Beethoven (Rolland)/Introduction
INTRODUCTION
By Edward Carpenter
It is not very generally recognised that Beethoven was not only a great musician, but a great leader and teacher. He freed the human spirit from innumerable petty bonds and conventions, he recorded the profoundest experiences of life, and gave form and utterance to emotions hardly guessed—certainly not definitely expressed—before his time. Personally I feel I owe much more to Beethoven in these respects than I do to Shakespeare: and though this, of course, may be a purely personal or accidental matter, yet I mention it in order to show that the music of such a man has, after all, the closest bearing on actual life.
M. Romain Rolland in his excellent little study has brought this prophetic and inspiring quality of Beethoven's life and music out very strongly. He has traced the tragedy of Beethoven's life and experience, and its culmination in a kind of liberation of his spirit from the bonds of mortality; he has shown how this connects up with the com- poser's strong sentiment of democracy and sym- pathy with the suffering masses; and how it leads to the utterance of that strange sense of joy which penetrates and suffuses his later work. In all these respects M. Rolland regards Beethoven as one of the greatest benefactors of humanity.
On the other hand our author builds in the picture of Beethoven's life and character with a great number of small touches derived from all sorts of writers and biographers—and so succeeds in giving a life-like impression of his personality.
As bearing on the subject of M. Romain Rolland's book, Mr. Carpenter has kindly given permission to insert the following few extracts from his own book, "Angels' Wings."
"Everything conspired in Beethoven to make his utterance authentic, strong, unqualified—like a gushing spring which leaps from the inaccessible depths of the mountain. His solitary habits kept his mind clear from the mud and sediment which the market-place and the forum mistake for thought; his deafness coming on at so early an age (twenty-eight), increased this effect, it left him fancy-free in the world of music; Wagner even mentions the excessive thickness of his skull (ascertained long after his death), as suggesting the special isolation of his brain. From a boy Beethoven was a great reader. He fed his mind in his own way. Unlike the musicians who went before him, he could brook no dependence upon condescending nobilities. He was not going to be a Court fool The man who could rush into the courtyard of his really sincere friend and 'patron,' Prince Lobkowitz, and shout 'Lobkowitz donkey, Lobkowitz donkey,' for all the valets and chambermaids to hear; or who could leave his humble lodgings because the over-polite landlord of the house would insist on doffing his hat each time they passed on the stairs; must have had 'something of the devil in him!' (This was the verdict of Hummel, Vogler, Gelinck, and others when they first heard him improvise on his arrival at Vienna). In politics, in a quite general way, he evolved radicalism or republicanism as his creed; in religion, though nominally a Catholic, he was quite informal. A pantheist one might perhaps call him, or a mystic after Eckhardt and Tauler Finally, one may mention, as an indication of the great range and strength of his personality, its exceedingly slow growth. While Mozart at the age of twenty-three had written a great number of Operas, Symphonies, Cantatas and Masses—many of them of quite mature character—Beethoven at the same age had little or nothing to show. His first Symphony and his Septett, which he always looked back upon as childish productions, were not written till about the age of twenty-seven; and his first great Symphony (the Eroica) not till he was thirty-two."—Angels' Wings, pp. 141-2.
"Beethoven came at the culmination of a long line of musical tradition. He also came at a moment when the foundations of society were breaking away for the preparation of something new. His great strength lay in the fact that he united the old and the new. He was epic and dramatic, and held firmly to the accepted outlines and broad evolution of his art, like the musicians who went before him; he was lyrical, like those who followed, and uttered to the full his own vast individuality. And so (like the greatest artists) he transformed rather than shattered the traditions into which he was born.
"Beethoven was always trying to express himself; yet not, be it said, so much any little phase of himself or of his feelings, as the total of his life-experience. He was always trying to reach down and get the fullest, deepest utterance of which his subject in hand was capable, and to relate it to the rest of his experience. But being such as he was, and a master-spirit of his age, when he reached into himself for his own expression, he reached to the expression also of others—to the expression of all the thoughts and feelings of that wonderful revolutionary time, seething with the legacy of the past and germinal with the hopes and aspirations of the future. Music came to him rich already with gathered voices; but he enlarged its language beyond all precedent for the needs of a new humanity."—Ibid, pp. 146-7.
"Bettina Brentano, writing to Gœthe of Beethoven, says: 'I am, indeed, only a child, but I am not on that account wrong in saying (what perhaps no one yet perceives and believes) that he far surpasses the measure of other men. Shall we ever attain to him? I doubt it. May he but live till the lofty problem of his spirit be fully solved; let him but reach his highest aim, and he will put into our hands the key to a glorious knowledge which shall bring us a stage nearer to true blessedness. . . He said himself, "I have no friend, I must live alone; but I know that in my heart God is nearer to me than to others. I approach him without fear, I have always known him. Neither am I anxious about my music, which no adverse fate can overtake, and which will free him who understands it from the misery which afflicts others."
"These are wonderful words which are put into Beethoven's mouth. Though their authenticity has been doubted, it is difficult, almost impossible, to suppose that the 'child' or any one else invented them. On the other hand, they agree strangely with those authentic words of his already quoted, 'Every day I come nearer to the object which I can feel though I cannot describe it.'
"Beethoven is the prophet of the new era which the nineteenth century ushers in for mankind. As things must be felt before they can be acted out; so they may be expressed in the indefinite emotional forms of music, before they can be uttered and definitely imaged forth in words or pictorial shapes. Beethoven is the forerunner of Shelley and Whitman among the poets, of J. W. Turner and J. F. Millet among the painters. He is the great poet who holds Nature by the one hand and Man by the other. Within that low-statured, rudely-outlined figure which a century ago walked hatless through the fields near Mödling or sat oblivious in some shabby restaurant at Vienna, dwelt an emotional giant—a being who—though his outer life by deafness, disease, business-worries, poverty, was shattered as it were into a thousand squalid fragments—in his great heart embraced all mankind, with piercing insight penetrated intellectually through all falsehoods to the truth, and already in his art-work gave outline to the religious, the human, the democratic yearnings, the loves, the comradeship, the daring individualities, and all the heights and depths of feeling of a new dawning era of society. He was in fact, and he gave utterance to, a new type of Man. What that struggle must have been between his inner and outer conditions—of his real self with the lonely and mean surroundings in which it was embodied—we only know through his music. When we listen to it we can understand the world-old tradition that now and then a divine creature from far heavens takes mortal form and suffers in order that it may embrace and redeem mankind."—Ibid, pp. 205-7.