Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians — Ludwig van Beethoven, Part 1

[Illustration: BEETHOVEN] LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN

Melody has by Beethoven been freed from the influence of Fashion and changing Taste, and raised to an ever-valid, purely human type.

Beethoven's music will be understood to all time, while that of his predecessors will, for the most part, only remain intelligible to us through the medium of reflection on the history of Art.

--_Richard Wagner_ LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN

Music is the youngest of the arts.

Modern music dates back about four hundred years.

It is not so old as the invention of printing.

As an art it began with the work of the priests of the Roman Catholic Church in endeavoring to arrange a liturgy.

The medieval chant and the popular folk-song came together, and the science of music was born.

Sculpture reached perfection in Greece, painting in Italy, portraiture in Holland; but Germany, the land of thought, has given us nearly all the great musicians and nine-tenths of all our valuable musical compositions.

Holland has taken a very important part in every line of art and handicraft, and in way of all-round development has set the pace for civilization.

Art follows in the wake of commerce, for without commerce there is neither surplus wealth nor leisure.

The artist is paid from what is left after men have bought food and clothing; and the time to enjoy comes only after the struggle for existence.

When Venice was not only Queen of the Adriatic but of the maritime world as well, Art came and established there her Court of Beauty.

It was Venice that mothered Giorgione, Titian, the Bellinis, and the men who wrought in iron and silver and gold, and those masterful bookmakers; it was beautiful Venice that gave sustenance and encouragement to Stradivari (who made violins as well as he could) up at Cremona, only a few miles away.

But there came a day when all those seventy bookmakers of Venice ceased to print, and the music of the anvils was stilled, and all the painters were dead, and Venice became but a monument of things that were, as she is today; for Commerce is King, and his capital has been moved far away.

So Venice sits sad and solitary--a pale and beautiful ruin, pathetic beyond speech, infested by noisy shop-keepers and petty pilferers, the degenerate sons of the robbers who once roamed the sea and enthroned her on her hundred isles.

All that Venice knew was absorbed by Holland.

The Elzevirs and the Plantins took over the business of the seventy bookmakers, and the art-schools of Amsterdam, Leyden and Antwerp reproduced every picture of note that had been done in Venice.

The great churches of Holland are replicas of the churches of Venice.

And the Cathedral at Antwerp, where the sweet bells have chimed each quarter of an hour for three centuries, through peace and plenty, through lurid war and sudden death--there where hangs Rubens' masterpiece--that Cathedral is but an enlarged "Santa Maria de' Frari," where for two hundred years hung "The Assumption," by Titian.

In these churches of Holland were placed splendid organs, and the priests formed choirs, and offered prizes for the best singing and the best compositions.

Music and painting developed hand in hand; for at the last, all of the arts are one--each being but a division of labor.

The world owes a great debt to the Dutch.

It was Holland taught England how to paint and how to print, and England taught us: so our knowledge of printing and painting came to us by way of the apostolic succession of the Dutch.

The march of civilization follows a simple trail, well defined beyond dispute.

Viewed in retrospect it begins in a hazy thread stretching from Assyria into Egypt, from Egypt into Greece, from Greece to Rome--widening throughout Italy and Spain, then centering in Venice, and tracing clear and deep to Amsterdam--widening again into Germany and across to England, thence carried in "Mayflowers" to America.

That remark of Charles Dudley Warner, once near neighbor to Mark Twain, that there is no culture west of Buffalo, was indelicate if not unkind;

and residents of Omaha aver that it is open to argument.

But the fact stands beyond cavil that what art we possess is traceable to our masters, the Dutch.

It must be admitted that the art of printing was first practised at Mayence on the Rhine, leaving the Chinese out of the equation; but it had to travel around down through Italy before it reached perfection.

And its universality and usefulness were not fully developed until it had swung around to Holland and was given by the Dutch back to Germany and the world.

And as with printing, so with music.

Germany has specialized on music.

She has succeeded, but it is because Holland gave her lessons.

* * * * * During the fore part of the Seventeenth Century, there lived in Antwerp, Ludvig van Biethofen, grandfather of the genius known as Beethoven.

A

life-size portrait of him can be seen in the Plantin Musee, and if you did not know that the picture was painted before Beethoven was born, you would say at once, "Beethoven!"

There is a look of stern endurance, as if the artist had admired Rembrandt's "Burgomaster" a little too well, yet that sturdiness belonged to the Master, too; and there are the abstracted far-away look, the touch of proud melancholy, and the becoming unkemptness that we know so well.

The child is grandfather to the man.

Beethoven bore slight resemblance to his immediate parents, but in his talent, habits and all of his mental traits, he closely resembled this sturdy Dutchman who composed, sang, led the military band, and played the organ at the Church of Saint Jacques in Antwerp.

Being ambitious, Ludvig van Biethofen, while yet a young man, moved to Bonn, the home of Clement Augustus, Archbishop-Elector of Cologne.

The chief business of elector was, in case of necessity, to elect a King.

America borrowed the elector idea from Germany.

But our "electoral college" is a degenerate political appendicle that is continued, because, in borrowing plans of government, we took good and bad alike, not knowing there was a difference.

The elector scheme in the United States is occasionally valuable for defeating the will of the people in case of a popular majority.

In justice, however, let me say that the original argument of the Colonists was that the people should not vote directly for President, because the candidate might live a long way off, and the voter could not know whether he was fit or not.

So they let the citizen vote for a wise and honest elector he knew.

The result is that we all now know the candidates for President, but we do not know the electors.

The electoral college in America is just about as useful as the two buttons on the back of a man's coat, put there originally to support a sword-belt.

We have discarded the sword, yet we cling to our buttons.

But the electors of Germany, in days agone, had a well-defined use.

The people were not, at first, troubled to elect them--the King did that himself, and then as one good turn deserves another, the electors agreed to elect the successor the King designated, when death should compel him to abdicate.

Then to fill in the time between elections, the electors did the business of the King.

It will thus be seen that every elector was really a sort of King himself, governing his little State, amenable to no one but the King.

And so the chief business of the elector was to keep the people in his diocese loyal to the King.

There have always existed three ways of keeping the people loving and loyal.

One is to leave them alone, to trust them and not to interfere.

This plan, however, has very seldom been practised, because the politicians regard the public as a cow to be milked, and something must be done to make it stand quiet.

So they try Plan Number Two, which consists in hypnotizing the public by means of shows, festivals, parades, prizes and many paid speeches, sermons and editorials, wherein and whereby the public is told how much is being done for it, and how fortunate it is in being protected and wisely cared for by its divinely appointed guardians.

Then the band strikes up, the flags are waved, three passes are made, one to the right and two to the left; and we, being completely under the hypnosis, hurrah ourselves hoarse.

Plan Number Three is a very ancient one and is always held back to be used in case Number Two fails.

It is for the benefit of the people who do not pass readily under hypnotic control.

If there are too many of these, they have been known to pluck up courage and answer back to the speeches, sermons and editorials.

Sometimes they refuse to hurrah when the bass-drum plays, in which case they have occasionally been arrested for contumacy and contravention by stocky men, in wide-awake hats, who lead the strenuous life.

This Plan Number Three provides for an armed force that shall overawe, if necessary, all who are not hypnotized.

The army is used for two purposes--to coerce disturbers at home, and to get up a war at a distance, and thus distract attention from the troubles near at hand.

Napoleon used to say that the only sure cure for internal dissension was a foreign war: this would draw the disturbers away, on the plea of patriotism, so they would win enough outside loot to satisfy them, or else they would all get killed, it really didn't matter much;

and as for loot, if it was taken from foreigners, there was no sin.

A careful analyst might here say that Plan Number Three is only a variation of Plan Number Two--the end being gained by hypnotic effects in either event, for the army is conscripted from the people to use against the people, just as you turn steam from a boiler into the fire-box to increase the draft.

Possibly this is true, but I have introduced this digression, anyway, only to show that the original office of elector was a wise and beneficent function of the Government, and could be revived with profit in America, to replace the outworn and useless vermiformis that we now possess in way of an electoral college.

* * * * * When Kings allowed Church and State to separate they made a grave mistake.

With the two united, as they were until a more recent time, they held a cinch on both the souls and the bodies of their subjects.

In the good old days in Germany the elector was always an archbishop.

Our bishops now are a weakling lot.

With no army to back their edicts the people smile at their proclamations, try on their shovel hats, and laugh at their gaiters.

Or if they be Methodist bishops, who are only make-believe bishops, having slipped the cable that bound them to the past, we pound them familiarly on the back and address them as "Bish."

Clement Augustus, Elector of Cologne, maintained a court that vied with royalty itself.

In his household were two hundred servants.

He had coachmen, footmen, cooks, messengers, a bodyguard, musicians, poets and artists who hastened to do his bidding.

He patronized all the arts, made a pet of science, offered a reward for the transmutation of metals, dabbled in astrology and practised palmistry.

Into this brilliant court came the strong and masterful Ludvig van Biethofen.

In a year his gracious presence, superb voice and rare skill as a musician, pushed him to the front and into favor with the powers, with a yearly salary of four hundred guilders.

The history of this man is a deal better raw stock for a romance than the life of his grandson.

From Seventeen Hundred Thirty-two, when he entered the court as an unknown and ordinary musician with an acceptable tenor voice, to Seventeen Hundred Sixty-one, when he was Kapellmeister and a member of the private council of the Elector, his life was a steady march successward.

Strong men were needed then as now, and his promotion was deserved.

Various accounts and mention of this man are to be found, and one contemporary described him as he appeared at sixty.

The only mark of age he carried was his flowing white hair.

His smoothly shaven face showed the strong features of a man of thirty-five; and his carriage, actions and superb grace as an orchestra-leader made him a conspicuous figure in any company.

Ludvig van Biethofen had one son, Johann by name.

This boy resembled his gifted father very little, and his training was such that he early fell a victim to arrested development.

If a parent does everything for a child, the child probably will never do anything for himself.

It is Nature's plan--she seems to think that no one needs strength excepting the struggler, and being kind she comes to his rescue; but the man who puts forth no effort remains a weakling to the end.

Johann placed success beyond his reach very early in life by putting an enemy into his mouth to steal away his brains.

His marriage to a daughter of a cook in Ehrenbreitstein Castle did not stop his waywardness, or give him decision as was hoped.

Marriage as a scheme of reformation is not always a success, and women who lend themselves to it take great chances.

Mary Magdalena was a widow, and some say possessed of wiles.

That she was beneath Johann in social station, but beyond him in actual worth, there is no doubt.

And whether she snared the incautious man, or whether the marriage was arranged by the elder Biethofen as a diplomatic move in the interests of morality, matters little.

The end justifies the means;

and as a net result of this mating, without putting forward the circumstance as a precedent to be religiously followed, the world has Beethoven and his work.