Dec 17th 2020

Beethoven 250: analysis of the composer's letters proves that creativity does spring forth from misery

by Karol J Borowiecki

 

Karol J Borowiecki is Professor of the Economic History of the Arts at the University of Southern Denmark

Portrait of Beethoven by Joseph Karl Stieler, 1820. Wikimedia

 

The notion that artistic creativity and emotional state are somehow related goes back to the time of Aristotle. However, it is extremely difficult to quantify the degree of misery (or happiness) of an artist, and even more so if an artist is deceased. In my research I have found a way to do so by extracting the emotional content from written correspondence.

My research uncovered patterns of emotional wellbeing throughout the lifetimes of creative individuals. During a series of research projects on how geographic clustering of composers influenced their creativity, I found large productivity gains by composers working in locations such as Vienna, Paris and London in the late 18th century to early 20th century. At the same time, it became apparent that in these cities composers have been surprisingly often unhappy or unwell, prompting the question: How do emotional factors influence creativity?

To answer this question I turned to the letters of one of the world’s most famous composers, Ludwig van Beethoven, who wrote over 500 letters throughout his life. Using linguistic analysis software, I was able to reveal how the emotional content of Beethoven’s letters carries the clues to his genius and productivity. I spent months pouring over the letter and creating code, carefully dating each letter. I also spent time distinguishing between different types of correspondent, as he would write differently to family members than to peers or associates.

Beethoven’s wellbeing over his lifetime

The graphs below shows Beethoven’s positive emotions (left panel) and negative emotions (right panel) throughout his lifetime. The rise and fall of Beethoven’s positive and negative emotions mirror the events that took place during his life. For example, an increase in negative feelings during Beethoven’s late teenage years corresponds with the deteriorating financial situation of his family. As a result, Beethoven had to help support his family by taking over some of his father’s teaching duties, to which he had “an extraordinary aversion”.

But Beethoven’s fortunes soon improved. He moved to Vienna in 1792 where he experienced high demand for his work, which bestowed upon him increasingly prestigious commissions. The composer’s positive emotions peaked in this period, and his negative moods were in a steady decline.

Around the turn of 1800, the composer’s life changed forever as he discovered that he was becoming deaf. Correspondingly, we observe a temporary increase in negative emotions as well as a draining of positive emotions, which stay very low but stable over the next 15 years of his life.

In 1809, Beethoven experienced a temporary lift in spirits as his financial stability became secured thanks to a generous grant from the court in Vienna. But the good mood did not last long.

In 1815, Beethoven’s brother died after a long illness. As a result, the composer became the guardian of his nine-year-old nephew, Karl, with whom he went on to have a violent relationship. This left Beethoven a broken man. His positive emotions reached the lowest point of his life, while negative emotions kept on gradually increasing until his death in 1827.

The sad genius?

Looking at the span of Beethoven’s life, the emotional development of the composer is particularly marked by many dark and sad moments. This is not uncommon for famous artists, but the intensity of hardship is particularly striking in Beethoven’s biography.

While his life may have been pock-marked with misery, Beethoven appears to have successfully channelled his negative emotions into his musical output. What I found is that creativity, measured by the number of important compositions, was significantly increased by his negative moods.

Portrait of a young boy.
The composer’s nephew and maker of much of his misery, Karl van Beethoven. Wikimedia

For instance, a 9.3% increase in negative feelings provoked by an unexpected event, like a death in the family, resulted in a corresponding increase in creativity and the creation of an additional 6.3% of significant works in the following year.


Read more: Beethoven 250: how the composer's music embodies the Enlightenment philosophy of freedom


Finally, you could ask whether there is any particular type of negative emotion that drives the results. For this reason, I have split the negative emotions index into anxiety, anger and sadness, and found that sadness is particularly conducive to creativity. Since depression is strongly related to sadness, this result comes very close to previous claims made by psychologists that depression may lead to increased creativity.

This constitutes an important insight into how negative emotions can provide fertile material upon which the creative person could draw – an association that has fascinated many since antiquity. But more importantly, on the 250th anniversary of Beethoven’s birth, these results show that all the hardship encountered by the composer has determined his prolific output and bestowed upon him immortal, unforgettable fame. So, as he wrote in his letters: “Farewell, and do not forget your Beethoven.”

Karol J Borowiecki, Professor of the Economic History of the Arts, University of Southern Denmark

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Browse articles by author

More Music Reviews

Sep 8th 2019
Extract: "David Fray looked surprisingly alert when he arrived for a 7:30 a.m. breakfast interview at a comfortable inn outside of La Roque d’Anthéron in the south of France. We had both been at a midnight dinner following his performance at the famous piano festival. I left the dinner early with a colleague but he stayed till 3:00 chatting and laughing with the violinist he had just performed with, his friend Renaud Capuçon. Their Bach sonatas and a Bach piano concerto were the highlights of the evening. Over breakfast (David ate a bowl of chocolate-flavored cereal sweetened with ample spoonfuls of Nutella) we indulged a few minutes of smalltalk, then got down to business. He responded lucidly in French to some heavy questioning. He only stumbled once, at the end, when I asked him,  “What does music really mean to you?” His reply, ”That’s a big subject for so early in the morning!” But he continued searching for the words, and he found them."
Aug 31st 2019
François-Frédéric Guy was just finishing his 20th performance at the piano festival of La Roque d’Anthéron in the south of France. The 2,200-seat outdoor amphitheater was almost full as Guy displayed his love of Beethoven –playing two of his greatest sonatas, No. 16 and No. 26 (“Les Adieux”). After intermission, Guy took his place at the Steinway grand again and rattled the audience with the stormy opening bars of the Hammerklavier sonata. It was like a thunderclap, as Beethoven intended. The audience sat up straight and listened in stunned silence. There were more surprises to come. Guy’s first encore was the little bagatelle “Letter for Elise”. A titter ran through the amphitheater. Was he joking? He looked out over the crowd and smiled back. A few bars into the piece, total silence descended once again on the crowd as Guy brought out the depth and beauty of little “Elise”. Everyone thought they knew this piece by heart. They were wrong. No one had heard it quite like this. Huge applause erupted a few seconds after the last note. Several spectators near me wiped away tears from their eyes.
Aug 3rd 2019
Combining “telepathic improvisation” plus original instrumentation, two adventurous Australian musicians have just launched a digital album of 12 new pieces brimming with sounds never quite captured before in recordings. The pianist plays two expanded keyboards simultaneously while his partner meets his ideas on an 18th century cello. The result is a marriage of the new and the old with echoes ranging from Bach to Arvo Part. 
Jul 20th 2019
Extract --- Question: What is your view of stage antics of ambitious pianists – the swoons and hair-flicks (Khatia Buniatishvili), the miniskirts and six-inch heels (Yuja Wang), the eye makeup and winks to the audience (Lang Lang)? --- Answer: It’s all show-biz. All three of those pianists, though, really CAN play (though in varying degrees of success in varying repertoire). No matter how short Yuja Wang’s vestigial swath of skirt becomes, no matter how vertiginous her high heels, she knows her way around the ivories (I especially like her Prokofiev), and I think she makes music more fun for a wide variety of listeners. If she couldn’t play, all the short skirts in Christendom couldn’t save her career. Same goes with the emoting of Buniatishvili, and, of course, most of all, the ultimate showman, Mr. Lang, the classical world’s answer to Liberace.  
Jun 9th 2019
Australian pianist Shaun Hern Lee, 16, took first prize on Saturday in the final round of the Cliburn International Junior Piano Competition following 12 days of eliminations and associated activities in Dallas, Texas.
May 25th 2019
  In a rare combination of artistic talents, pianist Jack Kohl offers seven erudite essays on great classical music compositions and his favorite readings, merging both to make an exciting volume of fresh ideas. Bone over Ivory: Essays from a Standing Pianist (Pauktaug Press, New York) puts on display Kohl’s background as a classical pianist and his lifelong obsession with Ralph Waldo Emerson. Along the way, we encounter Gershwin, Fitzgerald, Thoreau, Dickens, Beeethoven and Master Yoda of Star Wars fame, among others.
May 9th 2019
"On the day before he was to play his marathon concerts, Maestro Buchbinder sat down with me in the 'Teddy Bar' of the Grand Théâtre de Provence to discuss his love for Beethoven. He was relaxed and cheerful and spoke freely......An edited transcript of our conversation follows."
May 6th 2019
One of the more exciting piano experiences of recent years is the development of a 108-key grand piano in Australia, built by Stuart and Sons and expanded with additional octaves at bass and treble extremes. The sound is new and audiences who have witnessed it tend to erupt in standing ovations.  If you don’t live in southern Australia, you probably will not hear it in all its glory but it’s worth a detour. I have recently had the privilege of listening to a high-definition recording, at 96 KHz, to be exact, of the inaugural concert performed a few months ago. The effect of the expanded keyboard, known as the Big Beleura, is stunning to mind and body. I sat with a friend in his music room in Bordeaux, listening for an hour, flabbergasted.
Apr 16th 2019
It’s heresy to say this, I know, but the great masterpieces of the 19th century piano composed by Liszt, Schumann, Schubert and Beethoven sometimes leave me exhausted. The complex structure and concentrated emotion, the moods, the arpeggios and stunning fingerwork demand an effort to reach true appreciation.  And so when I first heard the new CD “Musiques de Silence”  -- interwoven selections of Frederico Mompou, matched with Maurice Ravel, Erik Satie, Henri Dutilleux, Frederic Chopin, Toru Takemitsu, Claude Debussy, Enrique Granados and early Alexander Scriabin – I felt a surge of relief. (Eloquentia EL1857).  The repertoire is selected and beautifully braided together by the rising young French pianist Guillaume Coppola. 
Mar 1st 2019
The lingering resonances and extreme bass and treble notes are new to the piano world and the premiere audience knew it, rising at the end for a standing ovation. This was the recent premiere of Big Beleura, a 108-key grand piano built by the prestigious Stuart and Sons firm, the only practicing piano maker left in Australia. Some say the piano world will never be the same.  "It's important," explains the designer-developer of the instrument, Wayne Stuart of Tumut, not far from Canberra, "to realize that we perceive sound not only through our ears but all of our body."  That’s how Big Beleura gets to you. 
Dec 12th 2018
The work ethic among young piano students in China shows no sign of abating as their tiny fingers fly up and down the keyboard ten or twelve hours a day. Competitions are welcoming the new Asian talent and European concert halls are filled with admiring fans.  Some of us don’t quite know what to make of it.  It’s not all about Lang Lang, Yuja Wang or Yundi Li. Potential new superstars are emerging every year. Brace yourself for more in the years ahead. Some 20 million young Chinese are said to be practicing madly as our European and American kids diddle mindlessly with their smart phones and iPads. 
Nov 28th 2018
French pianist Bertrand Chamayou [in the drawing by the author, Michael Johnson] plunges into major composers one by one, reading works by and about them, traveling to their favorite haunts, and absorbing their art almost into his blood.  As he told me in an interview, he tries to immerse himself in the era of the composition, and to think of it as “new” for its time. In the past ten years he has done this with Liszt, Ravel and Saint-Saëns. 
Sep 24th 2018
The rich culture of the proud and ancient Basque people is sadly underexposed outside their homeland, a remote bi-national region where Southwest France meets northern Spain. Their language, Euskara, is a world in a bubble with no relationship to other living languages. Most outside interest in recent decades has sprung from the sometimes-violent Basque independence movement. Basque music, however, does travel well across cultures, and is worth a detour. The French sisters Katia and Marielle Labèque, born in Bayonne, grew up with Basque melodies and lyrics in their ears. Now an established two-piano duo, their new CD (KML Recordings) Amoria” groups14 disparate pieces of Basque music they researched over several years. It is a departure from their usual classical repertoire.
Sep 11th 2018
I know several professional pianists who will admit under pressure that they find their work ultimately unsatisfying. Not because of the crowded marketplace, the dreary practice rooms, the clapped-out pianos or too many exhausting tours. No, they are tired of something more basic — the endless repetition of notes penned by someone else. True artists seek self-expression, artistic adventure. They feel the urge to “own” their work. But written music places strict limits on all but the most marginal departures from notation. Some musicians eventually realize they are mere messengers whose teachers steer them relentlessly back to the page. This may explain why so many pianists and other professional musicians also paint.
Sep 7th 2018
With a large cast, full orchestra, and incredible jazz-inflected music, “Porgy and Bess” stands alone as the one American opera that is recognized around the world. Written by George Gershwin and premiered in 1935 on Broadway, it had to wait until mid-1980s to become a standard of the operatic repertoire. The jazz idiom that Gershwin used was surely one of the reasons that “Porgy and Bess” was adopted slowly by the operatic world. But another roadblock was the story, which told about the love between a crippled beggar, Porgy, and a drug-addicted woman, Bess, who live in an impoverished African-American community in the South.
Sep 5th 2018
Frederic Chopin left detailed markings of tempo, dynamics, phrasing, pedaling, even some fingerings, for his 21 Nocturnes to guide interpreters. Yet no two versions – and there are dozens of them -- are anything like the same. The essence of playing Chopin today is deciding how far to veer, how sharply to swerve, from the master’s ideas today without losing sight of his artistic intentions. The player must ask, “When does Chopin cease to be Chopin?” Now comes the rising French pianist François Dumont with a stunning new version that sets him apart (Aevea Classics). PICTURE: Dumont by Johnson.
Sep 5th 2018
Princeton University in the United States is best known for its big thinkers, top scientists and heavyweight historians but now is embarking on a determined effort to make a splash in the arts. Princeton’s new Lewis Center of the Arts is going about it in the most American manner, with millions of dollars upfront investment and a business plan to attract young talent into its music program. Nothing is left to chance. This fall, a new crop of music students have full access to 48 freshly minted Steinway pianos, a large enough stock to attract global attention among pianophiles.
Jul 19th 2018
San Francisco Opera’s revival of its Ring Cycle got off to a rousing start with a top notch performance of “Das Rheingold” at the War Memorial Opera House on June12. The production featured outstanding performances from top to bottom by an exceptional cast and new video projections that were even better than the ones used back in 2011.......
Mar 26th 2018

Johann Sebastian Bach’s B Minor Mass, performed at Symphony Hall on Friday (March 23) and again on Sunday (March 25), was delivered in impressive Baroque style by the Handel+Haydn Society orchestra and chorus.