ABSTRACT
Wagner, although he was sceptical of Bettina's account of her conversation with Beethoven, was completely uninhibited in his own interpretation of Beethoven's music. 'A deaf musician!' he exclaimed. 'Could one imagine a blind painter~ But a blind seer we do know. Teiresias, who was shut off from the world of appearances but who is able to perceive the reason of all appear,.. ances with his inner eye-like him, the deaf musician listens to the harmonies of his inner being. . . .' His inner light reflects on the world of appearances and gives it back its childlike innocence: '"Today thou wilt be with me in Paradise"-who does not hear this word of the Redeemer when he listens to the Pastoral Sym,. phony~' Never has any art created anything so joyful, Wagner continues, as Beethoven's symphonies in A and F (i.e. No.7 and No. 6, the Pastoral). Their effect on the hearer is that of freeing him from all guilt and their after,..effect, when he returns to the
The high point of the deification of Beethoven's music, and even of the composer himself, was reached in the Beethoven biographies of the early twentieth century. Paul Bekker wrote in 1912: 'Thus he regards himself as a vessel of supernatural revelation-as the hero, the conqueror who had suffered, had let himselfbe crucified, had descended to the dead and had risen and felt God awaken in himsel£'86 Romain Rolland, in 1903, had put it more elegantly, but only a little less fancifully: 'Eta mesure qu'il etait plus seul, veuf d'amities et d'amours, et qu'il s'achemi ... nait vers le complet detachement de cette vie ... Dieu remplissait en lui tout l'espace: il epousait sa triple forme: la Force, 1' Amour et la Lumiere. Il s'identifiait avec la Toute ... Puissance creatrice, en meme temps qu'avec la tremblante humilite de la cn!ature.'87
