Titans of History (41 page)

Unlike Mozart, Beethoven's genius took time to flower fully. Nevertheless, by the age of nine he was receiving composition lessons from Christian Gottlob Neefe, court organist at Bonn, becoming official assistant organist by the age of fourteen. Around
this time Beethoven traveled to Vienna, and it is likely that he met Mozart and played to him. But his stay was interrupted by news of his mother's illness, and he was forced to return home to Bonn, where he found her dying of tuberculosis.

Beethoven now took charge of the family finances, largely because of his father's increasing incapacity. He began working as a musical tutor to the children of wealthy courtiers, as well as performing as a violinist in the court orchestra and the local theater. His positions allowed him to meet many influential nobles, including the Viennese aristocrat Count Ferdinand Waldstein, a skilled musician who became a friend and patron. Possibly at Waldstein's arrangement, Beethoven went to Vienna to study with the composer Haydn, lessons paid for by the elector, his employer. He left Bonn in 1792 and never returned.

Impressing the Viennese salons and nobility with his virtuoso performances on the piano, Beethoven performed widely and was considered a superb improviser—even greater than Mozart. His compositions at this time included piano sonatas, variations and concerti, as well as his first two symphonies, all of which show the influence of his own heroes, Mozart and Haydn.

The following years, up until around 1802, are considered Beethoven's early period, during which he composed some significant piano works. Brilliant, fine compositions, they are not as innovative as the music of his later years. By now Beethoven's progressive deafness had become impossible for him to ignore. He was brought close to despair and, perhaps recognizing that his career as a virtuoso was over, began to focus on composition.

The story goes that when Beethoven oversaw the first performance of his Ninth Symphony at the Kärntnertor Theater in 1824, the soloists in the orchestra had to point out that the audience was applauding his work. Turning to see the silent adulation, he
began to weep. He was by now totally deaf and never heard the work that had just been performed to such acclaim.

Beethoven had noticed the first symptoms from 1796, when he had begun to experience tinnitus, a constant ringing in his ears that made it difficult to hear and appreciate music or to engage in conversation. By 1802 there was little doubt that his condition was serious, and worsening. For a composer there could be nothing so destructive. Fully realizing the depth of his affliction darkened his mood. In the summer of 1802, in a letter discovered only after his death and known as the “Heiligenstadt Testament,” he wrote:

O ye men who think or say that I am malevolent, stubborn or misanthropic, how greatly do you wrong me. You do not know the cause of my seeming so … for six years I have been in a hopeless case, made worse by ignorant doctors, yearly betrayed in the hope of getting better, finally forced to face the prospect of a permanent malady whose cure will take years or even prove impossible
.

All that kept him from suicide, he said, was his art, which made it “unthinkable for me to leave the world forever before I had produced all that I felt called upon to produce.”

Although he could not hear the music he composed, Beethoven's gradual descent into deafness coincided with an increasing brilliance in his composition, with his middle-period works being characterized by themes of struggle and heroism, and those of his third period—the late period—a time of total deafness, displaying a powerful intellectual depth.

By 1817 Beethoven was completely deaf, and for the latter part of his life he was able to communicate with friends only through written conversations. The resulting notebooks are unique historical
documents, recording his thoughts and opinions on his music and the way it should be interpreted, and there are also written notes in the scores of his works.

At Beethoven's autopsy he was diagnosed as having a “distended inner ear,” which had developed lesions over time. Since then, other explanations have been suggested, including syphilis, typhus, the physical damage caused by beatings from his father and the effects of immersing his head in cold water to stay awake.

Posthumous analysis of Beethoven's hair revealed dangerously high levels of lead, certainly damaging to health, the effects of which may have contributed to his unpredictable moods. We may never know the cause of his deafness for certain; but what is beyond doubt is Beethoven's heroism in defying his condition to create a musical world of such timeless resonance today.

Settled in Vienna, he produced a series of masterpieces. His Symphony No. 3, completed in 1803, was originally dedicated to Napoleon Bonaparte, whose revolutionary zeal made him a hero to Beethoven. When Napoleon declared himself emperor in May 1804, the disillusioned composer angrily removed the dedication. Nevertheless, this dramatic, powerful symphony remained a landmark in Beethoven's musical development and when published in 1806 was suitably re-entitled Sinfonia eroica.

Beethoven's middle period saw a rush of compositions that included the Waldstein and Appassionata piano sonatas, the Fourth Piano Concerto, the Razumovsky Quartets and the Violin Concerto, and also his first and only opera,
Fidelio
. His Symphonies Nos. 4 and 5 also date from this period, with the Fifth, its opening theme recognizable the world over, being a landmark in musical originality. Just as original is his Symphony No. 6, known as the Pastoral, in which woodwind instruments imitate the birds of the local countryside. The Symphonies Nos. 7 and 8 mark the close of a period filled with orchestral masterpieces.

Composing less in his later years, as complete deafness claimed him, Beethoven's late-period works, from around 1815 onwards, are marked by increased intimacy and emotional power. His final piano sonatas, opuses 109, 110 and 111, are extraordinary virtuoso works, in which complexity is perfectly partnered with lyricism. On the other hand, his majestic Symphony No. 9, of 1824, explodes with the final movement's “Ode to Joy,” featuring a full choir and soloists—its soaring and exhilarating jubilance now used, somewhat absurdly, to drum up enthusiasm for the bureaucracy of the European Union. His last string quartets were completed in 1826, which coincided with the attempted suicide of Beethoven's nephew, to whom he was guardian. This, along with a bout of pneumonia and the onset of cirrhosis of the liver, probably contributed to his death in March 1827.

Prone to black moods and periods of emotional upheaval, Beethoven had difficulty maintaining relationships, and he never married—though a letter discovered after his death, addressed to his “Immortal Beloved,” has led many to speculate on the possibility of a secret, married lover. He was buried in great pomp, his funeral in Vienna befitting a composer who had become famous throughout Europe as one of the greatest of his, or any other, time.

1775–1817

Like Shakespeare, she took, as it were, the common dross of humanity, and by her wonderful power of literary alchemy, turned it into pure gold. Yet she was apparently unconscious of her strength, and in the long roll of writers who have adorned our noble literature there is probably not one so devoid of pedantry or affectation, so delightfully self-repressive, or so free from egotism, as Jane Austen
.

George Barnett Smith, in
The Gentleman's Magazine
, No. 258 (1895)

A parson's daughter who completed just six novels during her short life, Jane Austen emerged from deliberate anonymity to become English literature's best-loved female writer. Her gently ironic yet profound novels of love, manners and marriage transformed the art of writing fiction.

Acutely observed and subtly incisive, Austen's works are acknowledged as masterpieces. Her irony conceals a penetrating gaze, encapsulated in the famous opening line of
Pride and Prejudice
(1813): “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.” This was the world she chronicled: “The Assemblies of Nottingham are, as in all other places, the resort of the young and the gay, who go to see and be seen; and also of those, who, having played their matrimonial cards well in early life, are now content to sit down to a game of sober whist or quadrille.” Thus, in 1814, was encapsulated the purpose of the endless round of entertainments that
consumed the lives of England's gentry and aristocracy: to find matches for the new generation.

As the feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft commented, a girl's “coming out,” at the age of fifteen or sixteen, was purely “to bring to market a marriageable miss, whose person is taken from one place to another, richly caparisoned.” The market they chose was of paramount importance. One prudent clergyman advised his stepsisters not to move to rural Oxfordshire, on the grounds that the location “is but an indifferent one for young ladies to shine in.” Ambitious young women—or those with ambitious parents—would head for London.

No one was under any illusions about where they stood in the pecking order. It was unlikely that a provincial parson's daughter, such as Jane Austen, with her modest portion and limited connections, would even meet, let alone marry, a son of the high aristocracy. The daughters of the elite, carrying substantial dowries, were rigorously protected against the adventurers who infiltrated London's society balls in the hopes of bagging themselves an heiress.

Parents and children alike were aware that choices were determined as much by financial considerations as by inclination. “When poverty comes in at the door love flies out the window,” one gentlewoman reminded her daughter in 1801. The absolute minimum a gentleman could hope to scrape by on during this period was about £280 a year. But this would require a life, as one bride accepted, where “we shall live in a quiet domestic manner and not see much company.”

Even an esquire on £450 a year would struggle to satisfy the social requirements of his class: a country household, lodgings in London, visits to the theater and the opera, attendance at balls and pleasure gardens. One impecunious suitor complained to his beloved that: “Every parent takes utmost care to marry his child
[where there] is money, not considering inclination … your papa no doubt may marry you to one [that] will make large settlements, keep an equipage and support you in all grandeur imaginable.” Prudence ruled as much as passion. The lurking specter of spinsterhood propelled many young women toward a match offering little but financial security.

Austen's amused restraint was in marked contrast to the romantic melodrama in fashion at the time, and the historian Macaulay thought that her well-constructed comedies of manners were the closest to perfection that writing could ever hope to reach.

The seventh child of eight, Austen spent her life among a large and affectionate family in Hampshire and Bath. “Her life passed calmly and smoothly, resembling some translucent stream which meanders through our English meadows, and is never lashed into anger by treacherous rocks or violent currents,” wrote George Barnett Smith in 1895. She wrote about ordinary lives, about the petty dramas of lively provincial society, about the preoccupations, the squabbles, the complexities and the exhausting difficulties of unexceptional people. Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832), the best-selling author of
Ivanhoe
, was one of the few to recognize the extent of Austen's genius at the time, writing that she had “the exquisite touch which renders ordinary commonplace things and characters interesting.” She pastiched the fashionable Gothic melodrama in
Northanger Abbey
, and broke away from the prevailing tradition that literature should be about great figures, great events or great dramas. Austen showed that the small and the conversational could be just as compelling, and her witty depictions of the elaborate matrimonial dances of the English gentry are thinly disguised social commentary, displaying a shrewd understanding of human motivation and social necessity.

Along the way, Austen produced some of literature's most
memorable characters, drawn with her typical precision and intricacy. Aloof Mr. Darcy, obsequious Mr. Collins, flustered Mrs. Bennet and her wry and long-suffering husband, Mr. Bennet, populate
Pride and Prejudice
. Feisty, outspoken daughter Elizabeth Bennet is one of literature's most engaging heroines, closely followed by the flawed but well-intentioned Emma Woodhouse of
Emma
(1816), who finds her equilibrium with the sensible and honorable George Knightley.

Austen's novels may end happily, but not without revealing the situation of women of her class and era. Marriage determined a woman's fate. As Charlotte Lucas's marriage to the ridiculous Mr. Collins so eloquently demonstrates, almost any kind of marriage was deemed better than being an old maid. Elizabeth Bennet's decision to challenge this convention is presented as admirable, but daring. Whereas we know that Elizabeth's wit and charm will win her a husband (and a well-deserved place in the aristocracy), we also know that scores of women like Charlotte will not be so lucky and will have to compromise. Under a calm surface, Austen illuminates the prejudices, the scandals, the sheer misfortune and misunderstanding that could leave women without a husband, and in the absence of a personal fortune, dependent entirely on the kindness of others for survival. Austen also suggested, through the successful social elevation of both male and female characters by means of marriage, that a stagnant but often snobbish aristocracy was in need of new blood.

The novelist who excelled in her treatment of love and marriage never herself married. She was, by all accounts, vivacious and attractive. The only surviving picture of her, a drawing done by her sister Cassandra, seems not to have done her justice. She had at least two semi-serious flirtations. At twenty-six she was briefly engaged to Harris Bigg-Withers, an heir five years her junior. Facing a lifetime with a man by all accounts as unfortunate as his name, Austen
broke it off after less than a day. Rumors prevail of another, later attachment that was Austen's true love. Her beloved sister Cassandra, who also remained unmarried, destroyed much of her correspondence after her death.