Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph

by Swafford, Jan

  As he left his teens Beethoven was small, swarthy, and slim, with a large head and a short neck and the piercing and expressive dark eyes he would possess until illness dimmed them in his last years. Perhaps he did not yet strike women as ugly, as later he generally did. Beethoven’s adult face bore what appeared to be smallpox scars, but there is no record of when or whether he had that often-fatal disease in youth.3 Some of the social rough edges had been knocked off him by Helene von Breuning. Now he could conviviate in company, laugh with the rest of them. With those of more or less his own age and station he freely used the du form of address indicating sworn friendship. Still, Count Waldstein, the Breunings, and his other mentors and friends in Bonn valued him despite his personality more than because of it. Yet even as a teenager Beethoven somehow radiated an aura of a great and noble nature that marked not only his music but him personally.

  This year, along with many of his friends, he subscribed to a collection of poems political, erotic, and antipapist by the town’s resident radical professor, Eulogius Schneider, who had conceived the plan for the Imperial Cantatas.4 In Schneider’s book, Beethoven read the poet’s paean to the French Revolution:

  Fallen now are the despot’s chains,

  Happy people! by your hand;

  The prince’s throne is your free abode,

  The kingdom become the fatherland.

  No stroke of the pen, no: This is our Will,

  Decrees again the citizen’s fate.

  Lo, in ruins the Bastille lies,

  Freedom today is the Frenchman’s state!5

  For all the liberalism of Bonn, Schneider’s poems caused rumbles in high places. Max Franz kept out of it but let his censor suppress the book in the electorate. In June 1791, the university had had enough and fired the irrepressible Schneider. He went to Strasbourg, where he became public prosecutor, equipped himself with a portable guillotine, and began serving the Revolution by chopping off heads.6 The Terror was adding its bloody caveat to Enlightenment dreams of reason and freedom. But powers that reigned now in Paris were displeased, and these men were not the sort benignly to let Schneider flee out the back door again. Louis Saint-Just and Philippe Lebas wrote Robespierre, “We are delivering the public prosecutor of the Strasbourg Revolutionary Tribunal to the Committee of Public Safety . . . We do not believe in this cosmopolitan charlatan and we trust only ourselves.”7 Schneider went to the guillotine in Paris in 1794.

  Schneider had been one of the most radical voices in Bonn, and an electrifying speaker. The town had never gone Jacobin, which is to say radical and in sympathy with the Terror, but Schneider had still found more listeners in Bonn than he would have in most of Germany. Beethoven was among those listeners; maybe Schneider contributed to the perennial resonance in his mind and in his music of the word freedom. One instance is Beethoven’s 1792 song Wer ist ein freier Mann? (Who Is a Free Man?), the text set in a melodically and harmonically straightforward, declamatory style to which he later returned for similar texts:

  Who is a free man?

  The man to whom his own will alone,

  And not any overlord’s whim,

  Can give him the law.

  That is a free man! . . .

  Who is a free man?

  The man for whom neither birth nor title,

  Nor velvet coat nor workman’s smock,

  Can conceal the presence of a brother.

  That is a free man! . . .

  For musical citizens in town, the great event at the end of 1790 was the appearance in December of the Bonn-born, London-based violinist and musical impresario Johann Peter Salomon, accompanied by someone as close to a living legend as a musician could get in those days: Joseph Haydn. As composer, conductor, Kapellmeister, opera producer, and conductor, Haydn had labored in the palaces of the Hungarian princes of Esterházy for nearly thirty years as a valued household servant, but a servant all the same. Before he gained his freedom, he wrote a female admirer, after he returned from a journey, “I did not know for three days whether I was Kapellmeister or Kapellservant . . . It is indeed sad to be a slave.”8 Now pensioned off and prospering from commissions and publications, Haydn had moved to Vienna, happy to be, at age fifty-eight, his own man for the first time in decades and creatively at the top of his form.

  Soon Haydn was surprised to find Salomon knocking at his door in Vienna, presenting him with a virtual demand: Haydn was to come with him to London to compose, perform, and be celebrated. Extravagant sums of money were specified for various services while in England, including a commission for six symphonies. Haydn was agreeable to the scheme. Before leaving for London he said farewell to his admired younger colleague and fellow Freemason Mozart. The legend ran that when Mozart cautioned, “You don’t know the language,” Haydn replied, “My language is understood all over the world.” The legend continues that both men wept and Mozart said, “We shall not see each other ever again.”9 In the event, they did not.

  En route to London, Salomon and Haydn made a stop in Bonn on Christmas Day 1790. The impresario still had family and friends in the town where he was born and learned his trade. Before becoming a promoter in England, he had established himself as one of the leading violin virtuosos in Europe.

  On Sunday, Salomon brought his prize catch to High Mass at the Bonn court chapel, where Haydn was surprised and pleased to hear the choir singing one of his masses. At the end of the service he was led to the oratory, where, to his further surprise, the gigantically portly Max Franz was waiting for him, beaming. Taking Haydn’s hand, the Elector declared to the assembled musicians of the court, “Here I make you acquainted with the Haydn whom you revere so highly.” During Haydn’s first sojourn in Bonn, Beethoven surely got a chance to shake the great man’s hand and get his first look at him, wearing an old-fashioned wig and clothes, long of torso and short of leg, his face large-nosed and homely but kind. Haydn’s musicians at the palace had affectionately called him “Papa.” A later age would call him “father of the string quartet” and “father of the symphony.”

  After a short stay in Bonn, the travelers set off for London, where Haydn was to discover that he was more famous than he could have imagined. There his fortune and his glory reached their zenith, where they resided for the rest of his life.

  Beethoven’s two Imperial Cantatas of 1790 opened a new vein of creativity. Having concentrated on piano for several years, now he returned to composing steadily. The pieces of 1790–92 included the first movement of a violin concerto in C (it apparently did not get past the draft of a first movement, scored for orchestra), songs and sets of variations, dances commissioned by Count Waldstein, and some piano variations on an Italian opera tune that stand as the most sophisticated work he completed in Bonn. Elsewhere 1791 saw momentous events: in Paris, the massacre of the Champ de Mars; Thomas Paine’s The Rights of Man, defending the French Revolution; Goethe’s becoming director of the court theater in Weimar; and the appearance of two operas that would be galvanizing to Beethoven—Cherubini’s Lodoïska and Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute).

  The commission from Beethoven’s chief patron Waldstein was a peculiar one. Beethoven was to write some little orchestral dances for a Waldstein-created event in the court theater to mark the end of Karneval. The nobility would attend in medieval German dress and watch a ballet featuring old-fashioned tunes—a march, drinking song, hunting and war songs, and so on.10 Since the count dabbled at composing, the music was to be billed as his work.

  The resulting Ritterballet, or Knight’s Ballet, premiered on March 6, 1791. The miniatures that make it up, the longest about a minute and a half, reveal that Beethoven knew how to write lilting and attractive dances in traditional style. The score implies he had most of the court orchestra at his disposal. He used it artfully, his scoring full and colorful: string writing in rich octaves, martial effects of winds and brass and timpani, hunting horns in the “Hunting Song,” a droll piccolo solo in the “Drinking Song” (the last two pieces in par
ticular echo Mozart’s Abduction from the Seraglio). The town Theaterkalendar gave a gushy review of the evening, saying that “Waldstein’s” piece reflected “the chief proclivities of our ancestors for war, the chase, love, and drinking . . . It was also noticeable that the ladies would lose none of their charms were they to return to the costumes of antiquity.”11

  That same year, Beethoven wrote and published a D-major set of piano variations of immense confidence and maturity, rich with prophecies for his future. For a theme he chose a popular operatic aria, the “Venni amore” of Vincenzo Righini. The Italian’s theme, two eight-bar periods, each repeated, is jaunty and slight. Beethoven transforms it into a virtuosic exploration of pianistic colors and effects on a more imaginative scale than anything in his piano writing so far.

  The echoes of the Righini Variations stretch to the end of Beethoven’s life, to his late piano music and last set of variations: the comic tone with moments of pathos and lyricism, the sudden changes of direction, the wide spaces between the hands, a variation glittering with trills that are not surface decorations but part of the music’s substance. Also present are his offbeat accents and his trademark device of a crescendo to a subito piano.12 In sound, the variations are singular individuals set off from their fellows by contrasts of all sorts: volume, rhythm, texture, register, and varieties of touch ranging from gently flowing to marchlike to staccato octaves dashing up and down the keyboard.

  Beethoven again shows off his formidable talent and technique along with his inexperience. The proportions seem too short and too predictable, most of the variations sticking to the theme’s two brisk periods, each relentlessly repeated. A variation has too little time to make its point before it is gone. Only the extended fantasias of the last two variations escape that problem. The first is a poignant and richly decorated Adagio sostenuto that recalls C. P. E. Bach’s soulful and inward empfindsamer style. The last variation is a return to the theme’s jaunty Allegro that amounts to a recall of earlier variations (the true Beethoven formal touch). He thought enough of the Righinis to use them during the next years as a showpiece, and was not embarrassed to republish them a decade later.13

  The vision of the greater musical world that Haydn brought to Bonn and to Beethoven continued in an extended excursion of autumn 1791, when Max Franz sailed up the Rhine to the ancient town of Mergentheim for a meeting of the Teutonic Knights. The recent Electors of Cologne had served as Grand Masters. Like his predecessors, Max Franz basked in the pomp and ceremony of the militant religious order whose symbol was the sharp-pointed Teutonic cross. Formed in the twelfth century and having been a leading force in the Crusades, the order acquired vast wealth and power. In the sixteenth century, the Grand Magistry of the now-secularized order was established in a medieval castle in Mergentheim, near Württemberg on the Rhine. As late as the eighteenth century, knights still appeared now and then on the battlefield, but by that point the Teutonic Order amounted to a legendary anachronism. As with the courts of Europe, the order endured because it had seemingly always been there, its power gone but its self-importance undimmed.14

  In their capacity as Grand Masters, the Electors of Cologne periodically journeyed to their official residence at Mergentheim for convocations. Max Franz arrived in the middle of September 1791, the knights of his retinue including Count Waldstein. He brought most of the Kapelle to help pass the time and to show off his musical establishment. His court actors and musicians—among them twenty-five men of the orchestra—traveled up the Rhine and Main Rivers in two large boats with mast and sail, installed in comfortable cabins. As a joke, the singer and comic actor Joseph Lux had been declared monarch of the journey for the artists; he appointed Beethoven and Bernhard Romberg his kitchen boys.

  In childhood Beethoven had made a freezing winter journey down the river to Rotterdam, and his father had taken him on summer tours around the countryside. Now in the best of spirits and in jolly company, he was sailing up the Rhine in lovely weather, watching the slow slipping past of vineyards and medieval towns, stone towers and ancient walls and hoary half-timbered houses presided over by castles on hilltops. Beethoven recalled the trip as “a fruitful source of loveliest visions.” Where the river narrowed dangerously at the Bingerloch, the Bonn artists disembarked and climbed to the Niederwald, where, on the heights above Rüdesheim, “King” Lux presented Ludwig with an ornate faux diploma officially promoting him in the kitchen ranks. Years later his friend Wegeler found that Beethoven had preserved the diploma as a memory of splendid days.

  There was a stop in Aschaffenburg-am-Main, at the summer palace of the Electors of Mainz. Working there was a then-celebrated pianist and composer whose keyboard music Beethoven had played and profited from, Abbé Sterkel. Like Muzio Clementi and a few others, Sterkel had made important contributions to the new repertoire specifically created for the pianoforte.

  Concertmaster Franz Ries and horn player Nikolaus Simrock took Beethoven to meet Sterkel. The famous man played for his guests in his famous manner. Beethoven found the playing refined but precious—“ladylike” was the term Wegeler recalled. In turn, Sterkel wanted to hear the young composer of the newly published Righini Variations. Beethoven resisted playing until Sterkel provoked him by expressing doubt that he could manage the most difficult of his own variations. Beethoven replied by sitting down and playing most of the piece from memory, continuing on with equally virtuosic improvised variations. This was impressive enough, but there was more: as Simrock recalled, rather than in his usual style, Beethoven “played them completely in the manner of the Herr Kapellmeister with the utmost daintiness and brilliant lightness . . . The Herr Kapellmeister was unbounded in his praises.”15

  When they reached Mergentheim, the musicians and actors of the Bonn court were featured in a round of evening entertainments whose pleasures must have been exhausting. One week’s listing shows the kind of marathon entertainment schedule courts were given to on holiday: a ball on Monday night, singspiel Tuesday, big concert Wednesday, comedy Thursday, operetta Saturday.16 In Mergentheim, the orchestra made an attempt to perform one of Beethoven’s Imperial Cantatas, probably the Joseph, but it was no-go. “We had all manner of protests over the difficult places,” recalled Nikolaus Simrock, “and [Beethoven] asserted that each player must be able to perform his part correctly; we proved we couldn’t, simply because all the figures were completely unusual.”17 For another joke during the trip, some musicians arranged for a waitress in a pub to flirt with Beethoven. Outraged, he boxed her ears.

  Among those admiring the Bonn Kapelle was amateur musician and writer Karl Ludwig Junker, chaplain at nearby Kirchberg. He traveled to Mergentheim to hear the Bonn musicians and wrote an account for a musical journal. “Here I was also an eyewitness to the esteem and respect in which this Kapelle stands with the Elector,” Junker wrote. He described an after-dinner orchestral concert, one of the time’s marathon evenings of music. The seven major works started with a Mozart symphony, included a single and a double cello concerto from the Rombergs, and ended with a symphony by the Kapellmeister of Wallenstein.

  Junker rhapsodized over the orchestra’s playing: “It was not possible to attain a higher degree of exactness . . . the members of the Kapelle, almost without exception, are in their best years, glowing with health, men of culture and fine personal appearance. They form truly a fine sight, when one adds the splendid uniform in which the elector has clothed them—red, and richly trimmed with gold.” Junker noted that the orchestra members were jammed together in the small room and sweated mightily as they played, but “one saw no unhappy faces among them.” He was surprised by the liberal temper of the court of the Elector of Cologne: “Before this one was apt to think of Cologne as a land of darkness, in which the Aufklärung had not found a foothold. One gets a quite different sense when one enters the Court of the Elector. Especially among the orchestra players I found quite enlightened, sound-thinking men.”18

  The one Bonn musician Junker singled out with part
icular warmth and admiration was Beethoven. This sophisticated dilettante would tell history a good deal about Beethoven as a virtuoso of age twenty. That the young man’s pride and his rough edges were scarcely showing to this new acquaintance indicates what a fine mood Beethoven was enjoying on that visit, how pleased at what people were making of him. Junker understood the singular quality of Beethoven’s playing, the result of years of not only practicing the pianoforte but also thinking about how it should be played, as distinct from a harpsichord or a clavichord:

  I heard also one of the greatest of pianists—the dear, good Bethofen . . . true, he did not perform in public, probably the instrument here was not to his mind. It is one of Spath’s make, and at Bonn he plays upon one by Steiner. But . . . I heard him extemporize in private; yes, I was even invited to propose a theme for him to vary. The greatness of this amiable, light-hearted man, as a virtuoso, may in my opinion be safely estimated from his almost inexhaustible wealth of ideas, the altogether characteristic style of expression in his playing, and the great execution which he displays . . . Even the members of this remarkable orchestra are, without exception, his admirers, and all ears when he plays. Yet he is exceedingly modest and free from all pretension. He, however, acknowledged to me, that, upon the journeys which the Elector had enabled him to make, he had seldom found in the playing of the most distinguished virtuosi that excellence which he supposed he had a right to expect. His style of treating his instrument is so different from that usually adopted, that it impresses one with the idea, that by a path of his own discovery he has attained that height of excellence whereon he now stands.19