‘The rot set in with Beethoven’, said Benjamin Britten, who, cold fish that he was, could never understand the idea of the artist as hero (though he admired Mahler, whose music is nothing if not attention-seeking). He had half a point, because the past century has been chock-full of artists, or ‘artists’, who have asked us to soothe their fevered brows. They are still around today. No matter. Their egotism cannot disguise Beethoven’s greatness, whether or not one considers the mighty Ninth to be his finest work.
Samuel Langford, the English music critic, considering Beethoven’s Op 132 quartet in A minor, conceived during a period of ill-health, wrote that
if these beauties were born of human weakness and frailty, and have come from the hardness of physical crisis…then there is something to be said even for weakness and sickness as an inspiration in the arts.
He concluded, as have so many others, from Berlioz onwards: ‘It is something to belong to the same race of beings as Beethoven’. As Sachs makes clear, in this engaging book, in a manner that neither hectors nor cloys, music-lovers will be saying as much a thousand years from now. Every human society will find Beethoven’s music eternally hopeful, eternally modern. We cannot live without it.
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