The Biography of Beethoven: Tribulations and Glory
By Jan Swaford
Translated by Han Yingchao
Published by Zhejiang University Press
This year marks the 250th anniversary of the birth of composer Ludwig von Beethoven.
The earliest record of Beethoven in China can be seen dating back to the 1860s or even earlier. According to the December 28, 1861 issue of the North China Victory Newspaper in Shanghai, a concert on December 26 performed Beethoven's early work, The Trio in E Major, which was well received by the audience, noting that "Beethoven was among the greatest composers of his time very early, and then surpassed them to a height unattainable by any composer in the future." More than 150 years later, Beethoven has become a household name in China, and the thesis that "no composer in the future can reach" is still valid.
As an unparalleled musician, what kind of existence is Beethoven? What are the characteristics of his personality, emotions, and creations? How did he achieve such an extraordinary feat? Like all biographies above the level, the book "Biography of Beethoven" by the American composer Jan Swaffford combines the details of the biography of the owner and the appreciation of works with personal feelings, showing a plump image of Beethoven and reducing him from a god in the field of music to a man.
Beethoven studies became a form of eminence
Soon after Beethoven's death, some immature and ill-rigorous biographies were published. His friend, violinist and conductor Schindler in his later years, relied on the large amount of important beethoven material he stole to publish a two-volume biography, which for a long time was regarded as the authority on Beethoven's research. However, later Beethoven researchers increasingly found that his writings contained a great deal of distortion, prejudice, deliberate omission, and forgery. Thayer's three-volume tome, published in 1866, was clearly much more rigorous in terms of documentation, and he was one of the first to challenge the veracity and reliability of Schindler's writings.
In the more than 100 years since then, there have been hundreds of long biographies of Beethoven, which can be called sweat cattle, and research papers are numerous. The Chinese people are most familiar with the "Biography of Beethoven" by Roman Rolland in 1903, which gives readers a full impact by shaping Beethoven's exciting qualities. Beethovenology has become a science of manifestation, and the only thing that can be compared in terms of the popularity and breadth of research is probably Shakespeare. The reasons for this phenomenon can be summarized as three points: First, Beethoven's works are vast and profound, representing the peak of the music field so far; second, Beethoven's own experience is legendary, especially he overcame many insurmountable obstacles such as deafness and liver disease, and his spirit has long inspired the world; third, Beethoven left behind and related to him a wide variety of materials, an astonishing number, a large number of manuscripts, notes, correspondence, archives, etc., emerge in an endless stream, but also trigger people to constantly identify forgeries. Compare and interpret.
Jan Swaffford was a versatile composer who published biographies of Charles Efs and Brahms, the most outstanding of which is the Biography of Beethoven. He wanted to examine the protagonist as clearly, clearly, and unbiasedly as possible, to take the reader as far into Beethoven's time as possible, to see him walking, writing, angering, and composing as directly as possible.
Illustration of the book: Bonn Market Square, with the town hall in the distance and the bar in Koch on the left.
Loneliness is the most stark footnote of Beethoven's life
In November 1792, at the age of 22, Beethoven became famous at a young age and came to Vienna from Bonn with a dream as a young master of performance. He wanted to fulfill what his father John and his teacher Neff had for him to become a brilliant musician; but his grander goal was to reach the heights of Handel, Bach, Haydn and Mozart and surpass them.
From Haydn and Mozart, Beethoven realized that he needed to master a erudite style in order to become a true artist. Whether on sheet paper or on the keyboard, his strength is improvisation, an explosion of lightning-like inspiration. His worldly desires matched his talents. He also always believed that he could stand out and would be saddled with a sacred duty to dedicate his life to music and embody it in music, to give music back to its source, and to give humanity a deeper understanding of it and of itself. He recognized that the path to success begins with oneself, with the cultivation of ethics, responsibility, discipline and courage, and that personal virtue, rather than skill and competence, is the true foundation of any meaningful work.
In Swafford's writings, one of Beethoven's talents was to get out of his mind, to sink into his spiritual world, to leave everyone and everything around him. This allowed him to stay away from the troubles that tormented him. In addition, improvising on the keyboard, or other behaviors, can allow him to find his own loneliness even in the crowd. Loneliness was his best, most faithful and most important companion, and it became the most vivid footnote in his life.
At the age of 24, Beethoven published the op.1 trio, which represented his first large-scale attempt at a highly Viennese style and subject matter, pioneering a new path and marking his own territory. Since then, Beethoven has produced a total of 9 numbered symphonies, 35 piano sonatas, 10 violin sonatas, 16 string quartets, 1 opera, 2 Mass, 1 oratorio and 3 cantatas, as well as a large number of chamber music, art songs and dance music. He symbolizes the pinnacle of Viennese classical music, inheriting the past and opening up the future, is the most important bridge to inherit the classical and point to the future of Romanticism, and has made outstanding achievements in almost all musical genres and technical fields, becoming a model and source of inspiration for countless future generations of musicians.
Beethoven was a popular playing star in his twenties and thirties, never far from love, but the object is changeable, and there are always women who deliver themselves. However, after missing josephine Dame, the charming Bettina Brentano and others, and being humiliated by the 17-year-old Teresa Malfatti, and experiencing repeated emotional failures, Beethoven has always lived a painful and depressed life, in addition to the desire for "eternal lovers", more than the torture of loneliness.
For an outstanding person, loneliness is not necessarily a bad thing, it may bring about a sublimation of ideas, or an artistic advancement. In a unique letter written by Beethoven to a strange pianist, he mentions that art has no boundaries, can never triumph, and that the goal most desired to achieve is always outside the boundary, which is a painful reality that all artists will find sooner or later. As a young man, Beethoven considered himself no inferior to anyone else, and emotional suffering allowed him to discover his limitations and further strengthen his faith in science and art.
Merler's portrait of Beethoven in 1804.
The perfect musician with a broken, imperfect life
There were three German giants at the beginning of the 19th century, which not only meant the end of the Enlightenment, but also predicted and opened the era of Romanticism: Kant of philosophy, Goethe of literature and Beethoven of music.
Much is devoted to Beethoven's dealings with other masters of art, which are often less pleasant in themselves. Take the scene where Beethoven and Goethe meet, for example, the encounter between the two giants does not spark any art or inspiration. Beethoven had always admired Goethe, but he was disappointed to see Goethe's humble attitude toward the nobility, while Goethe felt that Beethoven was unruly and felt a thorn in the back of this "demigod" who sat on an equal footing with him. For the rest of Beethoven's life, he claimed that Goethe was his friend, but this was not the case. Goethe's assessment of him was: "He often offends others, and he is also very pitiful, because he is getting deafer and weaker..." And when Beethoven's flesh becomes a terrible, merciless enemy, what awaits him is either destruction or tribulation and glory.
However, in addition to the main theme of Beethoven's life's tribulations and glory, there are also various dimensions intertwined. As Swaford reveals in his book, Beethoven, seen as the typical genius of Romanticism, lived a different life, some of which was noble, elegant, and incomparablely beautiful, and others world-weary, delusional, and morally inferior. As an Enlightener, he believed in reason, but in everyday life he became increasingly lost in irrationality. His world often had incompatible conflict, completely hostile territory, but he kept the boundaries clear and survived the predicament.
A major feature of this "Biography of Beethoven" is to integrate beethoven's works into his experience for interpretation, which can not only reflect the creator's ideological situation at that time more truthfully and objectively, but also enable readers to accurately and completely understand the context and connotation of the work.
For example, why did Beethoven create the Solemn Mass? For Beethoven, who had no Christian faith and whose life was trapped by material things, it was indeed strange to create a work larger than Mass in C major without commission. Although Beethoven himself stated that the purpose of the creation was to celebrate the promotion of Archduke Rudolf to Archbishop of Olomouc, it is clear that there are many more factors at play if one understands it from the perspective of secularism and humanism in Beethoven's music.
In terms of faith, was Beethoven still an "atheist" in the eyes of the devout Haydn? Swaford analyzed that as the breath of death approached, Beethoven's thoughts began to turn to eternal existence, and he once showed his friends the traces of "soaring after death". In his heart, Christ was more like a moral icon like Socrates. At the same time, secular needs play a role. The greatest Mass of the time was Haydn's work, and Haydn remained Beethoven's rival long after his death, and through this Mass he was able to compete with Haydn in the religious sphere. Perhaps the more important motivation for creation lies in Beethoven's desire to make a name for himself in history. As a respectable genre and a large-scale work close to the symphonic style, the "Solemn Mass" has long formed a great tradition of Mass composition in the development of hundreds of years. The creation of the most ambitious Mass is not only a personal statement of faith, but also a challenge to great traditions.
Everyone is a mystery. In general, the longer the time goes, the more complex the mystery becomes. For Beethoven, an outstanding figure who has never been born in music, the complexity is even more self-evident. What is certain is that no act or thought of Beethoven, as a latecomer, can be completely restored to its original appearance, and moreover, in the two centuries since Beethoven became famous, he has been repeatedly studied and described by biographers and other writers. Born during the German Enlightenment and growing up in the revolutionary years, Beethoven was considered by many to be a revolutionary musician, associating him with the spirit of the French Revolution; by the time of his death, it had become a myth of Romanticism. In fact, his personality is blunt, rough, and irritable, and he only wants to be a complete, real person, but in an era of genius worship, he became the model of romantic genius.
Almost all of Beethoven's work to date has portrayed him as a mythical being, a demigod Beethoven, sometimes even close to a transcendent saint. Swaford's in-depth deconstruction of Beethoven and his work makes this biography fundamentally different from the work of other writers. Under his pen, we seem to be able to feel the jumps of beethoven's notes, phrases, and paragraphs when he composed, as if we could hear the rustle of the quill pen on the sheet music, as if we could see the works that had been repeatedly revised and finally formed on a large number of drafts, and seemed to be able to touch this perfect musician with a mutilated and imperfect life. It can be said that this is a biographical work that is extremely close to the real Beethoven.