Lyre v. Orchestra

GOETHE AND BEETHOVEN--Remain Rolland--Harper ($5).

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Ludwig van Beethoven were contemporaries, but it was long before they met, not long before they parted. In these four essays Remain Rolland, music-lover, Goethe expert, discussed in scholarly but readable fashion their queer relationship toward each other and toward the enthusiastic girl who tried to bring them together.

Her name was Bettina von Arnim-Brentano. She was the child of Maximiliana von Laroche, one of Goethe's many loves, and may have thought (thinks Rolland) that she was actually Goethe's daughter. Her own affair with Goethe was rapturous but platonic, except for some early scenes in which the poet behaved himself like Daddy Browning. When Bettina met Beethoven he was still unfamous but very conscious of his worth, and she wrote rhapsodically to Goethe about this unappreciated musical genius. When they finally met, however, Goethe thought Beethoven uncouth; Beethoven considered Goethe an anxious snob. When they met some royalty a-walking, Beethoven barged right through the middle of them, snorting plebeian resentment, while Goethe stood hat in hand by the roadside, bowing, murmuring, "Your Highness! Your Highness!" When Beethoven played and Goethe's eyes filled with tears, Beethoven "lectured him sharply on his sentimentality." Afterwards Goethe seldom mentioned Beethoven, but sometimes he had his music played. But the music scared him, he never really liked it. He would sit iri a corner and growl: "It is stupendous, absolutely mad. It makes me almost fear that the house will collapse. And supposing the whole of mankind played it at once!"

The Author. A citizen more of Europe than of France, Remain Rolland was one of the few top-flight intellectuals who not only tried to prevent the late Great War but refused to succumb to it. The result: exile in Switzerland, where he still lives (aetat 65). When he digs into a subject he digs deep. His ten-volume Jean-Christophe won him the Nobel Prize (1915). The Soul Enchanted, a study in feminism, ran to three volumes. Since then he has been working the Beethoven vein, has published one (U. S.-translated) book on Beethoven the Creator (TIME, Sept. 16, 1929). Rolland's scholarship is a mine from which he does not care to emerge. Says he: "My connections with my generation are broken."

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