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Goethe and Beethoven by Alfred Brendel

 

Goethe and Beethoven

ALFRED BRENDEL

Thinking about extraordinary figures such as Goethe and Beethoven, one gets the feeling of observing in the distance two inconceivably tall towers. Their height seems impossible to calculate. What do they have in common? Where do they differ from each other? How harmonious is their architecture? Are there areas of dilapidation? Getting nearer, you can count the number of stories and windows, but the highest features are hidden in the clouds. 

Let me start by establishing what Goethe and Beethoven are not. Beethoven’s music is not, as the legend has it, harsh and heroic, in the sense that this would indicate the core of his personality. To be sure, he composed grand works such as the Eroica Symphony and the Fifth Symphony, and he had to endure the latter part of his life heroically with his hearing gravely diminished. But where does the harsh-and-heroic picture leave the profundity of his incomparable slow movements, his dolce and his pianissimo, his personal variety of grace, the dancing character of some of his finales, the humor that is discernible up to his final works? Without recognizing the full range of his expressivity and his innovative urge, we would fail to do justice to Beethoven’s greatness. Goethe, similarly, is not captured by his legend. He was not just the Olympian spirit or the privy councillor, the stormy poet or the distanced classicist of Iphigenia; he was all these things at once and so much more. The singularity of both are steeped in their personal diversity. 

Both lived in a period of upheaval. Goethe as well as Beethoven, who was a generation younger, admired Napoleon, and Goethe, in awe, considered him demonic. Napoleon told Goethe that he had read The Sorrows of Young Werther for the seventh time. Beethoven tore up his dedication to Napoleon of the Eroica Symphony after he had proclaimed himself the French Emperor, but Goethe’s admiration did not cease. He continued to wear the cross of the Légion d’honneur that was presented to him by Napoleon, and he kept a portrait relief of the French emperor next to his desk. Goethe’s art collection included no less than fifty Napoleon medals. He never shared the patriotic frenzy that Napoleon provoked in German circles. 

An aesthetic upheaval around 1800 was the transition to Romanticism. Goethe’s late that pronouncement “the Classical is healthy, the Romantic sick” should not lead us astray. He himself had taken part in the formation of Romantic poets and philosophers at the University of Jena, an institution that he had masterminded. Some of these writers were Goethe’s personal friends, and his Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship was profusely praised by Friedrich Schlegel. In the second part of Faust and in some of his papers on the natural sciences, Goethe’s writing came close to the romantic idea of Universalpoesie, of poetry merging with science. Late in his life, he declared that “it is high time that the passionate discord between Classics and Romantics will finally be reconciled.” 

Beethoven seems to us to belong safely to the classical side: even in the experimental works of his late style, he presents us with something autonomous and self-contained. And yet the contemporary German writer and composer E.T.A. Hoffmann, in his celebrated essay on the Fifth Symphony, called Beethoven a Romantic, while for the French he has always been romantique. Thus we find contradictions not only in their personalities but also in the way they were perceived, and in the manner in which they remain meaningful to us. Neither of them quite add up.

Beethoven and Goethe shared huge renown already in their lifetime. Beethoven’s coffin was followed in the streets of Vienna by many thousands of mourners, while Goethe in his later Weimar years received the homage of countless visitors whom he generously entertained. His Werther brought him early fame. Later his posterity seemed to owe more to his Faust, the impact of which in books, plays, opera, and film continue into our time. Beethoven’s posthumous fame grew to make him the most widely appreciated of all composers. His Ninth Symphony has become the universal anthem of progress; it is presented to the public throughout the world on any occasion that points towards peace, freedom, and fraternity, if possible with a cast of thousands. Napoleon aimed to conquer the world, but it was Beethoven, it would seem, who succeeded in doing so, and permanently. 

Beethoven and Goethe also share a similar range of expression. Beethoven’s musical compass reaches from the lyrical to the heroic, from simplicity to complexity, from humor to tragedy, from every mode of motion including dance to the utmost calm, from extraversion to contemplation, from triumph to desolation, from turbulence to composure, from string quartets, sonatas, and symphonies to bagatelles, from the lofty universal to the patriotic aberration. 

Goethe’s abundance, while no less impressive, was supplemented by the enormous range of his interests. Let me start with the literatures. Goethe had an impressive command of languages, read Greek and Latin in the original, wrote poems in English and French as a teenager, loved Persian poetry, and translated from the French, English, and Italian. He read Kant, and, to him even more important, Spinoza. He collected folk songs at Herder’s suggestion, and warmly welcomed Arnim’s and Brentano’s compilation of German folk poetry Des Knaben Wunderhorn, which appeared in 1805-1808. In his writings he treated history and politics, and also public affairs, economics, and mining. He immersed himself passionately in the arts and contemplated for a while whether to become a painter. Inspired by Winckelmann, he enthused about the art of antiquity, while Palladio became his architectural guiding light. His musical needs ought by no means to be forgotten — they were particularly geared towards singing. For comic opera and opera buffa, he even wrote a number of libretti that were composed and performed. In Weimar, where he kept all of Mozart’s later operas in the repertory, he remained in charge of theatre and opera for many years, frequently stage-directing the performances himself. Yet what fascinated Goethe more than anything during his late years were the natural sciences. His Theory of Colors, written in opposition to Newton’s, was particularly close to his heart. His phenomenological approach has recently found a number of advocates; it stands opposed to the empirical world of Galileo or Newton. If there was a blind spot in Goethe’s quest for knowledge, it was mathematics. 

And what Goethe and Beethoven further shared, if only for a while, were the persistent advances of Bettina von Arnim, an attractive young woman of considerable eloquence, a kind of female Cherubino, who pursued them both relentlessly. The ardor with which she tried to persuade Goethe of Beethoven’s greatness obviously did not fall on receptive ears.

Beethoven remained a staunch admirer of Goethe throughout his life — without, however, earning any acknowledgement for his settings of several of Goethe’s poems. The only one of Beethoven’s works that Goethe appreciated was his incidental music for Goethe’s play Egmont, a stirring plea for freedom that was performed at the Weimar court. But not overly much: it appears that Goethe, who was hardly a born revolutionary, perceived Beethoven’s music as excessively violent. Goethe admired Mozart above all; he staged Don Giovanni at his theatre with particular care. Like his political ideas, Goethe’s musical views were strongly defined but hardly progressive. For this reason, the magnificence of Schubert’s lieder eluded him as well. Where Goethe’s ears continued to serve him to perfection was in the perception of the sound of his own poetic language. 

When Beethoven and Goethe met in Teplitz in 1812 and spent time together, Goethe sent a note to Christiane Vulpius: “Never have I encountered an artist more concentrated, more energetic, or more cordial.” It is remarkable that, for once, this lucid characterization of the person may also be applied to Beethoven’s music: to its concentration, its propelling impulse, its warmth. Soon, however, some differences became apparent — for example, Goethe’s effortless socializing with dukes, queens, and ladies-in-waiting versus Beethoven’s grim unconventionality and social sullenness, his way of sometimes brusquely dealing with friends and antagonizing even male benefactors — Lobkowitz, Kinsky, Lichnowsky, Razumovsky — who nevertheless generously continued to finance his life in Vienna, keeping the Schuppanzigh Quartet at his disposal, and organising extensive rehearsals for the Eroica Symphony in various of Lobkowitz’ castles ahead of its first performance in Vienna. A glance at their handwriting serves to make their social difference apparent. Goethe writes in a thoroughly controlled manner, the lines strictly horizontal, the letters strongly slanted to the right. Beethoven’s letters, notes, and music manuscripts, by contrast, frequently push at the borders of the legible in their chaotic disorder.

While Beethoven’s hearing problems progressively excluded him from social contact, Goethe retained his reputation as a superb conversationalist and reciter over many years. Within a remarkable circle of poets, writers, and intellectuals living in Weimar or teaching in Jena, Goethe always stood out. So how did he look? For his time he was tall. Tending towards corpulence, he had stunning dark brown eyes, a sonorous bass voice, yellow and somewhat crooked teeth, and an impressively sizeable nose. All the same, he was considered good-looking, and not just by women. Count Wolf Baudissin — who, jointly with August Wilhelm Schlegel, Dorothea Schlegel and Ludwig Tieck, produced the great German-language version of Shakespeare — pronounced that he never saw a more beautiful man of sixty. Goethe’s eloquence was legendary. He spoke softly and in a very measured way, it was said, but with an incredible assurance and adroitness of expression, with vivid mimicry and expressive gestures in an uninterrupted flow. 

Yet Goethe also loved to contradict, which brings me to a principal feature of his personality. His inner constitution consisted of contradictions, a fact of which he was well aware. He called himself “a person whose nature constantly throws him from one extreme to the other.” Like his Faust, he himself is “a man with his contradictions.” Contradictions embraced the whole of his life. Goethe didn’t think highly of opinions and contradicted them with pleasure. “Each uttered word stimulates its contrary sense.” Kanzler von Müller, one of his most intelligent conversation partners, speaks of his ability “to transform himself into all shapes, to play with everything, to absorb the most diverse of opinions and let them pass.” 

On the one side, Goethe declared: “For poems conjured out of nothing I have no use.” On the other: “All my poems are occasional.” (Alle meine Gedichte sind Gelegenheitsgedichte.) For Goethe, “the obstinacy of the moment” embodied the natural and the norm. He demanded spontaneity, though he reported to Frau von Stein about his work on Wilhelm Meister’s Theatrical Mission “that he was infusing artificiality into his style, in order to make it appear more natural.” “The conscience of the poet is a precious thing, yet the true power of production always rests, in the end, in the unconscious.” Goethe mistrusted the Socratic “know thyself,” but he also wrote a memoir called Dichtung und Wahrheit, or Poetry and Truth. He is light and dark, a man of alternations, open both to reason and the irrational. He criticizes sentimentalism while simultaneously penning his own productions in the sentimental manner, not to forget his satire called “The Triumph of Sentimentality.” He avoided funerals but he clandestinely kept Schiller’s skull at his house for decades. He protested that “there is nothing more painful to me than writing letters,” but he produced, by the estimate of Albrecht Schöne, more than twenty thousand of them. Against an all-devouring empiricism he counterposed his own dogmatic worldview. 

He even contradicts his own contradiction. Surprisingly enough, there is one constant in Goethe’s life: the unassailability of nature. “In a conversation with another human being I am never quite sure who of us is right, but in conflict with nature I can tell from the start that she is right.” “The consistency of nature consoles us beautifully about the inconsistency of men.” “In whatever fashion, life is good.” Goethe accepts nature in all its beauty and terror. Nature is unfeeling, illuminating the good and the bad in equal measure. The disastrous earthquake of Lisbon in 1755 did not unsettle him as it did Voltaire. Goethe, who mistrusted all rules and dogmas, surrendered to natural law, to the consistency of nature. He called nature an organ played by our Lord, with the devil operating the bellows. 

Similarly, the artist in Goethe’s view proceeds not as an imitator but as an innovator and a creator. Here he agrees with Kant, of whom he said in old age: “His immeasurable merit on behalf of the world and, I may say, on my own behalf, is that in his Critique of Judgement art and nature are positioned next to one another and both are entitled to act aimlessly from grand principles.” Madame de Staël, one of the most perceptive women of her time, who greatly contributed to Goethe’s fame, once remarked that Goethe “feels powerful enough to bring, like nature, destruction into his own work.” 

In literature, Goethe saw Shakespeare’s creations as nature’s embodiment. His plays, as Goethe says, all rotate around that secret point, the one that no philosopher has yet been able to determine, the point where the peculiarity of our self, the pretended freedom of our will, collides with the necessary motion of the whole. To describe freedom of will as pretended and questionable strikes the present reader as strangely modern.  

Beethoven, too, was close to nature, but hardly in the same fundamental sense. In his roamings through the countryside, you would hardly imagine him philosophizing or cataloguing the plants rather than pursuing his musical ideas. To be sure, a work such as the Pastoral Symphony gives evidence for Beethoven’s warm rural sympathy and affection. Yet I see liberty, not nature, as his principal concern, while Goethe, as he himself says, in a conflict between Natur- und Freiheitsmännern, between the adherents of nature and the adherents of liberty, would choose the naturalist. What concerns Goethe is inner freedom, the freedom of the single individual and not, as in Beethoven’s case, that of a future, utopian mankind. In his Mephisto he declares that he wouldn’t mind raising a glass in honor of liberty “if only the quality of your wines were slightly better.” 

Already in Bonn, Beethoven encountered the writings of Kant and Schiller. In Kant he would have found this: “The beautiful things indicate that human beings fit into the world” — an essential sentence. (Nietzsche made it even more poignant when he later said that “the only justification of the world and of humankind is aesthetic.”) Of Goethe’s poems, Beethoven’s set twenty to music, although lied composition was not his foremost interest. As we know, Beethoven had decided already in Bonn to compose Schiller’s “Ode to Joy.” When he finally did so in Vienna, he shortened the poem and left out those stanzas which celebrate nature. 

How did Beethoven look? Again, like Goethe, he was equipped with a sonorous bass voice. For the rest, his appearance was markedly different — stocky, pockmarked, with curly hair, untidy in his numerous Viennese quarters, negligent also in his attire. This unruliness stands in utter contrast to the rigorous control of his compositions. Yet Beethoven famously improvised on the piano. Goethe as well must have been an outstanding improviser — of poems, of course — as was Marianne von Willemer, for a while his poetic companion, who contributed a few of the finest pieces to his West-Eastern Divan. Already in Goethe’s early poems of this “Storm and Stress” period, we encounter a directness and a spontaneity not seen before. 

Opinions about Goethe’s and Beethoven’s posthumous impact have differed. Both Heine and Nietzsche, two vociferous if not uncritical admirers, thought Goethe to have been an event within the German language that remained without consequence. On the other hand, there does not seem to be any doubt about his impact on various other disciplines. Beethoven’s later music remained an enigma even to some of his friends. It was admiringly absorbed by Berlioz, Mendelssohn, Liszt, and Wagner, yet its audacity found its true continuation only in the twentieth century. Schumann, Mendelssohn, and Brahms responded to the challenge of the late quartets by domesticating them, smoothing them out.            

The ambition to write and to think about the meaning of music has persisted for centuries. One of Beethoven’s leading commentators calls him an ideological composer. Others have different and equally simplifying views. The urge to derive from his works a formal analysis or to impose on it poetic, philosophical, religious, or even political ideas makes us easily forget that music has above all to be performed, turned into sound. (I am speaking here both as a performer and a listener.) The notion that the personal life of an artist will inform us about the reason for a work or furnish us with the explanatory background of a piece is widespread. But art and artist are not an equation — rarely does one mirror the other. What the composer creates may even be the opposite of his personality. We are talking about two incommensurable spheres — the common human one necessarily limited, the one within a great artist almost unlimited. 

The first piece that Mozart seems to have composed after the death of his father was “A Musical Joke.” Beethoven’s Fifth Piano Concerto, a work so obviously given to the positive, was composed during Napoleon’s siege of Vienna 1809, which the composer described: “What a destructive and desolate life around me. Nothing but drums, cannons, human misery of all kinds.” By no means does Beethoven’s sympathy for Napoleon explain the musical greatness of his Third Symphony, nor does his longing for liberty and brotherhood explain the stature of his Ninth Symphony. (Program music after Beethoven, which is inspired by personalities from imagination and myth such as Faust, Don Quixote, Zarathustra, Taras Bulba or Scheherazade, or by artists and ideas, only rarely aims at self-disclosure.) Goethe understood this irreducibility: in his view music possesses a demonic dimension — rising from cryptic depths, chaos turns into order. 

Can music tell a story? There are instances where one could believe it. Here is an example. In Beethoven’s two-movement Sonata Op. 54, the title La Belle et la Bête that was bestowed on it by Richard Rosenberg seems apt, because it also hints at the formal process. A gracefully feminine theme and a fiercely stomping masculine theme are juxtaposed. In the course of the movement, la belle gradually gets the upper hand: the space that is granted to the beast is curtailed at each recurrence. When in the coda a new lyrical theme appears, la bête is reduced to soft triplets in the bass. After an ultimate short outburst of the beast in fortissimo, the concluding bars belong to la belle alone. 

There is something like a psychology of music that follows the trail of its frame of mind, its characters, its tensions and resolutions. To be able to hear it is a special talent. Beethoven seems to have toyed with the idea of providing his works with poetic titles, but he refrained from it in the end. And yet his skill at characterization has never been surpassed. He had honed it in several smaller variation works before, while in his three most important sets of theme and variations he extended and diversified the variation form to an unprecedented degree. Whoever plays all his sonatas will constantly be reminded of the fact that Beethoven does not repeat himself. Obviously, his memory for what he had already composed was as powerful as his urge for innovation. Was there any other composer who covered a comparable distance from his beginnings to the string quartet Op. 135? 

In humor, Beethoven has a marked advantage. Goethe, it is said, possessed a brilliant skill in reciting comic texts, but he was not a humorist and he did not want to be one. Can you imagine Goethe laughing? When he called a writer a humorist, he was excluding him from the possibility of greatness. The exception was Laurence Sterne, the author of Tristram Shandy, who delighted him to no end. Goethe distinguished between “good” humor and “evil” humor, but he only appreciated the good kind because it requires “equanimity and strength of character,” whereas the evil kind includes misanthropy and contempt of the world. When humor becomes grotesque, Goethe feels threatened. He talks of his own “timidity in the face of the absurd,” which can be overcome only by good humor and irony. He was familiar with Schlegel’s statement that naivety and irony are the hallmarks of genius. Schiller counted Goethe among the naifs, and Goethe did not object. 

In Goethe’s main poetic artery, blood from the heart continued pulsing until the end. His encounters with Ulrike von Levetzow and the Polish pianist Maria Szymanowska generated glorious poems. Up to his last days, however, we also come across those states of mind of which Goethe says: “I find myself in a veritable poetic mood in which I don’t know what I want or what I ought to do.” He counts his Wilhelm Meister among the most incalculable productions “to which I myself do not own the key.” Madame de Staël mentions, not without justification, his deep-seated immorality covered by a veil of mysticism. 

But finally the veil obscures both of them. Whatever one can say about Beethoven and Goethe remains incomplete, an inadmissible simplification. The highest stories of the towers remain invisible.

https://libertiesjournal.com/articles/goethe-and-beethoven/