Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
Beethoven wrote a lot of letters, because of his deafness. He wonders how he can face people. How can he of all people face the public when the one organ that distinguishes him and gives him his art is not working? It agonised him. The other thing that comes through in the letters is this absolute confidence – not arrogance, just complete confidence in his, I suppose, destiny: schicksal.
Beethoven wasn’t prone to such flights of fancy.
Beethoven had much more guilt than Mozart. It’s astonishing because between Mozart’s death and Beethoven’s it’s only 36 years, but the Napoleonic wars, the weakening of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the rise of the individual as opposed to the class meant that the whole zeitgeist had changed. Beethoven lived at exactly the time when individual, personal feelings, and the personal experience, became something to be expressed (thanks to Goethe, Schiller, and indeed Beethoven), rather than the effect of the Baroque, and the 18th century, where an emotion was slightly generalised.
One of the things that particularised emotion in Beethoven’s case was his deafness – it’s very hard to imagine how difficult that must have been. Beethoven wrote a lot of letters because of his deafness.
Does he mention it in the letters?
Oh yes – he wonders how he can face people. How can he of all people face the public, when the one organ that distinguishes him and gives him his art is not working? It agonised him. He drank a lot. I mean, I suspect he was deeply frustrated by his deafness. But in a funny kind of way, the isolation of his deafness was a huge help to him – I don’t think there’s much doubt that it gave him an ability to think more deeply. And he tried to find ways to avoid work. He had a long problematic saga with his nephew Karl, with whom he had a sort of love-hate paternal relationship. Beethoven was tremendously controlling of Karl, who at 19 blew off part of his head in an attempted suicide. A lot of Beethoven’s letters are about that saga, about Karl and the dreadful influence of Karl’s mother, whom he describes as the queen of the night and the whore of Babylon: quite strange. But the other thing that comes through in the letters is this absolute confidence – not arrogance, just complete confidence in his, I suppose, destiny: schicksal.
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Giles Swayne is a British composer, best known for his monumental choral pieces and his interest in African musical culture. He studied at the Royal Academy of Music under Harrison Birtwistle and at the Paris Conservatoire with Olivier Messiaen. In 1980 his choral work Cry, for 28 amplified voices, was premiered by the BBC Singers under John Poole. Hailed as a landmark, it has since been performed twice at the Proms and many times worldwide. In 1981, Swayne visited Senegal to record the music of the Jola people of Casamance. These recordings are now in the British Library. From 1990 to 1996 he lived in the Akuapem Hills in eastern Ghana. He now lives in London and is Composer-in-residence at Clare College, Cambridge. He is currently working on an open-ended series of bagatelles for piano, and a choral setting of a poem. ‘The thing about music, like the arts, is that there’s an extraordinary dichotomy between the art and the career,’ he says. ‘You can have people who are really extremely mediocre with huge careers, and you can have people who are wonderfully good, who explore their art in great depth, and actually don’t have wonderful careers. Bach was one of those.’
