an extraordinary reputation."[1] Thus nothing was able to break this indomitable will. It seemed now to make sport of grief. The music written in these last years, in spite of the painful circum. stances under which it was composed,[2] has often quite a new, ironical character of heroic and joyous disdain. The very last piece that he finished, the new Finale to the Quartet, Op. 130, is very gay. This was in November 1826, four months before his death. In truth this gaiety is not of the usual kind; for at times it is the harsh and spasmodic laughter of which Mocheles speaks; often it is the affecting smile, the result of suffering conquered. It matters not; he is the conqueror. He does not believe in death.
It came, however. At the end of November, 1826, he caught a chill which turned to pleurisy: he was taken ill in Vienna when returning from a journey undertaken in winter to arrange for the future of his nephew.[3] He was far from his friends.
- ↑ In 1819 he was followed by the police for having said aloud "That, after all, Christ was only a crucified Jew." He was then writing the Mass in D. That work alone is enough to show the freedom of his religious inspirations. (For the religious opinions of Beethoven, see Theodor von Frimmel; Beethoven, 3rd Edition, Verlag Harmonie; and Beethovenia, edited by Georg Müller, Vol. 11, Blöchinger). No less free in politics, Beethoven boldly attacked the vices of the government. He attacked amongst other things, the administration of justice, hindered by the slowness of its process, the stupid police regulations, the rude and lazy clerks in office, who killed all individual initiative and paralysed all action the unfair privileges of a degenerative aristocracy, the high taxation, etc. His political sympathies seemed to be with England at that time.
- ↑ The suicide of his nephew.
- ↑ See an article by Dr. Klotz Forest on the last illness and
