Chapter 3
Ideals have a way of colliding with reality in every life. In Beethoven’s case, the distance between the two was more extreme than most, the collision more severe. His ideals—the principles by which he lived—grew out of a mixture of religious, ethical, and philosophical beliefs. His reality was the need to earn a living in a world of sound he was increasingly unable to hear.
For Beethoven, the one ideal that dominated all others was self-cultivation, or as the German term would have it, Bildung. The imperative to develop and realize one’s fullest potential, obvious as it may seem to us today, was by no means self-evident in Beethoven’s time. His generation in fact witnessed a momentous change in the very conception of the self. The ideal of Bildung allowed—indeed, compelled—individuals to explore and exploit those aspects of the self that lay beneath consciousness and apart from the social positions into which they had been born. Its novelty lay not in the belief that each person is unique, but rather that this uniqueness could be cultivated. The term “individualism” was itself an invention of the early nineteenth century.
Beethoven embraced this new sense of self. His correspondence, the Heiligenstadt Testament, and his diary all bear witness to a lifelong effort to articulate his vision of what he could become and what he could accomplish. In spite of an only rudimentary formal education, he read widely and was determined “to grasp the import of the better and wiser individuals of each age.” Quotations and allusions sprinkled throughout his correspondence reveal a more than passing acquaintance with such authors as Homer, Plutarch, Shakespeare, Calderón, Herder, Goethe, and Schiller. A French officer who visited him on several occasions in the fall of 1809 reported that the two conversed about “philosophy, religion, politics, and especially of Shakespeare, his idol.”
But Bildung was about more than knowledge or even self-knowledge: it was above all about the purpose of one’s life. Beethoven was aware of his extraordinary musical gifts and saw their realization as his calling. This sense of mission lay at the core of his being and recurs throughout his writings. Anything that impeded his realization of this goal was to be resisted at all costs. Fulfillment of this mission, moreover, required sacrifice. Beethoven recognized that he could achieve his fullest potential only at the cost of foregoing the ordinary pleasures of life, including love. The very first entry of the diary he began to keep in late 1812, shortly after the end of his affair with the Immortal Beloved, reads: “You must not be a human being, not for yourself, but only for others: for you there is no longer any happiness except within yourself, in your art. O God! Give me strength to conquer myself, nothing at all must fetter me to life.”
As if to underscore the centrality of artistic creation to his life, the diary’s very next entry reflects on the finer points of voice-leading: “The precise coinciding of several musical voices generally hinders the progression from one to the other.” Despair returns with the diary’s third entry: “O terrible circumstances, which do not suppress my longing for domesticity, but [prevent] its realization. O God, God, look down upon the unhappy B., do not let it continue like this any longer.”
The back-and-forth of these opening three entries—from the personal to the technical and back to the personal—captures the inseparability of Beethoven’s perspectives on life and music. Only this “divine art,” as he put it in 1824, gave him the “lever” and the “power to sacrifice to the heavenly muses the best part of my life.” He peppered his diary with self-admonitions to forego earthly pleasures for the cause of art:
There is much to be done on earth, do it soon! I must not continue my present everyday life; art demands this sacrifice too. Rest and find diversion only in order to act all the more forcefully in art.
If possible, bring the ear trumpets to perfection and then travel. This you owe to yourself, to Mankind and to Him, the Almighty. Only thus can you once again develop everything that has to remain locked within you.
Live only in your art, no matter how limited you are by your senses. This is nevertheless the only existence for you.
Sacrifice yet again all the trivialities of social life to your art, O God above all!
For Beethoven, art was both a manifestation of the divine and a means by which to approach the divine. He encouraged a young musical admirer not only to practice her art but to “penetrate its interior,” for “only art and science elevate mankind to the deity.” He made much the same point years later when he wished one of his publishers “every good success for your efforts on behalf of art, for it is only art and science, after all, that point to a higher life and give us hope for it.”
Beethoven was scarcely alone in regarding art as a form of religion. German-speakers of the time even coined a word for it: Kunstreligion, or “art-religion.” By this line of thought, art provided a glimpse of a higher realm beyond the travails of earthly life. And instrumental music, because of its inherently abstract nature, lent itself particularly well to providing intimations of a higher form of existence. Free from the burden of representation and the strictures of language, instrumental music had the capacity to convey what words could not. The poet and dramatist Ludwig Tieck, for example, an acquaintance of the composer, declared the modern symphony to be capable of “delivering” us “to a quiet, happy, peaceful land,” and E. T. A. Hoffmann perceived in Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony a “wondrous spirit-realm of the infinite.”
Art-religion did not supplant the teachings of the church but supplemented them. Beethoven was born into the Catholic faith, and while he was not particularly observant of ritual, he took the Last rites on his deathbed and never expressed the slightest doubt in the existence of a higher power. He regarded Christ as a model of stoicism, and the repeated references and appeals to God in his correspondence rarely come across as formulaic. He considered entrusting his nephew Karl to the care of the noted Catholic theologian and bishop Johann Michael Sailer and annotated heavily his own copy of Christoph Christian Sturm’s Reflections on the Works of God in the Realm of Nature, a treatise that expounded at length on the reconciliation of science and religion.
But faith for Beethoven went well beyond the church. He seized on any number of belief systems that might help him establish spiritual and ethical coordinates. These included not only Catholicism but also Freemasonry, tenets of various Eastern religions, and pantheism. We should not parse these too closely. He took from each what he found most helpful.
Freemasonry placed special value on the ideal of brotherhood. Beethoven never joined a lodge, for by the time he arrived in Vienna, the golden age of Freemasonry in the imperial city had passed. The order had flourished under the rule of Joseph II in the 1780s, and Mozart and Haydn had both been members. But in the wake of the French Revolution, Emperor Franz II disbanded the lodges on the suspicion that they encouraged revolution, and the movement went underground. Beethoven was nevertheless deeply sympathetic to its basic principles: an obligation to improve one’s self, endurance in the face of suffering, and above all the conviction that deeds counted for more than the accident of one’s social standing at birth. His network of Viennese friends, patrons, and publishers included many who had previously been active Freemasons, and his correspondence is full of catchphrases that may well have carried Masonic overtones for their recipients. In one particularly curious entry in his diary, Beethoven equates the year 1816 with 5816, an assertion that resonates with the Masonic belief that the world had been created in 4000 BCE.
Eastern religions, the distant (and in many respects imagined) basis for much Masonic doctrine, provided another source of ethical ideals, particularly those associated with stoicism, renunciation, and self-overcoming. Beethoven’s engagement with Hindu, Vedantic, and Brahman writings was part of a broader European fascination with Eastern texts that were then being translated and made available for the first time in the West. The diary contains a number of transcriptions from sacred texts, as well as commentaries taken from various German-language books on Eastern religions.
Beethoven was also deeply sympathetic to the idea of pantheism. Nature was for him yet another manifestation of God’s presence in the physical world and as such a source of mystical insight. In the countryside, he mused, it was “as if every tree spoke to me: Holy! Holy! In the forest: enchantment! Who can express it all?” On another occasion he claimed that “no one can love the countryside as much as I do. For the forests, trees, and rocks produce the resonance mankind desires.” That “resonance” found its own expression in the “Pastoral” Symphony.
Beethoven believed in fate, something never far from his mind. He spoke of it repeatedly in his correspondence and in his diary, always with a sense of reverence. It is never “God’s will” but rather something more akin to the ancient Greek concept of an impersonal force, sometimes administered by the gods, sometimes not. Fate plays a major role in the epic poems Iliad and Odyssey, and Beethoven seems to have appropriated the attitudes of their lead characters as his own. He copied out in his diary the cry of the mortally wounded Hector from Book 22 of the Iliad: “But now Fate catches me! Let me not sink into the dust unresisting and inglorious, but first accomplish great things, of which future generations too shall hear.” The passage is eerily similar to what Beethoven himself had written in the Heiligenstadt Testament of 1802, in which he confessed to having contemplated suicide in the face of growing deafness but declared that he had held back on the grounds that “it seemed to me impossible to leave the world before having produced everything that I felt called upon to bring forth.”
Deafness was an agent of fate. Beethoven accepted it but not without a struggle. When he confessed his condition to Wegeler in 1801, he vowed to “grab fate by the throat, it shall certainly not break me completely.” He spent years seeking a cure and ultimately concluded that his only option short of suicide was resignation. He called it “a wretched means of refuge” but embraced it because it was the only path by which he could pursue his art. That, in the end, would remain the highest form of self-development and as such his highest ideal.