On Freud's Admiration for Beethoven and his “Splendid Creations”

Recently, Peter Gay (1988) commented that Freud “did not seek out musicians, and his daughter Anna tersely noted, ‘he never went to concerts’” (italics added, p. 168). Anna's (apparently defensive) remark has triggered the following speculative questions that I hope will generate interest in other authors to search for details of the full extent of Freud's interest in music. The first question is: If Freud never went to concerts, then how did he get to know Ludwig van Beethoven's music, which according to his words, were “splendid creations” (Freud, 1939[1934-38])?

“If we unhesitatingly declare that, for instance, Goethe and Leonardo da Vinci and Beethoven were great men, we must be led to it by something other than admiration for their splendid creations” (p. 108).

As Mellers (1962) has stated: “From the start Beethoven desired change. He wanted to build a new world; and he thought of his music as a means to that end” (p. 52). Freud certainly could identify with this ideal; he also wanted to build a new world with psychoanalysis.

At the turn of the century, in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), he already had referred to Beethoven's opera Fidelio (1808-14) in a patient's dream and then in his own associations, to Friedrich von Schiller's (1759-1895) line used by Beethoven (1817-23) in the last movement of his Ninth Symphony (“Choral”), Opus 124. Yet, to date it is unknown if and when Freud attended a performance of these works. In the case of Fidelio, of course, he could have just read the libretto to fully understand his patient's dream. It seems highly improbable, however, for Freud to have included Beethoven with Goethe and da Vinci in his remark if he only knew these two works. Thus, Freud's observation suggests that he knew more about Beethoven's life and works than has been documented to date.

In the Minutes of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society (Nunberg and Federn, 1962), a valuable source of data, Beethoven appears in passim in the