Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph

by Swafford, Jan

  Elector Max Franz remembered Beethoven’s excursion to Vienna very well. He remembered that it produced more debts than results. If that abortive journey did not represent the hoped-for turn in the young musician’s fortunes, however, they were about to turn anyway, decisively and at home.

  7

  Bildung

  IN EARLY 1788, a new figure arrived at the Bonn court: a young nobleman, handsome and charming, very greatly promising. Count Ferdinand Ernst Joseph Gabriel Waldstein was of an old and influential Bohemian lineage. The year before, he had joined the Order of Teutonic Knights, and he came to Bonn at the summons of Max Franz, who, like his predecessors, was Grand Master of the order. By his first summer in Bonn, at age twenty-six, Waldstein had been knighted and was serving as a trusted envoy and companion of the Elector.1

  A connoisseur, a capable amateur pianist, and an occasional composer, Waldstein joined the ranks of aristocratic musical Schwärmers in Bonn. He would have come to town relishing how liberal politically and also how musical was his new post. He looked over the local talent, perhaps hoping to discover a protégé in whom to invest attention and money. In any case, he was quick to find Bonn’s leading prodigy and to take him up.

  Beethoven’s childhood friend Franz Wegeler would call Waldstein the teenager’s “first, and in every respect most important, Maecenas.”2 Probably he was not the first: when, at around age seventeen, Beethoven first met Waldstein, he already had admirers among the nobility and the bureaucratic middle class. But in Bonn he never had a socially more exalted, musically more sophisticated, more generous and influential champion and mentor than Waldstein.

  It was the beginning of Beethoven’s lifetime of association not only with well-placed music lovers but also with the higher nobility, of the kind who could open golden doors to him. His ascent would be charted by the status of the people who lionized him. For years he accomplished that rise without kowtowing unduly to the nobility or even acknowledging their admiration, and often despite their annoyance at his lack of deference and his manners of an unlicked bear—the legacy of an early childhood where he was taught music, not grooming and graces. In his childhood nearly everything but music and the love of his mother had been shabby, grueling, and ordinary.

  On the whole, Beethoven ascended in the world not because he courted the great but because of his gifts, combined with an indefinable aura of inner grace and a relentless ambition to learn and to rise in every sense of the term. Waldstein understood this protégé and helped the boy become what nature had fitted him to be. The brilliant and sociable Waldstein rose as well, for a while, serving for ten years in the British army, then becoming Commander of the Teutonic Order at Virnsberg. Later, in Vienna, he served as exchequer to the emperor.3 He began his career young, at the top of his form. Then, after a couple of decades of glory in high posts, his recklessness and his passion for gold speculation mastered him. In the end Waldstein lost everything he had: the affection of the Elector to a political quarrel, his wife to death, his fortune, his houses, the respect of his peers. The destiny of Waldstein was to die wretchedly in Vienna a few years before Beethoven, long out of touch with the man who he had once prophesied was to inherit the genius of Mozart.4

  When he took up the teenage Beethoven, Waldstein was in his prime, generous with funds and influence, a Freemason with close ties to liberal aristocratic and Masonic circles in Vienna. With gentle irony, Waldstein called the happiness of humankind “my favorite chimera.”5 He began to slip Beethoven small sums, letting the proud teenager believe they were gratuities from the Elector. He encouraged the youth not only in his performing and composing but also in his improvising.6

  There was nothing unusual in a performer taking up improvisation. For centuries, many composers had been instrumental virtuosos as well, and in both capacities they were expected to extemporize. A visitor to Venice in the early eighteenth century recalled with awe the violin improvisations of Antonio Vivaldi; J. S. Bach’s improvisations were celebrated in his time, his admirers including Frederick the Great. In his Vienna years, Beethoven’s extempore playing would be compared to memories of Mozart’s. Here as otherwise, his conception of his apprenticeship in music had to do with first mastering, then personalizing the traditional skills and techniques of being a composer: figured bass, instrumentation, vocal setting, counterpoint. But the leading edge in establishing his reputation would be improvisation.

  As he settled into Bonn, Count Waldstein naturally gravitated to the circle of Helene von Breuning, who had been serving not only as a patron of Beethoven but also as a substitute mother. At Helene’s big house on the Münsterplatz, Beethoven was still teaching piano to her daughter Lorchen and youngest son Lenz. Meanwhile, he served as Helene’s showpiece among the cultured circle who gravitated to her. A silhouette of the Breuning family made by a local artist has Lorchen pouring tea for her mother as the latter reads a book; her son Christoph also reads, while Lenz plays violin and Stephan toys with a bird in a cage; also in the picture stands Helene’s brother-in-law, Canon Lorenz von Breuning, a prominent name among progressive clergymen in Bonn.7 All the children would be close to Beethoven in his teens, and Stephan survived just long enough to tend to his friend on his deathbed. The silhouettist of the Breunings also did a likeness of their protégé Beethoven at about sixteen, his first portrait.8 It shows a fleshy profile, his father’s blunt nose, a thin wig with a ribbon-tied pigtail.

  Later Beethoven called the Breunings “the guardian angels of my youth.” Even before Maria van Beethoven died, Ludwig spent many nights in the house on Münsterplatz. He submitted to Helene’s efforts to mitigate his stubbornness and his hot temper, to civilize and socialize him.9 Franz Wegeler, who brought him into the Breuning circle, wrote that Beethoven’s youthful exuberance first bloomed in that lively and sophisticated atmosphere.10 Beethoven was not a gracious companion and never would be, but he was no longer the sullen and taciturn child he had been. He could be funny and sociable, and he turned his relentless will to learn and to raise himself in every dimension.

  Performing regularly at the Breunings for a salon of knowledgeable and admiring listeners, Beethoven played Haydn and Mozart and Bach, his own pieces, improvisations. Often he was asked to improvise a character portrait of one of the Breuning circle.11 That came naturally to him; Christian Neefe had taught him that music was modeled not only on forms but also on passions and characters. Young Beethoven joined in the ongoing dialogue over the Good, the True, and the ­Beautiful. He read books he heard spoken of in the house: Homer and Plutarch and Shakespeare, the current German poems of Klopstock, and works of the young Goethe and Schiller. He soaked up the Aufklärung ferment that was a constant presence.12

  In childhood, Ludwig’s father had loomed over him; in his early teens, Christian Neefe was his mentor and champion. Beethoven and Neefe still worked together daily at court, but his mentors and champions now were Waldstein and the Breunings and the cultured young intellectuals his age and older who befriended him when he emerged from his childhood shell.

  Now Beethoven was old enough to fall in love, too, though he would be constrained in his romantic affairs by a puritan idealistic streak about women, maybe absorbed in part from the antifeminist doctrines of the Freemasons and Illuminati around him.13 He and Stephan von Breuning shared their first love, for a music-loving, delicately blond girl from Cologne named Jeanette d’Honrath, who frequented the Breunings. This presumably decorous passion ran its course with no visible scars.14 Sooner or later, Beethoven likely fell in love with his student Lorchen von Breuning; that ended with a quarrel before he left Bonn. (Lorchen finally married his friend Franz Wegeler.)

  It was Helene von Breuning who gave a name to Ludwig’s tendency to drift off into his thoughts and become oblivious to everything and everybody. His landlord’s daughter Cäcilie Fischer recalled that once she spoke to Ludwig and, staring into space, he did not seem to hear her. When Cäcilie demanded a reply, he came to and explained, “I was just occupi
ed with such a lovely, deep thought, I couldn’t bear to be disturbed.”15 When the like happened around Helene, she would say, “He has his raptus again today.”16

  The raptus became a little legend in his circle. It was not different in kind from that of other artists, most of whom create in something on the order of a trance. But Beethoven’s trance was profound, a withdrawal into his mind that echoed his steady physical isolation from the world. Alone in rooms, alone in nature, alone in his raptus, Beethoven was happiest and always would be. For his friends, the raptus was most familiar when he improvised, falling into the music that flowed from his fingers as if he were falling into a dream.

  In June 1788, Count Waldstein petitioned the court to increase Ludwig’s salary. The family was still living on Wenzelgasse, where Maria van Beethoven had died, followed four months later by her last child, Maria Anna. Ludwig was receiving 150 florins as assistant organist, father Johann 300 florins plus three measures of grain. Without the rudder and goad of his wife, Johann was drinking heavily, losing much of the vivacity and joie de vivre that had once made him so many friends. He was rearing Ludwig’s brother Carl as a musician, though this son had no notable talent. Probably Ludwig gave him lessons, though that may have been a fraught situation: Carl was even more hotheaded than Ludwig. Mild-tempered brother Nikolaus Johann was apprenticed to an apothecary.

  The more Johann van Beethoven’s fortunes and spirits fell, the more Ludwig at seventeen and eighteen had to take over as head of the family, overseer of his younger brothers and finally of his father. Ludwig got in the habit of managing his brothers’ lives. From that point he essentially never lost the conviction that it was his duty to shepherd them. Count Waldstein’s petition to the court for a raise in pay for Ludwig, despite the latter’s mounting burdens and responsibilities, was turned down.

  With the university under way, the Elector turned his attention to reviving the court theater and to expanding and deepening his Kapelle. The National Theater was reopened, with a stronger focus on musical productions; that made Bonn an important center for opera in German lands. Christian Neefe served as theater pianist and stage manager of the reconstituted theater. Directing the orchestra, and soon the opera and concert and chapel ensembles as well, was Bohemian-born cellist Joseph Reicha, who had arrived in Bonn in 1785 to work in the Kapelle. He oversaw a record expansion of the orchestra.17 With him he brought his young nephew flutist and violinist Anton Reicha, who wanted to be a composer. Anton studied with his uncle and then with Neefe.

  Beethoven and Anton Reicha became close. Reicha recalled, “Like Orestes and Pylades, we were constant companions during fourteen years of our youth.”18 If Reicha was not as gifted as Beethoven and was destined to be frustrated in his dreams of fame as a composer, he was still a talented and ambitious musician. The two became young artists together, talking music and politics and aesthetics, sharing adventures in and out of the Kapelle.

  Making use of his early training in strings, as his father had intended, Beethoven joined the viola section of the court orchestra.19 From his position in the center of the string section, he absorbed the orchestral and operatic repertoire from the inside and learned the art of scoring for orchestra in the most practical way. In the course of performances in theater and concert and dance rooms and in the chapel, he also developed a feeling for musical genres: the functional and stylistic differences between a symphony and an overture, between incidental music for plays and scores for singspiels and operas and ballets, between sacred and secular music, between the traditions of opera seria and opera buffa. During 1789 and 1790, the court opera mounted productions of Mozart’s The Abduction from the Seraglio, The Marriage of Figaro, and Don Giovanni.20

  Of the musicians in the orchestra, then numbering thirty-one and rising, many, including Anton Reicha and Beethoven, went on to fame of one kind and another, Reicha more as a musical theorist. The cousins Andreas (violin) and Bernhard (cello) Romberg found solid success as soloists and composers, Bernhard also as a cello pedagogue.21 Old Beethoven family friend and Kapelle concertmaster Franz Ries was a widely respected violinist and might have had a solo career if he had not preferred to stay in his hometown. Horn player Nikolaus Simrock founded a historic music publishing house. In his teens, Beethoven gained a great depth of experience among first-rate musicians and a first-rate orchestra, comparable to what had been available to Haydn and Mozart in their formative years.22

  Now there was a good deal besides music in his life. Along with most of the creative and cultured people of Bonn, Beethoven frequented the wine house, bookshop, and rooming house Zum Zehrgarten, run by widow Anna Maria Koch in her house on the market square. By the late 1880s her place had become the epicenter of the town’s endless talk of philosophy, science, music, politics, literature, and drama, plus a generous helping of local gossip. The popularity of the Zehrgarten owed much to the daughter of the house, Barbara Koch, called Babette, the belle of Bonn, who made the Aufklärung atmosphere still more attractive. University professor and philosopher Bartholomäus Fischenich, one of many of Babette’s admirers, boarded in the Zehr­garten: “In that house I spent a lovely part of my life and many happy hours. It was once the center of all intellectual and social pleasures in Bonn.”23

  Beethoven numbered among Babette’s admirers, who for that matter included many of the professors, officials, musicians, and students in town. Though Babette was musical, she appears to have been too busy with business and beaux to reciprocate Beethoven’s interest; he was a face in a crowd. The conviviality of the Zehrgarten regulars is seen in a day in summer 1789 when “the whole table from Koch’s house” went on an excursion to the Elector’s palace, the Augustusburg, and its French gardens at Brühl.

  In May of that year, Anton Reicha, Beethoven, and Karl Kügelgen, one of the painter twins whom the Elector supported but admitted he did not understand, enrolled in the university. There is no record what if any classes or other school activities Beethoven attended. He resisted Franz Wegeler’s attempts to sign him up for lectures on Immanuel Kant, the philosopher of the day.24 For Beethoven, enrolling in the university was probably a gesture in the direction of broader education rather than a commitment to it. In his new responsibilities at court and in his private attention to his art as well as his social life, he was an extraordinarily busy eighteen-year-old. Beethoven was entering the heart of his Bildung.25 By his teens, he was impressing the adults around him by the force of his spirit as well as by his music.

  Europe itself entered a creative and catastrophic era of Bildung in 1789. After a decade of revolutionary fever, the long-anticipated day of wrath against the old order arrived on the fourteenth of July, when an armed mob of Parisians stormed the dungeon fortress of the Bastille, which had become a symbol of the tyranny of the ancien régime. In August the new National Assembly published the Declaration of the Rights of Man, proclaiming that not just French men but people everywhere had a natural right to liberty, property, security, happiness, equality, opportunity, and freedom from oppression.26

  The shock wave flew around Europe, and the reverberations amplified as the French Revolution took shape. For devotees of Enlightenment, there was a dazzling sense of It has happened!, the tide of ­humanity turning once and for all in the direction of reason and freedom, of liberté, egalité, fraternité. Edmund Burke wrote in England in 1790 that the Revolution “is the first example of a government based on principles and a coherent and consistent system.”27 America had mounted the first Enlightenment revolution and fashioned the first rational and representative government. But America was far away. This was here and now. For the first time in Europe, a government was going to be created on practical and egalitarian principles, an answer to the thrones that had ruled because they had always ruled, and for no better reason.

  The French Revolution aspired to wipe away the past and replace it with a future fashioned by and for the people. Wrote one contemporary in 1798, “If suddenly . . . the Alps would collapse from the Mon
tblanc to Istria, if all of England would be swallowed by oceans . . . such a revolution in the physical world could not be greater, nor would the familiar shape of Europe suffer more from change, than the Revolution . . . brought to the political world.”

  There was joy unto ecstasy in Freemason lodges and Lesegesellschafts all over Germany. Philosophers Kant and Herder, writers Schiller and Klopstock, and a chorus of other German artists and thinkers were quick to hail the Revolution. Klopstock cried to Germans, “France free—and you hesitate? Are silent?” To many in that intoxicating early period, it seemed that the Elysium of brotherhood and happiness that Schiller had prophesied in his “An die Freude” was taking shape. The French National Assembly declared Schiller and Klopstock, along with Americans George Washington and Thomas Paine, honorary French citizens. Goethe, skeptical of chaos, held back his approval: “Sudden action is for the masses, thus they command respect. In judgment they are pitiful.”28

  Inevitably the response of the Austro-German ruling class was muted. Even so, many progressive nobles and clergy and bureaucrats applauded the unfolding events in France. In Germany and Austria there had already been a movement to curtail the unbounded powers of the nobility and end feudalism. Besides, German princes might conclude that a blow against the proud and powerful French throne was to Germany’s advantage. Or so it appeared at the time.