This sense of humor, inherent in the mental equipment of Beethoven, enabled him to enjoy a joke as well as give it, to perceive a ridiculous situation and extract due amusement from it, to appropriate it wherever he found it.  But singularly enough, when the point of a joke was turned against himself, his sense of humor failed him utterly.  He would often become angry in such cases and the perpetrator would come in for a round of abuse which made him chary of attempting it again.

Very bad music of which there was a sufficiency already in those times, gave him great amusement, which he manifested by roars of laughter, we are informed by Seyfried, who saw more or less of him during a period covering a quarter of a century.  “All his friends,” says Seyfried, “recognized that in the art of laughter, Beethoven was a virtuoso of the first rank.”  He often laughed aloud when nothing had occurred to excite laughter, and would in such case ascribe his own thoughts and fancies as the cause.  Naive and simple as a child himself, he could only see the naivete in the worthless compositions above referred to, and could not understand the small ambition back of the pitiful effort.  He often unintentionally afforded equally great amusement to others by his own naivete.  Thus he once told Stein, of the noted family of pianoforte makers that some of the strings in his Broadwood were out of order or lacking, and to illustrate it, caught up a bootjack and struck the keys with it.  Ries states that Beethoven several times in his awkwardness emptied the contents of the ink-stand into the piano.  On this same piano the master was often begged to improvise.  The instrument was a present from the manufacturers, and when made, was probably the best example of its kind extant.  It later came into the possession of Liszt.

Beethoven’s love of a joke was such that it appears in the title to one of his works, the opus 129.  It is a rondo a capriccio for piano, with the title, Die Wuth ueber den verlorenen Groschen (fury over a lost penny), of which Schumann says “it would be difficult to find anything merrier than this whim.  It is the most harmless amiable anger.”

Beethoven was ready in repartee, and full of resources, with a wit that was spontaneous and equal to any emergency.  One New-year’s day, as he and Schindler were sitting down to dinner, a card was brought in

JOHANN VAN BEETHOVEN
Gutsbesitzer (Landed proprietor).

Beethoven took the card and wrote on the back of it—­

L. VAN BEETHOVEN
Hirnbesitzer (Brain proprietor).

and sent it back to Johann.  Cold-blooded, selfish, always ready to profit by his talented brother, and never caring how he compromised him, it was not to be expected that Johann would have the master’s approval, or that there could be any accord between them.  In any encounter, the composer generally managed to be master of the situation, through the exercise of his wit, something which the duller Johann could neither appreciate nor imitate.  It may be said in passing, that the master supplied the funds which enabled Johann to start in business.  This was in 1809.  He made money rapidly in army contracts, a business for which he was well qualified, and finally bought an estate and set up for a landed proprietor.