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from Part 1 - Composers
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
Towards the end of his life Beethoven's pupil Carl Czerny recounted a story that appeared in Cocks's London Musical Miscellany on 2 August 1852:
His [Beethoven's] improvisation was most brilliant and striking. In whatever company he might chance to be, he knew how to produce such an effect upon every hearer that frequently not an eye remained dry, while many would break out into loud sobs; for there was something wonderful in his expression in addition to the beauty and originality of his ideas and his spirited style of rendering them. After ending an improvisation of this kind he would burst into loud laughter and banter his hearers on the emotion he had caused in them. ‘You are fools!’ he would say. Sometimes he would feel himself insulted by these indications of sympathy. ‘Who can live among such spoiled children?’ he would cry.
This story is told in connection with the King of Prussia, who had attended such an improvisation and offered Beethoven an invitation there and then. Beethoven refused, he told Czerny, because of this feeling of being insulted by his audience's emotion.
The picture is vivid and disturbing since we would normally suppose that to hear Beethoven improvising would indeed be a moving experience. If Liszt could reduce his audience to tears playing the ‘Moonlight’ Sonata in a darkened room, how much more affecting would be the presence of Beethoven himself hunched over the lower end of the keyboard, laying out solemn chords perhaps like the slow movement of the ‘Appassionata’, throwing in surprise sforzandos and abrupt changes of key and keeping the emotional tension high.
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