“Jules Romains: Beethoven, miroir grossissant et ultime recours”

Résumé 0

“Jules Romains: Beethoven, miroir grossissant et ultime recours” [“Jules Romains: Beethoven, Magnifying Mirror and Last Resort”], Luc Fraisse and Augustin Voegele (Eds.), Écrire avec Beethoven [Writing with Beethoven], Paris, Honoré Champion, 2023, p. 173-190. (Symposium. University of Haute-Alsace, 02-03/12/2021.) In the text he devotes to the eponymous hero of the collective Beethoven published by Hachette in 1961, Jules Romains begins by settling his score with the erudite biographers and technicians who claim to explain the most beautiful outbursts of the Bonn master by a fit of amorous melancholy or by the substitution of a C sharp for a C flat. They – unlike the author himself, who considers himself a homo plenarius – are incapable of rising to the level of a composer who is “the very type of great man” who sums up in his work the most precious part of the human conscience. In this way, Beethoven becomes a magnifying mirror that allows Jules Romains to portray himself as the “supreme incarnation” of the human spirit of his time.