52 The New York Review
that come up in the conversations, his
general index, which takes up more
than thirty pages at the end of vol-
ume 1, will be an essential tool for
threading one’s way through the maze
of situations, people, and topics that
come up in this day- by- day record of
Beethoven’s interactions. Some of my
favorite entries are these for Bernard:
“Basks in Beethoven’s friendship” (said
by Oliva); “Dislike of foreign authors”;
“Goddamned pretension” (Oliva); and
“Moocher.” All these and more are
what readers who want to explore this
vast material will need, since reading it
consecutively is an unlikely prospect,
as one miniature scenario and topic
succeeds another. Equally valuable are
Albrecht’s comments on who is speak-
ing and on when and where an entry
was written down, often including the
exact date, time, and location of a con-
versation. Sometimes they take place
in Beethoven’s apartment, sometimes
in restaurants or coffeehouses, in other
people’s apartments, or when he and
his companions are out walking.^8
The struggle over the guardianship
of Karl is a central topic in the conver-
sations of 1818–1820. It had all begun
when Ludwig’s brother Kaspar Karl
van Beethoven died in 1815, leaving
his wife, Johanna, and their only child,
Karl, then nine years old. A fierce
battle then began between Beethoven
and Johanna for custody, at first seem-
ingly resolved when a court appointed
them co- guardians but erupting again
when Beethoven fought to become the
sole guardian, which he was appointed
in January 1816. He then placed Karl in
a local boarding school, where the boy
remained until January 1818, just before
this first volume of conversations begins.
Many details of the ongoing dispute
emerge during these months, as a num-
ber of Beethoven’s interlocutors, espe-
cially Bernard, have a lot to say about
it. Accordingly, we are witnessing the
early stages of a conflict that was of
paramount emotional importance to
Beethoven and that had a deeply dam-
aging effect on young Karl, who found
himself torn between the obsessive de-
mands of his famous and dominating
uncle and his desperate longing to stay
close to his mother. It all led, some years
later in 1826, to Karl’s failed attempt
at suicide, after which he was able to re-
cover and begin a military career.^9
Of course, every reader will want to
know whether and how the written con-
versations and implied answers in these
books reflect in some way on the com-
positions that Beethoven was creating
at the time. The answers are mixed. In
a reader’s guide at the beginning of the
first volume, Albrecht presents a seg-
ment on “Beethoven’s Daily Routine,”
reporting that it was his normal habit to
awaken at about 5 AM, work “as long as
he could (composing and/or writing let-
ters),” then leave his apartment about
noon, have dinner at about 2 PM, “often
with friends,” then later in the after-
noon go to a coffeehouse until supper
in the evening, and go to bed by 10 PM.
The Beethoven of these conversa-
tion books is the Beethoven of the af-
ternoon and evening, not the composer
of the morning, when he would
have been enveloped in his com-
positional projects, large or small,
with his sketchbook or working
manuscript near his piano. In the
two- and- a- half- year period cov-
ered by these first two volumes,
from February 1818 to September
1820, we know from his sketch-
books, letters, and other evidence
what Beethoven was working on,
and a brief list tells an eloquent
tale. Early in 1818 he was sketching
ideas for the first movement of the
Ninth Symphony^10 and was starting
work on the monumental “Ham-
merklavier” piano sonata, Opus
106, which he completed by Au-
gust of that year. In March 1819 the
publisher Anton Diabelli invited a
number of leading Viennese com-
posers to write single variations on
his own waltz theme, whereupon
Beethoven began composing not
a single variation but a gigantic
set that would wholly outdo all his
contemporaries. Two months later,
in May 1819, he had to put the Dia-
belli project aside for several years to
start work on the Missa Solemnis, in-
tended for the ceremonial installation
of the Archduke Rudolph, his royal
pupil and patron, as archbishop of Ol-
mütz, scheduled to take place in 1820.
In turn, the Missa became a project of
immense complexity and significance
for him, and it was not finished until
early in 1823. By this time, he had also
turned to other major works, including
the last three piano sonatas, Opp. 109,
110, and 111, and was deep in work on
the Ninth Symphony, first performed in
May 1824.
What, then, appears in the conversa-
tions of 1818–1820 about Beethoven’s
creative work? Largely reflections by
his conversational partners, but nev-
ertheless they can be of value for what
they show about how musicians and
others responded to his works when
they were new. An example is Joseph
Czerny’s comments on the recently
published “Hammerklavier” Sonata in
late November or early December 1819:About one fugue fewer.//Frau
Streicher [Nannette Streicher, an
accomplished pianist] has al-
ready studied your last Sonata for
3 months and still cannot [play]
the exposition. She complains the
most about the beginning.In volume 2, covering March to Sep-
tember 1820, there are more conversa-
tions on music, and in later years, when
musicians close to Beethoven appear,
such as the violinists Ignaz Schuppan-
zigh and Karl Holz, there are consid-
erably more of them. Yet it is not for
close discussion of his works that the
conversation books are valuable, but
for illuminating the stuff of daily life
in Beethoven’s Vienna, the interests
and concerns of his visitors and of
Beethoven himself, as we can interpret
them from this mass of conversational
material. When he writes his own en-
tries, they can vary from shopping lists
or brief and elliptical entries to occa-sional comments that give us piercing
insight into his view of larger matters.
In early February 1819, for example,
we find a much- quoted entry in which
Beethoven writes, “‘The Moral Law in
us, and the starry Heaven above us.’...
Kant!!!” The three exclamation points
are of course by him, and he follows
these words with the name “Littrow,”
whom he identifies as director of the ob-
servatory. It has long been known that
just a few days before he made th is entr y,
Beethoven had seen an article by the
astronomer Joseph Littrow that ended
with a passage from Kant’s Critique of
Practical Reason. For Beethoven, this
is not just a passing thought but a mo-
ment of reflection on a basic issue in his
outlook on the world. Even though he
is quoting Littrow rather than Kant’s
own words, it is striking in the Kantian
original to find an eloquent description
of the feeling with which an individual
can look up at the heavens and ponder
his place in the universe. Kant follows
these words with this passage:I do not merely conjecture them
[the stars] and seek them as though
obscured in darkness or in the
transcendent region beyond my
horizon: I see them before me, and
I associate them directly with the
consciousness of my own existence.There is plenty of evidence that when
Beethoven thought about his place in
the world and his stature as an artist, he
saw himself in a special, elevated posi-
tion that he had to strive to maintain.
Thus his disdain for the nobility, with
whom he had to have dealings all his
life, and his denigrating references to
“our monarchs.” In a letter of 1814, hewrites, “I much prefer the empire of the
mind, and I regard it as the highest of
all spiritual and worldly monarchies.”^11
In 1825 he writes to Prince Nikolaus
Galitzin, who had commissioned the
first three of the late quartets, “My
supreme aim is that my art should be
welcomed by the noblest and most cul-
tivated people. Unfortunately we are
dragged down from the other- worldly
element in art only too rudely into the
earthly and human sides of life.”^12
The conversation book quotation
from Kant is not his only reference to
the stars. Carl Czerny later reported
Beethoven’s telling him that the beau-
tiful E- major slow movement of the
quartet Opus 59 No. 2, the second
of the Razumovsky set, had come
to him while he was “contemplat-
ing the starry sky and thinking of
the music of the spheres.”^13 And it
is not accidental that in the Credo
of the Missa Solemnis and in the
final movement of the Ninth Sym-
phony, Beethoven found ways to
symbolize the higher spheres with
dramatic use of very high orches-
tral and vocal sonorities.^14 In the
religious portion of the finale to
the Ninth Symphony, whose text
is from Friedrich Schiller’s “Ode
to Joy,” the chorus asks, “Do you
sense the Creator, oh world? Seek
him above the stars! He must dwell
above the stars!” and Beethoven’s
chorus and orchestra rise to ethe-
real harmonies in pianissimo.
In his official brief to the Court of
Appeal in 1820, Beethoven vilified
his sister- in- law Johanna, beginning
with his opening words, “It is pain-
ful for a man like me to have to sully
himself in the smallest degree with a
person like Frau Beethoven,” and going
on from there to attack her credibility.
But in private diary entries of 1818, he
had confessed his remorse over what he
was doing to take Karl away from her,
in passages like, “It would have been
possible without hurting the widow’s
feelings, but it was not to be,” and he
called on God: “My refuge, my rock,
O my all. You see my inmost heart and
know how it pains me to have to make
somebody suffer through my good
works for my dear Karl!”
Caught between his overwhelming
need to have his way in the guardian-
ship case and guilt over the tactics he
was using, Beethoven was torn be-
tween the opposing dimensions of his
life in the world, the ideal and the real.
All this was paralleled by his constant
awareness of the distance between what
he knew he could achieve as an artist—
above all, in these last years, in works
that lay far beyond the comprehension
of most of his contemporaries—and
the grim demands of everyday life, in
which he had to come to grips with all
the patrons, publishers, visitors, money,
family problems, law courts, illness,
deafness, and the world at large. QKarl van Beethoven, 1831(^8) A useful supplement is Albrecht’s ar-
ticle “Time, Distance, Weather, Daily
Routine, and Wordplay as Factors in
Interpreting Beethoven’s Conversation
Books,” The Beethoven Journal, Vol.
28, No. 2 (Winter 2013).
(^9) Readers of these conversations of
1818–1820 will do well to fortify their
understanding of this fearful situation
by reading more detailed discussions
of the whole case, certainly including
Maynard Solomon’s essay “Beethoven
and His Nephew: A Reappraisal,” in
Beethoven Essays, and the relevant
chapter in his biography, Beethoven,
second edition (Schirmer, 1998), pp.
297–330. The main documents, in-
cluding Beethoven’s lengthy “Draft of
Memorandum to the Court of Appeal,
Vienna,” of February 1820, are in The
Letters of Beethoven, edited by Emily
Anderson (St. Martin’s, 1961), volume
3, appendix C.
(^10) For a full listing of the many sketches
for the Ninth Symphony and their
dating, see Ludwig van Beethoven:
Thematisch-bibliographisches Werkver-
zeichnis, edited by Kurt Dorfmüller, Nor-
bert Gertsch, and Julia Ronge (Munich:
Henle, 2014), volume 1, pp. 821–823.
(^11) Letter to Johann Nepomuk Kanka of
April 6, 1814; Anderson No. 540.
(^12) Letter of circa July 6, 1825; Anderson
No. 1405, translation modified.
(^13) On celestial imagery in Beethoven’s
work and thought, see Maynard Solo-
mon, Late Beethoven: Music, Thought,
Imagination (University of California
Press, 2003), pp. 52–57.
(^14) See William Kinderman, Beethoven,
second edition (Oxford University
Press, 2009), pp. 266ff.