When I think of Beethoven the human being, I think of a child born into a family in which the marriage began in conflict. The composer’s grandfather, also named Ludwig, strenuously opposed the marriage of the composer’s parents because he mistakenly, even intentionally, falsely believed she was lower class and unworthy. Beethoven’s mother Anna Maria Magdalene, described as a clever and beautiful woman, once said “if you want my good advice, stay single, then you’ll have the true, quietest, most lovely and pleasant life, … Then what is marriage, a little joy, but after that a chain of suffering, and she is still young.”[1] His father Johann—whose date and place of birth are unknown to this day and who had difficult relations at times with his father[2]—became an alcoholic later in their marriage, and the three sons were sent at times to rescue him from bars. He and his brothers were raised, according to family friends, without any kindness, and Beethoven himself was sometimes “filthy.” Fortunately he found refuge in the von Breuning household, where he was treated with love and respect; he remained friends with members of the family till his death in 1827.
Already in Bonn, Beethoven began to suffer from the serious abdominal issues that plagued him through the end of his life. Soon after he settled in Vienna in 1792 and had begun to make a name for himself, especially among the music-loving aristocracy who supported him, the first signs of his deafness appeared around 1796-97. By 1802 that oncoming deafness made Beethoven—increasingly famous now only as a brilliant improviser and fortepianist but also as a composer—despair, and he seriously contemplated committing suicide, as he confessed in the Heiligenstadt Testament. Only music held him back, he declared. Two years later Beethoven fell in love with one of his beautiful and gifted fortepiano students, Josephine Brunswick, newly widowed, but she could not marry him because it would mean the loss of her nobility and her children’s inheritance. Josephine herself ended the friendship in 1808 or 1809 and later remarried. Two years later, in 1811 (according to his own testimony), Beethoven fell in love with a woman he called a “chimera” in 1816. To me, she was most probably the beautiful and enchanting composer, song and poem improviser, and political activist Bettina Brentano, whom he addressed with the familiar you (“du”) in 1811 even though he suspected she was married by that time. The next year he used the familiar you for the second and only other time in his life in the important letter to the woman known as the Immortal Beloved. This relationship too ended in loss. In 1815 one of Beethoven’s brothers died and left him as co-guardian of the nephew Karl. This decision would lead to years of legal wrangling and to a terrible outcome in 1826. By 1817-18 Beethoven’s hearing loss had become so severe that he had to resort to conversing with people via paper—they would write what they wished to say on paper and he would respond orally. The composer’s isolation from others intensified. In 1821 Beethoven suffered from a severe attack of jaundice, and his last six years were marked with many illnesses. In 1826 the relationship with nephew Karl reached a climax point: his nephew climbed the mountain in the Helenenthal outside Baden to the ruins, one of his uncle’s favorite spots, and tried to kill himself with two pistols. Fortunately, he failed. When the police asked the young man what drove him to it, Karl pointed the finger straight at his uncle. It was eight months before Beethoven’s death.
It’s no wonder that Beethoven was truly difficult at many times: paranoid, distrustful of not only publishers but friends and family, moody, not above lying or exaggerating. But he could also be charming, patient, kind, thoughtful, and tried to be as moral as he could be. His moral struggles and spiritual explorations are clear in his diary from the 1810s.
To summarize, he was a person born into a family beset with sorrows, who began to suffer chronic abdominal pains in Bonn, who noticed the first signs of deafness just as he was beginning to make his fame in the musical capital of western Europe, who was in so much despair by 1802 about becoming deaf that he seriously contemplated suicide, who never remotely succeeded in a romantic relationship, who failed as the guardian (“true father” in legal terms) of his nephew, and whose own health deteriorated over the 1820s. In many of the ways we judge a successful life, his was a failure.
But Beethoven the composer was as much of an extraordinary success, and one for the ages, as his biography was a failure. Are the two linked? It’s past time, in my view, to argue about separating the music from the human. Time and time again in his works, his music probes the depths of what it means to experience the range of what humans experience. The Eroica Symphony explores what it means and what the costs are of being a “hero.” The Fifth presents struggle giving way slowly over the middle movements to overcoming (perhaps his resolve to not let his deafness define his worth). The middle movement of the Fourth Fortepiano Concerto recounts the painful moment when Orpheus loses Euridice because he looks back too soon. The late Fortepiano Sonata, Opus 110, depicts unbearable lamenting about the death of someone he cherished (most probably Josephine Brunswick, his first great love). The String Quartet in A Minor, Opus 132, has a slow movement that speaks of what Beethoven himself learned after his serious illness of 1825 about what it means to come to terms with death. The Ninth, the most beloved classical symphony of all time, depicts the movement from despair (a word he used in his sketches to describe the first movement) to the search for joy and our shared humanity.
And for all of these pieces for which we know the stories, most of the ones without known stories have equal power to touch us just as deeply. Beethoven’s music is the perfect example of an eighteenth-century belief that music’s proper subjects were the states of the soul (the famous Doctrine of the Affections, which can be traced directly back to the music philosophy of the Greeks). Whether a piece or movement has a nickname or not, or an evocative title, they all capture one or more states of the soul (and the popular sonata form of the Classical period is built on contrasting an opening state of the soul with an alternate one). The Waldstein Sonata, Opus 53, for example, begins with a pulsing striving rising theme (some hear it as stereotypically “masculine”) that is countered with an ethereal descending theme in a remote key (that could be perceived as “feminine” if one finds meaning in those gendered terms; the remoteness may symbolize the “other”). The original middle movement, the Andante favori (the “Favorite Andante” because it was so often requested), expresses a rare kind of fulfilled happiness, and the finale depicts an alternation between another existential kind of happiness and bursts of energetic joy in C Major with as much energy as the long exuberant and affirming close of the finale of the Fifth Symphony. The “Moonlight” Sonata depicts lamenting, sorrow, and anger about confronting different stages of coming to terms with death. The late Fortepiano Sonata in E Major, Opus 109, ends with a profound variation movement that falls into the transcendental category of his last works. The movement ends by repeating the opening variation theme—it may be the same but we are not because of the journey we took with the composer through the variations.
Because of his deep conviction that only the arts and sciences can lift humanity to the level of the gods, Beethoven asserted a greater importance for music than to “please and entertain.” Mozart once said that music can never forget that it is music—Beethoven believed music must forget that it is only music.
[1] Fischer fair copy, p. 55, left column.
[2] Beethoven’s grandfather once said to his son, “run, run, you’ll eventually run to your end.” (Fischer fair copy, p. 7, left column)