Beethoven's personality

The relationship between personality and the last 2 items on the list escapes me...

Azzurro wrote:

Don't you find Beethoven's personality to be unclassifiable?

Why?

Azzurro wrote:

- In short, through an iron will, he overcame the trials of a life marked by the drama of deafness

If only that were it... Anyway: tenacious. And willful. And determined.

Azzurro wrote:

- his music celebrates the triumph of heroism

- his art was expressed in all genres

What do you think?

Not relevant to defining his personality. At least in my opinion.

My question: why this inquiry?

But no, poor Azzurro! The question posed isn't all that dystopian; if anything, it is poorly formulated, or rather it is so concise that it simply cannot be understood; the error lies in condensing fundamental issues into a few lines to receive exhaustive answers. Now let's reformulate the question and..... unleash our Daniele!

Friendship,

I agree Armando . . . . let's unleash him!

Friendship to all!

What little rascals!

Anyway, Daniele won't be able to let loose before Sunday.

In the meantime, it would be nice and interesting if our friend Azzurro responded to Carlos, because his questions are absolutely pertinent.

For example, I think that the discussion about heroism could have something to do with Beethoven's character, whereas I absolutely do not understand - or I am missing something - regarding his frequenting of all kinds of musical genres.

Azzurro, if you're here, give us a sign and tell us what you think in this regard and also more generally if you feel like it!

My intention was to try to describe or outline the personality of a character like Beethoven starting from his music. I wrote down the first things that came to mind.

Perhaps it is a difficult thing to do (or impossible), don't you think that personality influences one's own music? Or at least influences the choices of an interpreter?

Indeed, in some works one can glimpse a somewhat "disturbed" personality ...

Natan! . . . let me guess . . . the serious quartet op. 95!?

...even at the point of the pathetic it almost seems as if it tends towards "noise" (clearly, compared to the context)...

I confess that in such a problematic moment, which causes me anguish for the future of our Country, it becomes difficult for me to concentrate on other unrelated topics.

The answer to Azzurro's question "Don't you find Beethoven's personality to be unclassifiable?" is: no, absolutely not!

It is indubitable that Beethoven "surpassed through an iron will the trials of a life marked by the drama of deafness" and, "if that were all" - as Carlos rightly writes -, precisely by composing music that, at least in a great phase of his life "celebrates the triumph of heroism."

The music that Beethoven composed, mainly between 1802 and 1814 – I say mainly because it also began partially as early as 1797 and had a tail in his last great works – was a direct consequence of that state of mind that arose from the realization that his deafness would be irreversible, and that his health, already precarious since adolescence, would grant him only brief pauses.

But it would be highly reductive to confine the character of a person – and of Beethoven in particular – to a single fact, however important and fateful it may be. On Beethoven's character weighed – as in each of us – congenital character traits and other things that, over the course of his life, beginning with his family drama, left an indelible mark on him.

Beethoven's personality is not unclassifiable because, if one wishes, it can be summarized and defined in a few words: he was a staunch two-faced person – something not exceptional in itself since substantially we all are – but he was this in an exponential manner. Everything in Beethoven was taken to excess to such an extent that any of us could easily construct the Beethoven that best pleases them, whether in a positive or negative sense. The exceptional thing is that this was due primarily to his own direction: in other words, it was he who contributed greatly to building his own myth.

I have already mentioned his refusal to deny anything said about him, in a letter from 1825; well, this has resulted in everything and its opposite being said about every aspect of his life. Beethoven the progressive and the reactionary, the surly intractable and the sweet passionate, the generous and the selfish, the solitary and the convivial, the melancholic always sulking and the man full of spirit with a hearty laugh. All this was Beethoven; all this coexisted in him in equal measure.

One of the most contrasting aspects of his life was that related to his sexual life: it ranges from those who want him absolutely chaste, to those who defined him as homosexual, to those who saw him as full of women whom he loved madly for about six months before falling out of love, to those who believe he was a frequent visitor of prostitutes only to repent bitterly immediately afterward and feel morally indecent. Famous is his criticism of Mozart's "Così fan tutte," considered an immoral work, while in his own life he would have indulged in immoral behaviors of much greater weight. We owe the greatest and most beautiful work on marital love to a composer who never married and who always had an absolutely conflicted relationship with the female sex and, in many respects, one that was difficult to interpret.

Beyond truths and falsehoods, partial truths and partial falsehoods, much of all this coexisted in Beethoven.

Beethoven compared himself to Socrates, to Egmont, to Leonore, to Coriolanus... and even to Jesus.

Was it not to Jesus that he thought when in 1815, in a letter to Countess Erdody, he wrote: "We finite beings, personifications of an infinite spirit, are born to experience joys and sorrows together; and it can be said that the best of us reach joy through suffering"?

His relationship was always direct with the Divine, never with Jesus!

Beethoven was an artist absolutely aware of his immeasurable greatness and, in facing his many health ailments, knew how to and wanted to combine these two things, building his immortal myth upon them.

"Submission, the most intimate submission to your Destiny, is all that sacrifices can offer you for this service of your art – or bitter struggle! - Do everything that must still be done to plan what is necessary for the long journey. You must find what your blessed desire grants, and then you must snatch it by force. Maintain a firm disposition of mind.

You must not be a man, not for yourself, only for others; for yourself there is no happiness except in yourself, in your art. God! Give me the strength to overcome myself, nothing must henceforth chain me to life."

The underlining was by Beethoven, while the words in bold are mine. They serve to highlight the messianic understanding that Beethoven wanted to carry out within his"}

art: the awareness that only renunciation and suffering could be the vehicles to fulfill his great function within the history of music.

This writing, as reported by me, constitutes the first page of his diary and dates back to 1812; it is very likely that this outburst occurred shortly after the end of his story with the mysterious "Immortal Beloved."

It is no coincidence that the only letters Beethoven never sent—the so-called "Heiligenstadt Testament" and the three to the Immortal Beloved—have served, more than any other, to create the Beethovenian myth. Beethoven would never have committed suicide, and from the very first lines, one strongly feels his clear intention not to do so. Beethoven treated his depression by feeling and convincing himself that he was an elect, a hero, and in that letter, all four movements of the Fifth [Symphony] can already be glimpsed.

The letters to the Immortal Beloved are representative of a Beethoven who is absolutely unprecedented and unexpected: in love, extremely sweet, and profoundly romantic.

But that "harsh struggle" he speaks of in his diary, in music, Beethoven translated into a harsh struggle that he undertook with the sonata form, initially assigning an absolute opposition to the two themes—translating his strong duality through this—and then leading it, with his final sonatas and his final quartets, toward its almost total disintegration; after Beethoven's quartets, there will not be the quartets of the Romantics, but those of Bartók; after his piano sonatas, there will not be those of the Romantics, but the two by Boulez: in the second, the subject of the fugue from the Hammerklavier is cited in the opening bars, and all this serves as proof that after Beethoven, there could only be the destruction of form.

Great response - as always - Daniele, and absolutely shareable. (also regarding the situation - this being "disturbed" in the narrow mental sense - of those governing us who will try in every way to scientifically destroy every economic and cultural initiative of our country). Two words for previous friends: If by noise or noisy one means din or "strepitoso" as a synonym for exceptional, formidable. A stupendous actor, a stupendous victory. The logical connection is intuitive: around the formidable, noise and confusion are created, and even exceptionality itself can be noisy. If by noise one means "going out of tune" or "rejecting," then it is a prosthetic phrase and you are completely off track: in no case did a musician like Beethoven make noise, whether scientifically or unconsciously, much less in opus 13! To move on to the "disturbed," one would have to analyze Beethoven's personality. Daniele has already responded excellently. I can say that, analyzing the sketchbooks, the compositional method is perfectly logical and consequential, meaning it perfectly respects what the Germans call (with a delicious and formidable synthesis) in a single word "Schwärmerei," which a mentally disturbed man could never apply!

Friendship,