Books: He-Artist

BEETHOVEN THE CREATOR—Remain Holland—Harper ($5). "I will refresh my eyes, a last time, at the sun of Beethoven," begins virile Author Holland. "The whole being of a Beethoven ... is representative of a certain European epoch. . . . He is not the shepherd driving his flock before him; he is the bull marching at the head of his herd." Portrait at 30. "The mind of Beethoven has strength for its base. The musculature is powerful, the body athletic; we see the short stocky body with its great shoulders, the swarthy red face, tanned by sun and wind, the stiff black mane, the bushy eyebrows, the beard running up to the eyes, the broad and lofty forehead and cranium, 'like the vault of a temple,' powerful jaws 'that can grind nuts,' the muzzle and the voice of a lion." A cold-water-bather, long-walker, sound-sleeper, lover of wine and fish. He needed women but liked them guardedly. Said he of them: "If I had been willing thus to sacrifice my vital force, what would have remained for the nobler, the better thing?" His heredity predisposed him to tuberculosis and alcoholism while enteritis, syphilis, weak eyes were potential added maladies. His deafness, believes Author Rolland, was due to overworked ears. Beethoven died of cirrhosis of the liver. He scorned the feeble, ignorant, baseborn, wellborn, and those who loved him. His most devoted friends were "instruments on which I play when I please." To the kind Lichnowsky he wrote: "Prince, what you are, you are by the accident of birth; what I am. I am of myself. There are and there will be thousands of princes. There is only one Beethoven." About laws of harmony he said: "The rules forbid this succession of chords; very well, I allow it." At weepers over his music he laughed: "The fools! . . . They are not artists. Artists are made of fire; they do not weep." He considered God his only equal. He lived precariously, striding along the Nietzschean tightrope. For all his self-sufficiency Beethoven could "never see a pretty face without being smitten." But a love-affair, he boasted, never lasted longer than seven months. He loved three cousins, his aristocratic pupils, Tesi, 25, Pepi, 21, and passionate Giulietta, 16. "by turn and all together." June Prime. The great eight-noted motive of the Eroica, clue to Beethoven's per- sonality, battles, loves, multiplies, resurrects itself, dances, dies. The Eroica is "one of the Great Days of music. It inaugurates an era."