Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph

by Jan Swafford

In his art Beethoven was reaching beyond the sorrows of lovers and friends, the rough jokes, the clashes of armies and exaltation of heroes that had inspired his work. Now for Beethoven, Sturm’s book melding science and religion joined with a sense of primeval mystery. Beethoven was pulling away from the earth, to a higher angle of view. At the same time he was singing more within than ever, starting with the locked inwardness of the deaf man who can hear only the songs in his own head. No less was Beethoven headed for the childlike, the naive, the utterly simple, all these qualities more than ever. He had not given up his drive, seen from his earliest music, to do and to express and to feel more in every direction. It was these kinds of conceptions and images that helped create the music he was to write in his last years: humanity standing under the infinite canopy of the stars, no less human and concrete than before, with no heroes to exalt us but only ourselves, reaching toward one another and, in that, toward Elysium and toward God, to make a world whose order reflects the sublime order of the universe.