Books: The Titan at Home

THE LETTERS OF BEETHOVEN (1,489 pp.) —Emily Anderson—St. Martin's Press ($40).

Ludwig van Beethoven has always been a favorite example of the artist as superman. Here was a genius who behaved like one: noble, solitary, brooding and eccentric. A titan pitted against fate, said his admirers, as they listened to what they thought was fate in the Fifth Symphony. But Beethoven's letters reveal a man pitted not so much against fate as against servants, publishers, a nephew and a sister-in-law. This new volume, the largest (1,570) collection of his letters to date, was assembled by Emily Anderson, who spent 15 years gathering them from places as remote from Beethoven's Vienna as Japan, Southern Rhodesia, Iowa and Ohio.

"I mean to devote my life to justice and virtue," wrote Beethoven in the fashionable rhetoric of his day. But as other letters amply demonstrate, he was governed mostly by his moods, and they were ungovernable. At 19, he berated a fellow composer: "You're a false dog, and may the hangman do away with false dogs." Next day he wrote the same man: "You are an honest fellow, and now I know you were right." Twenty-four years later. Beethoven had not mellowed. "I must declare that the purity of my character does not permit me to reward your kindness with friendship." he informed a secretary who had just done him a favor. But later all was forgiven: "Excellent fellow! You may dine with me at noon."

Sometimes Naughty. While young, Beethoven loved in great gusts of passion. In 1805 he wrote the Countess Josephine Deym: "Long—long—of long duration may your love become, for it is so noble. Oh you—you make me hope that your heart will long beat for me—mine can only—cease—to beat for you—when it no longer beats." But one passion led to another, and Beethoven was soon writing the same words to another woman. Once, when his exuberance got the better of him, he had to make excuses to an irritated husband for trying to talk his wife into a date while he was away. "It is one of my chief principles." he wrote sheepishly, "never to be in any other relationship than that of friendship with the wife of another man. Possibly I did indulge in some jokes which were not quite refined. But I myself told you that sometimes I am very naughty."

From the first letter to the last, Beethoven complained of illness. Occasionally he tried to lift the gloom with a little labored humor. (He thought it a joke to set the salutation of a letter to a couple of bars of music, sometimes elaborating it into a canon.) But deafness, his last and worst affliction, was no matter for jokes and gradually drained him of any gaiety. "You would find it hard to believe what an empty, sad life I have had for the past two years," he wrote a friend. "My poor hearing haunted me everywhere like a ghost; and I have avoided all human society. I seem a misanthrope and yet am far from being one."