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The appearance of The Letters of Beethoven (translated and edited by Emily Anderson: Macmillan, 3 vols., 10 guineas) is an event of importance, and their acquisition a necessity to serious students of the composer. That Beethoven was almost totally incapable of expressing in words any but the simplest sentiments we have always known, so we must not expect anything in the way of literary style. Nevertheless his personality does come across to us through the breathless, dash-ridden haste of these letters, and it is easy to build from them a picture of his day-to-day life in Vienna: a distorted picture, of course, of reality as it was filtered through the composer’s raving paranoia. But though his view of the outside world was, to say the least, wildly subjective, his comments on his own music are often exciting and illuminating.

     Asthma and melancholia make their appearance in the very first letter written, when he was seventeen, to an Augsburg lawyer who had befriended him. These early letters contain as well, however, rather more small talk than one had expected: ‘We are having very hot weather here, and the Viennese are afraid that soon they will not be able to get any more ice cream.’ And so on. As he grows older, and deafness begins to assail him, the tone of many of the letters becomes that of an irritability tempered by irony. One of the many terse notes to his publishers Breitkopf and Härtel begins thus: ‘Mistakes — mistakes — you yourself are a unique mistake — Well, I shall have to send my copyist to Leipzig or go there myself, unless I am prepared to let my works appear as nothing but a mass of mistakes —  Apparently the tribunal of music at Leipzig can’t produce one single efficient proof-reader; and to make matters worse, you send out the works before you receive the corrected proofs.’

     He is continually grumbling about his poverty though, in fact, he lived reasonably well. Certainly his rooms in Baron Pasqualati’s house on the Mölkerbastei where he lived between 1804 and 1815, I remember as being quite spacious. So many of the letters are pathetic to read even now. His awful behaviour to his nephew, to his servants, and his double-dealings with business acquaintances and friends are sad and touching. But it is surely good that we should be able to know all this. I find it extremely difficult to understand or, more exactly, to sympathize with the attitude expressed by W. H. Auden who, writing of these letters in The Spectator, says: ‘It would have been much better if three-quarters of this correspondence had been destroyed by its recipients immediately after reading it.’ His reason is, apparently, that it avails us nothing to learn ‘ugly little secrets about another human being’. This seems to me to display an extremely superficial and sentimental idea of the artist in relation to his fellow men. Mr Auden goes on to assert that ‘ordinary’ people, after reading these letters, may say to themselves, ‘If a great man can have weaknesses, why should I be ashamed of mine?’ (Though even the ‘ordinary’ person so arrogantly characterized by Mr Auden might well reply to himself, ‘Because I am not a great man’.) This unfortunate being, the next time he hears the Missa Solemnis, will, according to Mr Auden, murmur, ‘Oh yes, his music sounds very noble, but we all know what he was really like.’ No, this will not do. The artist is the man, and by widening our knowledge of one, we deepen our understanding of the other. The ladies who adore Mozart but who are shocked to the marrow to find him setting to music at the age of thirty such childish filth as Ich scheiss dir aufs Maul ... o leck mich doch geschwind, geschwind im Arsch, adore only a Mozart of their own invention. And the same is true of Beethoven. The Missa Solemnis, the last quartets and sonatas, the Ninth symphony are sublime works. Whoever wrote them was a great and remarkable human being. His name was Beethoven, and they, the works, are ‘what he was really like’. But so are these wretched letters. You can only love the man more after you’ve read them.

     One of the finest Beethoven performers of our time was the late Artur Schnabel. There used to be a story about him and Klemperer rehearsing the G major concerto. Klemperer noticed Schnabel surreptitiously conducting the strings, trying to alter the tempo. Stopping the orchestra, he called ‘Herr Schnabel, ich bin hier. Klemperer ist hier,’ to which Schnabel replied, ‘Ja Klemperer ist hier, Schnabel ist hier. Aber wo ist Beethoven?’ Probably apocryphal, but a typical Schnabel story. He himself recounts several others in My Life and Music (Longman.), a collection of lectures which he gave to Chicago students in 1949. He also, when not sidetracked by nuttily naïf questions thrown at him by his audience, talks a great deal of common-sense about technique and interpretation, reminisces about musical life in Germany and Austria in the pre-Nazi days, and touches on such diverse subjects as the prevalence of draughts in English concert halls, and the art of Lieder singing.

     Arguably the greatest Lieder composer, and certainly one to whom the Lied was the most important musical form, Hugo Wolf is well served by Eric Sams’s The Songs of Hugo Wolf (Methuen.) in which all 242 of the songs are separately discussed. The author’s method is to list each song with a prose translation (or sometimes simply a précis, followed by a paragraph or two of analytical comment. An excellent volume which will be found particularly useful to the music-lover who, responsive to the Lieder of Schubert, Schumann, Brahms and Strauss, feels he has not enough German to get to grips with Wolf in whose songs words and music are equal partners. Such a person might well try the beautiful miniatures of the Italienisches Liederbuch, armed with Mr Sams’s reliable guide.

     Several essays by the genial American composer Aaron Copland are collected in Copland on Music (Andre Deutsch.). His book is divided into four sections: the first consists loosely of essays on music, on composers, and on interpretative musicians, as well as some brief diary jottings; the second looks back on European and American music in the twenties and thirties; the third reprints various music and book reviews the composer has written over the years; the last is made up of other occasional pieces. Of most value is the book’s opening essay The Pleasures of Music, but Copland’s urbanity and amiable yet incisive intelligence are evident even in the more ephemeral pieces. The one unpromisingly called ‘Paris: 1928’ in the list of contents, turns out to be a fascinating critical account of the first performance of Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex.

     Soviet Music by Lyudmila Polyakova (Central Books.) is not likely to be read for either its entertainment value or its critical opinion. But it does mention a lot of names of composers of symphonic music, oratorios, cantatas (very popular, these), operas, ballets, chamber music, operetta and so on. The lecture begins severely, though vaguely: ‘All composers in the Soviet Union . . . are united by one creative principle. All Soviet art armed with progressive socialist ideology must turn all its variety of forms and genres to the service of the people.’ But by the end of the book, the tone has degenerated into this kind of thing: ‘Solovyov-Sedoi’s other songs, such as “Why Are You Sad, Mate?”, “The Komsomol Song”, “On the Sun-lit Glade”, “Play, My Accordion”, were also popular.’

     A rather more serious work of scholarship is Henry Purcell and the Restoration Theatre by Robert Etheridge Moore (Heinemann.), a book addressed, as its author remarks, as much to students of literature and the theatre as to students of music. The nature of the baroque theatre for which Purcell’s operas were written is frequently misunderstood. This world in which literature and music meet and combine is described and analysed in detail by Professor Moore who goes on to examine each of the Purcell operas. Until the Old Vic production of The Dryden-Purcell Tempest, the BBC’s concert performance of King Arthur, and recent recordings of The Fairy Queen and The Indian Queen, the Purcell stage works were virtually unknown to us, the one exception being Dido and Aeneas. Future stage productions of these extravagant Restoration entertainments, and one hopes they will be several and soon, will benefit greatly from Professor Moore’s scholarship: present readers will enjoy his style.

     Finally, The Opera Directory (John Calder). This is strictly for opera managements and opera fanatics. Indeed, I imagine it will be more widely used by the latter, as an aid to fantasy-casting. Difficult to see what anyone else would make of, for instance, the list of nearly 2,000 operetta singers ‘and others with unspecified voices’, particularly since almost all the entries are comically abrupt and uninformative, e.g. ‘Dimitrova F. Vtarsa’ or ‘Kampus Michael. Passau’. A certain depression is induced by the list, eight pages long, of operas by about 400 living composers, but fun can be had with the Casting Index. Remembering Sir David Webster’s fascinating pronouncement some time ago that ‘it is impossible for an opera house to find a Radames at short notice’, I chuckled quietly over the names of the seventy-two tenors who are listed here as having Radames in their repertoire. It is only fair to add, however, that at least five of the gentlemen mentioned (some of whom have appeared at Covent Garden) are quite incapable of singing the röle. And I don’t really understand how it can happen that, while twelve singers are available for the title role in Benjamin Britten’s Albert Herring, only one person in the world can sing Mr Upfold in the same work. Nonetheless, The Opera Directory should be bedside reading for all opera managements. There being only two opera managements in the whole of England, it is fortunate that the book is printed in five languages.