Deep Life Reflections: Friday Five
Issue 119 - The Last Masters
Welcome to Issue 119 of Deep Life Reflections, where each week I share my thoughts on what I’m reading, watching, and thinking about.
This week, we explore artistic genius, uncompromising vision, and the kind of art that endures. We’re guided by the mercurial spirit of Ludwig van Beethoven in John Suchet’s masterful biography, and the audacious vision of Werner Herzog in his jungle epic, Fitzcarraldo. Both works pull back the curtain on what it takes to persist—through madness, hardship, and obsession. They leave us asking: Who is taking those kinds of risks today.
Are these The Last Masters?
Join me as we explore this week’s Friday Five.
1. What I’m Reading
Beethoven: The Man Revealed. By John Suchet.
“What you are, you are by accident of birth; what I am, I am by myself. There are and will be a thousand princes; there is only one Beethoven.” - Ludwig van Beethoven.
Ludwig van Beethoven was a man uncomfortable with words. “I would rather write 10,000 notes than a single letter of the alphabet,” he once said. He could be volatile, eccentric, intense, lacking in what we would call today emotional intelligence. But he was also an undisputed genius. A man who changed music forever.
I’ve always been drawn to biographies of extraordinary lives. Beethoven’s was a story I didn’t really know beyond the overture: a semi-mythical figure from a long-ago Europe who lost his hearing and composed exceptional pieces like Fur Elise, Ode to Joy, and the ‘Moonlight’ Sonata. In John Suchet’s excellent Beethoven: The Man Revealed, we get the full symphony.
Suchet tells Beethoven’s story in clear, chronological fashion. A lifelong scholar of the man, he focuses on who he was—Beethoven the character rather than the composer. And it’s a momentous life.
Born in Bonn, Germany, in 1770, Ludwig van Beethoven suffered a challenging childhood. His father was an alcoholic while his mother had already lost a husband and two children before she was 20. He grew up rough around the edges: wild, ill-dressed, and speaking in a thick, guttural tone. This was a Europe of Mozart, aristocracy, and refinement. Vienna stood at the centre. At first glance, Beethoven and Vienna seemed an ill-suited match. Yet, that’s exactly where his incredible talent took him. He went and never left.
Vienna plays a central role in Beethoven’s story. Cataclysmic events like the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars were taking place across Europe. Vienna, epicentre of the Habsburg dynasty, was a city at permanent war and later a repressive police state. Beethoven lived through it all during his 34-year residence. As Suchet writes, “Beethoven absorbed the drama, the tension, the danger, and it all left its mark on his music.”
And his music was spellbinding.
As a short aside, I broke my usual rule of reading in silence. For Beethoven, I made an exception. Listening to his famous symphonies as I read about their creation enhanced the whole experience. I felt like an audience member in one of those early concerts in Vienna, hearing a new masterpiece for the first time.
Suchet recounts the famous meeting of a young Beethoven and an established Mozart, two decades his elder and at the height of his fame. As the story goes, Beethoven played for him; Mozart walked out, seemingly unimpressed, then turned to his companions and said, “Watch out for that boy.”
One of the great paradoxes of Beethoven’s life was his ability to create sublime music at times of great personal despair. And there were many such moments. Unrequited love (he died without a wife or children), chronic illness, constant financial strain, a destructive obsession with his nephew Karl, and—most devastating of all—his increasing deafness. Yet through it all, Beethoven somehow reached into his whirring mind and pulled out music that continues to be played two centuries later—and will continue for centuries to come.
Suchet provides vivid insight into Beethoven’s professional life—one that might feel familiar to many creatives today. His apartment was a mess of scattered music sheets. Preparation for concerts were notoriously chaotic: last-minute changes, blazing arguments with orchestras, and frequent berating of singers whom he felt lacked the ability to perform his work. They argued his demands were impossible. To be fair, they may have had a point. Even today, Beethoven’s music remains exceptionally difficult for opera singers.
There’s an anecdote of Beethoven sending his right-hand man out at 5am to find three new cellists—hours before a major performance. Remarkably, he did. And it wouldn’t be the last time.
Beethoven’s growing deafness drove him to despair and even led to thoughts of suicide. But he persisted. There was too much music in his mind that he still wanted to give. We are left with the impression of a man aware of his flaws yet also an ironclad belief in his genius. By the time the Ninth Symphony premiered in 1824—to a standing ovation—he was completely deaf. He heard it only in his head.
It would be his last.
When he died, the playwright Franz Grillparzer wrote:
“The Last Master, the tuneful heir of Bach and Handel, Mozart and Haydn’s immortal fame… He was an artist, but a man as well… Thus he was, thus he died, thus he will live to the end of time.”
Beethoven knew it too. As he himself declared, there is only one Beethoven.
__________
For those interested in seeing genius in action, watch this outstanding performance of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 at the Philharmonie Berlin, conducted by Daniel Barenboim and performed by the West–Eastern Divan Orchestra.
2. What I’m Watching
Fitzcarraldo (1982). Directed by Werner Herzog.
If Beethoven was single-minded in giving the world his music, Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald—known as Fitzcarraldo because the locals can’t pronounce ‘Fitzgerald’—may be a distant fictional descendant.
Fitzcarraldo’s ambition: to build a grand opera house in the middle of the Peruvian jungle. To do so involves dragging a 360-ton steamboat over a mud-ridden mountain, surviving encounters with indigenous tribes who “shrink heads,” and trying to keep his crew from mutiny.
He manages all but one.
Fitzcarraldo is something of a curiosity. Flawed, yet engrossing. Written and directed by the masterful German filmmaker Werner Herzog, it’s a film I only discovered recently. Herzog’s films are deeply personal, visually captivating, and uncompromising. He is the quintessential European auteur: a director as the original and creative force behind the work. The heroic figure, always struggling against reality to realise his vision.
This is especially true of Fitzcarraldo himself. Set in the early part of the twentieth century, the film opens on a note of madness: Fitzcarraldo rowing 1,200 miles down the Amazon with a brothel madam, just to hear the great opera singer Caruso perform. The tone is set.
Inspired by this experience, Fitzcarraldo, who we learn has already failed at building railways and is now trying to sell ice to the locals, embarks on a grandiose plan to open the Amazonian jungle to river transport, gain access to new rubber plantations and make enough money to build his opera house. An opera he hopes Caruso himself will one day open.
For the title role, Herzog chose his frequent collaborator, Klaus Kinski. Raving through the jungle in a white suit, floppy panama hat, and bleached blonde hair, Kinski is perfectly cast: manic, wild-eyed, and completely undeterred. Fitzcarraldo feels like a cross between Doc Brown from Back to the Future, Belloq from Raiders of the Lost Ark, and Max Bialystock from The Producers. All amped to the max.
When his crew abandons him, leaving only the captain, engineer, and a drunken chef, Fitzcarraldo improvises. He recruits a tribe of Amazonian Indians to help pull his steamboat over the mountain. It helps that they think of him as some kind of deity given his extravagant appearance. But they know he’s no God. They carefully watch the man in the white suit, trying to figure out what drives him. But they have their own motives too.
This quest—equal parts madness and obsession—is what kept me watching. Because despite its flaws—stilted dialogue, moments of wooden acting—I found the whole story quite absorbing. I wanted to see if this lunatic could really pull it off, serenading the jungle with scratchy Caruso recordings blaring from a gramophone as he drifts down the Amazon on his mission.
The film was a real labour of love for Herzog. And near destruction. “I live my life or end my life with this film” he said during production. He insisted on filming in the rainforest, 500 miles from the nearest city, believing the jungle would “bring out the special qualities in the actors and even the crew.”
He got more than he bargained for.
The making of Fitzcarraldo is documented in Burden of Dreams, which reveals the toll it took on everyone involved. At one point, Herzog calls the jungle “vile and base,” a place “God, if he exists, created in anger.” The production was plagued by accidents, illness, ill tempers, and exhaustion. Kinski reportedly fought violently with the crew and Herzog even claimed ones of the chieftains offered to kill Kinski for him. After four gruelling years, Herzog said, “Even if I get that boat over the mountain, nobody on this earth will convince me to be happy about that, not until the end of my days.”
Yet the photography of the film is stunning. Herzog has always valued image over story. Fitzcarraldo is filled with widescreen shots of the Amazon at dusk and dawn, capturing nature’s beauty, isolation, and menace. And they really did drag that steamboat over the mountain—without any special effects. Herzog believed the audience would know the difference: “This is not a plastic boat.”
In Fitzcarraldo, Herzog made a deeply personal film and the story behind it is inseparable from the story within it. Like a sheet of music; it must be played to come alive. The image of a 360-ton steamboat being hauled up a muddy, 40-degree slope in the jungle mist remains one of the most spectacular images I've seen on film.
This is a film about a man driven by obsession to challenge the wilderness. It’s about Fitzcarraldo the character and Herzog the director.
Both are on a quest for something transcendental among the mud, mutiny, and madness.
It’s something to be experienced.
3. What I’m Contemplating
Werner Herzog said at the end of shooting Fitzcarraldo, “I don’t want to live in a world without lions, and without people who are lions.” Watching the film, you feel the cost of that commitment. Hauling a real steamboat over a mountain is about as audacious as you can get. But that’s the point. And Herzog committed.
Likewise, with Beethoven. He had an uncompromising vision of what music could be, and he carried it into the storm, despite the piling up of personal adversity around him. He created works that changed the course of music, where his name is synonymous with genius.
In art, especially film, but also music, I feel like we are losing the lions. Fifty years ago this summer, Jaws was released. Take every decade since and there are stacks of films and directors who walked their own path, took risks, and hit big.
For the past couple of decades, Hollywood seems content to churn out reboots, sequels, and lightweight superhero comic book adaptations. There haven’t been many films enticing me to the cinema. Studios seem unwilling to take risks, banking on the easy cash, driven by the dollar in an era when Netflix, Apple, and other platforms are changing how people watch movies. The decrease in attention span seems to mirror the decrease in originality and big visions.
One exception is Christopher Nolan. Whenever Nolan releases a new film, I’ll go to the cinema and watch it. Simply because it’s Nolan. There are very few directors I can say that about. Why? Because Nolan is one of Herzog’s lions. A director with originality, vision, and craft—who puts everything he has into his films. He always takes a big swing. It was Nolan’s Oppenheimer that got people back to the cinema post-Covid.
Beethoven never heard the Ninth Symphony. Herzog nearly lost his mind in the jungle. And yet, what they made endures.
Who risks that today?
4. A Quote to note
“Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.”
- T.S. Eliot
5. A Question for you
Is there a moment when you took a risk, despite the obstacles, and discovered how far you could really go?
Thanks for reading and being part of the Deep Life Journey community. If you have any reflections on this issue, please leave a comment. Have a great weekend.
James
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