ‘Bonaparte’! It was actually a direct picture of Napoleon, his life and his motivating forces. Beethoven was a huge admirer of Napoleon Bonaparte until Napoleon decided to declare himself Emperor, at which point Beethoven realized he was just a fallible and probably a not very good human being, like everyone else. He scrubbed out the dedication on the symphony so hard that he left a hole in the page. That definitely started off as a political statement. But after that I don’t think he ever tried to be quite so overtly political again. I can’t say I blame him. Well, this is the wonderful paradox at the heart of Beethoven’s working life. He didn’t want to be like his grandfather, a kapellmeister, in the employ of one princely patron and basically a servant. Beethoven wanted to be a freelancer. He wanted to be an independent artist, but that meant that to achieve independence, he had to be dependent on a lot of different people, instead of just one. Of course, they were all princes and aristocrats of one sort or another and this was a situation that had its many ups and downs over the years. When he had a fallout with one, like his massive fallout with Prince Lichnowsky, he immediately lost a quarter of his annual income, because Lichnowsky had been extraordinarily supportive to him and had given him 600 florins per annum. The fallout was never really mended. After that, there was a consortium of three princes and archdukes who were trying to give him an annual stipend so that he didn’t have to leave Vienna and get a job elsewhere. Then along came the Napoleonic wars, the currency collapsed, and the princes were all ruined. So after that he had to live a hand-to-mouth existence, trying to find commissions that would pay him. That’s why, around the time of the Congress of Vienna, you find him composing some fairly bad pieces of music because these things, like ‘Wellington’s Victory’, were being trotted out to try and please people. And he was never really at his best when he was doing that. Yes. He had to earn a living if he wasn’t going to have a job as a kapellmeister—and he couldn’t have had a job as a kapellmeister in any case because he couldn’t hear . He had to find a way to eat and that was how the system worked at that time. He was very exposed to the buffets of fate, and when there were financial problems in society generally, they hit him quite hard. He was about 30, possibly even younger, because he had problems with his hearing for a few years before he actually faced up to it, which is what happened in 1802. He wrote the Heiligenstadt Testament to his brothers, saying he was in such despair about losing his hearing that he’d even thought of taking his own life. It was all downhill from thereon. He actually did rally after the Heiligenstadt Testament . He didn’t get his hearing back, but it didn’t disappear at quite the rate he thought it would. He tried all sorts of strange things to combat it. There were ear trumpets, and a sort of hood that stood on top of his piano; he could put his head under it and it would amplify sounds. And there was a piece of wood that he could put against the frame of piano, with another end against his jaw bone or the bone behind the ear, which would convey the vibrations to his inner ear. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . He was always trying to battle it. He used conversation books, getting visitors to write down what they wanted to say to him, so he could actually interact with them. But he was pretty young when it began, and he battled with this for nearly half his life. And it was a terrible problem for him socially. Deaf people have trouble at parties and can’t interact with people in noisy situations; he was quite a sociable person and found himself forced into solitude. It probably made him a much less attractive prospect to the women he tried to persuade to marry him. It’s very sad. Then, when he adopted his nephew, he couldn’t have conversations with this little boy. It’s a very extraordinary episode in his life, which I think hastened his death. Part of the problem with the adoption was: how could you have a child if you couldn’t talk to them, and they can’t talk to you?"