Liberties There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence

Thinking about extraordinary figures such as Goethe and Beethoven, one gets the feeling of observing in the distance two inconceivably tall towers. Their height seems impossible to calculate. What do they have in common? Where do they differ from each other? How harmonious is their architecture? Are there areas of dilapidation? Getting nearer, you can count the number of stories and windows, but the highest features are hidden in the clouds.  Let me start by establishing what Goethe and Beethoven are not. Beethoven’s music is not, as the legend has it, harsh and heroic, in the sense that this would indicate the core of his personality. To be sure, he composed grand works such as the Eroica Symphony and the Fifth Symphony, and he had to endure the latter part of his life heroically with his hearing gravely diminished. But where does the harsh-and-heroic picture leave the profundity of his incomparable slow movements, his dolce and his pianissimo, his personal variety of grace, the dancing character of some of his finales, the humor that is discernible up to his final works? Without recognizing the full range of his expressivity and his innovative urge, we would fail to do justice to Beethoven’s greatness. Goethe, similarly, is not captured by his legend. He was not just the Olympian spirit or the privy councillor, the stormy poet or the distanced classicist of Iphigenia; he was all these things at once and so much more. The singularity of both are steeped in their personal diversity.  Both lived in a period of upheaval. Goethe as well as Beethoven, who was a generation younger, admired Napoleon, and Goethe, in awe, considered him demonic. Napoleon told Goethe that he had read The Sorrows of Young Werther for the seventh time. Beethoven tore up his dedication to Napoleon of the Eroica Symphony after he had proclaimed himself the French Emperor, but Goethe’s admiration did not cease. He continued to wear the cross of the Légion d’honneur that was presented to him by Napoleon, and he kept a portrait relief of the French emperor next to his desk. Goethe’s art collection included no less than fifty Napoleon medals. He never shared the patriotic frenzy that Napoleon provoked in German circles.  An aesthetic upheaval around 1800 was the transition to Romanticism. Goethe’s late that pronouncement “the Classical is healthy, the Romantic sick” should not lead us astray. He himself had taken part in the formation of Romantic poets and philosophers at the University of Jena, an institution that he had masterminded. Some of these writers were Goethe’s personal friends, and his Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship was profusely praised by Friedrich Schlegel. In the second part of Faust and in some of his papers on the natural sciences, Goethe’s writing came close to the romantic idea of Universalpoesie, of poetry merging with science. Late in his life, he declared that “it is high time that the passionate discord between Classics and Romantics will finally be reconciled.”  Beethoven seems to us to belong safely to the classical side: even in the experimental works of his late style, he presents us with something autonomous and self-contained. And yet the contemporary German writer and composer E.T.A. Hoffmann, in his celebrated essay on the Fifth Symphony, called Beethoven a Romantic, while for the French he has always been romantique. Thus we find contradictions not only in their personalities but also in the way they were perceived, and in the manner in which they remain meaningful to us. Neither of them quite add up. Beethoven and Goethe shared huge renown already in their lifetime. Beethoven’s coffin was followed in the streets of Vienna by many thousands of mourners, while Goethe in his later Weimar years received the homage of countless visitors whom he generously entertained. His Werther brought him early fame. Later his posterity seemed to owe more to his Faust, the impact of which in books, plays, opera, and film continue into our time. Beethoven’s posthumous fame grew to make him the most widely appreciated of all composers. His Ninth Symphony has become the universal anthem of progress; it is presented to the public throughout the world on any occasion that points towards peace, freedom, and fraternity, if possible with a cast of thousands. Napoleon aimed to conquer the world, but it was Beethoven, it would seem, who succeeded in doing so, and permanently.  Beethoven and Goethe also share a similar range of expression. Beethoven’s musical compass reaches from the lyrical to the heroic, from simplicity to complexity, from humor to tragedy, from every mode of motion including dance to the utmost calm, from extraversion to contemplation, from triumph to desolation, from turbulence to composure, from string quartets, sonatas, and symphonies to bagatelles, from the lofty universal to the patriotic aberration.  Goethe’s abundance, while no less impressive, was supplemented by the enormous range of his interests. Let me start with the literatures. Goethe had an impressive command of languages, read Greek and Latin in the original, wrote poems in English and French as a teenager, loved Persian poetry, and translated from the French, English, and Italian. He read Kant, and, to him even more important, Spinoza. He collected folk songs at Herder’s suggestion, and warmly welcomed Arnim’s and Brentano’s compilation of German folk poetry Des Knaben Wunderhorn, which appeared in 1805-1808. In his writings he treated history and politics, and also public affairs, economics, and mining. He immersed himself passionately in the arts and contemplated for a while whether to become a painter. Inspired by Winckelmann, he enthused about the art of antiquity, while Palladio became his architectural guiding light. His musical needs ought by no means to be forgotten — they were particularly geared towards singing. For comic opera and opera buffa, he even wrote a number of libretti that were composed and performed. In Weimar, where he kept all of Mozart’s later operas in the repertory, he remained in charge of theatre and opera for many years, frequently stage-directing the performances himself. Yet what