The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 01, No. 07, May, 1858

Yet call him not up for judgment, without reflecting that his awful elevation and the gigantic task he had assumed had perverted a heart naturally kind and affectionate, and left him little leisure to devote to the virtues which decorate domestic life. The numberless anecdotes related of him, the charm with which he won to himself all whom he attempted to conciliate, the warm attachment of those immediately about him, tend to the belief that there was much of good in him. But his eye was continually fixed on the star he saw blazing before him, and in his efforts to follow its guidance, he heeded not the victims he crushed in his onward progress. He considered men as mere instruments to extend his dominion, and he used them with wasteful expenditure, to advance his projects or to secure his conquests. But he was not cruel, nor was he steeled to human misery. Had he been what he is sometimes represented, he never could have retained the ascendency over the minds of his followers, which, regardless of defeat and suffering and death, lived on when even hope had gone.

Accusatory words are easily spoken, and there is often a disposition to condemn, without calculating the compelling motives which govern human actions, or the height of place which has given to surrounding objects a coloring and figure not to be measured by the ordinary rules of ethics. Many a man who cannot bear a little brief authority without abusing it, who lords it over a few dependants with insolent and arbitrary rule, whose temper makes everybody uncomfortable within the limited sphere of his government and whose petty tyranny turns his own home into a despotic empire, can pronounce a sweeping doom against one who was clothed with irresponsible power, who seemed elevated above the accidents of humanity, whose audience-chamber was thronged by princes, whose words were as the breath of life, and who dealt out kingdoms to his kindred like the portions of a family inheritance. Let censure, then, be tempered with charity, nor be lightly bestowed on him who will continue to fill a space in the annals of the world when the present shall be merged in that shadowy realm where fact becomes mingled with fable, and the reality, dimmed by distance, shall be so transfigured by poetry and romance, that it may even be doubted whether he ever lived.

Seventeen years after the period which I have attempted to illustrate by a few incidents, I stood by his grave at St. Helena. I was returning from a long residence in the East, and, having doubled the stormy Cape of Good Hope, looked forward with no little interest to a short repose at the halting-place between India and Europe. But when I saw its blue mass heaving from the ocean, the usual excitement attendant on the cry of "Land!" was lost in the absorbing feeling, that there Napoleon Bonaparte died and was buried. The lonely rock rose in solitary barrenness, a bleak and mournful monument of some rude caprice of Nature, which has thrown it out to stand in cheerless desolation amidst the broad waters of the Atlantic. The day I passed there was devoted to the place where the captive wore away the weary and troubled years of his imprisonment, and to the little spot which he himself selected when anticipating the denial of his last wish,—now fully answered,—"that his ashes might repose on the banks of the Seine, in the midst of that French people whom he had so much loved."

There was nothing in or about the house to remind one of its late occupant. It was used as a granary. The apartments were filled with straw; a machine for threshing or winnowing was in the parlor; and the room where he died was now converted into a stable, a horse standing where his bed had been. The position was naked and comfortless, being on the summit of a hill, perpetually swept by the trade-winds, which suffered no living thing to stand, except a few straggling, bare, shadeless trees, which contributed to the disconsolate character of the landscape. The grave was in a quiet little valley. It was covered by three plain slabs of stone, closely surrounded by an iron railing; a low wooden paling extended a small distance around; and the whole was overhung by three decaying willows. The appearance of the place was plain and appropriate. Nothing was wanting to its unadorned and affecting simplicity. Ornament could not have increased its beauty, nor inscription have added to its solemnity.

The mighty conqueror slept in the territory of his most inveterate foes; but the path to his tomb was reverently trodden, and those who had stood opposed to him in life forgot that there had been enmity between them. Death had extinguished hostility; and the pilgrims who visited his resting-place spoke kindly of his memory, and, hoarding some little token, bore it to their distant homes to be prized by their posterity as having been gathered at his grave.

The dome of the Invalides now rises over his remains; his statue again caps the column that commemorates his exploits; and one of his name, advanced by the sole magic of his glory, controls, with arbitrary will and singular ability, the destinies, not of France only, but of Europe.

The nations which united for his overthrow now humbly bow before the family they solemnly pledged themselves should never again taste power, and, with ill-concealed distrust and anxiety, deprecate a resentment that has not been weakened by years nor forgotten in alliances.

Not to them alone has Time hastened to bring that retributive justice which falls alike on empires and individuals. The son of "The Man" moulders in an Austrian tomb, leaving no trace that he has lived; while the lineal descendant of the obscure Creole, of the deposed empress, of the divorced wife, sits on the throne of Clovis and Charlemagne, of Capet and Bonaparte. Within the brief space of one generation, within the limit of one man's memory, vengeance has revolved full circle; and while the sleepless Nemesis points with unresting finger to the barren rock and the insulted captive, she turns with meaning smile to the borders of the Seine, where mausoleum and palace stand in significant proximity,—the one covering the dust of the first empire, the other the home of the triumphant grandson of Josephine.

* * * * *

EPIGRAM ON J.M

  Said Fortune to a common spit,    "Your rust and grease I'll rid ye on,  And make ye in a twinkling fit     For Ireland's Sword of Gideon!"  In vain! what Nature meant for base     All chance for good refuses;  M. gave one gleam, then turned apace     To dirtiest kitchen uses.

BEETHOVEN: HIS CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH

(From Original Sources.)

There is upon record a remark of Mozart—probably the greatest musical genius that ever lived—to this effect: that, if few had equalled him in his art, few had studied it with such persevering labor and such unremitting zeal. Every man who has attained high preëminence in Science, Literature, or Art, would confess the same. At all events, the greatest musical composers—Bach, Handel, Haydn, Gluck—are proofs that no degree of genius and natural aptitude for their art is sufficient without long-continued effort and exhaustive study of the best models of composition. And this is the moral to be drawn from Beethoven's early life.

"Voila Bonn! C'est une petite perle!" said the admiring Frenchwoman, as the Cologne steamboat rounded the point below the town, and she caught the first fair view of its bustling landing-places, its old wall, its quaint gables, and its antique cathedral spires. A pearl among the smaller German cities it is,—with most irregular streets, always neat and cleanly, noble historic and literary associations, jovial student-life, pleasant walks to the neighboring hills, delightful excursions to the Siebengebirge and Ahrthal,—reposing peacefully upon the left bank of the "green and rushing Rhine." Six hundred years ago, the Archbishop-Electors of Cologne, defeated in their long quarrel with the people of the city of perfumery, established their court at Bonn, and made it thenceforth the political capital of the Electorate. Having both the civil and ecclesiastical revenues at their command, the last Electors were able to sustain courts which vied in splendor with those of princes of far greater political power and pretensions. They could say, with the Preacher of old, "We builded us houses; we made us gardens and orchards, and planted trees in them of all manner of fruits"; for the huge palace, now the seat of the Frederick-William University, and Clemensruhe, now the College of Natural History, were erected by them early in the last century. Like the Preacher, too, "they got them men-singers and women-singers, and the delights of the sons of men, as musical instruments, and that of all sorts." Music they cherished with especial care: it gave splendor to the celebration of high mass in chapel or cathedral; it afforded an innocent and refined recreation, in the theatre and concert-room, to the Electors and their guests.

In the list of singers and musicians in the employ of Clemens Augustus, as printed in the Electoral Calendar for the years 1759-60, appears the name, "Ludwig van Beethoven, Bassist." We know little of him, and it is but a very probable conjecture that he was a native of Maestricht, in Holland. That he was more than an ordinary singer is proved by the position he held in the Chapel, and by the applause which he received for his performances as primo basso in certain of Mosigny's operas. He was, moreover, a good musician; for he had produced operas of his own composition, with fair success, and, upon the accession of Maximilian Frederick to the Electorate in 1761, he was raised to the position of Kapellmeister. He was already well advanced in life; for the same record bears the name of his son Johann, a tenor singer. He died in 1773, and was long afterward described by one who remembered him, as a short, stout-built man, with exceedingly lively eyes, who used to walk with great dignity to and from his dwelling in the Bonngasse, clad in the fashionable red cloak of the time. Thus, too, he was quite magnificently depicted by the court painter, Radoux, wearing a tasselled cap, and holding a sheet of music-paper in his hand. His wife—the Frau Kapellmeisterinn—born Josepha Poll—was not a helpmeet for him, being addicted to strong drink, and therefore, during her last years, placed in a convent in Cologne.

The Bonngasse, which runs Rhineward from the lower extremity of the Marktplatz, is, as the epithet gasse implies, not one of the principal streets of Bonn. Nor is it one of great length, notwithstanding the numbers upon its house-fronts range so high,—for the houses of the town are numbered in a single series, and not street by street. In 1770, the centre of the Bonngasse was also a central point for the music and musicians of Bonn. Kapellmeister Beethoven dwelt in No. 386, and the next house was the abode of the Ries family. The father was one of the Elector's chamber musicians; and his son Franz, a youth of fifteen, was already a member of the orchestra, and by his skill upon the violin gave promise of his future excellence. Thirty years afterward, his son became the pupil of the Beethoven in Vienna.

In No. 515, which is nearly opposite the house of Ries, lived the Salomons. Two of the sisters were singers in the Court Theatre, and the brother, Johann Peter, was a distinguished violinist. At a later period he emigrated to London, gained great applause as a virtuoso, established the concerts in which Haydn appeared as composer and director, and was one of the founders of the celebrated London Philharmonic Society.

It is common in Bonn to build two houses, one behind the other, upon the same piece of ground, leaving a small court between them,—access to that in the rear being obtained through the one which fronts upon the street. This was the case where the Salomons dwelt, and to the rear house, in November, 1767, Johann van Beethoven brought his newly married wife, Helena Keverich, of Coblentz, widow of Nicolas Laym, a former valet of the Elector.

It is near the close of 1770. Helena has experienced "the pleasing punishment that women bear," but "remembereth no more the anguish for joy that a man is born into the world." Her joy is the greater, because last year, in April, she buried, in less than a week after his birth, her first-born, Ludwig Maria,—as the name still stands upon the baptismal records of the parish of St. Remigius, with the names of Kapellmeister Beethoven, and the next-door neighbor, Frau Loher, as sponsors. This second-born is a strong, healthy child, and his baptism is recorded in the same parish-book, Dec. 17, 1770,—the day of, possibly the day after, his birth,—by the name of Ludwig. The Kapellmeister is again godfather, but Frau Gertrude Müller, née Baum, next door on the other side, is the godmother. The Beethovens had neither kith nor kin in Bonn; the families Ries and Salomon, their intimate friends, were Israelites; hence the appearance of the neighbors, Frauen Loher and Müller, at the ceremony of baptism;—a strong corroborative evidence, that No. 515, Bonngasse, was the actual birth-place of Beethoven.

The child grew apace, and in manhood his earliest and proudest recollections, save of his mother, were of the love and affection lavished upon him, the only grandchild, by the Kapellmeister. He had just completed his third year when the old man died, and the bright sun which had shone upon his infancy, and left an ineffaceable impression upon the child's memory, was obscured. Johann van Beethoven had inherited his mother's failing, and its effects were soon visible in the poverty of the family. He left the Bonngasse for quarters in that house in the Rheingasse, near the upper steamboat-landing, which now erroneously bears the inscription, Ludwig van Beethovens Geburtshaus.

His small inheritance was soon squandered; his salary as singer was small, and at length even the portrait of his father went to the pawnbroker. In the April succeeding the Kapellmeister's death, the expenses of Johann's family were increased by the birth of another son,—Caspar Anton Carl; and to this event Dr. Wegeler attributes the unrelenting perseverance of the father in keeping little Ludwig from this time to his daily lessons upon the piano-forte. Both Wegeler and Burgomaster Windeck of Bonn, sixty years afterward, remembered how, as boys, visiting a playmate in another house across the small court, they often "saw little Louis, his labors and sorrows." Cecilia Fischer, too, a playmate of Beethoven in his early childhood, and living in the same house in her old age, "still saw the little boy standing upon a low footstool and practising his father's lessons," in tears.

What indications, if any, the child had given of remarkable musical genius, we do not know,—not one of the many anecdotes bearing upon this point having any trustworthy foundation in fact. Probably the father discovered in him that which awakened the hope of some time rivalling the then recent career of Leopold Mozart with little Wolfgang, or at least saw reason to expect as much success with his son as had rewarded the efforts of his neighbor Ries with his Franz; at all events, we have the testimony of Beethoven himself, that "already in his fourth year music became his principal employment,"—and this it continued to be to the end. Yet, as he grew older, his education in other respects was not neglected. He passed through the usual course of boys of his time, not destined for the universities, in the public schools of the city, even to the acquiring of some knowledge of Latin. The French language was, as it still is, a necessity to every person of the Rhine provinces above the rank of peasant; and Beethoven became able to converse in it with reasonable fluency, even after years of disuse and almost total loss of hearing. It has also been stated that he knew enough of English to read it; but this is more than doubtful. In fact, as a schoolboy, he made the usual progress,—no more, no less.

In music it was otherwise. The child Mozart seems alone to have equalled or surpassed the child Beethoven. Ludwig soon exhausted his father's musical resources, and became the pupil of Pfeiffer, chorist in the Electoral Orchestra, a genial and kind-hearted man, and so good a musician as afterward to be appointed band-master to a Bavarian regiment. Beethoven always held him in grateful and affectionate remembrance, and in the days of his prosperity in Vienna sent him pecuniary aid. His next teacher was Van der Eder, court organist,—a proof that the boy's progress was very rapid, as this must have been the highest school that Bonn could offer. With this master he studied the organ. When Van der Eder retired from office, his successor, Christian Gottlob Neefe, succeeded him also as instructor of his remarkable pupil.

Wegeler and Schindler, writing several years after the great composer's death, state, that, of these three instructors, he considered himself most indebted to Pfeiffer, declaring that he had profited little or nothing by his studies with Neefe, of whose severe criticisms upon his boyish efforts in composition he complained. These statements have hitherto been unquestioned. Without doubting the veracity of the two authors, it may well be asked, whether the great master may not have relied too much upon the impressions received in childhood, and thus unwittingly have done injustice to Neefe. The appointment of that musician as organist to the Electoral Court bears date February 15, 1781, when Ludwig had but just completed his tenth year, and the sixth year of his musical studies. These six years had been divided between three different instructors,—his father, Pfeiffer, and Van der Eder; and during the last part of the time, music could have been but the extra study of a schoolboy. That the two or three years, during which at the most he was a pupil of Pfeiffer, and that, too, when he was but six or eight years of age, were of more value to him in his artistic development than the years from the age of ten onward, during which he studied with Neefe, certainly seems an absurd idea. That the chorist may have laid a foundation for his future remarkable execution, and have fostered and developed his love for music, is very probable; but that the great Beethoven's marvellous powers in higher spheres of the art were in any great degree owing to him, we cannot credit. Happily, we have some data for forming a judgment upon this point, unknown both to Wegeler and Schindler, when they wrote.

Neefe was, if not a man of genius, of very respectable talents, a learned and accomplished organist and composer, as a violinist respectable, even in a corps which included Reicha, Romberg, Ries. He had been reared in the severe Saxon school of the Bachs, and before coming to Bonn had had much experience as music director of an operatic company. He knew the value of the maxim, Festina lente, and was wise enough to understand, that no lofty and enduring structure can be reared, unless the foundations are broad and deep,—that sound and exhaustive study of canon, fugue, and counterpoint is as necessary to the highest development of musical genius as mathematics, philosophy, and logic are to that of the scientific and literary man. He at once saw and appreciated the marvellous powers of Johann van Beethoven's son, and adopted a plan with him, whose aim was, not to make him a mere youthful prodigy, but a great musician and composer in manhood. That, with this end in view, he should have criticized the boy's crude compositions with some severity was perfectly natural; equally so that the petted and bepraised boy should have felt these criticisms keenly. But the severity of the master was no more than a necessary counterpoise to the injudicious praise of others. That Beethoven, however he may have spoken of Neefe to Wegeler and Schindler, did at times have a due consciousness of his obligations to his old master, is proved by a letter which he wrote to him from Vienna, during the first transports of joy and delight at finding himself the object of universal wonder and commendation in the musical circles of the great capital. He thanks Neefe for the counsels which had guided him in his studies, and adds, "Should I ever become a great man, it will in part be owing to you."

The following passage from an account of the virtuosos in the service of the Elector at Bonn, written in 1782, when Beethoven had been with Neefe but little more than a year, and which we unhesitatingly, attribute to the pen of Neefe himself, will give an idea of the course of instruction adopted by the master, and his hopes and expectations for the future of his pupil. It is, moreover, interesting, as being the first public notice of him who for half a century has exercised more pens than any other artist. The writer closes his list of musicians and singers thus:—

"Louis van Beethoven, son of the above-named tenorist, a boy of eleven years, and of most promising talents. He plays the piano-forte with great skill and power, reads exceedingly well at sight, and, to say all in a word, plays nearly the whole of Sebastian Bach's 'Wohltemperirtes Klavier,' placed in his hands by Herr Neefe. Whoever is acquainted with this collection of preludes and fugues in every key (which one can almost call the non plus ultra of music) knows well what this implies. Herr Neefe has also, so far as his other duties allowed, given him some instruction in thorough-bass. At present he is exercising him in composition, and for his encouragement has caused nine variations composed by him for the piano-forte upon a march7 to be engraved at Mannheim. This young genius certainly deserves such assistance as will enable him to travel. He will assuredly become a second Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, should he continue as he has begun.

  "'Wem er geneigt, dem sendet der Vater der    Menschen und Götter  Seinen Adler herab, trägt ihn zu himmlischen    Höh'n und welches  Haupt ihm gefällt um das flicht er mit    liebenden Händen den Lorbeer.'  Schiller."

In the mere grammar of musical composition the pupil required little of his master. We have Beethoven's own words to prove this, scrawled at the end of the thorough-bass exercises, afterward performed, when studying with Albrechtsberger. "Dear friends," he writes, "I have taken all this trouble, simply to be able to figure my basses correctly, and some time, perhaps, to instruct others. As to errors, I hardly needed to learn this for my own sake. From my childhood I have had so fine a musical sense, that I wrote correctly without knowing that it must be so, or could be otherwise."

Neefe's object, therefore,—as was Haydn's at a subsequent period,—was to give his pupil that mastery of musical form and of his instrument, which should enable him at once to perceive the value of a musical idea and its most appropriate treatment. The result was, that the tones of his piano-forte became to the youth a language in which his highest, deepest, subtilest musical ideas were expressed by his fingers as instantaneously and with as little thought of the mere style and manner of their expression as are the intellectual ideas of the thoroughly trained rhetorician in words.

The good effect of the course pursued by Neefe with his pupil is visible in the next published production—save a song or two—of the boy;—the

"Three Sonatas for the Piano-forte, composed and dedicated to the most Reverend Archbishop and Elector of Cologne, Maximilian Frederick, my most gracious Lord, by LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN, Aged eleven years."

We cannot resist the temptation to add the comically bombastic Dedication of these Sonatas to the Elector, which may very possibly have been written by Neefe, who loved to see himself in print.

"DEDICATION"MOST EXALTED!

"Already in my fourth year Music began to be the principal employment of my youth. Thus early acquainted with the Lovely Muse, who tuned my soul to pure harmonies, she won my love, and, as I oft have felt, gave me hers in return. I have now completed my eleventh year; and my Muse, in the hours consecrated to her, oft whispers to me, 'Try for once, and write down the harmonies in thy soul!'—'Eleven years!' thought I,—'and how should I carry the dignity of authorship? What would men in the art say?'—My timidity had nearly conquered. But my Muse willed it:—I obeyed and wrote.

"And now dare I, Most Illustrious! venture to lay the first fruits of my youthful labors at the steps of Thy throne? And dare I hope that Thou wilt deign to cast upon them the mild, paternal glance of Thy cheering approbation? Oh, yes! for Science and Art have ever found in Thee a wise patron and a magnanimous promoter, and germinating talent its prosperity under Thy kind, paternal care.