Word: beethovens
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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...
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...
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...
...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...
...hour and a half is a long time for any child-or beagle-to be amusing, and the whimsy that attempts to fill the time frequently falters. Charlie's grim pursuit of Best Speller status could use some comic-strip relief. And an interlude of Schroeder playing Beethoven's Pathètique falls into the old Fantasia trap, overly baited with pictorial gewgaws and kitsch...