Just Curious

Beethoven the Creator

Among all the men of letters of the twentieth century, Romain Rolland (1866-1944) was the most intriguing. Musicologist, historian of art, communist sympathizer, socialist, pacifist, essayist, 1915 Nobel Laureate in literature, novelist, hermit; M. Rolland was the perennial loner whose "lofty idealism" in his literary production has ultimately embodied the "sympathy and love of truth with which he has described different types of human beings," to paraphrase the citation of the Nobel prize he received.
 
He was also a man of great contradiction. A socialist activist, he advocated vehemently against violent resolution to class conflict; a staunch supporter of the democratic form of government, he nonetheless wholeheartedly endorsed the regime of blood and iron Josef Stalin established in Russia.
 
Above all, he was a music lover, and hence a comrade of mine. Yea, his doctoral dissertation, completed in that ancient institution of Paris, the University of Sorbonne, was on "The History of Opera in Europe before Lully and Scarlatti." 
  
A  revolutionary and a man ahead of his time, Rolland was a great admirer of Beethoven. One could argue that the protagonist of his magnum opus, Jean Christophe, completed 1912, was based on the life and passions of none other than that great composer.
 
It was via Rolland's "Beethoven the Creator: from Eroica to the Appassionata" that I finally come into spiritual communion with my beloved Beethoven. I have always played his piece, yet (using Biblical language), I knew him not. It was through another titan that I have finally unveiled that giant of all times.
 
Beethoven, under Rolland's passionate pen, was first and foremost a revolutionary with lofty ideals, whose defiant disposition forged by the rapidly changing attitudes of his time. And yes we are talking about a time when the whole civilized world, the ancien regime, fell apart, where every person's understanding of their place in the world, their weltanshaung, were challenged by the torrents of revolution. 
 
"The Music of Beethoven is the daughter of the same forces of imperious Nature that had just sought an outlet in the man of Rousseau's confessions...Rousseau and the Sturn und Drang, these April showers, these equinoctial storms, are the signs of the break-up of an old society and the coming of a new. And before the new can take shape there must be an emancipation of man as individual...Beethoven belongs to the first generation of those...who launched in the night on the stormy sea of the Revolution, discovered their own Ego and eagerly subdued it...everything becomes for him a field on which to deploy the battalions of his thoughts, his desires, his regrest, his furies, his melancholies. His imposes them on the world." In our composers' case, he chose music as his battlefield. 
 
In one word, Beethoven is the "Ego" of the "period of combat." Not only were he going to smash all the irrational and barbarous vestiges of the old days, he is the "masculine sculptor who dominates his matter and bend it to his hand; the master-builder, with Nature for his yard." In his victories of the Eroica and the Appassionata, the most striking thing is "not the vastness of the armies, the floods of tone...but the spirit in command, the imperial reason."
 
To be such a master builder, one must first discipline one's own mind and flesh. This our Hero did. "The mind of Beethoven has strength for its base. The masculature is powerful, the body athletic...Everyone of his acquaintance was astonished at his physical rigor." "He was strength personified" exclaimed the poet Castelli. "He is one of the hard, knotty, pitted fruits of the age that produced a Mirabeau, a Danton, a Napoleon" our friend Rolland said. He sustains this strength of his by "means of vigorous ablutions with cold water, a scrupulous regard for personal clealiness...then a sleep so sound and long that he thanklessly complained against it!" His way of way was substantial but simple.
 
"The soul is willing, yet the flesh is weak" Thus spake our good Jesus of Nazareth to good ole' St. Peter. This is not the case of our Hero.  Not only does he maintain a vigorous body, he guarded his mind and soul jealously against any possible contamination above all. To many of us, he has gone probably too far. "His conception of love is too lofty for him to be able...to degrade it in these--to use his own word--bestial (viehisch) unions. He ended up by banishing the sensual from his own passional life." When Giulietta Giucciardi, the first object of affection young Beethoven ever had, "still beautiful, comes to him in tears and offer herself to him, he repulses her with disdain. He guards the sanctity of his memories against her, and he guards his art, his deity, against contaminations."
 
Within his heart, there are two dominating spirits, one cynical, the other warm. He is "rich in scorn--scorn for the feeble, the ignorant, the common people, equally so for the aristocracy, even for the good souls who love and admire him...of which he never quite succeeded in purging himself." Nevertheless, "imputation of this kind are belied, at every period of his life, by the torrent of his warm humanity." These two currents, vast love, vast scorn, often came to a clash in him.
 
The vast love for truth and perfection no doubt lead to his scorn for the outdated, the conservative, and the hypocritical. Whereas Goethe, Gluck and Rousseau concealed their ego beneath their humble manners, Beethoven "blurts out straight to [the nobility's] faces...the contempt or the insult that he has on his tongue for this world." One example, when he was rebuked by the Prince Lichnowsky, he wrote, "Prince, what you are are are by the accident of birth; what I am, I am of myself. There are and there will be thousands of princes. There is only one Beethoven." When the Countess von Thun fell on her knees before him and begs him to play, Beethoven refused without even rising from his sofa.
 
It must finally be mentioned that Beethoven was a tremendously spiritual man. Defiant outwardly ("after all, Jesus of Nazareth was no more than a crucified Jew."), God to him "is the first reality, the most real of realities...He can treat him as an equal, or behave as his master. He can regard him as a companion to be treated roughly, as a tyrant to be cursed...or as a rough friend, a severe fatherqui bene castigat."  "But whatever this Being may be that is at issue with Beethoven, he is at issue with him at every hour of the day: he is of his household, and dwells in him; never does he leave him." In all of Beethoven's work, we find dialogues of the soul.

posted by James Chang @ 9:53 PM