Beethoven and Goethe, July 1812

[Michael]

This famous incident took place 200 years ago this month.

http://www.gramophone.co.uk/features...ethe-july-1812

The meeting certainly took place but now I find that the incident depicted in the painting may have been fabricated. I always thought it really happened.







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[Fidelio]

We have the account and observations from Bettina Brettano:

" As they were walking together, Beethoven and Goethe crossed paths with the empress, the dukes and their cortege. So Beethoven said to Goethe: Keep walking as you did until now, holding my arm, they must make way for us, not the other way around. Goethe thought differently; he drew his hand, took off his hat and stepped aside, while Beethoven, hands in pockets, went right through the dukes and their cortege, barely miming a saluting gesture. They drew aside to make way for him, saluting him friendlily. Waiting for Goethe who had let the dukes pass, Beethoven told him: " I have waited for you because I respect you and I admire your work, but you have shown too great an esteem to those people. "

[Roehre]

We have the account and observations from Bettina Brettano:

" As they were walking together, Beethoven and Goethe crossed paths with the empress, the dukes and their cortege. So Beethoven said to Goethe: Keep walking as you did until now, holding my arm, they must make way for us, not the other way around. Goethe thought differently; he drew his hand, took off his hat and stepped aside, while Beethoven, hands in pockets, went right through the dukes and their cortege, barely miming a saluting gesture. They drew aside to make way for him, saluting him friendlily. Waiting for Goethe who had let the dukes pass, Beethoven told him: " I have waited for you because I respect you and I admire your work, but you have shown too great an esteem to those people. "

May I point to the fact that Bettina Brentano's recollections are just as (un)reliable as Schindler's?

[Fidelio]

Thanks Roehre for pointing that out....I should have made that clear.

[Michael]

It is amazing how many Beethoven anecdotes are pure fiction or, at the least, exaggeration. Many sayings attributed to him are in doubt.

In his essay, "Beethoven and the Creative Process", Maynard Solomon quotes passages from Schlosser's "Personal Recollections of Beethoven", published in 1885. These show a remarkable similarity to a letter supposedly written by Mozart and published by F Rochlitz in 1815.

Here are two examples:

Mozart: "Concerning my way of composition ....I can really say ....no more about it and cannot account for it. When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone and of good cheer, say, travelling in carriage or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep, it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly.
Whence and how they come, I know not; nor can I force them.
The committing to paper is done quickly enough .......
My subject enlarges itself and I expand it ever wider and ever clearer, and the whole .... stands almost complete and finished in my head, so that I can survey it in my mind like a first picture or a comely form at a glance."

Beethoven: You will ask me whence I take my ideas? That I cannot say with any degree of certainty: they come to me directly or indirectly. I could almost grasp them in my hands out in Nature's open, in the woods, during my promenades, in the silence of the night, at the earliest dawn.
All that is left is the work of writing it down. That goes quickly according as I have the time.
Then the working out in breadth, length, height and depth begins in my head ... it rises grows upward, and I hear and see the picture as a whole take shape and stand forth before me in mind as though cast in a single piece."

The extraordinary thing is that, according to Solomon, both of these quotations (and I have only transcribed two or three passages in each case) were never uttered by either Mozart or Beethoven. For a number of reasons, the Mozart letter is considered spurious by many people but had survived as a romanticised notion of how a composer works.
Schlosser's reminiscences "turn out to be be a patchwork stitched together from the published standard literature."

(All this, by the way, is courtesy of Solomon who can be as wayward as Bettina or Schindler.)