Portrait of Ludwig van Beethoven. Via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).
Autumn 1821, Wiener Neustadt, a small town south of Vienna. Toward evening the gendarmes stop a man wandering the streets in pitiful condition: an old overcoat, no hat, peering into the windows of houses. To their questions he answers that he got lost on a walk, and then, with mounting irritation, declares that he is Beethoven. The gendarme’s reply has passed into history: you’re a vagrant, Beethoven hasn’t sunk to that. And he marches him to the lockup.
The man, who was of course Beethoven, had set out on foot from nearby Baden, where he spent the summer taking treatment, and walking lost in thought had taken a wrong turn by several kilometres: it happened often, and the local peasants knew him as an eccentric who gesticulated and hummed to himself in the fields. In the cell he kept on protesting, until the police commissioner, at eleven at night, gave in to doubt and sent to wake the town’s Kapellmeister, a certain Herzog, who was acquainted with Beethoven. Herzog arrived in the dead of night, looked at the detainee and pronounced the identification. The bureaucratic panic we can imagine followed: the mayor apologised, the composer was given decent clothes, and the next day he was sent back to Baden in the municipality’s official carriage. The episode has come down to us from the commissioner’s own account, gathered in Thayer’s great biography, and is considered reliable.
The anecdote makes you laugh, then makes you think. In 1821 Beethoven was the most famous man in European music, and at the same time he was this: a deaf, sick man of fifty, unkempt to the point of being unrecognisable, who in that very year was writing the last three piano sonatas, Opus 109, 110 and 111, some of the most inward pages ever conceived. Fame, in those days, travelled without photographs: the name was immense, the face unknown. No algorithm, no image: you could be the greatest living artist and end up in a cell for your jacket. From Heiligenstadt onward, Beethoven’s life always teaches the same thing: the distance between how a genius looks and what he is really doing can be as wide as a night in the lockup.