Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph by Jan Swafford

• Unlike others of his status, Beethoven has been relatively immune to the usual historical ebbs and flows of artistic reputations. That has happened partly because in the decades after his death the concert hall evolved into more of a museum of the past than an explorer of the present. That situation too has its dangers. Instrumental music is in many ways a mysterious and abstract art. With Shakespeare and Rembrandt, we can be anchored in the manifest passions in their works, their racy jokes, their immediacy. It is that immediacy that is all too easy to lose when confronting iconic musicians like Beethoven, Bach, and Brahms.
• came of age during the revolutionary 1780s. Many in his time saw him as a musical revolutionary and connected him to the spirit of the French Revolution. By the time he died in 1827, he was already a Romantic myth, and that is what he stayed through the nineteenth century: Beethoven the demigod, a combination of suffering Christ figure and demonic icon.
• This book is a biography of Beethoven the man and musician, not the myth.
• I see a man in the creative trance all of us work in—but Beethoven’s trance deeper than most, and the results incomparably fine and far-ranging.
• Genius has to be founded on major talent, but it adds a freshness and wildness of imagination, a raging ambition, an unusual gift for learning and growing, a depth and breadth of thought and spirit, an ability to make use of not only your strengths but also your weaknesses, an ability to astonish not only your audience but yourself.
• Our lives are not like a book; real lives drift, and my books drift along with them.
• For me, the idea of spending one’s life chasing something impossible is simply normal, necessary, even a touch heroic.
• By the time sketches for a work were well under way, what we see in the sketchbooks is not as much the creation of a work as the realization of a fundamental conception that was already in place, with a firm sense of the leading ideas and of what the whole was “about.”
• From his parents, who had traded in fine goods, the elder Ludwig seems to have inherited an interest in business as well. He leased two apartments and rented out one of them. More profitably, he started a trade buying local Rhine wine and shipping it in bulk back to his native Brabant; in town, he rented two cellars from which he sold wine by the barrel. In a census of the 1760s, Ludwig is listed not as a musician but as a wine dealer.28 Later he added a sideline lending money to local citizens.
• Only once in his life was one of his piano sonatas played in a public concert.
• “The desire to talk to God is absurd,” Kant wrote. “We cannot talk to one we cannot comprehend—and we cannot comprehend God; we can only believe in Him.”
• So many excesses of the Enlightenment, in all its forms great and terrible, rose from excesses of hope.
• At the same time, this earliest-known Beethoven work is rich in prophecy not only in its musical substance but also in its existence in print: already Neefe and others were inspired to feats of generosity for this brilliant but oblivious student.
• Bonn.14 In Holland, he had found favor with both his composing and his playing, met
• a rift between them. In Vienna, he had befriended Mozart, and for a while Mozart envisioned himself the future court Kapellmeister in Bonn. But by 1781, Mozart was fed up, writing his father, “Stupidity stares out of his eyes. He talks and pontificates incessantly, always in falsetto.”7 Still, behind this Elector’s outlandish facade lay convictions that bore vitally on Bonn and its life practical, philosophical, and artistic. He wrote, “To rule a land and people is a duty, a service to the state. I must make everything depend on making my people happy.” If his table was excessive, he was generally frugal in matters of spending and ceremony. The extravagant building projects with which Elector Clemens August had once nearly bankrupted the state were anathema to Max Franz.
• He had been taught that to be a complete artist he must be a complete man. Now he willed himself to become that man. This is the first recorded sweeping resolution of his life. There would be more. Unlike most such resolutions by most people, Beethoven’s would mark turning points in his life and his work.
• After the Terror broke out and the French turned to conquest, Holy Roman Emperor Franz II’s hatred of democracy or of any change in the status quo, and his fear of secret societies, became an obsession. The Freemasons and all other secret societies had already been effectively banned in 1793.
• From a broader perspective, the word for op. 1 is uneven.
• In a fine frame of mind, Beethoven wrote brother Johann: “First of all, I am well, very well. My art is winning me friends and renown, and what more do I want? And this time I’ll make a lot of money. I’ll stay here for a few weeks longer and then travel to Dresden, Leipzig, and Berlin . . . I hope you will enjoy living in Vienna more and more. But do be on your guard against the whole tribe of bad women . . . And now I hope that your life will become more and more pleasant and I trust that I shall be able to contribute to your happiness.”
• The cello sonatas in F major and G major that Beethoven wrote in Berlin and premiered with Jean-Louis Duport were published the next year as op. 5, dedicated to King Frederick William II of Prussia. It would be no surprise that these sonatas turned out confident, ebullient, fresh, and youthful.