Open publication - Free publishing - More late period

Solitude


Rilke on Letters to a young poet describes solitude in the following terms:

There is only one solitude, and it is vast, heavy, difficult to bear.
What is necessary, after all, is only this: solitude, vast inner solitude.
To walk inside yourself and meet no one for hours - that is what you must be able to attain.
To be solitary as you were when you were a child, when the grownups walked around involved with matters that seemed large and important because they looked so busy and because you didn't understand a thing about what they were doing.


As Maynard Solomon has pointed out, in 1814 Beethoven´s artistic career reached its lowest point with patriotic works such as Wellingtons Sieg or Der glorreiche Augenblick. On words of Solomon, these works, filled with bombastic rhetoric and patriotic excesses, mark the nadir of Beethoven´s career. In them his heroic style is revived, but as parody and farce. Rather than moving forward to his late style, he regressed to a pastiche of his heroic manner.

On the contrary, in this year Beethoven reached the highest point of popularity and social connections. It shouldn't be a surprise that at the same time he ended in conformity.

But later on the late period, the situation was very different. When Beethoven was isolated from the society, considered as a madman, and not anymore into the musical trends of that moment, he would bring music into a level never known before. Again Solomon pointed out rightly: his music would be created out of the composers imagination and intellect rather than through a combination and amplification of of existent musical trends. In Beethoven´s late style an apparently unprecedented style comes into being, one whose tendencies and formative materials are not readily identifiable in the music of his contemporaries or immediate predecessors.

The space where Beethoven´s late style was generated had nothing to do with success, fame, personal situation within a social power relations or being supported by patrons. I think his late style was possible because his solitude was vaster than ever. His isolation from society implied an inner trip, a taking care of the world that he carried inside of him. Rilke continues: the world that you carry inside you, and call this thinking whatever you want to: a remembering of your own childhood or a yearning toward a future of your own - only be attentive to what is arising within you, and place that above everything you perceive around you. In this sense we must understand Beethoven´s choice. He didn´t bet for success or fame because actually that implied that his music became shabby and his vocation petrified and no longer connected with life. In order to stay alive, and in this sense I call him survivor, he kept alive his artistic career because he placed his solitude above everything else and this is the way the late period should be also understood, as the artistic choice of taking the risk of being beyond social and contemporary world propelled by a self confident impulse from the very deep heavy vast solitude.

And here is where Beethoven showed his freedom, freedom of following own artistic needs, freedom of placing one´s own solitude above everything else.

As Fernando Pessoa would say: to be a poet is not my ambition, it´s my way of being alone.