The Bear from Bonn

The French baron wanted urgently to see Beethoven, but a friend assured him it was impossible: "Ever since France became an Empire, Beethoven has had such a hatred for the French . . ."* The baron made his visit to Beethoven's apartment in Vienna, nonetheless, and "a very ugly and evidently ill-humored man opened the door."

The visitor was aghast at what he saw inside: "A rather old grand piano covered in dust . . . Beneath it ... an unemptied chamber pot . . . The chairs . . . were covered with plates full of the remains of the previous evening's meal." It was an equal shock to realize that the ugly man who let him in was Beethoven himself. Concluded the baron: "I had seen the bear in his cage."

In this scene, as in others from Michael Hamburger's Beethoven: Letters, Journals and Conversations (Pantheon; $3.75), the great composer appears as one of the shaggiest two-legged bears of all time. British Author Hamburger contributes nothing that is new; but his neat arrangement of recollections, and some new translations of Beethoven's letters and notebooks, give readers an intimate, cage-side view of the master, if not quite the whole picture.

A Naked Heart. The Beethoven of 1809 was 39, and already the famed composer of the mighty "Eroica," the "Moonlight" and "Appassionata" sonatas. He was a self-made man risen from low birth--his father was a drunken court musician in Bonn--to lofty republican ideals. He was also a man tortured by a bad stomach and that most "terrible affliction" of a musician, deafness. The deafness left its mark early. At 31 he confided in letters to a friend: "I fled from men, had to appear a misanthropist, though I am far from being one ... I scarcely hear those who are speaking softly . . . and yet I cannot bear to be yelled at."

He was "very clumsy and awkward," and "he seldom took up anything without dropping it or breaking it ... It is difficult to understand how he succeeded in shaving himself . . . He could never learn to dance in time .. ." He had a sharp eye for beautiful women: "Usually when we walked past a rather attractive girl, he would turn round, look at her again sharply through his glasses, and laughed or grinned when he found that I had observed him. He was very frequently in love, but usually only for a very short time." He never married.

He was "a naked heart without show," but he was also a puzzling mixture of parsimony and generosity, arrogance and humility. Once, as the Austrian Empress and her attendants approached, he muttered to Goethe: "Keep your arm linked in mine; they must make room for us, not we for them." Yet in 1812 the man who had liberated music from its classical bounds, and raised composers to something more than servants of a court, wrote to a friend, "Do not rob Handel, Haydn, Mozart of their laurel wreaths: they deserve them; I have not yet earned mine."

A Scandalous Subject. For Beethoven, Handel was "the unequalled Master of all Masters! Go and learn to produce such great effects by such modest means." He revealed a prudish side of his nature in his comment on Mozart: "The Magic Flute remains [his] greatest work," but as for Don Giovanni: "Art, which is sacred, should never be debased in the service of so scandalous a subject."

He had no doubts about his own prowess as an opera composer: "Although I know what my Fidelio is worth, I know just as clearly that the symphony is my true element."

His end, to those who saw it, seemed almost as if the master himself had composed it. He lay unconscious while a fierce storm raged outside. Suddenly, as a great flash of lightning and a massive peal of thunder split the heavens, Beethoven sat up, opened his eyes, clenched his upraised fist for several seconds, and fell back dead.

* In 1804, disillusioned by the news that his revolutionary idol, Napoleon, had had himself proclaimed emperor, Beethoven raged: "Now, too, he will tread underfoot all the rights of man." He strode to his work table and ripped off the part of the title page of his "Eroica" Symphony bearing the inscription "Buonaparte."

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