/lit/ - Literature

>Of the books of which he was possessed at the time of his death there have been preserved four volumes of translations of Shakespeare’s works, Homer’s “Odyssey” in the translation of J. H. Voss, Sturm’s “Observations” (several times referred to in the preceding pages), and Goethe’s “West-ostlicher Divan.” These books are frequently marked and annotated in lead pencil, thus bearing witness to the subjects which interested Beethoven. From them, and volumes which he had borrowed, many passages were copied by him into his daily journal. Besides these books Schindler mentions Homer’s “Iliad,” Goethe’s poems, “Wilhelm Melster” and “Faust,” Schiller’s dramas and poems, Tiedge’s “Urania,” volumes of poems by Matthisson and Seume, and Nina d’Aubigny’s “Letters to Natalia on Singing,”—a book to which Beethoven attached great value. These books have disappeared, as well as others which Beethoven valued. We do not know what became of the volumes of Plato, Aristotle, Plutarch and Xenophon, or the writings of Pliny, Euripides, Quintilian, Ovid, Horace, Ossian, Milton and Thomson, traces of which are found in Beethoven’s utterances.

>The catalogue made for the auction sale of his posthumous effects on September 7, 1827, included forty-four works of which the censorship seized five as prohibited writings, namely, Seume’s “Foot Journey to Syracuse,” the Apocrypha, Kotzebue’s “On the Nobility,” W.E. Muller’s “Paris in its Zenith” (1816), and “Views on Religion and Ecclesiasticism.” Burney’s “General History of Music” was also in his library, the gift, probably of an English admirer.

>Truth exists for the wise; beauty for the susceptible heart. They belong together—are complementary.