Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 7, May, 1858 by Various

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Seventeen years after the period which I have attempted to illustrate
by a few incidents, I stood by his grave at St. Helena. I was returning
from a long residence in the East, and, having doubled the stormy Cape
of Good Hope, looked forward with no little interest to a short repose
at the halting-place between India and Europe. But when I saw its blue
mass heaving from the ocean, the usual excitement attendant on the
cry of "Land!" was lost in the absorbing feeling, that there Napoleon
Bonaparte died and was buried. The lonely rock rose in solitary
barrenness, a bleak and mournful monument of some rude caprice of
Nature, which has thrown it out to stand in cheerless desolation amidst
the broad waters of the Atlantic. The day I passed there was devoted to
the place where the captive wore away the weary and troubled years of
his imprisonment, and to the little spot which he himself selected when
anticipating the denial of his last wish,--now fully answered,--"that
his ashes might repose on the banks of the Seine, in the midst of that
French people whom he had so much loved."

There was nothing in or about the house to remind one of its late
occupant. It was used as a granary. The apartments were filled with
straw; a machine for threshing or winnowing was in the parlor; and the
room where he died was now converted into a stable, a horse standing
where his bed had been. The position was naked and comfortless, being
on the summit of a hill, perpetually swept by the trade-winds, which
suffered no living thing to stand, except a few straggling, bare,
shadeless trees, which contributed to the disconsolate character of the
landscape. The grave was in a quiet little valley. It was covered by
three plain slabs of stone, closely surrounded by an iron railing; a
low wooden paling extended a small distance around; and the whole was
overhung by three decaying willows. The appearance of the place was
plain and appropriate. Nothing was wanting to its unadorned and
affecting simplicity. Ornament could not have increased its beauty, nor
inscription have added to its solemnity.

The mighty conqueror slept in the territory of his most inveterate foes;
but the path to his tomb was reverently trodden, and those who had stood
opposed to him in life forgot that there had been enmity between them.
Death had extinguished hostility; and the pilgrims who visited his
resting-place spoke kindly of his memory, and, hoarding some little
token, bore it to their distant homes to be prized by their posterity as
having been gathered at his grave.

The dome of the Invalides now rises over his remains; his statue again
caps the column that commemorates his exploits; and one of his name,
advanced by the sole magic of his glory, controls, with arbitrary will
and singular ability, the destinies, not of France only, but of Europe.

The nations which united for his overthrow now humbly bow before the
family they solemnly pledged themselves should never again taste power,
and, with ill-concealed distrust and anxiety, deprecate a resentment
that has not been weakened by years nor forgotten in alliances.

Not to them alone has Time hastened to bring that retributive justice
which falls alike on empires and individuals. The son of "The Man"
moulders in an Austrian tomb, leaving no trace that he has lived; while
the lineal descendant of the obscure Creole, of the deposed empress,
of the divorced wife, sits on the throne of Clovis and Charlemagne, of
Capet and Bonaparte. Within the brief space of one generation, within
the limit of one man's memory, vengeance has revolved full circle; and
while the sleepless Nemesis points with unresting finger to the barren
rock and the insulted captive, she turns with meaning smile to the
borders of the Seine, where mausoleum and palace stand in significant
proximity,--the one covering the dust of the first empire, the other the
home of the triumphant grandson of Josephine.

* * * * *

EPIGRAM ON J.M.

Said Fortune to a common spit,
"Your rust and grease I'll rid ye on,
And make ye in a twinkling fit
For Ireland's Sword of Gideon!"

In vain! what Nature meant for base
All chance for good refuses;
M. gave one gleam, then turned apace
To dirtiest kitchen uses.

BEETHOVEN: HIS CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH.

(From Original Sources.)

There is upon record a remark of Mozart--probably the greatest musical
genius that ever lived--to this effect: that, if few had equalled him
in his art, few had studied it with such persevering labor and such
unremitting zeal. Every man who has attained high preeminence in
Science, Literature, or Art, would confess the same. At all events, the
greatest musical composers--Bach, Handel, Haydn, Gluck--are proofs that
no degree of genius and natural aptitude for their art is sufficient
without long-continued effort and exhaustive study of the best models of
composition. And this is the moral to be drawn from Beethoven's early
life.

_"Voila Bonn! C'est une petite perle!"_ said the admiring Frenchwoman,
as the Cologne steamboat rounded the point below the town, and she
caught the first fair view of its bustling landing-places, its old wall,
its quaint gables, and its antique cathedral spires. A pearl among the
smaller German cities it is,--with most irregular streets, always
neat and cleanly, noble historic and literary associations, jovial
student-life, pleasant walks to the neighboring hills, delightful
excursions to the Siebengebirge and Ahrthal,--reposing peacefully upon
the left bank of the "green and rushing Rhine." Six hundred years ago,
the Archbishop-Electors of Cologne, defeated in their long quarrel with
the people of the city of perfumery, established their court at Bonn,
and made it thenceforth the political capital of the Electorate. Having
both the civil and ecclesiastical revenues at their command, the last
Electors were able to sustain courts which vied in splendor with those
of princes of far greater political power and pretensions. They could
say, with the Preacher of old, "We builded us houses; we made us gardens
and orchards, and planted trees in them of all manner of fruits"; for
the huge palace, now the seat of the Frederick-William University, and
Clemensruhe, now the College of Natural History, were erected by them
early in the last century. Like the Preacher, too, "they got them
men-singers and women-singers, and the delights of the sons of men, as
musical instruments, and that of all sorts." Music they cherished with
especial care: it gave splendor to the celebration of high mass in
chapel or cathedral; it afforded an innocent and refined recreation, in
the theatre and concert-room, to the Electors and their guests.

In the list of singers and musicians in the employ of Clemens Augustus,
as printed in the Electoral Calendar for the years 1759-60, appears the
name, "Ludwig van Beethoven, Bassist." We know little of him, and it is
but a very probable conjecture that he was a native of Maestricht, in
Holland. That he was more than an ordinary singer is proved by the
position he held in the Chapel, and by the applause which he received
for his performances as _primo basso_ in certain of Mosigny's operas. He
was, moreover, a good musician; for he had produced operas of his own
composition, with fair success, and, upon the accession of Maximilian
Frederick to the Electorate in 1761, he was raised to the position of
Kapellmeister. He was already well advanced in life; for the same record
bears the name of his son Johann, a tenor singer. He died in 1773, and
was long afterward described by one who remembered him, as a short,
stout-built man, with exceedingly lively eyes, who used to walk with
great dignity to and from his dwelling in the Bonngasse, clad in the
fashionable red cloak of the time. Thus, too, he was quite magnificently
depicted by the court painter, Radoux, wearing a tasselled cap,
and holding a sheet of music-paper in his hand. His wife--the Frau
Kapellmeisterinn--born Josepha Poll--was not a helpmeet for him, being
addicted to strong drink, and therefore, during her last years, placed
in a convent in Cologne.

The Bonngasse, which runs Rhineward from the lower extremity of the
Marktplatz, is, as the epithet _gasse_ implies, not one of the principal
streets of Bonn. Nor is it one of great length, notwithstanding the
numbers upon its house-fronts range so high,--for the houses of the town
are numbered in a single series, and not street by street. In 1770,
the centre of the Bonngasse was also a central point for the music and
musicians of Bonn. Kapellmeister Beethoven dwelt in No. 386, and the
next house was the abode of the Ries family. The father was one of the
Elector's chamber musicians; and his son Franz, a youth of fifteen, was
already a member of the orchestra, and by his skill upon the violin gave
promise of his future excellence. Thirty years afterward, _his_ son
became the pupil of _the_ Beethoven in Vienna.

In No. 515, which is nearly opposite the house of Ries, lived the
Salomons. Two of the sisters were singers in the Court Theatre, and the
brother, Johann Peter, was a distinguished violinist. At a later period
he emigrated to London, gained great applause as a virtuoso, established
the concerts in which Haydn appeared as composer and director, and was
one of the founders of the celebrated London Philharmonic Society.

It is common in Bonn to build two houses, one behind the other, upon the
same piece of ground, leaving a small court between them,--access to
that in the rear being obtained through the one which fronts upon the
street. This was the case where the Salomons dwelt, and to the rear
house, in November, 1767, Johann van Beethoven brought his newly married
wife, Helena Keverich, of Coblentz, widow of Nicolas Laym, a former
valet of the Elector.

It is near the close of 1770. Helena has experienced "the pleasing
punishment that women bear," but "remembereth no more the anguish for
joy that a man is born into the world." Her joy is the greater, because
last year, in April, she buried, in less than a week after his birth,
her first-born, Ludwig Maria,--as the name still stands upon the
baptismal records of the parish of St. Remigius, with the names of
Kapellmeister Beethoven, and the next-door neighbor, Frau Loher, as
sponsors. This second-born is a strong, healthy child, and his baptism
is recorded in the same parish-book, Dec. 17, 1770,--the day of,
possibly the day after, his birth,--by the name of Ludwig. The
Kapellmeister is again godfather, but Frau Gertrude Mueller, _nee_ Baum,
next door on the other side, is the godmother. The Beethovens had
neither kith nor kin in Bonn; the families Ries and Salomon, their
intimate friends, were Israelites; hence the appearance of the
neighbors, Frauen Loher and Mueller, at the ceremony of baptism;--a
strong corroborative evidence, that No. 515, Bonngasse, was the actual
birth-place of Beethoven.

The child grew apace, and in manhood his earliest and proudest
recollections, save of his mother, were of the love and affection
lavished upon him, the only grandchild, by the Kapellmeister. He had
just completed his third year when the old man died, and the bright sun
which had shone upon his infancy, and left an ineffaceable impression
upon the child's memory, was obscured. Johann van Beethoven had
inherited his mother's failing, and its effects were soon visible in the
poverty of the family. He left the Bonngasse for quarters in that
house in the Rheingasse, near the upper steamboat-landing, which now
erroneously bears the inscription, _Ludwig van Beethovens Geburtshaus_.

His small inheritance was soon squandered; his salary as singer was
small, and at length even the portrait of his father went to the
pawnbroker. In the April succeeding the Kapellmeister's death, the
expenses of Johann's family were increased by the birth of another
son,--Caspar Anton Carl; and to this event Dr. Wegeler attributes the
unrelenting perseverance of the father in keeping little Ludwig from
this time to his daily lessons upon the piano-forte. Both Wegeler and
Burgomaster Windeck of Bonn, sixty years afterward, remembered how, as
boys, visiting a playmate in another house across the small court, they
often "saw little Louis, his labors and sorrows." Cecilia Fischer, too,
a playmate of Beethoven in his early childhood, and living in the same
house in her old age, "still saw the little boy standing upon a low
footstool and practising his father's lessons," in tears.

What indications, if any, the child had given of remarkable musical
genius, we do not know,--not one of the many anecdotes bearing upon this
point having any trustworthy foundation in fact. Probably the father
discovered in him that which awakened the hope of some time rivalling
the then recent career of Leopold Mozart with little Wolfgang, or at
least saw reason to expect as much success with his son as had rewarded
the efforts of his neighbor Ries with his Franz; at all events, we have
the testimony of Beethoven himself, that "already in his fourth year
music became his principal employment,"--and this it continued to be to
the end. Yet, as he grew older, his education in other respects was not
neglected. He passed through the usual course of boys of his time, not
destined for the universities, in the public schools of the city, even
to the acquiring of some knowledge of Latin. The French language was, as
it still is, a necessity to every person of the Rhine provinces above
the rank of peasant; and Beethoven became able to converse in it with
reasonable fluency, even after years of disuse and almost total loss of
hearing. It has also been stated that he knew enough of English to read
it; but this is more than doubtful. In fact, as a schoolboy, he made the
usual progress,--no more, no less.

In music it was otherwise. The child Mozart seems alone to have equalled
or surpassed the child Beethoven. Ludwig soon exhausted his father's
musical resources, and became the pupil of Pfeiffer, chorist in the
Electoral Orchestra, a genial and kind-hearted man, and so good a
musician as afterward to be appointed band-master to a Bavarian
regiment. Beethoven always held him in grateful and affectionate
remembrance, and in the days of his prosperity in Vienna sent him
pecuniary aid. His next teacher was Van der Eder, court organist,--a
proof that the boy's progress was very rapid, as this must have been the
highest school that Bonn could offer. With this master he studied the
organ. When Van der Eder retired from office, his successor, Christian
Gottlob Neefe, succeeded him also as instructor of his remarkable pupil.

Wegeler and Schindler, writing several years after the great composer's
death, state, that, of these three instructors, he considered himself
most indebted to Pfeiffer, declaring that he had profited little or
nothing by his studies with Neefe, of whose severe criticisms upon his
boyish efforts in composition he complained. These statements have
hitherto been unquestioned. Without doubting the veracity of the two
authors, it may well be asked, whether the great master may not have
relied too much upon the impressions received in childhood, and thus
unwittingly have done injustice to Neefe. The appointment of that
musician as organist to the Electoral Court bears date February 15,
1781, when Ludwig had but just completed his tenth year, and the sixth
year of his musical studies. These six years had been divided between
three different instructors,--his father, Pfeiffer, and Van der Eder;
and during the last part of the time, music could have been but the
extra study of a schoolboy. That the two or three years, during which at
the most he was a pupil of Pfeiffer, and that, too, when he was but
six or eight years of age, were of more value to him in his artistic
development than the years from the age of ten onward, during which he
studied with Neefe, certainly seems an absurd idea. That the chorist may
have laid a foundation for his future remarkable execution, and have
fostered and developed his love for music, is very probable; but that
the great Beethoven's marvellous powers in higher spheres of the art
were in any great degree owing to him, we cannot credit. Happily, we
have some data for forming a judgment upon this point, unknown both to
Wegeler and Schindler, when they wrote.

Neefe was, if not a man of genius, of very respectable talents,
a learned and accomplished organist and composer, as a violinist
respectable, even in a corps which included Reicha, Romberg, Ries. He
had been reared in the severe Saxon school of the Bachs, and before
coming to Bonn had had much experience as music director of an operatic
company. He knew the value of the maxim, _Festina lente_, and was wise
enough to understand, that no lofty and enduring structure can be
reared, unless the foundations are broad and deep,--that sound and
exhaustive study of canon, fugue, and counterpoint is as necessary to
the highest development of musical genius as mathematics, philosophy,
and logic are to that of the scientific and literary man. He at once saw
and appreciated the marvellous powers of Johann van Beethoven's son, and
adopted a plan with him, whose aim was, not to make him a mere youthful
prodigy, but a great musician and composer in manhood. That, with this
end in view, he should have criticized the boy's crude compositions with
some severity was perfectly natural; equally so that the petted and
bepraised boy should have felt these criticisms keenly. But the
severity of the master was no more than a necessary counterpoise to the
injudicious praise of others. That Beethoven, however he may have spoken
of Neefe to Wegeler and Schindler, did at times have a due consciousness
of his obligations to his old master, is proved by a letter which he
wrote to him from Vienna, during the first transports of joy and delight
at finding himself the object of universal wonder and commendation
in the musical circles of the great capital. He thanks Neefe for the
counsels which had guided him in his studies, and adds, "Should I ever
become a great man, it will in part be owing to you."

The following passage from an account of the virtuosos in the service of
the Elector at Bonn, written in 1782, when Beethoven had been with Neefe
but little more than a year, and which we unhesitatingly, attribute to
the pen of Neefe himself, will give an idea of the course of instruction
adopted by the master, and his hopes and expectations for the future
of his pupil. It is, moreover, interesting, as being the first public
notice of him who for half a century has exercised more pens than any
other artist. The writer closes his list of musicians and singers
thus:--

"Louis van Beethoven, son of the above-named tenorist, a boy of eleven
years, and of most promising talents. He plays the piano-forte with
great skill and power, reads exceedingly well at sight, and, to say all
in a word, plays nearly the whole of Sebastian Bach's 'Wohltemperirtes
Klavier,' placed in his hands by Herr Neefe. Whoever is acquainted with
this collection of preludes and fugues in every key (which one can
almost call the _non plus ultra_ of music) knows well what this implies.
Herr Neefe has also, so far as his other duties allowed, given him
some instruction in thorough-bass. At present he is exercising him
in composition, and for his encouragement has caused nine variations
composed by him for the piano-forte upon a march[A] to be engraved at
Mannheim. This young genius certainly deserves such assistance as will
enable him to travel. He will assuredly become a second Wolfgang Amadeus
Mozart, should he continue as he has begun.

[Footnote A: The variations upon a march by Dressler.]

"'Wem er geneigt, dem sendet der Vater der
Menschen und Goetter
Seinen Adler herab, traegt ihn zu himmlischen
Hoeh'n und welches
Haupt ihm gefaellt um das flicht er mit
liebenden Haenden den Lorbeer.'
Schiller."

In the mere grammar of musical composition the pupil required little of
his master. We have Beethoven's own words to prove this, scrawled at the
end of the thorough-bass exercises, afterward performed, when studying
with Albrechtsberger. "Dear friends," he writes, "I have taken all this
trouble, simply to be able to figure my basses correctly, and some
time, perhaps, to instruct others. As to errors, I hardly needed to
learn this for my own sake. From my childhood I have had so fine a
musical sense, that I wrote correctly without knowing that it _must_ be
so, or _could_ be otherwise."

Neefe's object, therefore,--as was Haydn's at a subsequent period,--was
to give his pupil that mastery of musical form and of his instrument,
which should enable him at once to perceive the value of a musical idea
and its most appropriate treatment. The result was, that the tones of
his piano-forte became to the youth a language in which his highest,
deepest, subtilest musical ideas were expressed by his fingers as
instantaneously and with as little thought of the mere style and manner
of their expression as are the intellectual ideas of the thoroughly
trained rhetorician in words.

The good effect of the course pursued by Neefe with his pupil is visible
in the next published production--save a song or two--of the boy;--the

"Three Sonatas for the Piano-forte, composed and dedicated to the most
Reverend Archbishop and Elector of Cologne, Maximilian Frederick, my
most gracious Lord, by LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN, _Aged eleven years_."

We cannot resist the temptation to add the comically bombastic
Dedication of these Sonatas to the Elector, which may very possibly have
been written by Neefe, who loved to see himself in print.

"DEDICATION

"MOST EXALTED!

"Already in my fourth year Music began to be the principal employment of
my youth. Thus early acquainted with the Lovely Muse, who tuned my soul
to pure harmonies, she won my love, and, as I oft have felt, gave me
hers in return. I have now completed my eleventh year; and my Muse, in
the hours consecrated to her, oft whispers to me, 'Try for once, and
write down the harmonies in thy soul!'--'Eleven years!' thought I,--'and
how should I carry the dignity of authorship? What would _men_ in the
art say?'--My timidity had nearly conquered. But my Muse willed it:--I
obeyed and wrote.

"And now dare I, Most Illustrious! venture to lay the first fruits of my
youthful labors at the steps of _Thy_ throne? And dare I hope that Thou
wilt deign to cast upon them the mild, paternal glance of Thy cheering
approbation? Oh, yes! for Science and Art have ever found in Thee a wise
patron and a magnanimous promoter, and germinating talent its prosperity
under Thy kind, paternal care.

"Filled with this animating trust, I venture to draw near to _Thee_
with these youthful efforts. Accept them as a pure offering of childish
reverence, and look down graciously, Most Exalted! upon them and their
young author,

"LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN."

"These Sonatas," says a most competent critic,[B] "for a boy's work,
are, indeed, remarkable. They are _bona fide_ compositions. There is no
vagueness about them.... He has ideas positive and well pronounced,
and he proceeds to develope them in a manner at once spontaneous and
logical.... Verily the boy possessed the vital secret of the Sonata
form; he had seized its organic principle."

[Footnote B: J.S. Dwight.]

Ludwig has become an author! His talents are known and appreciated
everywhere in Bonn. He is the pet of the musical circle in which he
moves,--in danger of being spoiled. Yet now, when the character is
forming, and those habits, feelings, tastes are becoming developed and
fixed, which are to go with him through life, he can look to his father
neither for example nor counsel. He idolizes his mother; but she is
oppressed with the cares of a family, suffering through the improvidence
and bad habits of its head, and though she had been otherwise situated,
the widow of Laym, the Elector's valet, could hardly be the proper
person to fit the young artist for future intercourse with the higher
ranks of society.

In the large, handsome brick house still standing opposite the minster
in Bonn, on the east side of the public square, where now stands the
statue of Beethoven, dwelt the widow and children of Hofrath von
Breuning. Easy in their circumstances, highly educated, of literary
habits, and familiar with polite life, the family was among the first in
the city. The four children were not far from Beethoven's age; Eleonore,
the daughter, and Lenz, the third son, were young enough to become
his pupils. In this family it was Ludwig's good fortune to become a
favorite, and "here," says Wegeler, who afterward married Eleonore, "he
made his first acquaintance with German literature, especially with the
poets, and here first had opportunity to gain the cultivation necessary
for social life."

He was soon treated by the Von Breunings as a son and brother, passing
not only most of his days, but many of his nights, at their house, and
sometimes spending his vacations with them at their country-seat in
Kerpen,--a small town on the great road from Cologne to Aix la Chapelle.
With them he felt free and unrestrained, and everything tended at the
same time to his happiness and his intellectual development. Nor was
music neglected. The members of the family were all musical, and
Stephen, the eldest son, sometimes played in the Electoral Orchestra.

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