Vyhľadávanie
Lieber Julius,
I spent the last fifteen years of my life in your place – in the World – in absolute silence. Deafness, though it is not a terminal disease, is unbecoming of man! When you lose your sight, your smell, touch, taste, everyone feels sorry for you, behaves in a solicitous and attentive manner and even with respect. However, when a person who is deaf or hard of hearing comes to a gathering, the people immediately start to nudge each other, make faces, and the most abominable of them will cheerily declare really loud, so even a deaf person could hear it: “Look, the man is as deaf as a post!” And they are all in such a jolly mood rather than in a sad one. I never made a great fuss about my deafness, even though it started affecting me in 1798 (I‘d only just turned 28) and in 1812, I was no longer able to hear my seventh symphony in A major and during the premiere of the eighth symphony in F major I also heard bugger all. I, LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN – can hear nothing at all since then. In my case, silence was not healing. I came to terms with this a long time ago. Nature is marvellous. When you lose your taste, in comes the taste imagination, the taste associations, an even – as FREUD used to say – taste auto-suggestion. With hearing, it is the same. You would never believe what a deaf person can hear in his imagination. Just ask BEDRICH SMETANA. He‘s one of us also. By the way, I have learned here – in the Other World – how to understand speech by lip-reading. It was difficult, because here, in the Centre of the Immortal Authors of the Universe, everybody talks about his own thing and we have some of the most incoherent geniuses of all times. Take DOSTOEVSKY or JAMES JOYCE: they can't even articulate properly. I understand GOETHE best of all, but that is probably because he speaks German. These fellow lodgers of mine are mostly absorbed in themselves. That is human. No other creature is as interested in itself as a human being. Good thing we had love when we were young and were interested in girls.
Once I got sick, I looked up the Viennese doctor Malfatti. Doctors are usually surrounded by nurses, or religious sisters. But this man had two sisters, both his own! Teresa was fifteen and her sister Anna Malfatti was a bit older. The older one was considered the most beautiful chick in Vienna. I liked Teresa and hoped I could be sick for a long time. Doctor Malfatti cured me so ridiculously quickly that I did not enjoy those “sisters.” Fortunately, fate gifted me – by coincidence – with another pair of sisters, Teresa and Josephine von Brunswick. The younger one was “quasi una fantasia.” Julius, you have to believe me, a connoisseur in retirement. I loved her with a cruel passion. I called her in my letters “Mein Engel,” 'Mein Alles,” or “Mein Ich.” Apparently Teresa survived me by many years and died in Brno in 1858 as an honest woman in a Damenstift. The girls inspired many of my compositions – that is well known. And it is also well known that they pretended “not to hear” my marriage proposals. Maybe that was why my ears were offended and stopped working. But when now, in the Other World, I remember the conditions in Europe after Napoleon's defeat and the restoration of the old regimes, when I remember what idiocies were then being bandied about, I am actually happy that I did not have to listen to them.
I felt best deep in the woods around Vienna. I used to go for long, day-long walks in any weather. I would go out during a rainstorm, in bad weather, through dark crevices, bright meadows, I hugged ancient trees, pushed through thick growth. A completely deaf, 57-year old, in light clothing (I couldn‘t stand heavy fabric), I overdid it a bit before the arrival of spring 1827. After a day-long hike, wet through to the bone, I stopped a dairy wagon on a field road and it gave me a ride to a nearby village. They let me sleep over in a local pub, but the room was unheated and I spent the whole night trembling in fever, I could not sleep and so, in my mind, I listened to the most dramatic finales of my symphonies. When an ordinary man can‘t sleep, he looks at the ceiling and thinks. But when a genius composer, even one deaf as a post, cannot sleep, he hears tympani, strings, woods, basses, in a word, everything that he composed, but in fortissimo. In addition, I was thirsty and I kept drinking ice-cold water all night long. Well, after this I only lived for three months. I was aching all over and I could not hear a thing. On March 25, the priest came to give me extreme unction. Then I wrote my last will and told my friends sitting around the deathbed in Italian: “Plaudite amici, commedia est finita!” Or was it in Latin? I can't remember. After the speech I began to moan with so much pain and with so much feeling that even those few friends left me and I died quite alone. That afternoon, they say, a powerful storm hit Vienna. It was March 26, 1827. While Grillparzer spoke at my funeral, my brother Johann ransacked my apartment on Schottengasse 1, grabbed the securities and stocks and a few days later sold my manuscripts at an auction. The whole score of the fifth symphony went for five Gulden and fetched seven and the score of the piano concerto in E flat major sold for three Gulden and 45 Kreuzer, the fragment of Egmont for 50 Kreuzer...
Is your world still so petty? I‘m wondering if Vienna really deserved HAYDN, MOZART, SCHUBERT... But I get satisfaction from the fact that people around the world are listening to us and the music is alive and healing like mineral springs and prickly like the human conscience. I‘ve heard that my symphonies... well, heard – I couldn't, since I'm deaf... that my symphonies are played to the cows to make them give more milk.
It bothers me a bit that the last morning—as you said to Tchaikovsky—you were listening to the fifth symphony of GUSTAV MAHLER, and not mine. Everyone here speaks about that genius Mahler. I haven't seen him here and I can't listen to his music, since I'm deaf. Try to understand my situation! When you live on Earth, it might be an advantage to be deaf, but here I would like to get to know something by listening to it...
Tantus quantus lumpus
Lvan Beethoven
P.S.: That's how I used to sign my name when I was young, writing to my close friends and sisters.
I AM OVERWHELMED
If I had unlimited power, I know what I would do! Today, most people are troubled by their sudden wealth. Not everyone has become suddenly rich, but that golden sword of Damocles is hanging practically over everyone. The revolution is over and one can go into business now. The other day I saw a bunch of rich people. They looked greasy, hung-over, surrounded by easy women, gold chains hanging around their necks, some of them were sporting ear rings – a few of them were facing bankruptcy, others were just after one... One could see that they were not ready for their sudden wealth. And who would get them ready? Life itself has thrust them into their wealth – in a rough sort of way! They do what they can – they would like to be gentle, distinguished-looking, intelligent – but one has to be trained for something like that! One has to acquire noble manners. But how was one to acquire noble manners when our enemies were always keeping us down? I will spell out the cruel truth: before the revolution – as far as the eye could see – there was nothing but poverty and vulgarity. Now, when democracy allows us to freely orientate ourselves and we can freely find the asshole in which we can stick ourselves with joyful greed – there is a surfeit of suddenly wealthy individuals that lack noble manners. I know a way to prepare the poor for the sudden acquisition of wealth. (What a pity I don't know how to suddenly acquire power! One obviously needs a lot of money to do that. The one who has money determines the political development! That is what Comrade Lenin used to say.) If I suddenly get rich – the devil never rests! – I'll buy myself a country. I'll buy it together with the school system and will immediately order a school reform. With a collective of rich people, I'll prepare a new teaching programme. This would be used for the night school for suddenly wealthy adults. The main course: wealth science. A person has to get used to operating with big sums of money right from childhood. Then, sudden wealth will not be a problem for one. Now there are many cases when a rich person wants to buy an aeroplane (just a small one, for six passengers), but he is shy, paces around a store with aeroplanes and has no idea how to go about it. The school in my own country would prepare the student for behaviour in the higher priced market. In the stores selling pipe organs, radar, and diamonds they would feel like fish in water. It will be important to teach the children of the suddenly wealthy families (but also their parents in the night schools) how to deal properly with the poor. It would be most helpful if the poor people died out in my country. It is easy to theorise about it. However, the poor have it tough. In every country one finds primitive people who prefer justice, honesty, and truth. These are the people who did not get the principle of democracy: to join the right kind of people and not to allow anyone to remove them from this group. We will have to behave kindly and properly to these poor people. If, by any chance, the poor did not want to remain poor, they would be paid well to stay poor. And the rich would spend entire days sponsoring them. But the suddenly wealthy will also have to learn how to sponsor! Just take a look around how difficult it is to find a sponsor. The rich refuse, the suddenly rich hide their wealth in the banks and we, who need to be sponsored by someone, are left high and dry!
In the country I would own, the official ideology (for there has to be one, no matter what!), to be precise would be to praise greed. I have no idea why our forefathers tried to keep our greediness so quiet. There is nothing embarrassing about it! The more greedy I am, the more wealthy is my country. If the Americans lacked greed, they would not have so many stars on their flag! I think that greed is a useful human characteristic and it has to be cultivated and developed. We have to constantly bear it in mind that ,in the event of sudden wealth, only the greediest will be able to keep their property. And if everyone makes an effort to be greedier than his neighbour, we will acquire with our greed the entire property of the country and then we can stop praising greed. There will be nothing to be greedy about any more. I don't know about you, but I am literally overwhelmed by my ideas about the country that would belong to me. My ideas are so vivid and I have planned everything to the smallest detail that all I need is to become suddenly rich. Suddenly means unexpectedly. Unexpected wealth has its iron rule: you cannot wait for it. And so I am far from expecting to be wealthy.
If I do expect anything – then it’s only your own feeling of being overwhelmed by my ideas. But knowing you, you were expecting something else from my article. You read the title and expected to find... look, I'll give you a piece of advice: don't expect anything from anyone. Only then can you unexpectedly and suddenly get something! It would be for the best if we all agreed: one for all and all for nobody.
Translated by Peter Petro
