Beethoven and I

Beethoven died of neurosyphilis, otosclerosis, brain trauma, or he died of something else. According to Professor Paul Wolf, writing in the Western Journal of Medicine, it was something else: an 1827 autopsy conducted by Karl Rokitansky “identified a uniformly dense skull vault and thick and shriveled auditory nerves, consistent with Paget’s disease of bone. Further investigation showed no evidence of syphilitic arteritis in the auditory arteries or recurrent otitis media. The liver, however, was atrophic, nodular, and cirrhotic.” Wolf boldly concludes: “Beethoven died of alcoholic liver disease, the result of alcohol misuse by a musician whose progressive hearing loss led to depression.”

What difference would it make if Beethoven was a drunk? None to the music, obviously, except maybe the banning of it in dry counties across the nation, lest minors and the God-fearing folks responsible for putting the fear of God into those minors be brought under its malevolent spell. (In faint-hearted parts of the land, Slaughterhouse-Five was banned, and burned, for less: the single appearance of the word “motherfucker” gave rise to widespread panic that those exposed to the book would suddenly become possessed with the desire to go out and fuck their mothers.) Banned in dry counties, on the other hand, Beethoven would be compulsory listening in Nevada.

What difference would it make to alcoholics if Beethoven was a drunk? Recovering alcoholics are reassuringly informed that there is no moral stigma to their disease, but mostly by their physicians and each other. There are plenty of people for whom alcoholism is sin, weakness of character, right next door to (voluntarily) sleeping outside the Canadian Embassy. So wouldn’t it be good to have on your team a few of the indispensables – Champagne Shakespeare, say, Leonardo the Lush, or Nine Noggins Newton?

For personal reasons, as well as perfectly objective ones (as far as objectivity goes in these matters), I’d have Beethoven on my side. With proud ignorance, I used to say that I disliked symphonic music. Then, not so long ago, I heard the Eroica on PBS. Later that day I bought it and played it several times, copied it onto the I-Pod and fell asleep to it. Then I bought the Fifth, Sixth, and Ninth Symphonies, then the Fourth, Seventh, and Eighth, and then the First and Second, in that order. I bought a copy of George Grove’s Beethoven and His Nine Symphonies, the first comprehensive study of the nine, initially published in 1896. From a second hand bookstore, I bought a copy of George Marek’s Beethoven, Biography of a Genius. From Border’s, I got a copy of Lewis Lockwood’s Beethoven, The Music and the Life and Edmund Morris’s Beethoven, The Universal Composer. All of this took under a week. By the end of another week I had the five piano concertos, the violin concerto, the complete piano sonatas, trios for violin, viola and cello and piano, violin and cello, the Missa Solemnis, and the late string quartets. For a while, Beethoven and I were inseparable. (Clive James said that the late string quartets waited for him for thirty years after he “went mad” for the Eroica; no way is he getting on the team.)

The above-mentioned Lewis Lockwood, Research Professor of Music at Harvard, recently concluded that whether Beethoven had cirrhosis of the liver remains speculative, but that he drank alcohol “in quantities” (whatever that means) is not to be doubted. Lockwood appears to be an impartial judge on the matter. He makes no mention of Doctor Rokitansky who, for his part, went on to personally conduct thirty thousand autopsies, two a day, seven days a week, every week of the year for forty five years. Professor Wolf calls Rokitansky “the father of modern morbid anatomy.” Morbid’s not the word. The man is not to be trusted. So the best bet is that Beethoven liked a drink and that’s about the extent of it.

A more inspiring thought remains, although you’d need a hammer to get the evidence to fit: Beethoven was indeed an alcoholic, but a recovering one. Between the Second and Final Maturity lie the “fallow” years, a twilight zone of diminished creativity that stretched from 1813 to 1817. Sounds like a bender to me. And what does he come up with after four years of debauchery? The Hammerklavier Sonata, the “Diabelli” Variations, the Ninth Symphony. Stick that in your moral stigma and smoke it!