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recalled to Bonn where his life was much saddened by the deaths of
his mother and his little sister.
At this time he made the acquaintance of the von Bruening family,
—mother, three boys and a girl, whose friendship was one of the
inspiring events of his boyhood. He gave lessons to Eleanore and to a
brother, and was a close friend to them all. Here he was introduced
to the marvels of literature, which proved to be a lifelong love and a
solace for the sad hours after he became deaf. He also accompanied
the von Bruenings on holidays in the country, and through them met
Count Waldstein, a young noble and amateur musician, who was
most enthusiastic over Beethoven’s budding talent. Through Count
Waldstein he was brought to the attention of the Elector of Bonn,
who gave the young musician a place as viola player in the orchestra
of his national theatre. Here he made several lifelong friends,—Franz
Ries, who probably taught him to play the violin and viola, the two
Rombergs, Simrock and Stumpff. His old teacher Neefe, was pianist
and stage manager in the theatre.
Now his home became most unhappy because of his father’s
drunkenness and bad habits. The Court, however, in 1799, looked
after Beethoven and saw that part of his father’s salary was paid to
him to help him care for the family. In addition to this the money he
earned by playing and by giving lessons enabled him to support his
brothers and sister.
 He Meets Papa Haydn

When Papa Haydn passed through Bonn on his way to London,

Beethoven went to visit him, and brought with him, instead of candy
or flowers, a cantata which he had written for the occasion. Haydn
was delighted with him and offered to teach him if he would go to
Vienna. So, in 1792, on the advice of Count Waldstein, we see him
again in Vienna, studying counterpoint with Haydn. At first he
frankly imitated his master, and although he leaned more toward
Mozart’s colorfulness of style than Haydn’s, from the older composer
he learned how to treat and develop themes, and how to write for the
orchestra.
When Haydn left Vienna for his second visit to England,
Beethoven studied with Albrechtsberger, also with Schenck, Salieri
and Förster. Although he was an amazing student his teachers were
afraid of and for him, for his ideas were ahead of his day. They failed
to see in him the great pathfinder, and naturally thought he was a
dangerous radical or “red” as we would say.
 Beethoven’s Friendships

The story of Beethoven’s life is a story of a few faithful friendships.

He was not befriended for his personal beauty, but for his inner
beauty. His head was too big for his body, he did not care what sort
of clothes he wore, nor did he have any regard for conventions,
fashions or great personages. He was a real democrat and cared
nothing for titles and the things smaller men respect. Once
Beethoven’s brother called on him and left his card upon which was
written, next his name, “Man of Property.” Beethoven in return sent
his card on which he wrote, “Man of Brains.”
Thinking that Napoleon was going to free mankind, he dedicated
the Eroica, the third symphony, to him. But when he heard that
Napoleon had set himself up as Emperor, in a violent rage, he
trampled on the dedication page.
One day he and Goethe were walking along the street when the
King passed by. Goethe stood aside with uncovered head but
Beethoven refused to alter his path for royalty and kept on his hat,
for he felt on an equality with every man and probably a little
superior. But he lost his friendship with Goethe because of his many
failures to conform to customs.
At twenty-seven Beethoven began to grow deaf. It made him very
morose and unhappy. In 1800 he wrote to his friend Wegeler, the
husband of Eleanore von Bruening, “My hearing during the last three
years has become gradually worse. I can say with truth that my life is
very wretched. For nearly two years past I have avoided all society
because I find it impossible to say to people ‘I am deaf.’ In any other
profession this might be tolerable but in mine, such a condition is
truly frightful.”
Beethoven was forceful and noble in spirit, quick tempered,
absent-minded, gruff, and cared little for manners and customs
except to be honest and good. But although he was absent-minded he
never neglected his work or his obligations to any man, and his
compositions show the greatest care and thought. He worked a piece
over and over before it was finished and not, like Mozart, did it
bubble from him whole and perfect.
 He was too high-strung and impatient to teach much and
Ferdinand Ries, the son of Franz, and Czerny seem to be his only
well-known pupils. But he taught many amateurs among the
nobility, which probably accounts for many of his romances. In later
years, he withdrew unto himself and became irritable and suspicious
of everybody, both because of his deafness and the misery his family
caused him.
Yet this great man, tortured with suspicions and doubt, and
storming often against his handicap, always stood upright and
straight and never did anything dishonorable or mean. In fact, he
was a very moral man, who lived and composed according to the
dictates of his soul and never wrote to please or to win favor.
He made valuable friends among music lovers and patrons such as
Prince and Princess Lichnowsky, Prince Lobkowitz, Count
Rasomouwsky, Empress Maria Theresa and others, to whom he
dedicated many of his great works. This he did only as a mark of his
friendship rather than for gain.
He was clumsy and awkward and had bad manners and a quick
temper, and he had a heavy shock of black hair, that was always in
disorder, but the soul of the man shone out from his eyes and his
smile lit up his face. Although he is said to have been unkempt, he
was exceedingly clean, for when he was composing he would often
interrupt his work to wash.
When the Leonore overture was being rehearsed, one of the three
bassoon players was missing. Prince Lobkowitz, a friend of
Beethoven, jokingly tried to relieve his mind by saying, “It doesn’t
make any difference, the first and second bassoon are here, don’t
mind the third.” Beethoven nearly pranced with rage, and reaching
the street later, where the Prince lived, he crossed the square to the
gates of the Palace and stopped to shout at the entrance, “Donkey of
a Lobkowitz!” and then passed on, raving to himself. But there was a
warm, sweet streak in his nature for his friends loved him dearly, and
he was very good to his nephew Carl, who lied to him and deceived
him. Carl added to Beethoven’s unhappiness, for when he was lonely
and in need of him, Carl never would come to him unless for money.
Beethoven had a high regard for women and loved Countess
Guicciardi, who refused many times to marry him, but he dedicated
The Moonlight Sonata and some of his songs to her.
 We see his great heart broken by his nephew, we see his sad letters
begging him to come and take pity on his loneliness, we see him
struggle to make money for him; and all Carl did was to accept all
and give nothing. Finally this ungrateful boy was expelled from
college because he failed in his examinations. This was such a
disgrace that he attempted to commit suicide. As this was also looked
upon as a crime he was given twenty-four hours to leave Vienna and
so enlisted in the army. Nevertheless Beethoven made Carl his sole
heir. Doesn’t this show him to be a really great person?
 Beethoven the Pianist

While at Vienna he met the great pianists and played far better
than any of them. No one played with such expression, with such
power or seemed worthy even to compete with him. Mozart and
others had been charming players and composers, but Beethoven
was powerful and deep, even most humorous when he wanted to be.
He worked well during these years, and with his usual extreme
care changed and rechanged the themes he found in his little sketch
books into which, from boyhood he had put down his musical ideas.
Those marvelous sketch books! What an example they are! They
show infinite patience and “an infinite capacity for taking pains”
which has been given by George Eliot as a definition of genius.
 The Three Periods

At his first appearance as a pianist in Vienna he played his own C

major Concerto in 1795. From 1795 to 1803 he wrote all the works
from opus 1 to 50. In these were included symphonies 1 and 2, the
first three piano concertos, and many sonatas for piano, trios and
quartets, a septet and other less important works.
This is the first period of Beethoven’s life. His second period in
which his deafness grew worse and caused him real physical illness,
extended to 1815—in this the trouble with his nephew and the deceit
of his two brothers preyed on his mind, to such an extent, that he
became irascible and unapproachable. His lodgings were the scene of
distressing upheavals and Beethoven was like a storm-beaten
mountain!
For consolation, he turned to his music, and in the storm and
stress he wrote the noble opera Fidelio, and the third symphony,
Eroica, concertos, sonatas and many other things.
Someone once asked him, “Why don’t you write opera?” He
replied, “Give me a libretto noble enough for my music.” Evidently
this is the reason why he wrote only one opera. We find another
example of his patience and self-criticism, as he wrote four overtures
for Fidelio. Three of them are called Leonore overtures and one
Fidelio. The third Leonore seems to be the favorite, and is often
played.
By 1822, the beginning of the third period, the great music maker
was stone deaf! Yet he wrote the magnificent Mass in D and his last
symphony, the Ninth, with the “Hymn of Joy,” two of the great
masterpieces of the world, although he was unable to hear one note
of what he had composed as he could not hear his beloved violin even
when he held it close to his ears.
Imagine Beethoven—stone deaf, attending a performance of the
Ninth Symphony in a great hall—not knowing that it had had a
triumphal success until one of the soloists turned him around to see
the enthusiastic faces and the hands clapping and arms waving, for
he could hear not a sound! He who had built such beautiful things for
us to hear, knew them only in his mind!
 Beethoven was a great lover of nature. He used to stroll with his
head down and his hands behind his back, clasping his note book in
which he jotted down the new ideas as they came to him. He wrote to
a friend, “I wander about here with music paper among the hills and
dales and valleys and scribble a bit; no man on earth could love the
country as I do.”
 Beethoven Makes Music Grow

If you have ever seen a sculptor modeling in clay you know that his
great problem is to keep it from drying, because only in the moist
state can it be moulded into shape. In the same way, we have seen in
following the growth of music, that no matter how beautiful a style of
composition is, as soon as it becomes set in form, or in other words
as soon as it hardens, it changes. Let us look back to the period of the
madrigal. You remember that the early madrigals were of rare beauty
but later the composers became complicated and mechanical in their
work and the beauty and freshness of their compositions were lost.
The people who felt this, reached out for new forms of expression
and we see the opera with its arias and recitatives as a result. The
great innovator Monteverde, broke this spell of the old polyphonic
form, which, like the sculptor’s clay, had stiffened and dried.
The same thing happened after Bach brought the suite and fugue
to their highest. The people again needed something new, and
another form grew out of the suite, the sonata of Philip Emanuel
Bach, Haydn and Mozart. The works of these men formed the Classic
Period which reached its greatest height with the colossus,
Beethoven. As we told you, he used the form inherited from Haydn
and Mozart, but added much of a peculiar power which expressed
himself. But again the clay hardened! Times and people changed,
poetry, science and philosophy led the way to more personal and
shorter forms of expression. Up to Bach’s time, music, outside of the
folk-song, had not been used to express personal feeling; the art was
too young and had grown up in the Church which taught the denial
of self-expression.
In the same way, the paintings up to the time of the 16th century
did not express personal feelings and happenings, but were only
allowed to be of religious subjects, for the decorating of churches and
cathedrals.
Beethoven, besides being the peak of the classic writers, pointed
the way for the music of personal expression, not mere graceful
expression as was the fashion, which was called the “Romantic
School” because he was big enough to combine the sonata form of
classic mould with the delicacy, humor, pathos, nobility and singing
beauty for which the people of his day yearned.
 This led again to the crashing of the large and dried forms made
perfect by Beethoven and we see him as the bridge which leads to
Mendelssohn, Chopin, Schubert and Schumann and we see them
expressing in shorter form every possible human mood.
Beethoven was great enough to bring music to maturity so that it
expressed not only forms of life, but life itself.
How and what did he do? First, he became master of the piano and
could from childhood sit down and make marvelous improvisations.
He studied all forms of music, counterpoint, harmony, and
orchestration. At first he followed the old forms, as we see in the first
two symphonies. In the third symphony, the Eroica, he changed
from the minuet (a relic of the old dance suite) to the scherzo, an
enlarged form of the minuet with more chance for musical
expression,—the minuet grown up. In sonatas like The Pathetique,
he used an introduction and often enlarged the coda or ending, to
such an extent that it seems like an added movement, so rich was he
in power in working over a theme into beautiful musical speech.
Later we see him abandoning set forms and writing the Waldstein
Sonata in free and beautiful ways. Even the earlier sonatas like The
Moonlight and its sister, Opus 27, No. 2, are written so freely that
they are called Fantasy Sonatas, so full of free, flowing melody has
the sonata become under his hand.
His work becomes so lofty and so grand, whether in humorous or
in serious vein, that when we compare his compositions to those of
other men, he seems like one of the loftiest mountain peaks in the
world, reaching into the heavens, yet with its base firmly standing in
the midst of men.
 A Composer of Instrumental Music

Beethoven was distinctly a composer of instrumental music,

although he wrote the opera Fidelio, also the Ninth Symphony in
which he made great innovations in symphonic form and introduced
the Choral.
Up to this time, composers in the Classic School had paid more
attention to the voice and to the soloists in the concertos than to the
orchestra. Thus we see men like Mozart leaving a space toward the
end of the movement in a concerto for the soloist to make up his own
closing salute to his audience before the orchestra ended the piece.
These cadenzas became acrobatic feats in which the players wrote
the most difficult “show-off” music. Beethoven, with his love for the
orchestra and his feeling that the soloist and the orchestra should
make one complete unit, wrote the cadenza himself and thereby
made the composition one beautiful whole rather than a sandwich of
the composer, soloist and composer again.
Fancy all this from a man who, when he multiplied 14 × 26 had to
add fourteen twenty-sixes in a column! We saw this column of
figures written on a manuscript of Beethoven’s in an interesting
collection, and the story goes that Beethoven tried to verify a bill that
was brought to him in the midst of a morning of hard work at his
composing.
Besides his symphonies, concertos and sonatas in which are light
moods, dark moods, gay and sad moods, spiritual heights and
depths, filling hearers with all beauty of emotion,—he wrote gay little
witty things, like the German Dances, The Fury over the Loss of a
Penny (which is really funny), four overtures, many English, Scotch,
Irish, Welsh and Italian folk-song settings. He also wrote one
oratorio called The Mount of Olives, two masses, one of which is the
magnificent Missa Solemnis, one concerto for the violin that is the
masterpiece of its kind, and the one grand opera Fidelio.
Thus we have told you about the bridge to the “Romantic
Movement” which will follow in the next chapter.
Beethoven could have said with Robert Browning’s “Abt Vogler”
Ye know why the forms are fair, ye hear how the tale is told;
It is all triumphant art, but art in obedience to laws....

And I know not if, save in this, such gift be allowed to man,
That out of three sounds he frame, not a fourth sound, but a star.

Johann Sebastian Bach.

George Frederick Handel.
Franz Josef Haydn.
 Carl Maria von Weber.

Three Classic Composers and an Early Romantic Composer.

The Piano and Its Grand-parents.

Courtesy of Morris Steinert & Sons,

Company
 CHAPTER XXII
The Pianoforte Grows Up—The Ancestry of the Pianoforte

The Ancestry of the Pianoforte

We feel so familiar with the Pianoforte that we call it piano for short
and almost forget that it is dignified by the longer name. We forget
too, that Scarlatti, Rameau and Bach played not on the piano but on
its ancestors, and that Byrd, Bull and Gibbon did not write their
lovely dance suites for the instrument on which we play them today.
The Pianoforte’s family tree has three distinct branches,—strings,
sounding board and hammers. First we know the piano is a stringed
instrument, although it hides its chief characteristic, not under a
bushel, but behind a casing of wood.
 Where Stringed Instruments Came From

We have seen the stringed instrument developed from the bow

when primitive man winged his arrow in the hunt, and heard its
twang. Later desiring fuller tone, the sounding board grew, when
early peoples sank bow-like instruments and reeds into a gourd
which increased and reflected the sound as the metal reflector
behind a light intensifies it.
Strings to produce sound, must be rubbed, like the bow drawn
across violin strings, plucked as the mandolin or the harp is plucked,
or struck with a hammer as was the dulcimer.
In the ancient times there were two instruments much alike, the
psaltery and the dulcimer, both with a triangular or rectangular
sounding box across which are stretched strings of wire or gut
fastened to tuning pins. The difference between these two “relatives”
is that the psaltery is plucked with fingers or a plectrum, and the
dulcimer is struck with hammers. So the psaltery is the grandfather
of the virginal, spinet, clavecin, and harpsichord, while the dulcimer
is the remote ancestor of the pianoforte.
The first record we find of a dulcimer is a stone picture near
Nineveh, of an Assyrian king in 667 B.C., celebrating a triumphal
procession. This dulcimer, suspended from the neck of the player, is
being struck with a stick in his right hand, while his left palm on the
string checks the tone. Here we have the first stringed instrument
which was hammered and muffled, two important elements in the
piano.
In Persia the dulcimer was called the santir and is still used under
different names in the Orient and other places. In Greece and other
countries it was called the psalterion, and in Italy, the dolcimelo.
Later, the Germans had a sort of dulcimer called the Hackbrett,
probably because it was “hacked” as the butcher hacks meat! We see
the dulcimer in many shapes according to the fancy of the people
who use it. The word comes from dulce—the Latin for “sweet” and
melos—the Greek for “melody.”
As people grew wiser and more musical, they padded their
hammers or mallets; this gave the idea for the padded hammer of the
piano for checking the tone as our Ninevehan did with his left palm.
Should you ever listen to a gypsy band, you will hear the dulcimer
or cembalo.
 The Keyboard

The third element in the making of the piano is the keyboard.

It is evident that the piano keyboard and the organ keyboard are
practically the same. The water organs of the Greeks and Romans
had keyboards, but as the Christian Church forbade the use of organs
as sacrilegious, keyboards were lost for almost a thousand years.
The keyboard seems to have developed from the Greek monochord
used in the Middle Ages to give the pitch in convent singing. It was
tuned with a movable bridge or fret pushed back and forth under the
strings and fingers. First it was stretched with weights hung at one
end. It was a simple matter to add strings to produce more tones,
later tuning pins were added and finally a keyboard. This was the
whole principle of the clavichord. (We might say that the monochord
and dulcimer are the Adam and Eve of the pianoforte family.)