Beethoven - His Spiritual Development

J. W. N. Sullivan

• Editorial: Read & Co. Books
• Año: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781446545942
• Categoría: Médias et arts de la scène
• Categoría: Biographies de musique

First published in 1927, J. W. N. Sullivan's "Beethoven - His Spiritual Development" explores the subject of Beethoven's spirituality, which the author believes he expressed through his greatest musical compositions. Contents include: "Art and Reality", "Music as Isolated", "Music as Expression", "Beethoven's Characteristics", "The Morality of Power", "The Mind of Beethoven", "The Hero", "The End of a Period", "Love and Money", "The Hammerclavier Sonata", "God the Companion", etc. A fascinating study of Beethoven's work not to be missed by fans of classical music. John William Navin Sullivan (1886–1937) was a popular literary journalist and science writer who wrote some of the first accounts of Albert Einstein's General Theory of Relativity for the laymen. Sullivan was acquainted with a number of important writers in 1920s London including T. S. Eliot, Aldous Huxley, and Aleister Crowley. Read & Co. Books is republishing this classic work now in a new edition complete with a specially-commissioned new biography of the author.

BOOK TWO

BEETHOVEN’S
SPIRITUAL DEVELOPMENT

CHAPTER ONE

BEETHOVEN’S CHARACTERISTICS

ONE of the most significant facts, for the understanding of Beethoven, is that his work shows an organic development up till the very end. The older Beethoven lived, the more and more profound was what he had to say. The greatest music Beethoven ever wrote is to be found in the last string quartets, and the music of every decade before the final period has greater music than its predecessor. Such sustained development, in the case of an artist who reaches years of maturity, is a rare and important phenomenon. Bach, for instance, who may be likened to Beethoven for the seriousness and maturity of his mind, lost himself at the end in the arid labyrinths of pure technique. Wagner, as the fever in his blood grew less, had nothing to express at the end but exhaustion and ineffectual longing. Beethoven’s music continually developed because it was the expression of an attitude towards life that had within it the possibility of indefinite growth.

Some attitudes towards life are not susceptible of development. They may achieve greater richness and subtlety, but they are incapable of organic growth. The cynic, for example, may become more bitter and penetrating, but unless he suffers a catastrophic change he remains at the same distance from reality. The man who has sincerely accepted a religious scheme in which all the major problems of life are provided with solutions is likely to go through life without ever experiencing the direct impact of those problems. That is, in fact, the weakness of Bach as compared with Beethoven. Wagner, the great apostle of the pride of life, finds, as the bright world slips past him, that he is left alone with his yearning and his pain. The attitude of both Bach and Wagner towards life was not sufficient to support all their length of days. Beethoven, on his death-bed, could say, Plaudite, amici, comædia finita est. But the “comedy” has been in play up to the last moment.

The chief characteristics of the fully mature Beethoven’s attitude towards life are to be found in his realization of suffering and in his realization of the heroism of achievement. The character of life as suffering is an aspect that our modern civilization, mercifully for the great majority of people, does a great deal to obscure. Few men have the capacity fully to realize suffering as one of the great structural lines of human life. Bach, as we have said, escaped the problem with his religious scheme. Wagner, on the basis of a sentimental philosophy, finds the reason and anodyne of suffering in the pity it awakens. Mozart, with his truer instinct, is bewildered. The G minor quintet is the most poignant expression of his angelic anguish at his late discovery of this earth’s pain. To Beethoven the character of life as suffering became a fundamental part of his outlook. The deep sincerity and naïveté of his nature, combined with the circumstances of his life, made this knowledge inevitable. The quality of this realization has nothing in common with the pessimism of such a man as Schopenhauer. It is the direct, simple and final acceptance of an obvious fact. This attitude of mind is perhaps rarer to-day than at any previous period in history. To the modern mind suffering is essentially remediable. Suffering is primarily due to physical and moral maladjustment, and with the spread of science and correct social theories we shall be able to abolish it. For an increasing number of people suffering is already practically abolished. They may go through life without meeting one problem they cannot evade until they reach their death-bed, while they find the sufferings of others easier to endure through their conviction that they are the temporary consequences of the imperfect state of society. But to the vast majority of people suffering is still one of the fundamental characteristics of life, and it is their realization that an experience of suffering, pure and profound, enters as an integral part into Beethoven’s greatest work, that helps to give that work its unique place in the minds and hearts of men.

Beethoven’s capacity for a deep and passionate realization of suffering necessitated, if he were not to be reduced to impotence, a corresponding capacity for endurance and an enormous power of self-assertion. No artist ever lived whose work gives a greater impression of indomitable strength than we find in some of Beethoven’s most characteristic movements. The force that triumphs throughout the Scherzo of the ninth symphony, for example, is indeed indestructible, while the fugue of the Hammerclavier sonata is an almost insensate outburst of unconquerable self-assertion. As he grew older his force increased. “I will take Fate by the throat,” he said as a young man, à propos of his increasing deafness, and there is plenty of the “will to victory” in the fifth symphony he proceeded to write. But a stronger, although a more subtle pulse, is to be found in some of the last string quartets. In his last years he had more to carry and he carried it more lightly.

The “personality” of such a man as Beethoven is a slowly developed synthetic whole. It is formed by the gradual combination of its constituent elements into an organic unity. For the development of a personality a rich and profound inner life is necessary, and for that reason it is usually only great artists and religious teachers who impress us as being complete persons. Amongst the elements constitutive of Beethoven’s personality we must include his lack of malleability. This quality made him almost immune from purely external influences. Thus he was impervious to criticism; his manners were atrocious; he ignored conventions; he was permanently subject to no social passions, not even sexual love. The low standard of education he achieved seems to have been as much due to his lack of plasticity as to his lack of opportunities. He was not an educable man. He accepted none of the schemes of thought or conduct current in his time; it is doubtful whether he was even fully aware of their existence. He remained utterly faithful to his own experience. It is for this reason that his affirmative utterances, as in the Credo of the Mass in D, have such unexampled weight. Such utterances spring solely from his own personal and tested experience.

Beethoven’s capacity for realizing the fundamental character of life in its two aspects of suffering and achievement, combined with his lack of flexibility, was the necessary condition for the development of his attitude towards life. That development takes the form of a synthesis. The Beethoven of the C minor symphony finds the meaning of life in achievement in spite of suffering. Fate is an enemy to be defied. The Beethoven of the last quartets finds that the highest achievement is reached through suffering. Suffering is accepted as a necessary condition of life, as an illuminating power. That the reconciliation he thus effected was genuine and complete is made evident by the music, for none of Beethoven’s music is more obviously the expression of an authentic experience. The quality of this experience has led many writers to call this music “mystical” or “metaphysical.” But whatever meanings these terms may be intended to convey, the music in question is really Beethoven’s expression of the final synthesis he achieved between the primary elements of his experience. He did not turn away from life towards some mystical Nirvana. He forgot none of the joy, the effort, or the pain. He abandoned nothing. What he achieved is something much more wonderful than an old man’s serenity. The life in the last string quartets is as full, varied and intense as anywhere in Beethoven’s music. But those aspects of life that Beethoven formerly presented as contrasted he now presents as harmoniously flowering from a single stem. Life’s experiences are still presented with all their diversity, but no longer as conflicting.

Within the iron framework of Beethoven’s permanent attitude towards life flourished a highly sensitive and passionate emotional nature. Although his vision had the stern strength of the Puritan outlook it had none of its bleakness. He was fully alive to the countless lovely and tender things in life. No one’s reaction to simple pastoral scenes, for example, was ever more intense and innocent than Beethoven’s. He had none of the doubts that troubled the Victorian romantics after their acquaintance with the doctrine of the “struggle for existence,” neither had he any of the eighteenth-century cultured affectation of a “love for nature.” His reaction was spontaneous, direct and unsophisticated. Only a man pure in heart could have written the Pastoral symphony. The same quality is shown in what may be called his love music. The Op. 78 sonata expresses that exquisite, shy and yet joyful tenderness, that only the truly chaste have ever achieved. In this it is typical. In spite of music’s unexampled power of expressing eroticism, most powerfully exemplified by Wagner’s work, there is no trace of this quality in Beethoven. He knows nothing, even in his most abandoned mood (as in the finale of the seventh symphony) of the ecstasy of sexual delirium. We know from Beethoven’s own words that he was what is called a “moralist” in sexual matters, but we know from his music that this was due to no asceticism, to no principles, but to the presence of very strong feelings which could allow nothing inferior in that kind to co-exist with them. To the man of the world Beethoven’s love for music may be that of a romantic; to the youth who is just awakening to the awe and rapture of this great experience Beethoven is one of the very few true poets of the heart. Beethoven’s attitude towards sexual love never became sophisticated. This very intense and rich emotional nature was, in truth, very simple and very pure. There were no feigned or borrowed emotions, and nerve-storms never took the place of feelings. He had no need to complicate his joy with bitterness or to distort his rapture with cynicism. These are the devices of a man who wishes to come to terms with his suffering without facing it in all its starkness. But Beethoven had the innocence of his courage.

We have, then, in the person of Beethoven a musical genius with all the conditions for writing great music. He has a realization of the ultimate character of life, he has a force adequate to any trial, however arduous, his growth will be free from the distorting effects of mere convention, and his response is pure and sincere to a wide range of experience. No other musician who ever lived has united so many advantages.

The mystery of the appearance of what Goethe called “eine Natur” in contrast to a “süsse Puppe,” is not to be resolved by any discussion of heredity and environment. For the chief characteristic of a person—a “personality”—is that it is a synthetic, an organic, whole, and not a mere collection of its constituent elements. If we could trace every one of Beethoven’s characteristics in his ancestry, we still should be in no position to “reconstruct” Beethoven. But, in fact, there is very little that is characteristic of Beethoven to be found in his ancestry. It must be remembered, of course, that we know very little about his ancestry. It has been traced back to the beginning of the seventeenth century and to a small village in Belgium near Louvain. But, for the most part, these people have left no record of themselves beyond their names and the dates of those events in their lives that are of interest to the State. We know that the family produced a painter, a sculptor, and a curé, and that the commercial enterprise with which it was most prominently associated was the wine trade. The first ancestor about whom we have a fair amount of information is the grandfather, Ludwig van Beethoven, born in 1712. This Ludwig came to Bonn, at the age of nineteen, as singer in the court chapel, and steadily rose in his profession until, in 1761, he became “Herr Kapellmeister.” He must have been a man with a character that inspired respect, for he was appointed to this position in spite of the fact that he was not a composer. Beethoven always spoke of this ancestor with particular respect and, indeed, in his vigour and integrity he was not unlike Beethoven. It is probable that the old man had a good deal of the same “moralistic” outlook although, as he was not a creative artist, we cannot tell on what perceptions and realizations it was based. In any case, he is the only ancestor we can point to as showing any resemblance to Beethoven at all. It is possible, nevertheless, that Beethoven derived more elements from his grandmother and father. We have no direct evidence for this, but it is significant that both were habitual drunkards. Habitual drunkenness is usually, psychologists inform us, the result of an inability to accommodate oneself wholly to reality. It is often a vice in that unfortunate class of people who have imperfectly co-ordinated artistic faculties. They yearn vaguely for something other than the world they know, but they lack the capacity to create a world nearer to their heart’s desire. Still more do they lack the capacity to attain a comprehensive vision of the beauty immanent in this world. Neither the art of escape nor the art of revelation is possible to them. Nevertheless, they have perceptions they cannot use and impulses that never come to fruition. Drink, or some other drug, by relieving their sense of impotence and by blurring the unfriendly outlines of the real world, brings them solace and becomes a necessity. In the case of the father we know that he had fair musical abilities, quite equal to the grandfather’s, although nothing sufficient to justify any great ambition. And he appears to have been of the weak, gradually deteriorating type, not in the least the headstrong passionate drunkard. He was a shiftless, feebly unscrupulous man. He presents many of the characteristics of the impotent dreamer type and certainly, if we are to account for Beethoven by any theory of heredity, something is needed to leaven the solid common sense and practical grasp of life shown by the grandfather. Of Beethoven’s mother we know even less. She may actually have been a rather colourless person, or this impression may be due to the conventional, in-discriminating language of the accounts we have of her. We learn that she was “always serious,” a “quiet, suffering woman,” pious, gentle and amiable, and that she was much liked and respected. It is certain that the boy Beethoven loved her passionately; it is also pretty clear that he confided to her nothing of what was fermenting in his young mind. It was her patience, gentleness and suffering that moved the boy to such an agony of tenderness. “What is marriage?” she said once; “at first a little joy, then a chain of sorrows.” If we imagine Madame Beethoven as the passively enduring, suffering woman she seems to have been, we can understand the special feeling with which Beethoven always referred to her. The profoundest love of such a man is always based on compassion. More virile types, where no sex interest was concerned, would get little from Beethoven but his best wishes.

The traceable resemblance between Beethoven and his ancestry is, then, of the slightest. But the actual circumstances of his early life do much more to make clear to us certain characteristics of the mature man. The fundamental characteristics we have already described are not, of course, to be illuminated in this way. There is no reason to suppose that Beethoven would have written like Mendelssohn if the circumstances of his life had been as happy as Mendelssohn’s. A capacity for realizing the character of life is not created, but only exercised, by particular occasions. Mendelssohn, in some circumstances, might have been reduced to impotence; he would never have become a tragic poet. From the point of view of Beethoven’s development he had what can only be regarded as favourable surroundings in his early years. They were undesirable, as his deafness was calamitous, only from the point of view of his personal happiness. From the point of view of mankind at large they were advantages. It must certainly be counted an advantage, for instance, that Beethoven should so early have been pushed on to acquire a considerable degree of self-reliance. When, in the early twenties, he went to Vienna, it was with a courageous self-confidence commensurate with his power and originality, a self-confidence very necessary for the full safeguarding of that originality. This unusual degree of maturity is the more explicable if we remember that Beethoven occupied a fairly important musical position even at the age of twelve years. Besides being assistant organist to Neefe he was also “cembalist in the theatre,” a position of considerable honour and responsibility. He owed his position largely to the fact that his father, inspired by the dazzling career of the young Mozart, endeavoured to exploit Beethoven as an infant prodigy. The father’s methods of achieving this end were certainly harsh. Sometimes the boy would be dragged from bed late at night, on his father’s return from the local inn, and forced to practise the clavier. The father required unremitting industry, which he secured by the threat and practice of punishment. Outside music, however, the father cared nothing for the boy’s ...

Índice

• J. W. N. Sullivan
• PREFACE
• BOOK ONE
• BOOK TWO