1   The Last Beethoven Beethoven, deaf, working on the manuscript of the Missa Solemnis (painting by Josef Karl Stieler, 1819) Overture This study is, above all, the outcome of a long-lasting personal concern that goes back to the period of my first music lessons and my attempts to play Beethoven’s music on the piano. My passion for certain musical compositions, the care to interpret them in the way, with the sensitivity and in keeping with their creator’s intentions might be translated as follows: I wish to perform as if he could hear me and could recognize himself in the music I performed. I was filled, at a very early age, with the desire to know as much as possible about his personality, his life, the events and the circumstances that led to the birth of his work. It is obvious and easy to prove, based on Beethoven’s own notes and the testimonies of those who have written about him for nearly two hundred years, that there were external triggers, such as social and even historical events or happenings, which activated certain musical themes that his genius and sensitivity gave expression in the form known to us today. In this study, I will speak, at the appropriate time, about situations, contexts and events of this kind: family problems, like the affair involving his nephew Karl, 2   or sentimental issues, like the “Immortal Beloved” (Der Unsterbliche Geliebte), the drama entailed by hearing loss, the evolution of event on the European stage during the Napoleonic and post-Napoleonic periods, etc. It may be noted, also by way of a personal observation, that an artistic interpretative exercise we embark on for a longer period in life may also have, in addition to the effect of acquiring certain artistic skills, another result, which is by no means negligible. The music we play forms us just like, if the comparison does not seem unlikely, prayers form those who are dedicated to spiritual life practice. To some extent, we play music in order to become the beings we aspire to be. We play music to crystallize our personality according to the artistic ideal we acquired at a particular point in time, through one of those intimate visions that reveals to us, through the exalted lens of adolescence, the sublime face of destiny. My suggestion that musical exercise and religious practice are somehow related is, I hope, not far-fetched, and while the similarity in question may not be generally valid, it certainly has personal relevance. I believe that at least two of the classical figures I am familiar with endorse this similarity: Bach and Beethoven. Who could dispute that Bach’s music is simultaneously a hymn, a prayer and a work for the glorification of God? Or who could have countered Beethoven’s belief that music is a revelation above metaphysics and religion, the primary revelation of the Absolute? Step by step, the composer whose music you perform over the course of many years devoted to a pianistic career becomes a form of your own sensitivity and, without understanding exactly how, he turns into an element and a measure of your artistic personality. This situation is probably also valid on a broader, general level. Without ever clarifying its nature, the performer’s relation to the music of a particular composer becomes personal, because each and every time, the former resurrects, gives life to the latter through the very act of interpretation. The forms of the creator’s sensitivity, his inner pace, his 3   architecture of sound, the vision incorporated into his work act slowly but surely on the performer, refining and, perhaps, converting him. Beyond technical ability and interpretative sensibility, I think that what is at stake is certain mystical fusion between a good musician and the music he aspires to instantiate. I use this term because it appears to be more relevant. When one of Beethoven’s sonatas or Bach’s fugues is performed, for example, what happens is more than the mere transposition into sound of a music score: a musical universe is literally instantiated into being. In this sense, the musician must take upon himself, at a profound and genuine level, the character, the spirit, the personality of the music he performs so that its translation into sound may exude the atmosphere of a mystical initiation. Through its very substance and character, music lends itself more than any other art to analogies with religious practice, even with what is known as ecstasy. In fact, initiations, incantations, chants and liturgies all have a musical background and a mystical purpose. Let us not be afraid of this term: there is nothing suspect about the mystical character of music, even of secular music, for the term essentially amounts to a simple fact – communion, fusion, participation. What else is music but the communion between composer, performer and listener? These three entities coexist at the level of experience in the mystical space created by music, in a space where limitations dwindle away and individualities dissolve unto the horizon of sound like the scent of lilac melts into the odor of commonality. Unlike other artistic products that have material consistency, such as painting, sculpture, photography, film, literature, etc., music cannot be congealed in a material support, since it exists only insofar as it is made, that is, interpreted. The canvas on which sounds are woven is the very canvas of time, and this is fluid, flowing. Passage is its very condition, for music is, effectively, each and every time, the action that shapes transition in sonorous form, providing audible support to the silent flow of time. The fact that it is composed in writing, entrenched in a music score simply means that there is a system of graphic signs that we, as 4   artists, can turn it into a music performance, but for this instrumentalists and musical instruments are needed. In other words, we must constantly produce and reproduce music, which always comes down to reforging a personal relationship with the composer. We must recreate the music he created in order to have a world in common. We may leave aside the fact that in reality, music can now be stored on various media and that it can technically be reproduced as many times as we wish and in however many places in the world simultaneously. The problem remains the same: someone or something must set into motion an entire audible edifice that we, listeners, with our auditive structures and predispositions, interpret as a music system. Second, this study represents a strictly theoretical undertaking. I wish to present, according to my own understanding, the connections formed throughout the nearly three decades of disease between Beethoven’s hearing impairment and his musical creation. Beyond the medical situation that he responded to with understandable panic, with a mixture of helplessness, tremor and depression, which brought him close to the brink of suicide in around the year 1803, the loss of hearing opened an agonizing horizon in the composer’s existence, a horizon against which he waged his battle with destiny. This is the theme, his perception, which led him to take on the image and role of a Hero, of a Titan, strained under the bleak attempts of the divine machinations that he met with courage and, sometimes, even with defiance. It was from these strains that some of his most complex, powerful, expressive and innovative works gushed forth, from his Third and Ninth Symphonies to the piano sonatas and several other compositions for strings. The heroic model he adopted certainly saved him. This circumstance of titanic emulation helped Beethoven to carry so far, in the creative sense, his difficult and somewhat ironic impairment. Still, we have to admit that outside of this romantic model of approaching 5   destiny by recourse to the Heroic and Titanic figures – grandiose epitomes of classical Greek culture – we may find it very difficult to ascertain the composer’s relationship with God in the Christian sense, the way in which he integrated his vision, his sense of life predicated thereupon. Of course, the Missa Solemnis in D major Op. 123, the Ninth Symphony and several other works or parts thereof confirm our view that like Bach, his model and favorite master, Beethoven composed music for the glorification and exaltation of God. And if this is entirely true, then our mission to understand his transitioning through such different cultural and religious models becomes even more difficult. Speaking strictly from a musicological standpoint, this may be of lesser importance, but in any case we must admit that Beethoven’s work, to which we shall refer in aesthetic terms, is the creation of a concrete individual with idiosyncrasies, ideals ambitions, values and life choices, revised sometimes with anguish, with diverse and constant crises and sufferings throughout his life, with passions, loves, disillusionments and frustrations, sedimented, layer by layer, in his intricate personality, from which masterpieces could suddenly erupt at the most unexpected of times. The relationship with the Absolute, whether or not we call it God, was a constant feature in Beethoven’s evolution as a creator and, if we read the themes of his major creations, we may infer that this was a living relationship, on a purely personal level, assumed as a steering force in life and as a form of embracing destiny. Even though, at times, he may appear to have been struck by destiny and engaged in a struggle against God, this merely confirms the resilience of his taut relation with the divine. After all, you cannot resist, you cannot stand face to face with someone you do not believe in, whom you cannot glance at questioningly, whom you cannot challenge in any way. A Titan will always rise against unjust, illegitimate or unbearable authority. As we shall see, Beethoven had a major problem with authority throughout his life, and this constantly fuelled the crystallization of his personality in keeping with the titanic archetype. 6   The circumstances surrounding Beethoven’s loss of hearing will be regarded as a point of caesura in this analysis and will be taken as the focal element around which the construction of ideas in this study will revolve. In the German composer’s biography, the gradual loss of hearing – which began when he was only twenty-six years old, that is, before he defined his own style and wrote the works that individualized him in the history of Western music – was a regrettable and incurable clinical situation, but in time it was converted into the very effigy of his destiny, which he assumed by creatively sublimating it in an exemplary manner. Perhaps it would be difficult to find a more abrupt and overwhelming illustration of the romantic hero in the entire European culture: Beethoven was the most eloquent and, at various moments, also the most popular musical genius of his time, despite the fact that he deprived of his sense of hearing, without which music cannot be produce or understood. There can be no better example than Beethoven to illustrate the romantic way of judging the destiny of a genius, which represented an even broader theme than that of the hero. It is on this assumption that I will rely in upholding the thesis that he has become a universal paradigm of the romantic artist, whom suffering impels to perpetually mold and remold himself through creation, eventually taking artistic expression to the height of a messianic ideal. A genuine romantic artist is saved through his creation, which enables him to express his vision of the Absolute, fleshing it out through artistic language. In his singular and unique way, through the caesura caused by the loss of his hearing, Beethoven ascended, through his creation, to the heights of expressing the Absolute. Of course, his genius is reason enough to imagine that he would have reached certain forms of expressing the same supreme reality even if he had not experienced the aforementioned caesura, but there is no knowing what those forms might have been. For this reason, his achievements in the sphere of music impel 7   us to relate them, again and again, to that which occasioned or triggered them, in other words, to what the artist had to suffer or to what he lost in real life. In the first part of the thesis, I will provide a biographical overview of the impact this caesura exerted on the artist, the way in which he assumed it and the consequences it entailed, at the individual level, for his interpersonal and social relations, as well as on the level of his creation. The tragic aspect is inevitably involved in the making of a hero, be he romantic or of any other kind. In Beethoven’s life, the loss of hearing functioned as a constant torsional force exerted by destiny. We could even use the term torture, but the connotations of a willfully and systematically organized violence would be a little too obvious, which is why we should leave it at the level of a suggestion. In any case, the effects in his concrete life, the way in which this torture was perceived and apprehended amounted to a feeling that he was constantly tortured by an invisible hand. This incomprehensible power that he could not oppose in any way was the transcendent authority that maintained Beethoven’s individual destiny entrapped in a tragic formula. Let it be well understood, this is not a question about the concrete cases of deafness, whose details I will discuss at the appropriate time, but about the inevitable and insurmountable nature of this process, which ravaged the composer’s private life with the force of fatality. Fatality is the invisible force of destiny and the tragic is its inevitable consequence. It is this diagram of the forces of nature, the universe or the divine, depending on which term we prefer, that the romantic hero belongs to and evolves within. The difference comes entirely from his ability to develop a personal project against the background of this fatality, through which he can save and, to some extent, liberate himself. In fact, Beethoven’s loss of hearing was a matter of fatality, but the composition of the Eroica Symphony, the Symphony of Destiny, the Missa Solemnis, the Ninth Symphony and other outstanding works exceeded the bounds of fatality. They are Beethoven’s works, the achievements of an individual struck by 8   the hand of destiny in the most precious and necessary sense for the development of his musical career. And yet, despite or even because of this fatality condition, his music was, indeed, composed, and its effect on the artistic level could be called, without fear of being wrong, a revolution. Its hero was no Napoleon, triumphant on his whirling horse before the troops seized by martial frenzy, but the deaf composer himself, frustrated, complexed, misanthropic and miserable, who travelled to Vienna – the European center of classical music – from Bonn, the provincial borough by the Rhine, leaving behind a broken family that he would always be ashamed of and which he would sometimes even try to disavow. It was from these complexes and the bitterness of an ingrate legacy that Beethoven’s heroic personal myth was to gain contours in a tumultuous and violent period, in an aristocratic society that was generous to geniuses, but xenophobic and contemptuous of the lower classes. 9   Part one: A biographical sketch “Beethoven was one of the great disruptive forces in the history of music. After him, nothing could ever be the same again; he had opened the gateway to a new world.” Donald Jay Grout, A History of Western Music, New York, 1960 1. The early years Donald J. Grout was not the only one who considered that Beethoven was one of the greatest forces of nature, which unleashed itself in the sphere of music and permanently changed the destiny of this art in the Western world, at first, and then at universal level. Grout is one of a very long series of authors who believe that the evolution of modern music, as we know and have it today, would be unthinkable without the innovations Beethoven introduced. Still, before adopting such glowing superlative terms, rightly deserved, in all likelihood, let us see who Beethoven was, how he lived, and what this unparalleled composer’s daily life was truly like. Those who listen to his music or play it without knowing anything about how he lived, what his roots were, what his legacy was, what he had to go through and what difficulties he was confronted with risks living with an illusion, with an inadequate picture. However much this may aggrieve us, sometimes we have to admit that geniuses have short, tragic or pathetic lives, that they sometimes achieve public recognition and are crowned with success, but that at other times they may be faced with mockery and relegated to anonymity. Novalis, Hölderlin, Byron, Heym, Trakl, Nietzsche, Mozart, Baudelaire, Weininger, van Gogh, Egon Schiele, to name just a few, composed their works in their brief lives as well as 10   they could, afflicted by suffering and removed from the stage after incurring madness or premature death. Among the historians, biographers and musicologists that I resorted to in reconstructing the image of Beethoven’s life and personality, the most important are Anton Schindler, Romain Rolland, Tia DeNora, Vincent D’Indy, Maynard Solomon and Robert Greenberg, who will often be mentioned or cited hereinbelow. Ludwig van Beethoven was born on 15 or 16 December – there is still no incontrovertible proof concerning the exact date of his birth – and he was baptized in Bonn on 17 December 1770, in a family with an important artistic heritage and great behavioral problems. In Greenberg’s crude terms, it was “dysfunctional family with an abusive and alcoholic father and a depressed mother.”1 The legacy of the alcoholic father came directly from his own mother, Ludwig’s grandmother Maria Josepha Poll, who spent the last fifteen years of her life locked up in a monastery annex intended for the sick, the helpless and the irrecoverable. The grandfather, Maria Josepha Poll’s husband was born in Belgium in 1712 and for most of his active life he was a musician, a conductor, an opera singer and a Kapellmeister at the Electorate in Bonn, during the time of Clemens August. He was a strong, authoritative and respectable man, and even though he died when Ludwig van Beethoven was only three years old, he left an indelible mark on his life. After his effective separation from his alcoholic wife, Beethoven’s grandfather lived alone, dedicating his entire life to music and to his only son, Johann van Beethoven, born in 1739 (or 1740), Ludwig’s father. A weak, unstable and inconsistent character by his very nature, Johann inherited his father’s ambition rather than his musical talent and his mother’s unbridled passion for alcoholic escapades. Therefore, despite the fact that he was employed as a professor of music and as a tenor at the                                                                                                                           1 Robert Greenberg – Great Masters: Beethoven, His Life and Music, The Teaching Company, 2001, p. 1