He-Artist

BEETHOVEN THE CREATOR--Remain Holland--Harper ($5). "I will refresh my eyes, a last time, at the sun of Beethoven," begins virile Author Holland. "The whole being of a Beethoven ... is representative of a certain European epoch. . . . He is not the shepherd driving his flock before him; he is the bull marching at the head of his herd." Portrait at 30. "The mind of Beethoven has strength for its base. The musculature is powerful, the body athletic; we see the short stocky body with its great shoulders, the swarthy red face, tanned by sun and wind, the stiff black mane, the bushy eyebrows, the beard running up to the eyes, the broad and lofty forehead and cranium, 'like the vault of a temple,' powerful jaws 'that can grind nuts,' the muzzle and the voice of a lion." A cold-water-bather, long-walker, sound-sleeper, lover of wine and fish. He needed women but liked them guardedly. Said he of them: "If I had been willing thus to sacrifice my vital force, what would have remained for the nobler, the better thing?" His heredity predisposed him to tuberculosis and alcoholism while enteritis, syphilis, weak eyes were potential added maladies. His deafness, believes Author Rolland, was due to overworked ears. Beethoven died of cirrhosis of the liver. He scorned the feeble, ignorant, baseborn, wellborn, and those who loved him. His most devoted friends were "instruments on which I play when I please." To the kind Lichnowsky he wrote: "Prince, what you are, you are by the accident of birth; what I am. I am of myself. There are and there will be thousands of princes. There is only one Beethoven." About laws of harmony he said: "The rules forbid this succession of chords; very well, I allow it." At weepers over his music he laughed: "The fools! . . . They are not artists. Artists are made of fire; they do not weep." He considered God his only equal. He lived precariously, striding along the Nietzschean tightrope. For all his self-sufficiency Beethoven could "never see a pretty face without being smitten." But a love-affair, he boasted, never lasted longer than seven months. He loved three cousins, his aristocratic pupils, Tesi, 25, Pepi, 21, and passionate Giulietta, 16. "by turn and all together." June Prime. The great eight-noted motive of the Eroica, clue to Beethoven's per- sonality, battles, loves, multiplies, resurrects itself, dances, dies. The Eroica is "one of the Great Days of music. It inaugurates an era."

In the Appassionato, the word of music is made man. "That is the secret of this revolution. . . . For just as in the form of a Greek temple or a Gothic cathedral there is summed up the still-burning flame of millions of lives that have passed away, so a whole epoch of the European mind, almost the whole nineteenth century, condenses musically into this sonata-form that Beethoven was to immortalise. ... He is the emperor of the world of feeling." His Leonora is a monument of anguish under oppression, and hope (in the deep horns and bassoons). The Significance. In 1903, when he became the Sorbonne's Professor of History of Music, Romain Rolland wrote a biography of Beethoven. That book told such "vital" facts as that Ludwig van Beethoven, son of a whiskey tenor, was born in Bonn, on Dec. 17, 1770; that he was sent to Vienna by the Elector of Bonn in 1792 where he studied under Haydn, Albrectsberger, Salieri, and established a permanent residence; that he received notice first as a pianist and counted among his patrons Prince Lichnowsky, Prince Kunsky, the Archduke Rudolph; that in 1815 he took charge of his nine-year-old nephew, a responsibility which drove Beethoven to privation, despair and finally to death when the scapegrace, ofttimes a failure, attempted suicide and was banished from Vienna. The present book is a lyrical approximation of the "creative epochs'' of Beethoven, releasing Beethoven's music from dry scholastic consideration in a manner disorderly, independent, powerful.

The Author. In 1914 Romain Rolland, 63, had to leave Paris for Switzerland, when he tried by denunciatory petitions to prevent the coming War. He had already written his ten-volume Jean Christophe (1904-12), a diffuse panorama of contemporary life. Later he wrote The Sold Enchanted, "a study in cosmopolitan feminism," three volumes of which (Annette and Sylvie, Summer, Mother and Son) have been published in the U. S., a fourth of which is forthcoming. His future work: more on Beethoven. He adds: "I propose to devote a work to the analysis of the laws that seem to govern the creative subconsciousness."