Music: Statesman’s Beethoven

Besides being a Cabinet Minister, a Deputy, a party chief and Mayor of Lyon, Edouard Herriot, thrice Premier of France, manages to turn out a good book almost every year. He may write about politics, the history of religions, archaeology or Madame de Staël. His study in Lyon is a jumble of dusty documents, old pipes, broken spectacles. In it there is also an old-fashioned upright piano, stacks of music which M. Herriot likes to play. Published for the first time in English last week was a Herriot book on Beethoven, the composer who appeals most to France’s solid bourgeois statesman.*

Herriot’s Beethoven is not only eloquently written but shows a rich understanding of Beethoven’s music and the environment in which he lived. Author Harriot visited Bonn, pictures the mean airless garret in which little Ludwig was born, the courageous mother who had been a servant girl, the drunken father who kept the boy practicing at the harpsichord for cruel lengths of time. When Beethoven went to Vienna he was an awkward, ill-kempt young man, flagrantly boorish at the fashionable soirées where he would sit down at the piano, pour out one improvisation after another. He wrote with prodigious energy. First came trios, quartets, sonatas.* The first symphony was criticized for what then seemed to be an excessive use of brasses and timpani. Drums were pounding in ears already growing deaf when, at 34, Beethoven wrote the Third, the Eroica which Napoleon inspired.

Deafness led to inner concentration but it made the man increasingly irascible, a pathetic groping figure when he ventured outside music. Biographer Herriot describes Beethoven quarreling with his cook, showering her with vermicelli, taking over the kitchen work himself. He liked to walk but he gesticulated so wildly that children often jeered him. For the first performance of Missa Solemnis he stood in the pit. supposedly to help conduct. He was oblivious to the fact that the singers skipped the passages which seemed to them too difficult.

At the end. when he was most unruly and so poor that he had to economize on food. Beethoven still had the detachment to sit down and write the last great quartets. He died shaking his fist at a storm which was beating against his window. But Herriot. the preacher of peace, does not end his book there. He takes for a final text the choral ending to the Ninth Symphony, pleads, as did Beethoven, for a brotherhood of man.

* The Life and Times of Beethoven—Macmillan ($4).

* Published last fortnight were the 32 Beethoven sonatas, edited by Pianist Artur Schnabel, peerless Beethoven interpreter (Simon & Schuster, 2 vol., paperbound $5, clothbound $8). Pianist Schnabel contributes valuable fingering and pedal indications, argues over controversial points in long scholarly footnotes printed in French, German and English. Supplementing such conventional markings as forte, pianissimo or con expressione are Schnabel’s own suggestions. Examples: “No hurry, no precipitation,” “avoid all restlessness,” “serious, somewhat gloomy, always arguing.”