Beethoven's life span (1770-1827) coincided with one of the most turbulent ages of Western civilization, encompassing as it did the French and American revolutions, the Napoleonic wars and their aftermath, and other nations' tentative steps towards a more democratic social order. As in society so in music - the gentle court orchestras which had nurtured his predecessors gave way to an order in which music came into its own as the expression of an individual spirit, and Beethoven's was for a long time the greatest spirit with the greatest power of expression.

It was the unrest after the French revolution that was the immediate cause of Beethoven's departure at the age of 22 from the provincial town of Bonn in the German Rheinland to the great city of Vienna, undoubted cultural capital of Europe for many years to come. Already in Bonn he had attained fame as a child prodigy with his renderings of Bach's Well Tempered Clavier, stimulated by his father's (like Mozart's father before him) eagerness to exploit the boy's talent to augment the family budget. During that time he had become accomplished in composition and made the acquaintance of Haydn and Mozart, both of whom expressed unqualified praise for his abilities.

Vienna was to be his home for the rest of his life, and just as his own somewhat uncouth appearance and casual approach to social proprieties blew a wind of change through the conventional society of the day, so his music broke away from the mould and set off in directions incomprehensible to many ears whose musical education had been traditional. So, whilst his first and second symphony kept basically to the form developed by his predecessors (though abounding in minor technical innovations), the third symphony, called Eroica ("heroic") startled the world as being something unlike anything before. Beethoven's original plan was to dedicate the work to Napoleon whom he revered as a hero and benefactor of mankind, but on hearing that Napoleon had proclaimed himself emperor Beethoven exploded into a frenzy and tore Napoleon's name from the title page, uttering the prophetic statement "Is he too nothing more than an ordinary human being? Now he will trample on the rights of man, indulge only his own ambition and become a tyrant!"

The composition of the Eroica followed a period of deep despair for Beethoven; his personal emotional life had always been full of tragedy: always a passionate lover as is shown in his famous three-part letter to his (still unidentified) Immortal Beloved, he never secured the sustained affections of a life partner; worst of all his health had begun to deteriorate and the first signs were detected of his deafness which was to become complete. Declaring himself "the unhappiest of God's creatures" he wrote a document, the Heiligenstadt Will, in which he seemed to be saying farewell to life.

Fortunately for us this was not to be, and he continued to compose for more than two decades; in his opera Fidelio dealing in a symbolic way with the theme of liberation of the human spirit, in choral works such as the Mass in D major (Missa Solemnis) and the last movement of the ninth symphony, and above all in his later piano sonatas and string quartets, he gives evidence of having entered a spiritual domain separate from that encountered in normal life, and of having succeeded in communicating something of that domain to the rest of humanity.

At his funeral, friends and celebrities gathered to hear the oration written by the Austrian dramatist Hans Grillpartzer, which managed to express poignantly the essence of the extraordinary qualities of the man and the tragedy of his spiritual isolation:

"He was an artist, but also a man, a man in every sense, in the highest sense. Because he shut himself off from the world, they called him hostile; and callous, because he shunned feelings... Excess of feeling avoids feelings. He fled the world because he did not find, in the whole compass of his loving nature, a weapon with which to resist it. He withdrew from his fellow men after he had given them everything and had received nothing in return. He remained alone because he found no second self. But until his death he preserved a human heart for all men, a father's heart for his own people, the whole world."

Source (mainly): Marion M. Scott: Beethoven (Dent, Master Musicians)
Acknowledgement to William Lane's excellent Beethoven website (see Favourites) for the Beethoven images and the texts of the Immortal Beloved letter and Heiligenstadt Will.

6 January 1998

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