The Emerson of Music

THAYER'S LIFE OF BEETHOVEN edited by Elliot Forbes. 1 volumes, 1,136 pages. Princeton. $25.

It was Richard Wagner who called Beethoven "a world walking among men." The world was, of course, his music, and there is no more striking example of a world so self-contained or so apparently independent of the man who created it. All of the conscious or subconscious control that Beethoven was capable of seems to have gone into the music--leaving none for the day-by-day business of living. The human Beethoven could not add, could not learn the rules of grammar, and could not master his emotions. For a time, his biographers were able to ignore these facts. But in 1866 the first volume of Alexander Wheelock Thayer's great Life appeared, and Beethoven biography has not been the same since.

An Ounce of Accuracy. Thayer was no debunker, but he was a scrupulous researcher after the truth. Until he wrote his Life, Beethoven biography had been a tissue of romantic fables and errors in "almost ludicrous contrast," as Thayer put it, to the facts of the composer's life. Thayer decided to set the record straight while he was still a graduate student at Harvard, and the effort occupied him for the rest of his life. On the theory that "an ounce of historical accuracy is worth a pound of rhetorical nourish," he went abroad in 1849 and roamed the Continent, rummaging through archives, talking with surviving Beethoven friends, old violinists and singing teachers, unearthing old letters and deciphering the scrawls and hieroglyphics in the composer's notebooks.

Always out of pocket and always complaining, like Beethoven, of his ill health (he had "overworked" his brain, he said, during a brief stint on the old New York Tribune and never recovered), Thayer labored for 40 years correcting dates, altering anecdotes and filling in the vast gaps in the Beethoven chronology. Because he could not find an English publisher, the Life came out, volume by volume, in German; by the time it appeared in English in 1920, it had long been regarded by scholars as a classic and its author had been dead for 23 years. Though long out of print, it is still the basic source book for all Beethoven biographies, and it has now been edited with notes and fascinating explanatory appendixes by Harvard Professor Elliot Forbes.

It was Thayer who, by scrupulous study of the sketchbooks, revealed the slow and strangely tentative manner in which Beethoven composed, starting with ideas so trivial they look like a student's and rewriting virtually each bar a dozen times. Thayer's study of Beethoven's correspondence disproved not only the composer's supposed grand love affair with the Countess Giulietta Guicciardi but also alliances with many of the ladies with whom the sentimental 19th century liked to link his name. Factually, Thayer was rarely wrong (although he assumed the Beethoven family had come from Holland, whereas later research indicates it came from Belgium). Incredibly, a whole generation of biographers had accepted Dec. 16, 1772 as the date of Beethoven's birth until Thayer established it as occurring two years earlier, thus clearing up a series of chronological contradictions that had plagued students of the first half of the composer's life.

Ungovernable Temper. It was the character of Beethoven that most fascinated Thayer, however, and he left a portrait of the man that every biographer, with varying degrees of embarrassment, has had to reckon with since. Thayer's Beethoven is a man of atrocious manners, immense ego and ungovernable temper who at one time or another turned on virtually every one of his friends and alienated most of the musicians of Vienna. His idea of a joke was to dump a bowl of gravy on a waiter who had brought him the wrong dish.

His ingratitude was staggering, and Thayer rightly criticizes him for gulling his old friend Johann Maelzel out of the first-performance rights to The Battle Symphony, which Maelzel had commissioned. Perhaps least appealing of all, he was a self-righteous moralist who could denounce his brother Johann's wife as "an infamous strumpet" though he himself, says Thayer primly, "did not always escape the common penalties of transgressing the laws of strict purity." What Thayer meant, as he later explained in correspondence, was that Beethoven had contracted syphilis, probably in the course of certain "conquests" during his early years in Vienna, and that his deafness may have resulted from it.

A generation after Thayer's death, at 80, in 1897, British Critic Ernest Newman set the fashion in psychological evaluation of Beethoven by concluding that he suffered from "morbid sex obsessions" because of his troubles with syphilis. Alexander Wheelock Thayer belonged to a gentler, less analytic age. All he could finally conclude about the man he had spent his life studying was that, take him all in all, his was "a very human nature, one which, if it showed extraordinary strengths, exhibited also extraordinary weaknesses."

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