Greg Stepanich

Upcoming Beethoven bio probes mystery of creativity

From Edmund Morris' upcoming biography of Beethoven (Beethoven: The Universal Composer), due out in October from the Harper Collins Eminent Lives series:

A distinguishing characteristic of the creative mind is that it can accept reversals of fortune without emotional damage — indeed, process them into something rich and strange. Ordinary psyches often react to bad news with a momentary thrill, seeing the world, for once, in jagged clarity, as if lightning has just struck. But then darkness and dysfunction rush in. A mind such as Beethoven's remains illumined . . .

I don't know quite what to think about this statement on the character of creativity. My first, unfair, impulse is to laugh out loud at its air of pretense, at its genuflecting in the face of the awesome mystery of the creative mind.

Morris himself — author of a standard biography of Theodore Roosevelt and a controversial one about Ronald Reagan — should probably be considered a creative person, so he's writing from the point of view of his own experience. But I'd hazard a guess that it's more likely he's adopted the position that he's merely a faithful recorder of history, not one of its progenitors; that gives him enough critical remove to assess the creative apparatus.

Surely, though, the idea that a creative person can transmute outrageous fortune into something sublime isn't evidence that the mind hasn't suffered emotional damage. A creative mind compartmentalizes, clearly, in order to get the work done while Chaos rules the rest of the world, but does that mean it does not suffer wounds, and is thereby changed?

Could it be argued that some of the music that results from the tragedies great and small is actually proof that there has been emotional damage? For example, much has been made of the increasing number of trills that play so important a part in Beethoven's late music.

Why all those trills? They could be evidence of a longstanding habit of mind, or simply increasing affection for a beloved sound effect. Then again, perhaps they are the way this aurally disabled person made sonic reference to the buzzing of his ears that tormented him for so long.

Or maybe those trills, such as the carpets of them that dominate the last pages of the Op. 111 piano sonata, are the sound of comfort, the sound made by a deeply damaged person trying to calm himself when his rage at the manifestly unsuccessful way his private life turned out threatened to overwhelm him. (Here's a link to the Beethoven Haus site in Bonn.)

I'm reminded, for some reason, of Conrad Aiken's much-anthologized short story, Silent Snow, Secret Snow, about a boy slowly descending into mental illness. The protagonist of that haunting story increasingly chose to escape into the mental pictures of falling snow he had in his head; the sight of the gently dropping screen of white gave him comfort.

I'm not suggesting that Beethoven was on the cusp of craziness, but it could be that the trills he so obsessively wrote into his later scores were a necessary response, an important release, for the mental traumas he had endured and was continuing to endure.

In other words, a creative mind, can indeed transform something horrible into something wonderful, but not without suffering emotional damage. Maybe Morris means something a little different by this phrase — he might mean that the instrument of creativity is still able to function and, importantly, function at a high enough level to continue the work.

Still, the amazing thing about so much great music is that many of the minds and psyches that created it were so profoundly damaged. The creative impulse reigned supreme, and was able to distance itself from the site, so to speak, of the abuse so that the symphony could be written.

But what a shattered wreck that symphony left behind in the shipyard as it embarked for the vast, immortal horizon.