Ian Warden | Is virginity always an anti-climax?

In his Why Beethoven - A Phenomenon In 100 Pieces, biographer and musicologist Norman Lebrecht tells us Beethoven had a policy of saying "No!" to almost anything that might distract him from his vital, urgent work of composing music.

Inessential travel (to see the overrated sea), churchgoing and brothelgoing were all thing he said "No!" to. Meanwhile his many short, sharp passions for fine women fell short of anything conjugal because those women were two social classes above his scruffy, unwashed station in Viennese life.

If I sound unusually astonished and obsessed by the discovery that Beethoven never had sex, I wonder if it is because that discovery (in Lebrecht's new piece about his Beethoven book just posted on The Critic) coincides with WorldPride 2023.

One's present immersion in unavoidable media coverage and wall-to-wall ABC TV and radio programming of sexuality matters to coincide with Sydney WorldPride somehow creates a sticky sense that everyone everywhere is a throbbingly, proudly, lubriciously sexual being and is defined by his or her sexuality/sexualities.

In this context, news of Beethoven's lifelong virginity perhaps makes him seem tragically odd. If there is such Pride in being openly, actively sexual, then perhaps, by inference, there is only Shame in never being sexual; makes it oxymoronic to imagine such a thing as Asexual Pride, to imagine a Chaste, Celibate and Monastic Mardi Gras.

Rapt admirers of Beethoven (such as your columnist, such as anyone with half a soul) will marvel at the biographer's reports of these big omissions, suggestive of a strange, blinkered, experience-impoverished narrowness, from Beethoven's life.

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He almost never left Vienna, Lebrecht tells us, "except, on doctor's orders, to summer spas, where he dallied with holidaymakers and made himself thoroughly miserable".

"In his life of 56 years, he never saw the sea. He never visited Paris or Rome, summits of civilisation. Haydn and Mozart profitably toured great capitals and crossed the sea. Not Beethoven. His was a life of single-minded dedication, not a moment to be wasted."

Then we, the thinking rapt, wonder if these big three omissions from his experience of his time on Earth had a limiting, narrowing, even impoverishing impact on his life, on his creativity? You wonder what fabulous creative uses he might have made of, say, the humanising experience of the joy of sex.

But then, a busy sex life as well as wasting his valuable composing time might have given him as much angst as joy (a common plight for sensitive men, the columnist mused, sighing).

And what's more, Lebrecht argues, Beethoven's hopeless passions for unattainable women may have had an element of calculation about them.

"Beethoven chose them for their unattainability. He needed to experience romantic love as a resource for his creative imagination, but he recoiled from physical contact and did nothing (such as washing) to make himself desirable. When [his crushes] end, his pain is brief."

And in any case there is a superabundance of other sorts of joys, raptures and thrills throbbingly expressed and captured by Beethoven in his music. If there was nothing sexual in his life for him to be Mardi Gras-minded about, he was certainly brilliantly attuned to life's other (perhaps bigger and better and more profound?) thrills.

Why not, to see what I mean, use the magic of YouTube to bring you the 10 orgasmic, all-dancing, all-gambolling minutes of the fourth and final movement of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony?

It seems somehow blasphemous to say it during this sex-mad, sex-marinated, lubricity-lubricated season of WorldPride but perhaps there are just a few things (Beethoven's nine symphonies among them) even better, even more thrilling than sex.

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