Beethoven's Hair Quotes

“only my art held me back. Ah, it seemed impossible to leave the world until I had produced all that I felt was within me, and so I spared this wretched life.”
― Russell Martin, Beethoven's Hair: An Extraordinary Historical Odyssey and a Scientific Mystery Solved

“Ah, how could I possibly admit weakness of the one sense which should be more perfect in me than others, a sense which I once possessed in the greatest perfection, a perfection such as few in my profession have or ever have had?”
― Russell Martin, Beethoven's Hair: An Extraordinary Historical Odyssey and a Scientific Mystery Solved

“Two decades later, Ferdinand Hiller had proposed in a long essay—published in a special issue of the magazine Salon that celebrated Beethoven’s centenary—precisely where the light of his genius shone most brightly. He had concluded that the fundamental brilliance of the master’s music was that it achieved softness without weakness, enthusiasm without hollowness, longing without sentimentality, passion without madness. He is deep but never turgid, pleasant but never insipid, lofty but never bombastic. In the expression of love, fervent, tender, overflowing, but never with ignoble sensuality. He can be cordial, cheerful, joyful to extravagance, to excess—never to vulgarity. In the deepest suffering he does not lose himself—he triumphs over it. . . . More universal effects have been achieved by others, but none more deep or noble. No, we may say without exaggeration that never did an artist live whose creations were so truly new—his sphere was the unforeseen.”
― Russell Martin, Beethoven's Hair: An Extraordinary Historical Odyssey and a Scientific Mystery Solved

“How painful it must have been for the animated, easily impatient man to be obliged to wait for every answer, to make a pause in every moment of conversation, during which, as it were, thought was condemned to come to a standstill!”
― Russell Martin, Beethoven's Hair: An Extraordinary Historical Odyssey and a Scientific Mystery Solved