Beethoven in His Own Words

Ludwig van Beethoven in his own words:

"Thus Fate knocks at the door."
[on the opening bars of the Fifth Symphony]

"He is a base man who does not know how to die; I knew it as a boy of fifteen."

"Emotion suits women only; music ought to strike fire from the soul of a man."

"There have been thousands of princes and will be thousands more; there is only one Beethoven."

"Force, which is a unit, will always prevail against the majority which is divided."

"Pity that I do not understand the art of war as well as I do the art of music; I should yet conquer Napoleon!"

"I care nothing about your whole system of ethics. Power is the morality of men who stand out from the mass, and it is also mine."

"How humiliated I have felt if somebody standing beside me heard the sound of a flute in the distance and I heard nothing, or if somebody heard a shepherd sing and again I heard nothing -- Such experiences almost made me despair, and I was on the point of putting an end to my life -- The only thing that held me back was my art. For indeed it seemed to me impossible to leave this world before I had produced all the works that I felt the urge to compose; and thus I have dragged on this miserable existence . . . "

"You should be stamped out! Belaboured with fists! Harpooned! Shot with a pistol!"

"So be it, then. For you, poor Beethoven, there is no outward happiness. You must create everything within yourself -- only in the world of the imagination will you find friends."

"Did not Dædalus, shut up in the labyrinth, invent the wings which carried him out into the open air? Oh, I shall find them, too, these wings!"

"I am resolved to rise superior to every obstacle. With whom need I be afraid of measuring my strength? . . . I will take Fate by the throat. It shall not overcome me. Oh, how beautiful it is to be alive -- would that I could live a thousand times!"

"I am the Bacchus who presses out the glorious wine for mankind. Whoever truly understands my music is freed thereby from the miseries that others carry about in them."

In the words of others:

"I assess the power of a will by how much resistance, pain, and torture it endures and knows how to turn to its advantage." (Friedrich Nietzsche)

"How does the matter stand if it is your feeble observation alone that the deep inner continuity of Beethoven's every composition eludes? If it is your fault alone that you do not understand the master's language as the initiated understand it, that the portals of the innermost sanctuary remain closed to you?" (E.T.A. Hoffmann)

"Whoever does not feel the unity of the impulse here, whoever considers it a riddle that . . . Bismarck, the statesman of blood and iron, caused Beethoven's sonatas to be played to him in the decisive moments of his life, understands nothing at all of the nature of the Teuton." (Houston Stewart Chamberlain)

"I believe in God and Beethoven." (Richard Wagner)

(Image shows the Beethoven Monument in Vienna, photographed by the author during his first trip to Europe, in 1993.)

Nietzsche: ''My conception of freedom''

From Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols (1889):

My conception of freedom. -- The value of a thing sometimes does not lie in that which one attains by it, but in what one pays for it -- what it costs us. I shall give an example. Liberal institutions cease to be liberal as soon as they are attained: later on, there are no worse and no more thorough injurers of freedom than liberal institutions. Their effects are known well enough: they undermine the will to power; they level mountain and valley, and call that morality; they make men small, cowardly, and hedonistic -- every time it is the herd animal that triumphs with them. Liberalism: in other words, herd-animalization.

These same institutions produce quite different effects while they are still being fought for; then they really promote freedom in a powerful way. On closer inspection it is war that produces these effects, the war for liberal institutions, which, as a war, permits illiberal instincts to continue. And war educates for freedom. For what is freedom? That one has the will to assume responsibility for oneself. That one maintains the distance which separates us. That one becomes more indifferent to difficulties, hardships, privation, even to life itself. That one is prepared to sacrifice human beings for one's cause, not excluding oneself. Freedom means that the manly instincts which delight in war and victory dominate over other instincts, for example, over those of "pleasure." The human being who has become free -- and how much more the spirit who has become free -- spits on the contemptible type of well-being dreamed of by shopkeepers, Christians, cows, females, Englishmen, and other democrats. The free man is a warrior.

How is freedom measured in individuals and peoples? According to the resistance which must be overcome, according to the exertion required, to remain on top. The highest type of free men should be sought where the highest resistance is constantly overcome: five steps from tyranny, close to the threshold of the danger of servitude. [...] This is true politically too; one need only go through history. The peoples who had some value, attained some value, never attained it under liberal institutions: it was great danger that made something of them that merits respect. Danger alone acquaints us with our own resources, our virtues, our armor and weapons, our spirit, and forces us to be strong. First principle: one must need to be strong -- otherwise one will never become strong.

-trans. Kaufmann/Hollingdale

(Illustration is John Henry Fuseli, Odysseus before Scylla and Charybdis, 1794-96.)