In his essay on instrumental music, the man Neefe calls one of the greatest philosophers was Johann Georg Sulzer, whose Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Künste (General Theory of the Fine Arts) was one of the celebrated treatises concerning aesthetics in the German Aufklärung. Sulzer’s ideas are as idealistic as Neefe’s but more concrete, less rhapsodic. Whether or not Neefe gave Beethoven his book, he taught from it in important ways. Many of Sulzer’s ideas read like a prophecy of Beethoven’s mature music in its conceptions, its technique, its methods. In adulthood, he owned a copy of Sulzer and consulted it. Sulzer wrote,
The most important service the fine arts can offer to man consists without doubt in the well-ordered dominating desires that it can implant, by which the ethical character of man and his moral work is determined. [To the end, Beethoven called himself a servant of humanity.]
Every individual part of a work that is conceptually ill-suited to the whole, that possesses no relation with the other parts and thus stands in opposition to the unity, is an imperfection and blemish . . . There has to be a thread drawing together the many different things so that they are not arbitrarily joined, but rather have a natural connection to one another. Variety must appear as the constantly varied effects of a single cause. [Beethoven’s sketchbooks are an illustration of this search for unity within variety.]
In any sketch . . . one’s complete attention must always be focused upon the whole so that one can see how every section fits in. [Later Beethoven said, “It is my habit . . . always to keep the whole in view.”]
The most important forms in which beauty ascends to the sublime, are those in which beauty is united with both functionality and a moral essence, where the matter conveys an impression of spiritual power, where the soul becomes visible, so to speak. [Later Beethoven said, “Only art and science can raise man to the level of the divine.”]
A musical composition written for many instruments, or one to be performed outside or in a large hall should not be so elaborated as a trio. [Beethoven had a strong sense of the differing styles of orchestral and chamber music.]
The composer would do well to imagine some person, or a situation or passion, and exert his fantasy to the point where he can believe that this person is ready to speak . . . He must never forget that music that expresses no kind of passion or sentiment in a comprehensible language is nothing but sheer noise. [Later Beethoven said that all his music was written with some idea, story, or image in mind.]
The main theme is commonly termed the thema. Mattheson justly compared it to the Biblical verses upon which a sermon is based, and which must contain in a few words all that will be developed more fully in the course of the sermon . . . The main theme is always the most important element. [This is a definition of Beethoven’s procedure in his mature music: Everything flows from das Thema.]27
Through Neefe, the ideals of both Freemasons and Illuminati reached his pupil, and to some degree these ideals stayed with Beethoven to his last symphony and his last days. But these influences did not play out in predictable ways. Contra Neefe, he composed, for example, plenty of minuets, polonaises, Turkish marches, and the like, the sort of commercial items his teacher deplored. Anyway, neither as a teenager nor later did Beethoven uncritically accept anyone else’s ideas about his art. Everything had to be transformed into his own terms. Though he sympathized with Freemasons and benefited from their network, there is no record he ever belonged to a lodge. Joining groups of any kind was not his style. Yet even as he resisted authority, he also had a German respect for authority, for precedent, for the scholarly and theoretical.
In other words, when all was said and done, Beethoven was not only incapable of taking any path but his own, he was incapable of understanding any path but his own. If this is true of most teenagers, he never moved beyond that stage. At the same time, there was a fruitful paradox in Beethoven’s relations to the world. For all his fierce independence and his obliviousness unto scorn regarding much of the life around him, from his youth on, musically and otherwise, he still took in everything significant he encountered and made use of it. Most of what he did as an artist was based on models in the past; but he had to make those models his own.28
Beethoven learned and grew extraordinarily through the course of his life and music, but his bedrock remained the intellectual and spiritual atmosphere of Aufklärung Bonn, and part of that comprised the teachings musical and otherwise of Christian Neefe. Among the elements that inflected Beethoven’s sense of his mission was the Illuminist (and Zauberflötean) sense of a cadre of the enlightened, initiates into the Mysteries and covert leaders of humanity in the direction of Elysium. The boundless optimism of the Aufklärung applied to music as well: the arts were to have a higher development, both in their creation and in the perception of them, and so would be part of the progress of humanity toward the light. Musically and otherwise, Neefe was a patient teacher. In contrast to Beethoven’s first teacher, his father, Neefe was encouraging rather than bullying, firm and frank, but he allowed his pupil to find his own ways and means. Neefe preached his social and spiritual ideals gently, likewise his teaching of composition.
As Neefe had written, he knew he had on his hands a student of Mozartian dimensions. Even if Neefe possessed a higher opinion of his own talents than history would, he had to have understood how far this boy’s gifts stretched beyond his own. At the same time, Neefe had enough experience to understand that talent is not enough, that in the end few prodigies amount to much. There must also be an unusual adaptability, a drive to learn, toughness, courage, tenacity, ambition, fire in the belly, none of which can be taught, all of which Beethoven possessed boundlessly. Neefe suggested, guided, critiqued, shaped, but he also gave the boy rein to follow where his gifts led him. By 1785, they led Beethoven to three works of remarkable maturity and skill.
The idea for the three Piano Quartets WoO (works without opus) 36—in E-flat major and minor, D major, and C major—smacks of an assignment a teacher gives a student: use particular works of a master as models for pieces of your own; follow the models as you like, but keep close to them as a formal, expressive, tonal, and gestural scaffolding. Whether the idea was assigned by Neefe or by himself, and without having much practice in composition since writing the Electoral Sonatas, in these quartets Beethoven made another exponential leap in his apprenticeship.
In the massive Adagio assai that begins the Piano Quartet in E-flat Major, listeners then and later could only be stunned at the subtlety and depth of feeling, call it a certain wistful pathos, coming from a composer of age fourteen. This does not sound like learned rhetoric, like everything he had written before; it sounds like music from the heart. What had he experienced to arrive at such an outpouring? All that can be certain is that he had experienced his model, Mozart’s Violin Sonata in G, K. 379. In his opening, Beethoven follows Mozart’s introduction closely. The gestures and the low, close harmonies are Mozart’s, and so is the Mozartian tone: languid, seemingly suspended between conflicting emotions, peculiarly shadowed for the major mode.
For all their modeling, these works are closer than Beethoven had ever been to the composer the world would know. While he based each of them on a particular Mozart violin sonata, his imitation became freer, more his own, as he went. He began making the models his own with his choice of medium: the virtually unknown piano quartet instead of solo sonata.29 If in all the quartets he generally follows Mozart’s forms, meters, and key relations, he extends everything; his quartets are longer and more substantial than the Mozart solo sonatas. The C Major Quartet has the dancing gaiety of its model in Mozart’s C Major Sonata, K. 296, though Beethoven’s is more madcap.30 Like Mozart, Beethoven concludes the piece grandly, with double-stops on the strings—but Beethoven’s finish is longer and louder than Mozart’s.
After his introduction to the E-flat Quartet, Beethoven, like Mozart, launches into minor mode, but more so: a fiercely driving Allegro con spirito. The most striking thing is the key. After Mozar
t’s G-major beginning, the Allegro is in an unexpected G minor, but that key itself is common, and a resonant one for the violin because it involves the open strings. In his quartet, Beethoven makes the same turn to the parallel minor, but that puts him in the outlandish key, at the time almost unknown, of E-flat minor—unresonant and ungratifying for the strings, but giving them and the untempered keyboard a singular shadowed coloration. (E-flat minor was familiar, though, to someone who knew The Well-Tempered Clavier.)31 Here begins Beethoven’s lifelong attraction to unusual keys, often ones in the deep-flat direction, like the six flats of E-flat minor.
In the fourth bar of his Allegro, Mozart introduces a dissonance, a diminished-seventh chord. Beethoven makes the same harmonic move in the same place, but his dissonance is more stark, a D diminished seventh clashing with a tonic pedal, and he prolongs the tension for four bars to Mozart’s one. In volume, Mozart never goes beyond forte and piano; right away, Beethoven crescendos from forte to fortissimo on the dissonant chord. Beethoven’s piano part is harder to play than Mozart’s, challenging the fingers of amateur musicians.
Foreshadowed here is another of Beethoven’s lifelong patterns. He pushes every envelope, makes his models his own partly by doing everything more: volume levels both louder and softer than his models, everything more intense, more poignant, more driven and dramatic, more individual, longer and weightier, with heightened contrasts and greater virtuosity. There is an attempt to give each piece a higher profile, a more individual personality than in the past. Mozart and Haydn shared motives among their movements; Beethoven took that unifying device further, creating intricate interconnections of melody, harmony, key, and gesture throughout a work.
The other two piano quartets are based less directly on Mozart’s notes, more on the violin sonatas’ tone and especially their forms. Maybe here was the essential point of this assignment: not just to study in Mozart the common layout of Classical forms—sonata form, theme and variations, rondo—but also to understand how malleable these formal models not only can be but must be, for a composer who wants to say something fresh, to make forms motivated from within rather than by rote.
The signs of immaturity in the Piano Quartets are less glaring and pervasive than in Beethoven’s earlier pieces. Here, his age is shown in the restricted string writing, the cello usually stuck fast to the bass line. A testament to how close to his later voice these quartets are is that he used ideas from them in three works graced with opus numbers: the C Minor Piano Trio, op. 1, no. 3, and two of the Piano Sonatas op. 2.32
There would be another legacy of these Piano Quartets. They were breakthroughs for him, and the spark of that breakthrough was Mozart. Through Mozart, Beethoven began to discover himself. Mozart was to remain his prime talisman, the model to whom he would return year after year for ideas and inspiration. On a 1790 sketch in C minor, Beethoven broke off and wrote, “This entire passage has been [inadvertently] stolen from the Mozart Symphony in C [the ‘Linz’].” He then reworked the passage slightly and signed it “Beethoven himself.”33 At the same time that Mozart became a talisman, he became a challenge, another father from whom Beethoven needed to escape.
For Christian Neefe, 1785, the year of his student’s Piano Quartets, his reinstatement as full court organist, and the publication of his Dilettanterien was also the year when it became clear that whatever his strengths were, whatever his devotion to the goals of the Aufklärung and Illuminati, his talents did not include leadership. As prefect of the Minerval Church, Neefe had earned enemies.
In a written denunciation, some lodge members, among them court official Clemens August von Schall and Kapelle hornist Nikolaus Simrock, declared brother Glaucus to be a failure as prefect. Joseph Eichoff, eventually one of Beethoven’s closet friends in Bonn, penned a devastating appraisal. Neefe is a good musician, Eichoff wrote, but he is proud and opportunistic, and he insults people we don’t need as enemies. Specifically, Eichoff cited a row of moral faults: Self-regard. Neefe believes all his works are masterpieces, and when people are looking at his things, he watches them intently, waiting for praise. He cavalierly wrote a satire of Count Belderbusch and read it out in a beer hall. Pride. He is a name-dropper and presumes inappropriate intimacy with people. Thirst for power. He is argumentative, can’t stand being contradicted, believes as leader he can do no wrong. Talkativeness. He likes to gossip over a glass of wine at Widow Koch’s wine house.34
Whether or not the accusations against Neefe were fair, they were believed. By 1786, Bonn’s Minerval Church of Stagira had collapsed. By that point, in any case, the Order of Illuminati had been outlawed in Bavaria, and its eight-year career was essentially over. But the passion for Aufklärung had not dampened among progressives in Bonn. Many Illuminati members, including Neefe, soon joined a new, less radical, but in the end more broadly influential organization, the Lesegesellschaft, or Reading Society.
Later Neefe wrote of this period in his life with regret but remarkably little bitterness: the ideas of the order were splendid, he said, “but in the results I discovered many gaps, many personal weaknesses, and still worse things that convinced me to remove myself.”35 The “science” of moral self-improvement had turned out more elusive than expected.
If with the collapse of the Illuminati lodge Neefe failed in his most ambitious endeavor to promote Aufklärung, Beethoven’s Piano Quartets represent what may have been the last major creative collaboration between Neefe and his pupil. Though in his mid-teens, Beethoven was now a rival to Neefe on the organ bench at court and some of his friends were sworn enemies of his teacher, the two remained colleagues, and the older man continued his paternal interest in the younger. At court, they worked peaceably side by side.
In any case, after the Piano Quartets, Beethoven seems to have largely put composition aside for several years, giving his energy to keyboard practice.36 By the time he left Bonn, he would be one of the finest piano players alive. And in his last years in Bonn, new mentors and champions shaped him.
6
A Journey and a Death
CONCEIVED AND DECREED under the reign of Elector Maximilian Friedrich, the University of Bonn was inaugurated in November 1786, under new Elector Maximilian Franz. He decreed a grand Rhenish celebration. The town was decked with flags, and bells rang the hours through three days of ceremonies. There were processions, church services, and speeches; public debates were held around a triumphal arch erected for the occasion.1 In his inaugural proclamation to the faculty, Max Franz laid out an agenda for the school by way of citing his brother the emperor in Vienna: “Joseph, who knew how to value men and the benefits of the Aufklärung, gave them to you in the confidence that you will live up to his high intentions.”2
A certain symbolism figured in the first location of the university. It took over the Bonn Academy, the former gymnasium of the Jesuits, who for years had imposed a conservative Catholic education across Bonn, as across most of Germany. The first rector of the university was liberal theologian Bonifaz Oberthür, once a brother in the Illuminati lodge.3 The reactionary clerics and professors of Cologne, nominally subjects of Max Franz, understood that this new university was a progressive rival to the University of Cologne, so they made themselves the first line of resistance against the liberal and anticlerical spirit flowing from Bonn. If the intellectual vanguard of the University of Bonn did not comprise the godless revolutionaries they were painted as, they constituted a true hotbed of Aufklärers, committed to all things rational and practical, their religion tending to Protestant and deist.
The founding of the university epitomized the golden age of old Bonn’s intellectual and artistic life. It was as a representative figure of that high-Aufklärung era and a contributor to it that Beethoven came of age. The early faculty included physician and Beethoven’s friend Franz Gerhard Wegeler. Teaching classics was Eulogius Schneider, a former monk who was heading away from the church and toward revolution. The philosophy of Immanuel Kant became a staple of the university. Amon
g the early students was Bartholomäus Fischenich, later professor of natural law and human rights, who became friends with Friedrich Schiller over their mutual fervor for Kant.4 The galvanizing force of the Aufklärung ferment in Bonn flowed not just from the university, however, but also from the new Elector and his court.
Maximilian Franz hardly looked the part of a thinker or a dynamic leader. He adored music and dancing, but his principal enthusiasm was the table: one of the heroic trenchermen of his time, Max Franz is said eventually to have weighed upwards of 480 pounds. The sight of the Elector heaving his prodigious avoirdupois into motion on the dance floor earned him the nickname L’abbe sacrebleu, “Father Omygod.”5 In manner usually jovial and easygoing if oddly affected, Max Franz gave audiences in a worn black uniform and wandered the streets of his capital in the early morning wrapped in a dirty topcoat.6 In those and other aspects of style and substance he echoed his brother Emperor Joseph II in Vienna. Growing up in Vienna under the rule of his formidable mother, Empress Maria Theresa, Franz took up Joseph’s high-Aufklärung ideals. In 1770, the year Beethoven was born, Franz’s mother sent his sister Marie Antoinette off to France to become queen beside Louis XVI. On Max Franz’s one visit to his sister in France, his lack of polish—perhaps also his girth—embarrassed Marie Antoinette and created a rift between them. In Vienna, he had befriended Mozart, and for a while Mozart envisioned himself the future court Kapellmeister in Bonn. But by 1781, Mozart was fed up, writing his father, “Stupidity stares out of his eyes. He talks and pontificates incessantly, always in falsetto.”7
Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph Page 11
