Mirabehn, Gandhi and Beethoven

by Mark Lindley
Before Madeleine Slade (1892-1982) became a disciple of Mahatma Gandhi and took the
name “Mirabehn,” she had been a devotee of the music of Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827),
who during the second half of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th was regarded in the
West as the greatest of all composers. When she was a teenager in England, her father had
bought a “player-piano” (i.e. with a mechanism for automatically playing pieces of music by
means of holes in a roll of strong paper; this was a 19th-century invention, quite popular in the
West until the phonograph was developed). The company provided, according to Mirabehn in
her autobiography, a “varied selection of piano-rolls”:
“I played and listened, but nothing interested me particularly except one piece which held
me from the moment it began. It was Beethoven’s Sonata Opus 31 No. 2. I played it over and
over.... I ...procured one Beethoven sonata after another.... I was finding something far beyond
the music.... I threw myself down on my knees in the seclusion of my room and prayed....
“Then... Father, who had become an admiral, was appointed Commander in Chief of the
East Indies Station.... [During that sojourn,] India... meant nothing to me but a life of social func-
tions and formalities in a very restricted society which did not appeal to me.... [So when] the
others left [again] for India in the autumn,... I remained [at home in England].... I played and
listened to Beethoven day after day.... I imbibed, more surely than if there had been words, a
sense of fearlessness, strength and purity passing, especially in the slow movements, to those
regions of the spirit which lift one into that which can only be felt but never spoken.”
(Classical sonatas and symphonies consist normally of three or four structurally more-or-
less independent pieces, each about five or ten minutes long; and the second of these three
or four “movements” is normally slow.)
She took piano lessons, attended concerts, and became herself a concert manager. (In
1921 she arranged for a famous German conductor to visit England and lead the London
Symphony Orchestra in some concerts, mainly of works by Beethoven, which brought an end
to the British boycott of German musicians occasioned by the First World War.) She made
pilgrimages to the house where Beethoven was born in Germany, and to Vienna, where he had
made his career. Soon after returning to London from Vienna, she “heard of an epic novel in
several volumes by a French writer, which, people said, was great work and partly based on
Beethoven’s life.” She began to read it, but her school-French was inadequate. Then she saw
in a newspaper that the author of the novel, Romain Rolland, was visiting London at the
invitation of the Pen Club (the original pen-friends’ club). She contacted him; she spent a year
in France studying the language so that she could converse with him; and then, the second
time they met (at his home, in Switzerland):
“He mentioned... a small book he said he had just written... called Mahatma Gandhi. I
looked blank.
“‘You have not heard about him?’, he asked.
“‘No’, I replied.
“So he told me, and added: ‘He is another Christ.’”
This led to her finding her own way to India; and within ten years Rolland was calling her
Gandhi’s “principal disciple” (meaning among Westerners).
She and Gandhi visited Rolland for a week in 1931, and Rolland expressed then his opinion
that just as Gandhi was the greatest soul of the 20th century, so Beethoven had been of the
19th. On the last evening, Gandhi asked to hear some music by Beethoven, so Rolland played
a piano transcription of the slow movement from Beethoven’s 5th Symphony. He asked Gandhi
how it had impressed him; Gandhi replied, with a little laugh which Rolland described in his
diary as having been at once mischievous and candid: “It must be beautiful, since you tell me
it is.” As the guests were leaving, Rolland gave to Mirabehn a musicological book about
Beethoven which he had written while she was in India. Years later, in 1960, she began to read
it, and it affected her so much (“Something began to stir.... It was the spirit of him from whose
music I had been separated”) that she moved from India to a village near Vienna, and devoted
her remaining years to the study of Beethoven’s life and music.
She wrote a screenplay from which she hoped that Richard Attenborough would make a film
on Beethoven as he had done on Gandhi. Then she wrote a little book, Beethoven’s Mystical
Vision, of which the first edition, with a preface by Yehudi Menuhin, has recently been
published. It tells Beethoven’s life (the chapter headings are appended below) with particular
attention to his personal and spiritual development. It discusses how “Beethoven wrote down...
passages drawn from... ancient Sanskrit literature.” It mentions also that a certain physician
“studied Beethoven closely with the eye of both a friend and a doctor ... [and said:] ‘Never in
my life have I met with such a childlike disposition combined with such a powerful and defiant
will.... His heart clings to all that is good and beautiful.... Any desecration by thought, word or
deed of what his heart loves and honours can rouse it to anger, resistance and even tears.’”
I love Beethoven’s music; yet Gandhi seems to me a greater man, because he invented a
better way to react when he was angered by the desecration of what his heart loved and
honoured. Likewise, I feel that Mirabehn’s book is a delightful relic of her own greatness, but
this greatness of hers lay less in her yearning for “that which can only be felt but never spoken”
than in her serving, for many years, the vision described by Gandhi when someone asked him,
in 1922 when there was a famine in Orissa, “May not some artists be able to see truth in and
through beauty?” He said:

“Some may, but... to the millions we cannot give that training to acquire a perception of beauty
in such a way as to see Truth in it. Show them Truth first, and they will see beauty afterwards.
Orissa haunts me, in my waking hours and in my dreams. Whatever can be useful to those
starving millions is beautiful to my mind. Let us give today first the vital things of life, and all the
graces and ornaments of life will follow.”

The chapter headings are as follows:

I. The setting. The Bonn period: 1770-1792.
II. Arrival in Vienna, November 1792.
III. Onset of deafness. The Brunwick family. Giuletta Guicciardi. The Heiligenstadt Testament.
IV. Josephine von Deym, née Brunswick.
V. Contact with Eastern thought.
VI. Breadth of reading.
VII. Theresa Malfatti. Bettina Brentano. Message to Goethe about music.
VIII. Meeting with Goethe in Teplitz. Amalie Sebald.
IX. Congress of Vienna.
X. Dr. Weissenbach on Beethoven’s character.
XI. Beethoven becomes the guardian of his nephew.
XII. Breakdown in health. Countess Erd-dy. Nanette Streicher.
XIII. Beethoven makes Baden his summer quarters. Completion of the Missa Solemnis
and work on the Ninth Symphony. Arrest in Wiener Neustadt.
XIV. Some parallels with ancient Taoism.
XV. Flashes of inspiration. Proofreading.
XVI. Trouble with Karl. The Galitzin Quartets.
XVII. Sir George Smart’s visit.
XVIII. Move to last Vienna quarters.
XIX. Visit to Gneixendorf.
XX. Fatal return journey in bitter cold. Further breakdown in health. Operation for dropsy.
XXI. Further operations. The Royal Philharmonic Society sends £100.
XXII. Rapid deterioration in health. Hummel’s visits. Beethoven’s spirit passes from his body.

The book is distributed by Sarvodaya Ilakkiya Pannai (32/1, West Veli Street; Madurai - 625
001) and can be purchased also at the National Gandhi Museum in New Delhi. The price in
India is Rs.225 hard-cover, Rs.150 soft-cover.