Rage and lust of Ludwig the brothel creeper
He was lonely and frustrated in love – but nothing could silence Beethoven’s sublime music
NOt many great men have been arrested as a tramp. But i t happened more than once to Beethoven, because of his slovenly appearance. he would shout down the police cells with rage, ‘I am Beethoven’, until he was identified and released.
Such stories encapsulate the problem of understanding him; so great a composer, so impossible and so unhappy a man. Beethoven seems to have lived his whole life over the top. In his frequent rages, as in his loves and his music, he was volcanic.
Genius cannot be comfortable to live with. as this massive, but fascinating, biography shows, Beethoven quarrelled even with his best friends, invariably chose unattainable women to love and drove his ‘son’ — his nephew, Karl, to whom he was guardian — to attempt suicide.
Of course, the central tragedy of his life was his deafness, crippling to most composers, which he spent his adult life defying. More and more, he composed in his head, in a state of creative trance that he called his ‘raptus’.
his deafness began in one of his rages at being disturbed. he fell flat on his face with fury. ‘When I got up, I found I was deaf, and have been ever since.’ Not entirely. his hearing partially returned, but accompanied by tinnitus, a constant hissing and buzzing in one or both ears. as sufferers, like myself, know only too well, it is incurable.
‘I would be happy, perhaps the happiest of mortals, if that fiend had not settled in my ears,’ he wrote to a doctor friend.
at first, he found it impossible to tell people ‘I am deaf ’, for fear it would ruin his reputation as the top-ranking virtuoso pianist and improviser in Vienna.
he became famous almost from the start; his genius was evident to the musicloving Viennese. When deafness struck, he withdrew in embarrassment from public performance and society in general.
Yet he carried on conducting the premieres of his new works — with more and more erratic results, as he could not hear the orchestra properly. eventually, a substitute conductor would stand behind him, keeping the players together, while they did their best to ignore Beethoven’s antics. Of course, he could not hear the applause of the audience. he had to be turned around in order to see it.
as well as increasing deafness, Beethoven suffered chronic ill-health. his biographer lists his complaints: colitis, vomiting and constant diarrhoea, rheumatic fever, jaundice, hepatitis and cirrhosis of the liver — and an attack of typhus in his early years may have undermined his health. Swafford thinks he may have made his digestive troubles far worse by drinking quantities of cheap wine, which contained lead.
But his short, squat, swarthy body was remarkably sturdy in standing up to all of this. he died of liver failure at the age of 56, a longish life for those times.
It was sheer bloody-minded defiance that got him through, and which fought off his despair and frequent thoughts of suicide. ‘I will seize Fate by the throat — it shall not bend or crush me.’
he was lonely, but his loneliness was selfinflicted. his patrons were all Viennese aristocrats, led by the emperor’s brother, the archduke rudolph, who was his prize pupil. he and a couple of other princes clubbed together to provide Beethoven with a steady i ncome — which was sometimes late in being paid, to Beethoven’s loud complaint.
he despised aristocrats. to one of his patrons, he wrote, ‘Prince! What you are, you are by circumstance and by birth. What I am, I am through myself. Of princes there have been thousands; Of Beethoven there is only one.’
Ugly as he was, Beethoven easily attracted
women. His pupil, Ferdinand Ries, described how, one day, he found Beethoven on a sofa with an unknown young woman.
Ries had come for a lesson. Beethoven waved him to the piano: ‘Play something romantic’. Ries obliged, averting his eyes from the sofa. ‘Something passionate!’ urged Beethoven.
Ries played on, until the woman made off. Beethoven said he had no idea who she was — she had knocked on the door and asked to see him. This happened, apparently, quite often. But his real love life, confined to three or four women, was a disaster.
Without fail, he fell for much younger girls ( 17 was a favourite age) of aristocratic birth, usually titled, often married — hopeless prospects. Swafford gives short shrift to the love life in a book of more than 1,000 pages. He is a stickler for evidence, and we are short of hard evidence.
There has been endless speculation, especially over the letter to ‘ the Immortal Beloved’, which Beethoven never sent, but was found among his personal talismans after his death.
This letter, almost incoherent in its l onging — ‘ My thoughts rush towards you . . . I can only live either wholly with you or not at all’ — suggests he was on his way to meet the beloved near Teplitz in Bohemia in the summer of 1812. But who was she? The style of the letter resembles that of the l etters he sent to Josephine Deym, a young, widowed countess, nearly ten years earlier.
His anguished longings for her seemed to have been frustrated by her reluctance (in her letters) to go to bed with him, and her wish that, ‘If only you loved me less sensually’.
Swafford sticks to the fact that they had parted five years before, and she had told her servants not to admit him anymore. There was no evidence that she was anywhere nearby when he wrote the letter to the immortal beloved.
AT LEAST three other possible candidates are considered and dismissed as unlikely f i ts. The mystery remains. There is plenty of evidence to suggest that he satisfied his sexual demands in Vienna’s fashionable brothels — along with some of his jocular men friends.
But true love he had to abandon as an impossibility. He was alone with his deafness, which is why he sought a substitute family in his nephew Karl, the son of his brother, Johann, who made him the boy’s guardian before he died.
Years that could have been spent i n creation were eaten up by Beethoven’s attempts to keep the boy from his mother, whom he regarded as wicked and a whore.
‘He is my son: I am his true father,’ Beethoven declared, and he tried to shape the boy as he would a piece of music. The predictable result was that Karl, suffocating in his teenage years, ran away, leaving Beethoven in tears (‘He is ashamed of me!’).
Then, he heard that Karl had tried, but failed, to kill himself, by attempting to shoot himself in the head with not one, but a pair of pistols. Beethoven’s attempts to be a father ended in remorse.
Indeed, there is more anguish than triumph in the story told here. The triumph is given due weight in music. Swafford gives a thorough description and analysis of all the major works. He is a music academic, but also a composer. His comments are full of insight.
He traces the development from Beethoven’s heroic period, through sadness, to the final mystic realm of the last quartets. at every stage, Beethoven stretched the bounds of music and of performance.
This book is a monument. Though a long read, it is always rewarding, dealing as it does with a fascinating mystery — where does great music come from? How is it inspired?
It certainly came out of suffering in Beethoven’s case. But it also ended with an Ode To Joy.