In the mere grammar of musical composition the pupil required little of his master. We have Beethoven’s own words to prove this, scrawled at the end of the thorough-bass exercises, afterward performed, when studying with Albrechtsberger. “Dear friends” he writes, “ I have taken all this trouble, simply to be able to figure my basses correctly, and some time, perhaps, to instruct others. As to errors, I hardly needed to learn this for my own sake. From my childhood I have had so fine a musical sense, that I wrote correctly without knowing that it must be so, or could be otherwise.”
Neefe’s object, therefore, — as was Haydn’s at a subsequent period, — was to give his pupil that mastery of musical form and of his instrument, which should enable him at once to perceive the value of a musical idea and its most appropriate treatment. The result was, that the tones of his piano-forte became to the youth a language in which his highest, deepest, subtilest musical ideas were expressed by his fingers as instantaneously and with as little thought of the mere style and manner of their expression as are the intellectual ideas of the thoroughly trained rhetorician in words.
The good effect of the course pursued by Neefe with his pupil is visible in the next published production—save a song or two—of the boy;—the "Three Sonatas for the Piano-forte, composed and dedicated to the most Reverend Arehbishop and Elector of Cologne, Maximilian Frederick, my most gracious Lord, by
Ludwig Van Beethoven,
Aged eleven years."
We cannot resist the temptation to add the comically bombastic Dedication of these Sonatas to the Elector, which may very possibly have been written by Neefe, who loved to see himself in print.
“DEDICATION
“Most Exalted!
“ Already in my fourth year Music began to be the principal employment of my youth. Thus early acquainted with the lovely Muse, who tuned my soul to pure harmonies, she won my love, and, as I oft have felt, gave me hers in return. I have now completed my eleventh year; and my Muse, in the hours consecrated to her, oft whispers to me, 'Try for once, and write down the harmonies in thy soul! ‘Eleven years!’ thought I,—‘and how should I carry the dignity of authorship? What would men in the art say?’ My timidity had nearly conquered. But my Muse willed it;—I obeyed and wrote.
“And now dare I, Most Illustrious! venture to lay the first fruits of my youthful labors at the steps of Thy throne? And dare I hope that Thou wilt deign to cast upon them the mild, paternal glance of Thy cheering approbation? Oh, yes! for Science and Art have ever found in Thee a wise patron and a magnanimous promoter, and germinating talent its prosperity under Thy kind, paternal care.
“Filled with this animating trust, I venture to draw near to Thee with these youthful efforts. Accept them as a pure offering of childish reverence, and look down graciously, Most Exalted! upon them and their young author, {{float right|“Ludwig Van Beethoven.”
“These Sonatas,” says a most competent critic,[1] “ for a boy’s work, are, indeed, remarkable. They are bonâ fide compositions. There is no vagueness about them. . . . He has ideas positive and well pronounced, and he proceeds to develope them in a manner at once spontaneous and logical. . . . Verily the boy possessed the vital secret of the Sonata from; he had seized its organic principle.”
Ludwig has become an author! His talents are known and appreciated everywhere in Bonn. He is the pet of the musical circle in which he moves, — in danger of being spoiled. Yet now, when the character is forming, and those habits, feelings, tastes are becoming developed and fixed, which are to go with him through life, he can look to his father neither for example nor counsel. He idolizes his mother; but she is oppressed with the cares of a family, suffering through the improvidence and bad habits of its head, and though she had been otherwise situated, the widow of Laym, the Elector’s valet, could hardly be the proper person to fit the young artist for future intercourse with the higher ranks of society.
In the large, handsome brick house still standing opposite the minster in
- ↑ J. S. Dwight.
