Beethoven Quotes

“Without suffering there is no struggle, without struggle no victory, without victory no crown.”
― Jan Swafford, Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph

“There’s something singularly moving about that moment when this man—deaf and sick and misanthropic and self-torturing, at the same time one of the most extraordinary and boundlessly generous men our species has produced—greets us person to person, with glass raised, and hails us as friends.”
― Jan Swafford, Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph

“Art is free,” he said, “and is not to be diminished by any chains of craftsmanship.”
― Jan Swafford, Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph

“On the other side of the misery of his training, there was the ecstasy of music itself. When he escaped from his father’s regime and found better teachers and discovered his own ambitions, the teenage Beethoven still sought solitude, hours when he could be alone with music and pore over his own creations. Even though he was performing constantly in public, the rest of the world and everybody in it could not reach him in that solitude. Music was the one extraordinary thing in a sea of the disappointing and ordinary. Reared as he was in a relentless discipline, instinctively responsive to music as he was, the boy never truly learned to understand the world outside music. Nobody ever really demanded that of him until, disastrously, near the end of his life. Nor did he ever really understand love. He could perceive the world and other people only through the prism of his own consciousness, judging them in the unforgiving terms he judged himself.”
― Jan Swafford, Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph

“In those days, private houses were the primary venue where secular music was heard. Public concerts in large halls were less common, largely reserved for orchestral and large choral works.40 From childhood on, Beethoven made his reputation as a performer mainly in the setting of house music, and that situation hardly changed through his career. Solo pieces and chamber music, in other words, were played in chambers, much of the time by amateur musicians for audiences of family and friends. Programs were a mélange of genres and media; a concerto might be followed by a solo piece, followed by an aria, the musicians alternately playing and listening. The audience typically wandered in and out of the room, sometimes chatted and played cards.”
― Jan Swafford, Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph

“In those days, the pursuit of music was perceived in a pair of dichotomies. Listeners were divided into amateurs and connoisseurs, performers into dilettanti and virtuosi. As in C. P. E. Bach’s keyboard sonatas for Kenner und Liebhaber, composers generally wrote with those divisions in mind. In 1782, Mozart wrote his father about his new concertos, “[H]ere and there connoisseurs alone can derive satisfaction; the non-connoisseurs cannot fail to be pleased, though without knowing why.”35 That defined the essentially populist attitude of what came to be called the Classical style: composers should provide something for everybody, at the same time gearing each work for its setting, whether it was the more intimate and complex chamber music played by enthusiasts in private homes, or public pieces for theater and larger concerts, which were written in a more straightforward style.”
― Jan Swafford, Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph

“In its dream of the triumph of reason and science, the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century failed in its hope of sweeping away old legends and superstitions like these—partly because the next generation, the Romantics, would condemn the reign of reason and embrace the ancient, the wild and mysterious, the mingling of fear and awe they called the sublime.   In”
― Jan Swafford, Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph

“Without suffering there is no struggle, without struggle no victory, without victory no crown." Maria van Beethoven (Beethoven's mom)”
― Jan Swafford, Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph

“He served humankind but never understood people, and though he yearned with all his heart for love and companionship, year after year he could bear humanity less and less in the flesh. His”
― Jan Swafford, Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph

“The situation is desperate,” runs an old Viennese saying, “but not serious.”
― Jan Swafford, Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph

“In the Eroica and other pieces of his middle years, Beethoven hailed the enlightened leader, the benevolent despot, the military spirit. Now for him the military spirit is nothing but destruction. By the end of this section the bugles are raging, the drums roaring, the choir crying Dona pacem! in terror. Now we understand what Beethoven meant by “prayer for inner and outer peace.” The inner peace is that of the spirit. The outer peace is in the world. The fear and trembling in the Missa solemnis is not the fear of losing salvation in eternity; it is the human, secular fear of violence and chaos.”
― Jan Swafford, Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph

“Whatever is difficult," Beethoven would write, "is good.”
― Jan Swafford, Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph

“[Later Beethoven said, “Only art and science can raise man to the level of the divine.”]”
― Jan Swafford, Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph

“Performing regularly at the Breunings for a salon of knowledgeable and admiring listeners, Beethoven played Haydn and Mozart and Bach, his own pieces, improvisations. Often he was asked to improvise a character portrait of one of the Breuning circle.11 That came naturally to him; Christian Neefe had taught him that music was modeled not only on forms but also on passions and characters. Young Beethoven joined in the ongoing dialogue over the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. He read books he heard spoken of in the house: Homer and Plutarch and Shakespeare, the current German poems of Klopstock, and works of the young Goethe and Schiller. He soaked up the Aufklärung ferment that was a constant presence.12 In”
― Jan Swafford, Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph

“From early on, Ludwig was a pianist rather than a harpsichordist, becoming one of the first generation to grow up as pure pianists from close to the beginning of their studies. Van den Eeden may also have taught the boy his first lessons in thoroughbass, giving him a foundation in harmonic practice by way of learning to read the numerical figures that indicate the chords to be played above a bass line.31 Most solo works of that time consisted simply of a melody and figured bass, the keyboardist improvising an accompaniment from the given harmonies. Learning the art of harmony via thoroughbass was a foundation of both composition and improvisation.”
― Jan Swafford, Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph

“Two days before the first concert, Franz Wegeler visited his old friend and witnessed a sight he never forgot. Beethoven was composing the finale for the C Major Piano Concerto, handing each page of score with the ink still wet to four copyists sitting in the hall, who were writing out the instrumental parts for a rehearsal the next day. At the same time Beethoven was wretchedly sick to his stomach, a familiar condition for him. So Wegeler watched his friend finish a rondo finale for piano and orchestra virtually in one sitting, his work interspersed with violent fits of vomiting. The next day Wegeler heard the concerto rehearsed with the whole, presumably small, orchestra crammed into Beethoven’s flat. Here Beethoven produced another feat. Finding that his piano was a half step flatter than the winds, he played his solo part in C-sharp major.26”
― Jan Swafford, Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph

“concert. It was a benefit for the string-playing”
― Jan Swafford, Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph

“locking the little scamp in the basement.”
― Jan Swafford, Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph

“Schubert had been one of the first composers to groan, “Who can do anything after Beethoven?”
― Jan Swafford, Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph

“perfervid”
― Jan Swafford, Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph

“munificence.”
― Jan Swafford, Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph