Peter J. Davies

Greenwood Press. 2002. 319 pp.

Reviewed by Peter McCallum

This is Peter Davies’s second book on Beethoven: the first dealt with his death: this one with his troubled life. Davies has sifted and sorted anecdotes from the Beethoven literature to construct a comprehensive series of notes on the composer’s childhood, religious beliefs and music, work habits, pastimes, and his personality. Sometimes these read like notes from the doctor’s couch, arranged in apparently random order, and of a relevance and direction which is initially unclear. The most interesting chapters are the last four, in which Davies uses his medical expertise to sift and interpret according to the language and concepts of modern mental health.

The Chapter on Childhood and Adolescence deals with Beethoven’s ancestry and Bonn years, particularly pointing out recorded mental disorders and the well-known alcoholism of his father, and the less well-known alcoholism of his grandmother, whose husband, Ludwig’s grandfather, was a wine merchant. Although the grandfather died when Beethoven was only three, Ludwig seems to have identified with him, once declaring that he thought he would probably die of a stroke “like my very worthy grandfather whom I somewhat resemble.” Davies sees the grandfather, in part, as a surrogate father compensating for the latter’s cruel and disreputable behaviour (4).

Davies gives considerable attention to Beethoven’s religious beliefs, expounding the view that religion was “as fundamental to him as thoroughbass”. In this respect he departs slightly in emphasis from much current and received opinion within the Beethoven literature, which has tended to take the view that Beethoven’s beliefs were either pantheistic, rationally deistic, or else at least eccentric and out of step with organised or orthodox devotion. Davies gives much interesting background to the conservative backlash in religious thought following the end of the Napoleonic wars, particularly on the Schlegel circle, the Redemptorist movement, fiery popular figures such as Zacharias Werner and the more moderate Johan Michael Sailer whom Beethoven admired. Davies writes with an apparently intimate knowledge of Catholic sensibilities and his comments on liturgical symbolism at such moments as the violin solo in the Missa Solemnis are interesting and persuasive.

However, his emphasis on this aspect of Beethoven’s personality is in my view overstated and influences his view on other matters with reasoning which seems to me somewhat circular. Davies asserts, for example, that Beethoven was opposed to adultery, citing one comment in a letter from 1807. It is also true that in his later years, he seems to have opposed liberal tendencies (which by then represented the faded radicalism of the enlightenment) in the matter of sexuality, partly out of concern for his nephew Carl. Davies then cites Beethoven’s opposition to adultery as his principle reason for rejecting the view, put by Maynard Solomon in 1977, that the intended recipient of the passionate love letter, anonymously addressed to the  “Immortal Beloved” and found among his papers on his death, was Antonie Brentano, since Antonie was married at the time. Solomon’s diligent research has achieved widespread acceptance, at least in the English-speaking world (though plausible suggestions for other candidates have emerged since then, notably by Celada, who suggested Countess Almerie Esterhazy in 2000). His argument is that his opposition to adultery, expressed at various times, would preclude such a relationship. It is equally plausible, however, that Beethoven’s public opinions and private passions had contradictory elements as Solomon has argued in some detail over this and other aspects of Beethoven’s sexuality. Davies’s interesting perspectives on Beethoven’s religious belief seems to me to have led him into a rather one-dimensional view of Beethoven’s attitude to women.

The discussion of Beethoven’s work habits dips into the field of Beethoven sketch study: Beethoven left some 8000 pages of drafts and sketches and recent advances in paper analysis and analytical theory have turned this area into a burgeoning area of scholarship. Davies’ interest is largely in the personality traits which such fastidious work reveals and he chiefly confines himself to anecdotes which reveal something of the composer’s work ethic and compulsiveness as revealed in his compositional practice. From this, the shift to his pastimes is mainly light relief: his befriending of dogs for example, and his fondness for macaroni cheese with fish, although Davies’s discussion of Beethoven’s reliance on alcohol is measured and informative.

Davies then moves to the chief focus of his study: Beethoven’s personality. In the first of four chapters on this he examines the paranoid aspects of Beethoven’s behaviour and its relation to his deafness. The evidence for clinical paranoid psychosis is limited and mixed. No-one familiar with Beethoven’s life could deny that he was inclined to be touchy. A modern view might incline to the belief that his behaviour towards others ranged from the justifiably irritated, to the irascibility of a person rarely in perfect health, to something approaching a borderline psychosis. It is not hard to see why he would become angry at his landlady listening at his door while he composed, even if the listener meant no harm. Equally, outmanoeuvring publishers, themselves of mixed virtue, often required cunning, and Beethoven, who liked to think of himself as honourable, seems sometimes to have been caught in dealings which appeared to be, and probably sometimes were, less than straightforward, at which times he reacted like a bear in a trap. An example is the publication of the Quintet, Opus 29 which resulted in protracted and unnecessary legal wrangling. He clearly became mistrustful of his factotum Schindler in 1824 over what seemed like paltry takings from the first performance of the Ninth Symphony but from what we now know of Schindler’s shameful distortions of the Beethoven legacy – he seems to have altered and destroyed the conversation books for example, and changed evidence to put himself in a good light -- it is not hard to imagine that Beethoven’s mistrust may have been justified.

Yet there are other aspects of his behaviour which go beyond the bounds of irascibility – his fear of being poisoned, for example, and his cruel treatment of his sister-in-law Johanna (for which he later felt remorse) over the custody of his nephew Carl. Davies assembles a balanced picture here with thoughtful detachment. Chapter Six, which deals with other personality traits, including his idolisation of the Eternal Feminine, seemed to me less satisfactory and readers might prefer Solomon’s perceptive discussion of this issue in his biography.

The last two personality chapters deal with Beethoven’s bipolar tendencies in both his personality and his music – his periods of depression around 1787, 1802, 1812, 1815-17 and 1826 – and his manic elation particularly in connection with documented creative highs, such as during the composition of the Missa Solemnis. Sudden changes from despair to elation which appear in some of his greatest late works, the final of the piano sonata, opus 110, or the Heiliger Dankgesang from the quartet opus 132, for example, seem expressively consistent with bipolar mood swings. One small detail: Davies gives 6 August 1826 as the date of Carl’s attempted suicide attempt. Some sources give this as 30 July, a difference of but a week but a significant one given that 30 July was the day he wrote the canon, Es muß sein, WoO 196 on which the finale of the last quartet, opus 135 is based. (I could not find Davies source for this date and would be interested to check this). Yet his survey of the sources in general is scrupulous and thorough and he has compressed a large amount of current knowledge into the book’s 319 pages. The text is readable in a straightforward, often dryly humorous way. The book does not bring new discoveries to the table, but it does assemble existing knowledge usefully under the cool white light of the doctor’s lamp.

Music Forum Vol 10 No 1