/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.23346154]

Beethoven was never drawn to anything except to that which exclusively engaged him: the play of a magician with the shapes of his inner world. For the outer world was now totally extinguished for him not because blindness robbed him of seeing it but because deafness finally kept it away from him. Hearing was the only sense through which the outer world still disturbed him: to his eyes the world had long since died. What did the enchanted dreamer see when he roamed through the colourful and crowded streets of Vienna staring ahead with his eyes open but animated only by the wakefulness of his inner world of sound? The origin and growth of his hearing difficulties pained him greatly and inclined him towards deep melancholy. He never, however, seriously complained about the onset of his total deafness, nor in particular about the loss of his ability to listen to musical performances; only the business of living became difficult which in itself held no attraction for him and he more and more deliberately distanced himself from it.
A deaf musician! Can we imagine a blind painter?
But we know a blind visionary. The deaf musician is now like Tiresias, for whom the world of appearances is closed and who is therefore aware of the basis of all appearance through his inner eye; undisturbed by the noises of life he listens only to the harmonies in his mind and from his depths still speaks only to a world – a world which has no more to say to him. Thus the genius is freed from everything external to himself and remains entirely with and in him. What a miracle it must have seemed to anyone then seeing Beethoven with the look of Tiresias: a world wandering among men, the ‘in itself ’ of the world as a wandering man!
And now the musician’s eye lit up from within. He now cast his glance on the appearance which, illuminated by his inner light, communicated back to his inner self in a wonderful reflex. Now only the essence of things is speaking to him again, showing them to him in the tranquil light of beauty. Now he understands the forest, the brook, the meadow, the blue ether, the cheerful crowd, the loving couple, the song of the bird, the passing of the clouds, the roar of the storm, the magic of the blissfully moving quiet. All his vision and creativity is there permeated by this wonderful joy which only he has bestowed on music. Even a lament, so deeply peculiar to all music, is softened to a smile: the world regains the innocence of a child. ‘This day ye shall be with me in paradise’ – who has not heard this word of our Saviour calling him when he listened to the Pastoral Symphony?

[Anonymous No.23346155]

This power of shaping the incomprehensible (things never seen or experienced) in such a way that it becomes immediately intelligible is now enhanced. The pleasure of exercising this power becomes humour: all the pain of existence disappears in face of the immense delight of playing with humour. The world creator Brahma laughs at himself, recognising the illusion about himself; regained innocence plays jokingly with the sting of atoned guilt and the liberated conscience teases the torment it has endured.
Never in the world has art produced anything as joyous as these symphonies in A major and F major, together with all the closely related compositions from the divine period of the Master’s complete deafness. The effect of this on the hearer is precisely this liberation from all guilt just as the after-effect is the feeling of a lost paradise, with which we return to the world of appearance. So these wonderful works preach remorse and repentance in the deepest sense of a divine revelation.
The only aesthetic concept applicable is that of the sublime: for here the effect of heightened awareness immediately surpasses any satisfaction deriving from the beautiful. Any defiance coming from proud reason disintegrates in the face of the magic overwhelming our whole nature; knowledge flees confessing its error and it is in the immense joy of this confession that we rejoice from the depths of our soul, however seriously the totally captivated expression of the listener betrays to us his astonishment at the inadequacy of our sight and thought when confronted with this most genuine of worlds.