Transcript Beethoven the Person

Beethoven the Person
•Appearance and manner
•Character and behavior
•Relationships
Beethoven was slim until his early thirties.
Penetrating brown eyes, broad forehead and
thick eyebrows.
Scars from childhood smallpox; cleft in his chin
which becomes more marked in later years.
Dressed elegantly and fashionably.
In his later years Beethoven became stockier.
Grillparzer on changes in his appearance: “I first
saw Beethoven in my boyhood years – which
may have been 1804 or 5….Beethoven in those
days was still lean, dark, and contrary to the
habit in later years, very elegantly dressed….One
or two years later I was living with my parents in
Heiligenstadt, near Vienna. Our dwelling fronted
on the garden, and Beethoven had rented the
rooms facing the street….My brothers and I took
little heed of the odd man who in the meanwhile
had grown more robust, and went about dressed
in a most negligent, even slovenly way.”
Röckel, the original Florestan in 1806, visited
Beethoven about the same time and described his
powerful physique: “…was placed the mighty
bathing apparatus in which the Master was
laving his powerful chest…and I had the
opportunity of admiring his muscular system and
sturdy bodily construction. To judge by the latter
the composer might look forward to growing as
old as Methuselah, and it must have taken a most
powerful inimical influence to bring this strong
column to so untimely a fall.”
Ries, on Beethoven’s clumsiness: “Beethoven
was the most awkward and bungling in his
behavior; his clumsy movements lacked all
grace. He rarely picked up anything without
dropping or breaking it….Everything was
knocked over,
soiled, or destroyed. How he ever
managed to shave himself at all
remains difficult to understand,
even considering the frequent cuts
on his cheeks. – He never learned
to dance in time with the music.”
Beethoven’s personality was filled with
contradictions:
good intentions / uncontrollable temper
kind / hard and cold
morose / high-spirited
On successive days he wrote to Hummel: “Don’t
come to me anymore! You are a false dog and
may the hangman do away with all false dogs!”
followed by…
“”Dear little Ignaz of my Heart! You are an
honest fellow and I now realize that you were
right….Kisses from your Beethoven, also called
dumpling.”
Frankness and rudeness
After a quarrel with Prince Lichnowsky
in 1806, Beethoven apparently said:
“Prince, what you are, you are by an
accident of birth; what I am, I am
through my own efforts. There have
been thousands of princes and there
will be thousands more;
there is only one Beethoven!”
Beginning when he was 27, his deafness grew
worse and worse, leading to
bouts of despair
more reserved
more suspicious and distrustful of others
Beethoven’s Residences
He rarely stayed in one dwelling for long.
Baron de Trémont visited Beethoven in 1809:
“Picture to yourself the dirtiest, most disorderly place
imaginable—blotches of moisture covered the ceiling,
an oldish grand piano, on which dust disputed the place
with various pieces of engraved and manuscript music;
under the piano (I do not exaggerate) an unemptied pot
de nuit;…the chairs, mostly cain-seated, were covered
with plates bearing the remains of last night’s supper
and with wearing apparel, etc.”
But paradoxically, Beethoven was obsessed with
washing—and often the water from the buckets he
Pasqualati House
Music room in Beethoven’s
last apartment, on the
Schwarzspanierstrasse
Beethoven’s Dressing
Count von Keglevics (nephew of Beethoven’s
pupil Barbara):
“He had the whim – one of many – since he
lived across from her, of coming to give her
lessons clad in a dressing gown, slippers and a
peaked nightcap.”
As he got older, he became more and more
eccentric, distrustful, convinced that he was in a
bad state financially, and his appearance—
especially his hair— grew more and more
neglected.
Beethoven’s Daily Routine
frequent change of address
housekeeping problems
But…
trouble managing financial Beethoven’s apparent
affairs
disorder was only
negligence concerning
external; he maintained
appearance
a disciplined approach to
overall untidiness
composing
many rough and apparently
illegible sketches
From Schindler:
“Beethoven rose every morning the year around at dawn
and went directly to his desk. There he would work until
two or three o’clock, his habitual dinner hour. In the
course of the morning he would usually go out of doors
once or twice, but would continue to work as he
walked…..His afternoons were regularly spent in long
walks. Late in the afternoon he would go to a favorite
tavern to read the papers….Beethoven always spent his
winter evenings at home reading serious works of
literature. Only very rarely did he work with musical
scores during the evening for the strain on his eyes was
too great….He would go to bed at ten o’clock at the
latest.”
On walking:
in
Beethoven would “twice
make the circuit of the city
double-quick time”
“I encountered Beethoven
several times on my walks
in
Mödling, and it was most
interesting to see him, a sheet of music paper and
a stump of pencil in his hand, stop often as
though listening, and then write a few notes on
the paper.