Word: beethoven
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...other five: Beethoven, Gounod, Mozart, Verdi, Wagner...
...French baron wanted urgently to see Beethoven, but a friend assured him it was impossible: "Ever since France became an Empire, Beethoven has had such a hatred for the French . . ."* The baron made his visit to Beethoven's apartment in Vienna, nonetheless, and "a very ugly and evidently ill-humored man opened the door...
...inside: "A rather old grand piano covered in dust . . . Beneath it ... an unemptied chamber pot . . . The chairs . . . were covered with plates full of the remains of the previous evening's meal." It was an equal shock to realize that the ugly man who let him in was Beethoven himself. Concluded the baron: "I had seen the bear in his cage...
...this scene, as in others from Michael Hamburger's Beethoven: Letters, Journals and Conversations (Pantheon; $3.75), the great composer appears as one of the shaggiest two-legged bears of all time. British Author Hamburger contributes nothing that is new; but his neat arrangement of recollections, and some new translations of Beethoven's letters and notebooks, give readers an intimate, cage-side view of the master, if not quite the whole picture...
...Naked Heart. The Beethoven of 1809 was 39, and already the famed composer of the mighty "Eroica," the "Moonlight" and "Appassionata" sonatas. He was a self-made man risen from low birth-his father was a drunken court musician in Bonn-to lofty republican ideals. He was also a man tortured by a bad stomach and that most "terrible affliction" of a musician, deafness. The deafness left its mark early. At 31 he confided in letters to a friend: "I fled from men, had to appear a misanthropist, though I am far from being one ... I scarcely hear those...