In Search of Beethoven: A Personal Journey
by John Suchet (Elliott & Thompson, 2024; 302 pages)
Between Two Stools
The journalist and broadcaster John Suchet has written several books about Ludwig van Beethoven, reflecting a lifelong love of the great composer’s music, bordering on the obsessive. So he has written extensively about Beethoven and while not a historian or musicologist in his own right, he obviously has the respect of others who are, and many who admire him and his books.
I have not read his other works, so am in no position to judge or compare. And Suchet has also written about his own life, most movingly in his memoir of his late wife Bonnie’s demise with dementia. This book aims to be both, but reads as neither one thing nor another. It is a lop-sided amalgam of travelogue, music history and episodes from his career in the media. It is a books of bits and pieces which don’t flow naturally, with unnecessary repetition of a few incidents in Beethoven’s life, presented each time as if new to the reader.
It takes nearly 90 pages until Beethoven reaches Vienna and then the book comes to life, with accounts of some extraordinary premieres of pieces, the beginning of Beethoven’s struggles with health, and also passages that stand out with vivid descriptions of certain piano sonatas and symphonies. When Suchet writes about the music, his love and appreciation come to the fore.
It’s “van” Not “von”
The outline of Beethoven’s life – his origins in Bonn and his flourishing in Vienna, his consuming deafness and irascible personality – is well known. But I did learn more about the composer which changes how I think about him. The account of his dealings with his nephew Karl, whom he manipulated and bullied, to the extent of driving the young man to attempt to take his own life, shines a clear light on what kind of man Beethoven was. I had assumed that Ludwig was a cantankerous old buffer who, frustrated by his deafness, had his eccentricities. But the picture that emerges clearly here is of a destructively selfish and self-important man who used his power and reputation to inflict deliberate cruelty on his relatives and friends. He also insulted and alienated the most generous of patrons who had made him who he was.
And in the midst of dragging his poor sister-in-law through the courts, in order to drive a wedge between her and her son, it emerges that Beethoven’s reputation and proud name were a sham. His family were “van Beethoven” with Dutch roots, and not “von Beethoven”, with connotations of German aristocracy. He had not corrected the acutely class-conscious Austrian high society who assumed he was of high birth, and was exposed by his own words to be none of the sort.
Art or the Artist?
How do we navigate the gulf between beautiful art and the flawed or even reprehensible artist who created it? There are those, like Suchet in my understanding, who are happy to overlook Beethoven’s appalling behaviour because of the struggle within him. Should the Artist be free of all constraints to express his unique god-like talent?
Hogwash, I say. There are and have been wonderfully talented individuals whose lives have been a disaster area. I admire the paintings of Caravaggio, who was a murderer. I can appreciate the elegance and exquisite design in the work of the sculptor and designer Eric Gill, but do we overlook the fact that he was a reprehensible paedophile? No, certainly not, in my opinion. Does that mean Gill’s sculptures should be removed from Westminster Cathedral or the façade of Broadcasting House? Some people believe so. Following that logic, should you and I remove all the “Gill Sans” typefaces from our computers?
In some ways a dedicated artist is likely to be selfish to some degree. They need others to provide the resources they lack, in order to concentrate on their art. Would we tolerate a contemporary artist – or a “genius” in any field of endeavour – whose freedom from the rules which constrain imagination and expression, do damage to the lives, freedoms or mental health of those around them? My implicit answer is no, they are not absolved from the consequences of their behaviour. They live in society, in families, in networks of people who often tolerate and enable them to fulfil their potential, but those privileges also entail responsibilities, however lightly they would like to wear them.
And I don’t see a distinction between artists of the present and those of the past. They may have lived in different times, with different standards, but there is no world in which murder (Caravaggio), sexual abuse of one’s family (Gill) or deliberate, calculated cruelty (Beethoven) become excusable because of the perpetrator’s talent.
Adulation of Genius
Is there even such a thing as “genius”? The notion has a lot to do with the Victorian historians’ promotion of the “Great Man” theory of history. But sometimes individuals have burnished their own exalted reputations. Certainly Sir Isaac Newton was happy to promulgate the image of himself as an unsurpassed intellectual. (He wasn’t.) Such towering intellectual “geniuses” seem to fall within Friedrich Nietzsche’s concept of the supermensch, individuals who throw off conventional values to achieve greater things. We all know the extension of that philosophy into the racial superiority and tyrannies that destroyed millions of lives in the 20th century. The notion of “genius” is a grossly overused term now, and the myth has been eroded by concepts of the “10,000 hours” that is a benchmark of practice and development of the greatest of virtuosos and artists.
Beethoven relied entirely on access to aristocratic circles in Vienna to attract the patronage that he needed. As one of the first “Romantics” (in terms of artistic style and revolutionary outlook) he was in an unusual position of both pandering to the highest aristocratic and royal admirers, while himself also a disciple of revolutionary Napoleon Bonaparte. The contradictions are indeed intriguing, but his puffed-up self-importance seems every bit as illusory as the high ideals of his hero Bonaparte, when the latter declared himself “Emperor” in 1804.
I am deeply moved by some of Beethoven’s music, but share none of the adulation that Suchet has for the man, which borders – in his own words – on worship (His second wife says of some serendipity, that “Beethoven is looking after you” – oh good grief!). Some of the composer’s works, particularly his late string quartets, would certainly find a place on my “desert island” playlist, but I have no respect or warmth towards him as a man. His works may be immortal, but Beethoven was a horrible man.
Elsewhere on the Bookshelf
Other books about artists I admire:
- Robert Simpson, Carl Nielsen: Symphonist (Kahn & Averill, 1952/1979; 260 pages) – This is a brilliant guide to the great Dane’s extraordinary sequence of 6 symphonies. Reading it while listening to the music has opened my ears to hear new things.
- Paul Griffiths, Bela Bartok (The Master Musicians series, J M Dent & Sons, 1984; 224 pages) – a well-integrated story of Bartok’s life and the development of his unique musical voice. Extraordinary man & extraordinary music.
- John Eliot Gardner, Music in the Castle of Heaven: A Portrait of Johann Sebastian Bach (Penguin, 2012/2013; 628 pages) – it’s not unfair to say that you have to be a fan of Bach’s music to endure, let alone enjoy this. It is an exhaustive biography that spares no detail of the man’s life or work. But it is worth plunging in for deep dive into the details of the composer’s work, especially the astonishing cycles of cantatas. I love it!
Books about problematic “genius”:
- Patricia Fara, Newton: The Making of a Genius (Picador, 2002; 348 pages) – the author shows how Sir Isaac Newton not only defended his reputation in his own lifetime, but made sure his legacy would become a myth of genius, while denigrating his rivals.
- Virginia Nicholson, Among the Bohemians: Experiments in Living 1900-1939 (Penguin, 2003; 400 pages) – this is a brilliant portrait and examination of the group of British artists, poets, and writers who threw off conventions to free their creative energies. Outrageous and occasionally sad, this account doesn’t shy away from the self-centred and sometimes damaging lifestyles adopted by such acclaimed artists as Augustus John and the Bloomsbury set.
Eric Gill: can we separate the artist from the abuser? | Eric Gill | The Guardian (an article about an exhibition in 2017 which confronted the controversies about Eric Gill and how we should approach his work.
Rejecting someone’s work because you don’t approve of how they behave is a slippery slope. The mathematician Fermat was also a judge, and he once had an erring bishop burned at the stake. Pythagoras was once unable to get the better of a pupil in an argument, so he had the lad drowned. Seems harsh.
I agree that it is a slippery slope. I object to Ted Hughes being “cancelled” because of his perceived behaviour towards his partner Sylvia Plath and I still read his poems. But then again, I find it hard to disentangle the OTT racial mythology of Wagner with the fact that his operas were beloved of the Nazis. Speaking of whom, in a different field, do we completely ignore the findings of Nazi doctors because of their lack of ethics? I really don’t know. But in the case of Beethoven, I find it hard to understand how every facet of his life is treated like a mediaeval relic worthy of veneration. His music may be matchless, but he was a flawed man. But then again, perhaps I just don’t understand the concept of “celebrity”.
A recent example is the late, great and not especially lamented James Watson. He had some horrible ideas about race, and his Nobel Prize and scientific eminence gave him a platform from which to spout them. But he still, with Francis Crick, discovered the double helix.
You mentioned Isaac Newton, and when he was responsible for the Royal Mint he had a man hanged for counterfeiting. Putting a man who was obsessed with alchemy in charge of a mint was a bold move on somebody’s part.