“I love the truth more than anything,” Beethoven wrote to Goethe 200 years ago. Of course, Goethe loved the truth as well, but in a rather glacial manner, at a distance. Beethoven’s love was passionate, urgent, unsettling; truth, to him, seems to have had something to do with God, with love itself, with justice and beauty. Certainly, these make up the elements of his music—sublime, sincere, and beautiful, beyond words.
Although his music is beautiful, Ludwig van Beethoven was not. His friends say that he was short, swarthy, solidly built, clumsy, and awkward, with a rather homely, pock-marked face. They also kindly mention his beautiful mane of hair and the brilliant whiteness of his teeth.
