Beethoven's Birthday

Happy Beethoven’s Birthday! His baptism on December 17, 1770 is documented, and scholars assume his (undocumented) birthday was December 15 or 16, because babies were typically baptized at a day or two old. When I was little, I loved the Peanuts comics and enjoyed getting paperback collections of the strips. Nearly every December 16, the story concerned Beethoven’s birthday and Schroeder’s celebration of it. Of course, Schroeder also performed Beethoven sonatas and other works on his toy piano.

Thus inspired by a favorite comic strip, I liked certain Beethoven compositions when I was young. In those days, the Huntley-Brinkley evening news on NBC concluded with the scherzo from Beethoven’s Ninth. I wrote NBC to find out the title and got a letter back! Subsequently, I found a used recording of the symphony at our hometown library’s annual book sale. Eventually, I also found LPs of the fifth and seventh symphonies and some of his named sonatas. I took piano lessons, but somehow never managed the spontaneous, unpracticed skill of Schroeder.

Our library acquired a copy of George R. Marek’s Beethoven: Biography of a Genius (Funk & Wagnall’s, 1969) when it was published or perhaps the following year. I didn't read the whole book but I enjoyed checking it out. I was 12 in 1969, and at 13 and 14 I had unrequited crushes on a couple of girls, which unfortunately aggravated some childhood depression I’d had even earlier. Feeling scarily hopeless at such a young age, I found comfort in the fact that, as Marek discussed, Beethoven struggled for acceptance, too!

Marek’s chapter on “The Immortal Beloved” is interesting. Beethoven's letter to his “Unsterbliche Geliebte,” dated July 6-7 and later analyzed to be 1812, was found among his effects after he died. But who was the woman, to whom Beethoven wrote with such passion? Was the letter returned to him, or did he never send it? Reviewing the numerous women important to Beethoven---like Josephine Brunsvik, Guilietta Guicciardi, Antonie Brentano,, Amalie Sebald, Bettina Brentano, Dorothea Ertmann, and Therese Brunsvik---many scholars argue for Josephine Brunsvik. Marek builds an interesting circumstantial case for Dorothea Ertmann. From time to time I still leaf through my own copy of Marek's thick book, which gives an excellent sense of the composer’s era and life.

This next birthday of mine, I'll be the same age as Beethoven when he died (56). My mother just passed away at age 93, though, and I hope that I live into old age like most of my family has. The cause of his death is disputed, possibly liver disease related to drinking or some other source of hepatitis, or to lead ingestion from wine containing the metal used to sweeten cheap wine, or to syphilis or other diseases. My daughter has seen the Trans-Siberian Orchestra's performance of their opera, "Beethoven's Last Night," which draws upon the drama of Beethoven's life and the element of fate so famously depicted in the beginning notes of the Fifth Symphony.

In a funny way, Beethoven sticks to my childhood Christmas memories, I suppose because of the Peanuts paperback collections, some of which I received as presents. And, of course, December 16 was, at least for the prodigy Schroeder, a significant day just nine days from Christmas, with a gladness all its own.