meaningofwilderness.com

Beethoven: The Man Revealed, by John Suchet 

Below is a review of the above book which I have posted at Amazon. Click here to see all the comments and my replies

Censors out the spiritual

Beethoven wrote: “We, finite beings who are the embodiment of an infinite spirit, are born to suffer both pain and joy, and it could almost be said the most distinguished of us know joy through pain.” No, Suchet does not include this quote in his book, which I admit might be called a titillating page turner that with only a few further adulterations of the truth might make a popular Hollywood flick. Rather, he focuses entirely on the finite being of Beethoven, even censoring out anything that might be the slightest bit spiritual. For example, he tells us that Beethoven wrote, “No one can love the country as much as I do.” But he leaves out the very next sentence (found in Maynard Solomon’s Beethoven): “For surely woods, trees, and rocks produce the echo man longs to hear.” And what is that echo of? Our infinite spirit — what Beethoven also calls the Godhead — of course. Suchet doesn’t want to know about that. More importantly, he doesn’t want us to know about it. Nor do we need to know this quote: “It seems as if in the country every tree said to me, ‘Holy! Holy!’—Who can give complete expression to the ecstasy of the woods?” Suchet doesn’t mind telling us about every irrational rage, every description of the squalor Beethoven lived in and his lack of concern for personal hygiene. He gives a complete account of the time he was mistakenly arrested for looking like a tramp. But to tell us he felt that every tree said to him, “Holy! Holy!” Well, this is over the top. 

He also doesn’t think it’s worth including quotes (again, found in Solomon) such as “There is nothing higher than to approach the Godhead more nearly than other mortals, and by means of that contact to spread the rays of the Godhead throughout the human race,” written at the time he was composing the Ninth Symphony. Nor this one (also in Solomon) regarding the Missa Solemnis, “My chief aim was to awaken and permanently instill religious feelings not only into the singers but also into the listeners.” No, in the “great” tradition of humanism overspreading our planet these days, for Suchet and so many others, well, this is something they just don’t want to think about. Or want us to think about either. Solomon, despite his rather annoying psychoanalytical approach, at least gives us these quotes.

And despite Suchet’s acknowledgment that Beethoven’s last works — the Ninth, the Late Quartets, the last three piano sonatas and the Missa Solemnis — are “his greatest body of work,” I can only presume he never read J.W.N. Sullivan’s Beethoven: His Spiritual Development, likely due to the word spiritual in its title. Sullivan understood, writing (regarding the 14th String Quartet) of a “vision . . . that resolves all our discords. . . . It is a transfigured world. . . . All creation . . . seems to be taking part in this exultant stirring. If ever a mystical vision of life has been presented in art it is here.  . . .” Nothing in this book, though, like that.

Sullivan also informs us that found on Beethoven’s writing desk after his death were the following quotations from Eastern sources: “I am that which is.” “I am all that was, that is, that shall be.” Solomon also gives these as well as: “He is of himself alone, and it is to this Aloneness that all things owe their being.” The essence of these sayings, and the above quotations of Beethoven, is repeated by such diverse persons as Zen master Huang Po and Albert Einstein. Huang Po: “Beginningless time and the present moment are the same. Understanding this is called complete and unexcelled enlightenment.” “That which before you is it, in all its fullness. There is naught beside.” “This One Pure Mind, the source of everything, shines forever and on all with the brilliance of its own perfection.” And Einstein in letters near the end of his life: “A human being is part of the Whole, called by us ‘Universe,’ a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest—a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us. . . . Our task must be to free ourselves. . . .” And: “For us convinced [in the truth of the theory of relativity, confirmed over and over] physicists the difference between past, present, and future is only the matter of an illusion.” Note that Beethoven wrote in his Tagebuch that in the Vedas it is written that for God absolutely there is no time. But all this is not something that concerns Suchet.

T.S. Eliot understood. The great masterpiece which won him the Nobel Prize, Four Quartets, arose out of his profound listening to the Late Quartets. They changed his life, as they did mine. At the very end he quotes English mystic Lady Julian of Norwich: “And all shall be well / And all manner of thing shall be well.” Which is precisely what is expressed in the third movement of the Ninth, the “Holy Song of Thanksgiving” of the 15th Quartet, the second movement of the 32nd Sonata, the Sanctus/Benedictus of the Missa Solemnis, the inner movements of the 14th Quartet, etc.

The great 19th-century pianist and conductor Hans von Bülow understood. In his edition of the Beethoven sonatas he wrote the two movements of the 32nd can be considered “Resistance, resignation, or better still, Samsara, Nirvana.” Exactly so. Von Bülow was also known for his double performances of Beethoven’s Ninth. But on one occasion when just a single performance was planned, upon determining at its conclusion the audience was insufficiently appreciative he . . . repeated the entire massive Symphony. This prompted one critic to write, “He baptizes the infidels with a fire hose.” No, this isn’t in Suchet’s book.

Don’t get me wrong. There are some juicy nuggets here. My favorite concerns the rehearsals for the Ninth: the contralto threw a tantrum over the extreme difficulty of her part — which Beethoven refused to change — and called him to his face, “A tyrant over all the vocal organs.” Then she turned to her fellow soloists and said, “Well then, we must go on torturing ourselves in the name of God!” 

But Suchet doesn’t see that this is precisely what Beethoven’s entire life was about: being tortured, utterly tortured — by deafness, by failure in love, by what Byron called “the mind’s canker in its savage mood,” — just so the rays of the Godhead could be spread throughout the human race. In fact this is nothing less than the most solemn duty of every true artist — to allow this to happen. And Beethoven understood the process well, for he wrote in 1816 just prior to the years when he composed his most profound works, “Man cannot avoid suffering . . . he must endure without complaining and feel his worthlessness and then again achieve his perfection, that perfection which the Almighty [a.k.a. the infinite spirit, Godhead, That Which Is, etc.] will then bestow upon him.” While Suchet does admit these last works are among the closest to perfection by any human, as far as their meaning goes, well . . . that just doesn’t interest him. (Readers who are interested in meaning may find Cabeza and the Meaning of Wilderness: An Exploration of Nature, and Mind, available at www.meaningofwilderness.com, worth reading. While perhaps only 10 to 20% of the book directly concerns music — primarily the last works of Bach, Beethoven, and Schubert —all of it, in one way or another, delves deeply into that wilderness of Mind from which all great art arises.)

And why is Suchet so obtuse? Perhaps if he’d read Kay Redfield Jamison’s Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament he might have had a little more understanding. If anyone was ever touched with fire, it was Beethoven. But even Jamison doesn’t get to the heart of the matter, which Eliot puts so succinctly: “Human kind cannot bear very much reality” — which applies, in vastly varying degrees, to both the author and subject of this book.

So I suggest boycotting this book. Why contribute to the material enrichment of someone who just doesn’t want to know? Read Sullivan and Solomon, then either get it out of the library as I did, or buy it used here at Amazon. Cast your vote — for truth.

Below are two comments I posted at Amazon in response to others’ comments:

I don't really know how people can justify appreciating Beethoven's music without at least paying some heed to his very own comments about how it came into being.

I will add that for Beethoven genuine religious feeling has nothing to do with what the average person thinks of as religion. None of the dogma, none of the beliefs, none of the rules. Just a profound intimate connection with what any word comes nowhere near doing justice to. For Einstein it was the "Whole." Zen master Huang Po called it "One Pure Mind." Native Americans have called it "The Great Mystery." For Beethoven it was "infinite spirit," " the Almighty," and the "Godhead." In fact the great discoveries of modern physics - quantum mechanics and relativity - have proved what we call the universe is really a profoundly mysterious interconnected whole. Niels Bohr said that whoever is not shocked by quantum mechanics has not understood it. String theorist Brian Greene wrote in his book, "The Fabric of the Cosmos,": "The reality we experience is but a glimmer of the reality that is."

It seems the first commenter only read the title of my review; the third seems to have read up only to the Godhead quote and perhaps skimmed the rest. Three quarters of the way through I do mention my own book, "Cabeza and the Meaning of Wilderness: An Exploration of Nature, and Mind," (not at Amazon; can be found with a Google search). While perhaps only 10 to 20% of the book directly concerns music - primarily the last works of Bach, Beethoven, and Schubert -all of it, in one way or another, delves deeply into that wilderness of Mind from which all great art arises. In the chapter The Last Sonata, which discusses Schubert's Sonata in B-flat, I write regarding the Adagio of Beethoven's Quartet No. 15, op. 132: ". . .which, when half-asleep I first understood it, raised the great question of how this man, so alone and isolated by deafness, could know such love, such joy. . . ." The late quartets are not easy listening. It took me a long time to even begin to appreciate them. It was my greatest good fortune, back in 1967, to take a noncredit course on Beethoven where Sullivan's Beethoven: His Spiritual Development was the required reading. This book induced me to keep trying with this music even though I got almost nothing out of it at first. If instead of Sullivan, Suchet's book had been assigned, well, as I write in Cabeza, I don't know where I'd be, IF I'd be.

Regarding the "reality that is" quotation, I apologize if I came across as being a know it all. The fact is, despite high school and college physics courses, I never understood the ramifications of relativity and quantum mechanics until I read books such as string theorist's Brian Greene's "Fabric of the Cosmos." Greene himself, while I'm sure he would describe himself as an atheist, says that even after 25 years he's still amazed when he reflects on the fact that no matter how fast you are moving towards or away from a beam of light (photons), you will still measure it as going exactly the same speed (186,000 miles per second in a vacuum). Einstein showed in his special theory of relativity (which he would've preferred to have been called the invariance theory) that this yields the stunning result that there are no such entities as space or time. Rather, only a space-time continuum, within which no event can ever be determined as having occurred prior to another. This is why he called the difference between past, present, and future only the matter of an illusion. And Greene also shows how the discoveries of quantum mechanics yield the equally stunning result that everything in our universe has been "entangled" since the moment of the Big Bang. As another physicist put it, "The more we learn about matter, the harder it is to be a materialist." These truths do not, as the third commenter maintains, give you no answers. Rather, they give a revelation of reality which is precisely expressed by the quotes Beethoven kept on his worktable: "I am that which is. I am all that was, that is, that shall be." Another book on physics clued me into the fact that everything we experience is due to the interaction of photons - "real" photons in the case of vision, and "virtual" photons in the case of all our other senses, INCLUDING our consciousness itself. Greene states that since massless photons are traveling at the speed of light, they themselves do not experience time. Thus, as I suggest in Cabeza, this opens up a way for us humans, us "finite beings," to experience for ourselves the timeless Whole that is "That Which Is." Just as Beethoven and the other very greatest artists, scientists, mystics of all religions, etc. of our species have.

Regarding hope, in Four Quartets T.S. Eliot wrote, "Wait without hope / for hope would be the hope of the wrong thing." Meaning hope for the "finite being" which is doomed to being snuffed out in a few short years. I'm sure if someone suggested to Beethoven that Godhead really meant hope, Beethoven wouldn't have known whether to laugh . . . or cry. To cite just one example, there is no work in all of art so devastating to the "finite being" as the first movement of the Ninth (with the exception of Bach's greatest work, The Art of the Fugue, of which Beethoven had two copies, and which is in the key of D minor - the very same key as the Ninth, Beethoven's ONLY work in that key). Beethoven even wrote on the sketch, "Despair!" But it was necessary for him to go through that absolute, total despair, to "endure without complaining and feel his worthlessness" - as Bach and Schubert did prior to composing their own most profound works - for the "perfection," the infinite lovingness of the third movement to come into being. The "infinite spirit" revealed in sound. To which I have cried my guts out more times than I can count. Beethoven also wrote, "Music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and all philosophy." If the third commenter has not experienced this for himself, well, I'm sorry.