By Stuart Mitchner
After watching YouTube sequences from the 1994 film Immortal Beloved starring Gary Oldman as Beethoven, and after admiring Keeley Hawes as Jane in the recent PBS series Miss Austen, I have good reason not to play matchmaker. I should know better. My only excuse is that the real Jane Austen and the real Ludwig van Beethoven happen to have matching December 16 birthdates, contrary to sources that list Beethoven’s December 17 baptism as his birthday. The author and the composer are also a numerical match of sorts, born five years apart, Beethoven in 1770, Austen 1775. And since she died in 1817 and he ten years later in 1827, the year 2025 marks her landmark 250th birthday, his 255th.
My fantasy of a secret relationship began with the image of Beethoven on the cover of The Beethoven Compendium, from a miniature on ivory crafted in 1802, when the composer was 33. Imagine this brooding German heartthrob as the mysterious music teacher Jane disappeared with after a recital in Bath, not to be heard from for a week, not even by her sister Cassandra. Literary historians might call it Austen’s Lost Week. One of Taylor Swift’s “modern idiots” might even be brainstorming a column.
Doubts Emerge
The problems are immediately obvious. For a start, they make an unlikely match size-wise: Jane was 5’6, Ludwig 5’4. Then there’s the fact that he never set foot in England. Plus, Jane’s letters suggest that she had a fraught relationship with music in spite of well-meaning, celebratory books like Gillian Dooley’s She Played and She Sang: Jane Austen and Music (Manchester Univ. Press 2024). As for the music teacher scenario, Austen vents on the subject in a letter to Cassandra: “The truth is that they are all, at least Music masters, made of too much consequence & allowed to take too many liberties with their Scholar’s time.” The teacher in question is “never very punctual, & never giving good Measure.”
Austen as Catherine
Undaunted, I tried pairing a fictional Beethoven with a rebellious fictional character like Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey, only to learn that because her mother “wished her to learn music,” she began “at eight years old,” “could not bear it,” and “when the music-master was dismissed” was one of the happiest days of Catherine’s life. But consider the Pride and Prejudice formula — all the “opposites attract” spin-offs. In “real life,” Jane owned, played and sang Scotch and Irish airs arranged by Beethoven and composed in 1776 when he was 17. What if Austen’s Catherine became enchanted by young Ludwig’s setting of the air “I dream’d I lay where flowers were springing gaily in the sunny beam, list’ning to the wild birds singing” when “the sky grew black and daring,” while through “the woods the whirlwinds rave.’’ OK, forget the mystical Gothic thing. What if Jane fell in love with the composer while playing the andante from his Sonatina in G Major on the piano-forte? She’d have been in her early thirties in 1807. Perhaps she’d write the great man a letter? Dream on.
Beethoven’s Downside
Look, I even found a quote from Emma I thought might work for an epigraph (“And have you never known the pleasure and triumph of a lucky guess? … — for, depend upon it a lucky guess is never merely luck. There is always some talent in it”). Except it would take a ton of talent to connect this oddest of odd couples. I gave up my guesswork romance after reading the “Character and Behavior” chapter in The Beethoven Compendium, which observes that even before “deafness overtook him,” the composer was “frank to the point of rudeness,” “a stranger to the rules of etiquette and all that they imply.” An 1809 visitor describes “the dirtiest most disorderly place imaginable,” with a dusty “oldish” grand piano, and under it an unemptied chamber pot; there were also cane chairs “covered with plates bearing the remains of last night’s supper.” And don’t forget Beethoven’s “almost obsessional attitude towards washing,” a ritual that “would be the cue for him to sing (or howl) at the top of his voice,” while emptying buckets of water over himself that often leaked through the floor.”
Then there’s “his negligence regarding dress,” which “bordered on eccentricity.” Since he lived across from one of his pupils, a girl named Barbara, “He had the whim … of coming to give her lessons clad in a dressing gown, slippers, and a peaked nightcap.”
No, only a master of screwball comedies could bring off this piece of matchmaking. Anyway, it’s not as if Jane Austen hasn’t already been debased by projects like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, first the book (2009) then the film (2016), which grossed (appropriate term) just $16 million worldwide against a budget of $28 million. And having mentioned Beethoven’s “negligence regarding dress,” it’s hard not to make note of ex-Beethoven Gary Oldman’s fate, the achievement of superstar popularity in Slow Horses as that apotheosis of Slob, Jackson Lamb, with his voluminous, un-girdled, Falstaffian belly, his habit of passing wind, and his tortured socks.
Calling Hepburn and Grant
Speaking of screwball comedies and unlikely romances, my wife and I saw the greatest of them all again last Sunday night, Howard Hawks’s Bringing Up Baby (1938). Imagine Katherine Hepburn’s ditzy, deliriously empowered rich girl from Riverdale setting her deranged sights on Cary Grant’s stuffy, bespectacled, but unforgivably handsome (after she breaks his glasses) paleontologist whose love object is a bone (the intercostal clavicle) he needs to complete the Brontsaurus he’s assembling at the Museum of Natural History. It’s a film we’ve seen at least six times, but on this viewing what came through above all was Katherine Hepburn’s once in a lifetime madcap stroke of genius as the huntress Susan to Cary Grant’s hapless David. Ironies abound, chiefly that this comic masterpiece was a box office flop and that the actress who dominates it in one of the most inspired performances in American cinema was considered “box office poison” at the time.
Kidnapped by YouTube
Every Wednesday, around the time the print edition of Town Topics is being delivered, I google the online version of my column. This week there were two titles, exact same words, my review arriving seven hours before the other, which was, to my amazement, read by a genial robot on YouTube, illustrated with side by side images of Taylor Swift in various guises, along with the only existing image of the adult Emily Dickinson.
My reviews sometimes turn up on sites like Newsbreak and Muck Rack, with links to the complete, credited Town Topics version. This one is presented by something called USA Last Moment, which seems to be devoted to Taylor Swift news. Although the reading is word for word, with the text running on the screen, it breaks off abruptly at the moment I write about Swift’s Tortured Poets Department (misread by the robot as Apartment). I tried to notify the site by clicking the comment box, but all that did was restart the video. A “This Content Is Not Available” message has since been added, but the video still plays, breaking off at the same point.
A Gift of Beethoven
YouTube, by the way, has been an invaluable resource in the 20-plus years I’ve been writing for Town Topics. At first, it was exciting to see my work in that familiar location, which has provided me with numerous unforgettable performances of Beethoven like the one by Ukrainian American pianist Valentina Lisitsa, emailed to me by a friend when our friendship needed just that thoughtful a gesture. Valentina happened to be communing with the adagio sostenato of Sonata number 29 in B flat major (Opus 106), known as the Hammerklavier. Referring to his own version, pianist Wilhelm Kempff called the slow movement “the most magnificent monologue Beethoven ever wrote,” an adagio “unequalled in the entire piano literature.” Writing about Kempff’s performance in 2013, I described “a series of ascending, probing, striving, needful, joy-seeking variations” leading to a “heaven of feeling so rich and strange that all you can think is how thankful you are that you heard it before you died.”
Forget the Beethovian downside. Think of the 33-year-old heartthrob my fantasy of Jane Austen might have run off with. No “might” about it if she heard him perform that adagio.