Late in 1815 his brother Caspar died, leaving to him the guardianship of a son, then not nine years old. This charge proved a progressive and culminating disaster. Beethoven believed it necessary to separate the boy from his mother's influence, but to do this required lawsuits which lasted till 1820. He lavished upon the lad the pent-up affection of his nature, but often with such wrong-headed intensity as to alienate his best friends and exhaust himself in all sorts of practical entanglements, besides seriously checking his artistic production. To crown all, the nephew was singularly unworthy, being stupid, lazy, ungrateful and morally at least weak; he failed in study and in business, and in 1826 actually attempted suicide, for which fiasco he was banished from Vienna. (He finally went into the army, and died in 1858.) Beethoven went with him to the farm of the third brother Johann, where he was thoroughly unhappy. Late in 1826 he decided to return to Vienna, took a violent cold on the journey, contracted dropsy, and, after much suffering, died in March, 1827, the end coming amid a terrific thunderstorm. The funeral drew a great concourse and was conducted with the utmost respect and reverence.
The recital of these events is necessary to the understanding of the record of the last period of his artistic life. Upon the perpetual agony of deafness, which became almost absolute, were piled the manifold distresses connected with the scapegrace nephew. The internal struggles of the composer's mind had no adequate vent except through composition, and, while the number of works produced now became relatively small, their size, intricacy and significance were vastly increased. Almost everything was laid out upon a titanic scale, as if to achieve the impossible. Of the piano-sonatas, No. 28 dates from 1815, No. 29 from 1818-9, No. 30 perhaps from 1820, and Nos. 31 and 32 from 1821-2. The final quartets were produced in 1824-6, that in B being his last work. The overture Die Weihe des Hauses belongs to 1822. The Ninth or 'Choral' Symphony was begun in 1817 and completed in 1823. The Missa solennis, originally intended for the installation of the Archbishop of Olmütz in 1820, was begun in 1818, but not finished till 1823. In his last years Beethoven came to feel that what he had produced was insignificant in comparison with what remained in his mind. Of these projected works we have but slight indications, though we know that they were to include a great Requiem and a Tenth Symphony, of the latter of which some sketches have been identified.
<tb>
In personal appearance Beethoven was short, stocky and muscular. His movements were angular and absent-minded, and his dress often careless or odd in the extreme. His face was full of strength, but its expression was usually stern and forbidding. But it was a sure index of his mood, and could vary instantly from genial courtesy to boisterous mirth or the flare of anger. His eyes were dark and piercing, and his hair black, thick and coarse.
He was wont to spend his mornings and evenings in labor at the piano or his table, often becoming intensely excited and absorbed in the travail of composition. His afternoons he loved to pass in the open country, where he often conducted himself so wildly as to seem insane. His concentration upon his work was always complete, but the realization of his thoughts cost infinite apparent pain and contest—more than in the case of any other composer of
