tion for his future remarkable execution, and have fostered and developed his love for music, is very probable ; but that the great Beethoven’s marvellous powers in higher spheres of the art were in any great degree owing to him, we cannot credit. Happily, we have some data for forming a judgment upon this point, unknown both to Wegeler and Schindler, when they wrote.
Neefe was, if not a man of genius, of very respectable talents, a learned and accomplished organist and composer, as a violinist respectable, even in a corps which included Reicha, Romberg, Ries. He had been reared in the severe Saxon school of the Bachs, and before coming to Bonn had had much experience as music director of an operatic company. He knew the value of the maxim, Festina lente, and was wise enough to understand, that no lofty and enduring structure can be reared, unless the foundations are broad and deep,—that sound and exhaustive study of canon, fugue, and counterpoint is as necessary to the highest development of musical genius as mathematics, philosophy, and logic are to that of the scientific and literary man. He at once saw and appreciated the marvellous powers of Johann van Beethoven’s son, and adopted a plan with him, whose aim was, not to make him a mere youthful prodigy, but a great musician and composer in manhood. That, with this end in view, he should have criticized the boy’s crude compositions with some severity was perfectly natural; equally so that the petted and bepraised boy should have felt These criticisms keenly. But the severity of the master was no more than a necessary counterpoise to the injudicious praise of others. That Beethoven, however he may have spoken of Neefe to Wegeler and Schindler, did at times have a due consciousness of his obligations to his old master, is proved by a letter which ho wrote to him from Vienna, during the first transports of joy and delight at finding himself the object of universal wonder and commendation in the musical circles of the great capital, He thanks Neefe for the counsels which had guided him in his studies, and adds, “Should I ever become a great man, it will in part be owing to you.”
The following passage from an account of the virtuosos in the service of the Elector at Bonn, written in 1782, when Beethoven had been with Neefe but little more than a year, and which we unhesitatingly attribute to the pen of Neefe himself, will give an idea of the course of instruction adopted by the master, and his hopes and expectations for the future of his pupil. It is, moreover, interesting, as being the first public notice of him who for half a century has exercised more pens than any other artist. The writer closes his list of musicians and singers thus:—
“Louis van Beethoven, son of the above-named tenorist, a boy of eleven years, and of most promising talents. He plays the piano-forte with great skill and power, reads exceedingly well at sight, and, to say all in a word, plays nearly the whole of Sebastian Bach’s ‘Wohltemperirtes Klavier,’ placed in his hands by Herr Neefe. Whoever is acquainted with this collection of preludes and fugues in every key (which one can almost call the non plus ultra of music) knows well what this implies. Herr Neefe has also, so far as his other duties allowed, given him some instruction in thorougli-bass. At present he is exercising him in composition, and for his encouragement has caused nine variations composed by him for the piano-forte upon a march[1] to be engraved at Mannheim. This young genius certainly deserves such assistance as will enable him to travel. He will assuredly become a second Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, should he continue as he has begun.
“'Wem er geneigt, dem sendet der Vater der
Menschen und Götter
Seinen Adler herab, trägt ihn zu himmlischen
Höh’n und welches
Haupt ihm gefällt um das flicht er mit
liebenden Händen den Lorbeer.’
Schiller
- ↑ The variations upon a march by Dressier.
