The Master's Voice

By local scribes.

What was on Beethoven's mind during those mundane moments when he was not working on the Ninth Symphony or the C Sharp Minor Quartet? Women, for one thing. The wife of a certain conductor, Beethoven once confided to a friend, had "a magnificent fanny from the side." Another concern in Beethoven's bachelor household was how to obtain writing paper, domestic help and food--fish, oysters and Hungarian wines were his special favorites--as cheaply as possible. That was important, since Beethoven was one of the greatest penny pinchers who ever lived. He was delighted to receive a fountain pen that held ink for five days, to hear about a new fragrance for men that supposedly was better than eau de cologne. In his last years, he made a brief effort to master one of the few arts he had never learned as a child --multiplication.

These and other diverse details of the towering romantic's everyday life are revealed in a fascinating series of books now being prepared for publication by music scholars in East Berlin. They are known as Beethoven's "Conversation Notebooks." To judge from a wide sampling shown TIME'S Bonn Correspondent Peter Range, reading the notebooks is like sitting down with the master and his friends and listening to them chat. Says George Marek, author of a massive recent Beethoven life:* "The notebooks give us the picture of Beethoven the real man. They tell us why he was displeased with his publishers, what books he wanted to buy, even about his indigestion."

Unmistakable Style. Chatting, perhaps, is not quite the word to describe communication with Beethoven. Nor is eavesdropping. From the age of 45, he was totally deaf, and anyone who wanted to talk to him had to write out the message. For this purpose, Beethoven would obligingly pull a pencil and a rumpled 5-in. by 7-in. notebook out of his pocket and offer them to visitors. Because he usually replied orally, the conversation books are as one-sided as one half of a telephone call. Yet they make clear what Beethoven was thinking about, and where he occasionally wrote in the books himself--usually for a comment that he did not want others in the room to overhear--the blunt style is unmistakable. Nephew Karl brings home a somewhat seedy friend, and Beethoven jots down: "I don't like your choice of this friend at all. Poverty deserves sympathy, but not without exceptions."

Beethoven was not one to throw things out. After his death in 1827, about 400 Conversation Notebooks were found. His Boswell--the devoted but officious Anton Schindler--collected them all, then destroyed about 260 as unimportant, uninteresting or, in the case of two books of conversations with a violinist whom Schindler despised, because "they contained the grossest and most boundless criticism of the Kaiser and Crown Prince. . . ." Schindler sold 137 books to the Staatsbibliothek (State Library) in what is now East Berlin, and there they lay for more than a century. A previous attempt to publish the notebooks got as far as three volumes, but was halted by World War II.

More recently, the dusty notebooks became part of a game of espionage and cold war politics. A phony musicologist named Wolfgang Kriiger-Riebow, apparently a double agent in the employ of both West Germany and Poland, worked himself up to the job of the Staats-bibliothek's music-division director. In 1950, he stole many of the library's rare manuscripts, including the conversation books. When his cover was blown during a trip to West Germany, the books were turned over to the Beethoven Archives in Bonn. In 1960, Bonn sent them back to East Berlin, and Karl-Heinz Koehler, music director of the Staatsbibliothek, embarked on the task of editing them and publishing them. The going was slow. The books are not dated, and the old German script is filled with archaic colloquialisms. Still, one volume (containing ten notebooks) is out. another is due in March, and by 1980 the twelfth and last volume should be ready.

A Hot Property. The available notebooks contain no Olympian revelations, but they will resolve many a puzzling cadence for scholars re-examining Beethoven's life during the bicentennial of his birth this year. They show that Beethoven never discussed the act of composing with friends, only how much he should be paid for a given composition. During his last illness he read omnivorously from Shakespeare and Sir Walter Scott (both in German translation). He planned (but never wrote) a fairy-tale opera called Melusine, a new Mass as well as an oratorio to be called The Victory of the Cross. Perhaps the most moving entry in the notebooks is one by Nephew Karl, whom Beethoven badgered unwisely in the hope that he would succeed as a scholar. The boy emerges from the pages of the notebooks as an agreeable fellow, though certainly no intellectual. Beethoven realized this truth only after Karl attempted suicide and, recovering in bed, wrote in his uncle's book: "It just happened. Don't torment me now with reproach."

From then on, Beethoven trusted and relied on Karl as though they were father and son. As soon as the master thought he had come up with a hot property in the Ninth Symphony, he sent Karl out knocking on embassy doors all over town. Would the King of England or Archduke Rudolf like to be the proud possessor of an original score by Beethoven? Indeed they would. Ten such buyers paid 50 ducats (equal to about $50 today) each for the "original," but what the old genius actually sent them were copies handwritten by local scribes.

*Beethoven: Biography of a Genius, Funk & Wagnalls, $10.

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