All men were brothers in the face of his mockery
Humour in Beethoven’s life and music All men were brothers in the face of his mockery Humour in Beethoven’s life and music

Ludwig van Beethoven continues to be seen as a grumpy and at the same time irascibly pig-headed genius, who suffered from problems with his hearing. But this is only half the picture. The other half reveals him to have been a perceptive analyst who brought a remarkable degree of irony to his characterization of his contemporaries. His enigmatic sense of humour is also apparent in many of his compositions.

Titanic, heroic and demonic – this was how the nineteenth century wanted its Beethoven to be, and whatever failed to conform to this image was cast aside as an irrelevant whim by middle-class observers keen to promote the idea of the musician as a genius. Humour was said to be the sole privilege of Joseph Haydn, which in turn meant that he was denied the attribute of the titanic. Mozart was cast in the role of the darling of the gods, a mixture of mistakes and half-truths but at least ideally suited to being carved in tablets of stone from an ideological standpoint. Few of his contemporaries acknowledged Beethoven’s gift for humour.

One exception was Robert Schumann, who in 1835 discovered the older composer’s Rage over a Lost Penny, persuading him to write that “it would be difficult to find anything merrier than this whim; I laughed heartily about it the other day when I played it over”. He then went on to add: “Now I have you, Beethovenians! […] You will think it common, unworthy of a Beethoven, like the melody to Freude, schöner Götterfunken in the D minor Symphony; you will hide it far, far beneath the Eroica!” 

And that is indeed what initially happened. In the longer term, however, the coarse and witty jokes in Beethoven’s works meant that observers gradually became less willing to trust in the widespread clichés. Was Beethoven really just a great pantheist and an apostle who preached the gospel of freedom? No, his dirty jokes and rabid outbursts could no longer be totally ignored, still less his spiteful remarks about critics, copyists and clerks. All men were brothers in the face of his mockery.

Few of Beethoven’s contemporaries acknowledged his gift for irony.

Beethoven was incapable of running his household along orderly lines and since he regarded all the housekeepers who were unwilling to accept his tyranny as his mortal enemies, he was forced to fall back on the culinary skills of pub landlords. But he was also drawn to taverns by the wine and by the convivial atmosphere. Here, by his own admission, he felt “unbuttoned” and engaged with friends and colleagues and, best of all, with waiters, giving rise to scenes of involuntary humour worthy of the funniest film comedian. Whether it was the Black Camel, the White Swan or the Golden Ox, few hostelries escaped his condemnation. But even his closest friends found themselves on the sharp end of his puns and of his sarcasm and his irony, when he could be completely ruthless. His fellow conversationalists fared no better. In 1794, for example, his publisher Nikolaus Simrock had to bear the brunt of his rudeness: “In my last letter I promised to send you some of my compositions; and you treated my statement as if it were merely the fine phrase of a courtier. How on earth can I have merited such a description? – Fie, who in these democratic times of ours would indulge in that kind of talk?” A Hungarian civil servant by the name of Nikolaus Zmeskall von Domanovecz, who was fond of passing himself off as a baron, came off even worse. In the context of his Duet with Two Obbligato Eyeglasses, Beethoven fired off the following missive: “My very dear Baron Muck-Cart Driver, je vous suis bien obligé pour votre faiblesse de vos yeux [I am most obliged to you for the weakness of your eyes]. – By the way, I refuse to allow you to rob me of my occasional good humour in the future because yesterday your Zmeskall-Domanoveczian twaddle left me very sad, the devil take you. I’ll hear no more of your whole morality.” Fortunately the “baron” was one of Beethoven’s most loyal friends and was used to having to put up with outbursts of this kind.

Beethoven’s friends and acquaintances also had to get used to his financial dealings. Here it became clear that the composer had not only turned his surliness into a fine art but was also a master when it came to adopting an elevated diplomatic tone, albeit only in an ironic context, of course. He adopted this tone by preference whenever it was a question of placating – or unsettling – his creditors. There is no finer example of this approach than his greeting to his publishing colleague Tobias Haslinger: “You can see how concerned I am about your soul’s salvation & it is with the greatest pleasure that I remain your most faithful debtor for ever & for aye.” Beethoven owed Haslinger 1,200 florins and had fallen behind with his repayments. By way of consolation he sent the publisher as three-part canon based on the line “O Tobias, O Tobias, Dominus Haaaaslinger, O!” On several occasions Beethoven set his own witty words as canons intended to raise a smile. They include mischievous pieces such as Ass of All Asses and Please Write Out the Scale of E♭, not to mention the admirable musical joke Graf, Graf, Graf (literally, “Count, Count, Count”) in which the word “Count” has been struck out and replaced by “Schaf” (a sheep or a fool). The canon’s first editor dutifully overlooked this change. It is tempting to think that Beethoven would also have felt irresistibly drawn to texts by other writers, including the “Song of the Flea” from Goethe’s Faust.

Humour was an integral part of Beethoven’s musical language.

It was inevitable that Beethoven’s sense of humour would also find its way into his major works. The most astonishing turns of phrase that create the impression of jokes are a feature of his personal style, a point already apparent in an early piece like the Piano Sonata in F major op. 10 no. 2, the presto finale of which has more staccato markings than any other piece in the whole history of music, notes that are to be played in an extremely clipped manner, taking to its most absurd extreme the genre picture of a peasants’ dance. In his op. 120 Diabelli Variations – Beethoven’s last great work for the piano – distortion and bafflement are raised to the level of a general principle. Here Diabelli’s waltz theme is dissected and destroyed in an extremely elaborate way. In his analysis of this set of thirty-three variations Hans von Bülow believed that he had discovered “every stage in the evolution of musical thought and of the musical imagination – from the most sublime profundity to the boldest humour – and all in the most incomparably manifold variety.”

But anyone looking for concrete evidence will find their quest all too easy. Of course, we can hear the jingling of coins in the street in Rage over a Lost Penny and the metronome is clearly audible in the Eighth Symphony. But humour is such an integral part of Beethoven’s musical language that it has also found its way into works that express natural mysticism and even the grandest emotions. It is not just about jokes and tomfoolery. It is far more worthwhile to look for traces of the humour and godlike irony that were essential to the Romantics’ outlook on life. It was this that allowed Beethoven to juxtapose completely disparate worlds in his late String Quartet in A minor op. 132, for example: its opening movement is a fugue that speaks of pain and meditation, while its second movement is a ländler accompanied by the sound of bagpipes. Composed in one of the older church modes, its third movement is headed “A Convalescent’s Song of Thanksgiving to the Deity”. Its fourth movement is a parody of a march. And its fifth and final movement ruthlessly undermines each and every attempt to strike a songlike note and threatens to turn the whole of the compositional structure on its head.

Countless personal tragedies and difficulties turned Beethoven into a curmudgeon but they were incapable of destroying his love of jokes and of satire and irony. This much is clear from what are reputed to have been the final words that he spoke on his deathbed on 24 March 1827: “Plaudite, amici, comoedia finita est” (Applaud, my friends, the comedy is over).