Beethoven in all his correspondence wrote himself down as what he was,—­a superior man, a mighty soul in many traits, as well as a supreme creative musician.  His letters are absorbing, whether they breathe love or anger, discouragement or joy, rebellion against untoward conditions of daily life or solemn resignation.  The religious quality, too, is strong in them; that element more in touch with Deism than with one or another orthodoxy.  Withal, he is as sincere in every line of such matter as he was in the spoken word.  His correspondence holds up the mirror to his own nature, with its extremes of impulse and reserve, of affection and austerity, of confidence and suspicion.  It abounds, too, in that brusque yet seldom coarse humor which leaps up in the Finale of the Seventh Symphony, in the Eighth Symphony’s waggery, the last movement of the Concerto in E flat.  They offer likewise verbal admissions of such depression of heart as we recognize in the sternest episodes of the later Sonatas and of the Galitzin Quartets, and in the awful Allegretto of the Symphony in A. They hint at the amorous passion of the slow movements of the Fourth and Ninth Symphonies, at the moral heroism of the Fifth, at the more human courage of the ‘Heroic,’ at the mysticism of the Ninth’s tremendous opening.  In interesting relation to the group, and merely of superficial interest, are his hasty notes, his occasional efforts to write in English or in French, his touches of musical allusiveness.

[Illustration:  BEETHOVEN. Photogravure from the Original Painting by C. Jaeger.]

It is not in the purpose of these prefatory paragraphs to a too-brief group of Beethoven’s letters to enter upon his biography.  That is essentially a musician’s life; albeit the life of a musician who, as Mr. Edward Dannreuther suggests, leaves behind him the domain of mere art and enters upon that of the seer and the prophet.  He was born in Bonn in 1770, on a day the date of which is not certain (though we know that his baptism was December 17th).  His youth was not a sunshiny period.  Poverty, neglect, a drunken father, violin lessons under compulsion, were the circumstances ushering him into his career.  He was for a brief time a pupil of Mozart; just enough so to preserve that succession of royal geniuses expressed in linking Mozart to Haydn, and in remembering that Liszt played for Beethoven and that Schubert stood beside Beethoven’s last sick-bed.  High patronage and interest gradually took the composer under its care.  Austria and Germany recognized him, England accepted him early, universal intelligence became enthusiastic over utterances in art that seemed as much innovations as Wagneristic writing seemed to the next generation.  In Vienna, Beethoven may be said to have passed his life.  There were the friends to whom he wrote—­who understood and loved him.  Afflicted early with a deafness that became total,—­the irony of fate,—­the majority of his master-works were evolved from a mind shut away from the pleasures and disturbances of earthly sounds, and beset by invalidism and suffering.  Naturally genial, he grew morbidly sensitive.  Infirmities of temper as well as of body marked him for their own.  But underneath all superficial shortcomings of his intensely human nature was a Shakespearean dignity of moral and intellectual individuality.