The Titan at Home

THE LETTERS OF BEETHOVEN (1,489 pp.) --Emily Anderson--St. Martin's Press ($40).

Ludwig van Beethoven has always been a favorite example of the artist as superman. Here was a genius who behaved like one: noble, solitary, brooding and eccentric. A titan pitted against fate, said his admirers, as they listened to what they thought was fate in the Fifth Symphony. But Beethoven's letters reveal a man pitted not so much against fate as against servants, publishers, a nephew and a sister-in-law. This new volume, the largest (1,570) collection of his letters to date, was assembled by Emily Anderson, who spent 15 years gathering them from places as remote from Beethoven's Vienna as Japan, Southern Rhodesia, Iowa and Ohio.

"I mean to devote my life to justice and virtue," wrote Beethoven in the fashionable rhetoric of his day. But as other letters amply demonstrate, he was governed mostly by his moods, and they were ungovernable. At 19, he berated a fellow composer: "You're a false dog, and may the hangman do away with false dogs." Next day he wrote the same man: "You are an honest fellow, and now I know you were right." Twenty-four years later. Beethoven had not mellowed. "I must declare that the purity of my character does not permit me to reward your kindness with friendship." he informed a secretary who had just done him a favor. But later all was forgiven: "Excellent fellow! You may dine with me at noon."

Sometimes Naughty. While young, Beethoven loved in great gusts of passion. In 1805 he wrote the Countess Josephine Deym: "Long--long--of long duration may your love become, for it is so noble. Oh you--you make me hope that your heart will long beat for me--mine can only--cease--to beat for you--when it no longer beats." But one passion led to another, and Beethoven was soon writing the same words to another woman. Once, when his exuberance got the better of him, he had to make excuses to an irritated husband for trying to talk his wife into a date while he was away. "It is one of my chief principles." he wrote sheepishly, "never to be in any other relationship than that of friendship with the wife of another man. Possibly I did indulge in some jokes which were not quite refined. But I myself told you that sometimes I am very naughty."

From the first letter to the last, Beethoven complained of illness. Occasionally he tried to lift the gloom with a little labored humor. (He thought it a joke to set the salutation of a letter to a couple of bars of music, sometimes elaborating it into a canon.) But deafness, his last and worst affliction, was no matter for jokes and gradually drained him of any gaiety. "You would find it hard to believe what an empty, sad life I have had for the past two years," he wrote a friend. "My poor hearing haunted me everywhere like a ghost; and I have avoided all human society. I seem a misanthrope and yet am far from being one."

Wrathful Prophet. As he grew deafer, he became more paranoiacally suspicious of everyone. He accused musicians of deliberately misreading his music, publishers of trying to cheat him, friends of betraying him. Cooped up alone in his house, he feuded endlessly with servants over trivia, described in minute detail how "brutish" they were. But he reserved his sternest strictures for his nephew Karl.

When Karl's father died. Beethoven took the boy away from his mother, whose casual amours he denounced like a wrathful prophet--a recriminating compensation, some biographers say, for the syphilis Beethoven picked up in his own youth. He prescribed music for Karl, then philosophy. But Karl was no genius and joined the army instead. Beethoven was full of advice. In letter after letter, he upbraided the boy: "What distresses me most of all is the thought of the consequences which you will suffer as a result of your behaviour. No one will believe or trust you who has heard what has happened and how you have mortally ruined me." Taking all this to heart, Karl tried to commit suicide in 1826. Beethoven never got over the shock. A year later he died.

As faithfully translated and copiously annotated as they are, these letters explain everything about Beethoven except his music. "Beethoven's letters are full of sham rhetoric, so obviously sincere," writes Biographer Alan Pryce-Jones. "He never learned to use words, let alone spell them, and scarcely troubled to attach more than an oblique meaning to them . . . He ran no risk of disseminating his feelings in the ordinary intercourse of humanity." Even while Beethoven was composing his finest works--the last quartets--his letters were concerned only with servants, publishers and nephew. Whence came the soaring grandeur and philosophic calm that characterize these works? The letters give no hint.

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