BookEnds: After Teddy Rex and Reagan, Morris Turns His Pen to Beethoven

When Edmund Morris was here at Harvard in February 1978 – presumably at work on his soon-to-be-released Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Theodore Roosevelt, Class of 1880 – a bitter blizzard battered Boston and left Harvard underneath several feet of snow.

On a Thursday morning, as students skied across the Yard, “some invisible person threw open a second-floor window…and blasted the finale of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony into the crisp air,” Morris writes. “So why, after the music ended 10 minutes later, with 48 thunderclaps of C major, were some of the listeners crying?”

Unlike his elder Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Beethoven does not hold the honor of having a Literature and Arts-B core course named after him. But he will soon be featured in a Hollywood biopic starring Ed Harris. And today, at 6:30 p.m. at the First Parish Church on 3 Church Street, Morris will seek to bring the long-dead Beethoven to life.

THE ODD COUPLE

The pairing of Morris and Beethoven seems incongruous at first. The author of a two-volume biography of Roosevelt and a notoriously sub-par work on Ronald Reagan, Morris has no obvious ties to the music world. However, he goes out of his way to mention on the back flap that he is both a pianist and a “private music scholar” who has been studying Beethoven with 50 years of devotion. These credentials sound about as compelling as those of the ousted director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Michael D. Brown. (But when Morris discusses at First Parish tonight, he will have the opportunity to show off his skills when he plays Beethoven pieces, according to the sponsor, the Harvard Book Store).

Regardless of his musical talent—or perhaps lack thereof—Morris’ “Beethoven” is a leisurely masterpiece that tells the story of the man behind the music with contagious enthusiasm. Undoubtedly, the music is important, and Morris lovingly describes the most moving compositions, right down to the “spasmodic disjunction between right hand and left” in “Piano Sonata, Opus 31, No. 1.” However, the beauty of Beethoven’s music often makes it easy to forget that the great composer was a person with very real human needs, desires, and failings—he scrounged for money, relished fame and attention, and lusted after women. Morris weaves together the music with the life and gives us members of the tone-deaf public a clear glimpse into the trials and turmoil that go into making genius.

A HARD-KNOCK LIFE

Beethoven was born December 1770 in Bonn, in what is now Germany. Beethoven, like most musicians, began his career early. His father, a tenor, pushed him to learn the piano, violin, and music theory with a brutal zeal that included floggings and time spent locked in the cellar. Beethoven would often improvise, only to be reprimanded by his father: “You are not to do that yet.” By age 13, Beethoven had already become the court organist and had published several compositions.

These formidable accomplishments, though, came against a backdrop of persistent family problems. Beethoven’s father was chronically short of money, and he found too much comfort at the end of the bottle. His mother, who saw seven of her 10 children die young, suffered from depression, and she neglected Beethoven’s dress and hygiene. Nevertheless, Beethoven loved her deeply. He cut short his stay in Vienna – where he was studying under Mozart – when he learned that his mother was dying.

‘SO UGLY, AND HALF CRAZY!’

The death prompted an emotional crisis that ebbed when a wealthy widow hired Beethoven as a private music tutor. He was drawn to the widow’s 16-year-old daughter Eleonore, whom he taught piano—but the love was unrequited. He never had much luck with the fairer sex, and he nevera married despite interest in a number of women. Prudishness and shyness are partial explanations: when one woman made passes at him in a tavern, “He was at first cold, and then violent, giving her head a sharp smack,” Morris writes. But Beethoven also carried the albatross of physical unattractiveness: he had a swarthy complexion, skin pits, and short legs. One singer rejected him, “because he was so ugly, and half crazy!”

He didn’t forge friendships any more easily than he lured ladies. In 1792, Beethoven moved to Vienna to study under the aging composer Joseph Haydn in an all-star match-up of historical heavyweights akin to Alexander and Aristotle, or Rocky and Tommy Gunn. The teacher and pupil never clicked though, and Beethoven was soon free to pursue his own devices. His skills were a key to the world of the privileged, and he picked up many friends among the aristocracy. By the age of 25, he had performed before the king of Prussia.

HEIL NAPOLEON!

Beethoven’s celebrity was rising against the backdrop of unprecedented upheaval in Europe, and Napoleon Bonaparte captured the composer’s imagination. In 1804, Beethoven wrote a symphony meant to be dedicated to Bonaparte. But after Napoleon shed all pretenses of democracy and crowned himself emperor, the Third Symphony was renamed the “Sinfonia Eroica”—to heroism.

By then, Beethoven had already realized that the worst fate imaginable for a musician had befallen him. In June 1801, he admitted to a friend, “For the last three years my hearing has become weaker and weaker. The trouble is supposed to have been caused by the condition of my abdomen.” Doctors suggested that swimming in the Danube River would assuage the pain of his chronic diarrhea, and that infusions of oil would soften the buzzing in his ears. “In all biography, there are few images more grotesquely sad than that of Beethoven, racked with cramps, bathing in fortified water and trying to drown the noise in his head with almond oil,” Morris writes.

ON THE VERGE OF SUICIDE

As Beethoven slowly lost his hearing, his thoughts turned to suicide. He wrote a surprisingly frank testament in 1802, confessing his frustration at hearing nothing but silence. Tempted to take his own life, Beethoven wrote, “it was only my art that held me back.” Remarkably, his flood of new compositions did not ebb.

His social skills, on the other hand, rapidly receded. Beethoven squabbled with his friends, and he tried to smash the head of one of his noble patrons with a chair. Fortunately for him, the aristocracy was forgiving. They gave him a generous stipend that plunged in value after the occupation and departure of French soldiers in 1809. That year, his prodigious works slowed to a trickle after he fell for a banker’s wife, Antonie Bretano, whom he referred to as “my Immortal Beloved.”

But it was not to be—Beethoven would die unmarried, and he knew it. So when his brother Casper became terminally ill, Beethoven pursued sole guardianship of Casper’s son Karl, much to the chagrin of the mother, Johanna. The composer drifted toward insanity, accusing Johanna of prostituting herself and convincing himself that Karl was in fact his own son. Johanna eventually hauled Beethoven into court, where witnesses testified about his incompetence as a guardian, and the court exposed his lack of nobility despite the Dutch predicate “van.” The composer was publicly humiliated.

ODE TO JOY?

Beethoven’s greatest moment of glory, however, was still to come with the public performance of his Ninth Symphony in May 1824. For anyone that has heard it before (or at least seen the unspeakably horrible Starz movie network commercial that uses it), the music is undeniably majestic. Morris writes that “for the rest of the century, symphonic composers would struggle in vain to write anything that sounded bigger.” Beethoven, deaf and facing the orchestra, did not realize the audience was enthusiastically clapping until a teenage soprano turned him around.

The composer died almost three years later, suffering from a bad liver and persistent stomach problems. His work continues to thrive, be it in atrocious Starz commercials, in concert halls, or from the second floor of freshman dorms in Harvard Yard.

—Staff writer David Zhou can be reached at dzhou@fas.harvard.edu.