Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph

by Swafford, Jan

  In December 1791, just after his twenty-first birthday, Beethoven was back playing his viola in the orchestra pit of the court theater, at the beginning of the fourth season since Max Franz had revived the opera. As history transpired, it turned out to be the last opera season in Bonn. Again, part of the repertoire was the biggest success of Mozart’s life, the exotic singspiel The Abduction from the Seraglio.20 Surely musicians mounted a memorial for Mozart, who had died in Vienna at age thirty-five on December 5. Hearing the news in London, Haydn was inconsolable.

  The hit of the opera season was Dittersdorf’s mellifluous Das rote Käppchen, or Little Red Riding Hood. Beethoven wrote two jovial sets of variations on tunes from the opera, one for keyboard and the other for piano trio. Around the same time came a piano trio in E-flat, with his first known movement called “scherzo.”21

  In Vienna Leopold II died after a short reign and was succeeded by his son Franz II, twenty-four, who appointed conservative to reactionary advisers and a cabinet that began to dismantle Joseph’s reforms in earnest and to turn Austria into a police state. On April 20, France declared war on Austria, Prussia, and Sardinia. For the next twenty-three years, Austria and its allies would alternate between fighting the French and licking their wounds while preparing for the next war.

  With armies on the march and travel uncertain, in July 1792, Joseph Haydn stopped in Bonn on the way back from his eighteen-month sojourn in England. His success had been monumental; he returned home a far wealthier man than he had left. His music, including the six new symphonies Salomon commissioned, had been featured in some two-dozen grand concerts and any number of smaller performances, and he had been awarded an honorary doctorate by Oxford University. He had gained a collection of new friends and thousands of admirers, and the particular admiration of a handsome widow. He luxuriated in his new life: “Oh, my dear gracious lady!” he wrote a friend from London. “The realization that I am no longer a bond-servant makes ample amend for all my toils.”

  During the visit Haydn had worked himself nearly to exhaustion, but in the end the only thing that truly sullied his triumph and his pleasure in it was the blow of Mozart’s passing. Haydn wrote to their mutual friend and fellow Freemason Johann Michael Puchberg, “For some time I was beside myself about his death and could not believe that Providence would so soon claim the life of such an indispensable man.”22 What Haydn would not have calculated but was nonetheless true was that in Vienna, Europe’s capital of music, after Mozart’s death there was no longer an apparent heir to his legacy. As Haydn approached his sixtieth birthday, the position of Mozart’s musical heir, the new indispensable man, lay open.

  During Haydn’s brief second sojourn in Bonn, the Kapelle orchestra members invited him to breakfast in nearby Godesberg. For some time the village had been known for its mineral waters, and the Elector was busy turning it into a spa. Among the first efforts in that direction was to build a theater and beside it a middle-sized but elegant building in subdued classical style called La Redoute, the Ballroom. Already in the theater and the still-unfinished Redoute there were plays, performances by the Kapelle orchestra and theater troupe, and balls twice a week featuring ladies boated in on the Rhine. The Redoute was where the orchestra’s gala breakfast for Haydn was held. There came the definitive meeting between Haydn and Beethoven.23

  Beethoven played and did what an aspiring young composer does: put some scores before the master. Mainly it seems to have been the Joseph Cantata. It is unlikely that Beethoven yet knew the story of Haydn’s triumph in England, but the young man knew quite well that he was in the presence of the reigning composer in the world, in person old and old-fashioned but vigorous, kindly, and without pretension. Haydn had been no child prodigy and was never a virtuoso performer, but he knew a prodigy when he saw one. He was powerfully impressed with what he heard from the young man. Perhaps, among other things, in the opening of the Joseph Cantata he saw a tragic voice in music beyond anything conceived in a long time, and an imagination capable of conjuring powerful expression out of sheer instrumental color, from a leap from low to high, from silence.

  Noting the dramatic style of the cantata, Haydn seems to have concluded that this young man should be writing operas—more or less the king of genres at that time.24 For much of his career, Haydn had considered opera his main métier, until the advent of Mozart revealed to Haydn his limitations as a composer for the stage. Nor was vocal music in general going to be Beethoven’s true forte.

  All that understanding lay in the future. The immediate matter of the meeting was for Beethoven to ask for lessons. The old man agreed. Beethoven was ready to finish his apprenticeship, and the Elector encouraged artistic youths to complete their studies out of town, to get a more cosmopolitan perspective. There were consultations, an appeal to the Elector for permission, and soon Beethoven had been granted leave to go to Vienna to study with Haydn. After acquiring his final polish there as an employee of the Elector, he was expected to return to Bonn, perhaps eventually to become court Kapellmeister like the first Ludwig van Beethoven. What would intervene in that plan was, for once, not the younger Beethoven’s recalcitrance but history: history in the streets, history at your door.

  What happened among Beethoven, his family and friends in the next weeks transpired virtually under the gun. In April 1792, France declared war on the Habsburg Empire; the Legislative Assembly vowed “aid and fraternity to all peoples wishing to recover their liberty.” Meanwhile a Prussian invasion of France, with the intention of restoring Louis XVI to the throne and thereby striking a blow at the Revolution, was stopped by the French in September at the Battle of Valmy. Everyone understood what that meant: the Revolution would go forward, and the king of France and his family might be doomed. Goethe was present at Valmy. Riding onto the front with French shells howling around him, for a moment he believed he saw the earth turn red. At the end of the day Goethe declared to a group of officers, “From this place, and from this day forth begins a new era in the history of the world, and you can all say you were present at its birth.”25

  In late October, Max Franz and his retinue, fearful of the French approach in the Rhineland, vacated Bonn for several weeks. With hostile armies close and anxiety in the air, Beethoven prepared to leave for Vienna. His circle at the Zehrgarten wrote their farewells to Ludwig in a Stammbuch, an album assembled by his friends Matthias Koch and Johann Martin Degenhart. One of them likely drew the portentous picture on the first page, a moldering gravestone topped by an urn in a wild and tumbled forest. The inscription on the stone reads, “My friends,” and at the bottom is written “Ludwig Beethoven”: no van among friends.

  Stammbuch means “stem-book,” not only a record of friendship but also a testament to a person’s roots. The farewells in the Stammbuch are earnest and serious, most of the men using the familiar form of address du, the women the more proper Sie. Most of the handwriting is in the exquisitely neat form taught to boys and girls in school, which Beethoven also possessed in those days. The entries are largely in verse, some original and so more personal, some quoted from poets including Klopstock and Schiller (there are three quotations from Don Carlos). There are no passionate declarations of eternal friendship and nothing approaching levity. A few amount to curt aphorisms: “Investigate and choose.”

  Lorchen von Breuning had sent Beethoven warm birthday cards in the last years, which he would preserve. But now Lorchen penned only a few distant and ambiguous lines from Herder: “Friendship with one who is good / Grows like the evening shadows / Until the sun of life sets.” He and Lorchen had quarreled. She and Christoph von Breuning signed the book, but, surprisingly, their mother, Helene, and brother Stephan did not, though they were the two people in the family closest to Beethoven. Widow Koch contributed, along with two of her children, but not the adored Babette. There is nothing from Christian Neefe and nothing from the Kapelle members, which is all not as surprising as the missing name of Franz Wegeler, his oldest friend.26

  Th
e verse farewell of Johann Martin Degenhart provides a sense of how the circle looked at the improvisations of their most musical member—with understanding, awe, and a touch of fear:

  Sometimes, as you coax love, anger, and subtle jokes,

  Mighty Master of Music!

  You coax passions and caprice from the string,

  With truth and accuracy,

  Such as the devil himself would treasure.

  The inscription that history would most remember is from Count Waldstein, written in a bold hand on a page facing his silhouette perched on a pedestal. Like the others more about music than friendship, it is not a poem but a prose prophecy by a man who knew music, knew about Beethoven’s abortive encounter with Mozart in Vienna, and knew what kind of potential this protégé had in him:

  Dear Beethoven!

  You are now going to Vienna in fulfillment of your long-frustrated wishes. Mozart’s genius still mourns and is weeping over the death of its pupil. In the inexhaustible Haydn, it had found refuge but no occupation; through him it wishes to form a union with another. Through uninterrupted diligence you shall receive Mozart’s spirit from Haydn’s hands.

  Your true friend,

  Waldstein27

  These few words say a great deal. Unlike most of his friends in the Stammbuch, Waldstein uses the formal Sie address, appropriate for an aristocrat addressing a commoner however well regarded. His conception of genius is that of the eighteenth century: a metaphor for a transcendent spirit that moves among and inhabits great creators, genius as a spirit one possesses, rather than the coming Romantic cult of genius as something one is in one’s very being, which elevates a person to the state of a demigod.28 Waldstein depicts the genius of Mozart as in mourning, surviving in the old Haydn but waiting to be handed off to a new young avatar.

  History would remember Waldstein’s prophecy because, on the whole, it came to pass. Except Beethoven would not claim Mozart’s genius quite as anybody expected him to. His genius would turn out to be to take the lessons of the past and make them into something boldly and singularly new: it could be called a revolution, but it was better an evolution from within tradition rather than against it. Now Mozart was dead. In part, Beethoven’s coming career as a composer would be predicated on having no real rival in his own generation.

  His youth was over now, everything focused on the future. Beethoven never found another circle of friends and mentors and admirers like the ones he had in Bonn—cultured, serious but lively, liberal unto radical, given to high-flown discourse—who understood and admired him but also saw him in terms of equality as well as fraternity. The effect of that loss on his creative life can be summarized briefly: little to none. Beethoven craved companionship, love, stimulation intellectual and spiritual, but other than people to play and publish and listen to his music, for most of his life he would never truly need anybody. He was to spend the rest of his years in Vienna, in a city and among a people he despised as fickle and frivolous. That also would have little or no discernible effect on his music.

  On the evening of November 1, 1792, as Widow Koch noted in the Stammbuch, the Zehrgarten saw Beethoven’s farewell party. At 6 o’clock the next morning he loaded his effects into the coach and the driver cracked his whip. Ahead of him was the prospect of more than a week of wretched roads, some of them filled with marching armies.

  He said goodbye to his brothers and to his father, who wrote no poems of farewell and who had been living for years in the shadow of his son. He had given the boy his first training, had spent years patiently showing him off to patrons at court and among the gentry. If Johann’s efforts had not made Ludwig the phenomenon Mozart had been, still they had effectively launched him.

  Beethoven was already far beyond his father’s reach, Johann too weary and bleary to reach for much beyond what was at hand. His son did not love him, wanted only to get away from him, now that his brothers could more or less fend for themselves. But it was well. As Johann watched his son disappear in the coach to Vienna, he knew he had accomplished one great thing in his life that could never be lost to him. That and the bottle were his solace. “My Ludwig!” Johann van Beethoven would crow to whoever was listening. “He is my only joy now, he has become so accomplished in music and composition that everyone looks on him with wonder. My Ludwig! My Ludwig! Someday he will become a great man in the world. You who are here today, remember what I have said!”29

  Other than a few possessions and a pile of manuscripts and sketches, what did Beethoven carry with him from Bonn to Vienna? He carried the musical talent he had inherited from his family and also the family temper, explosive and aggressive. For well and for ill, he would meet all challenges and challengers with attack—sometimes followed, as was his mother’s style, by heartfelt apology. He had the family love of wine but the force of will to keep it at bay. His phenomenal discipline was his own. Then and later, he considered himself responsible for his younger brothers.

  When he left Bonn, Beethoven was nearly twenty-two and as much pianist as composer. It was evident to him and to many others that he was one of the finest virtuosos alive, and he was an improviser of tremendous power. He had not written a great deal of music compared to what Mozart had done by that age, and his output in the next few years would be spotty. Still, he had taken tremendous strides as a composer, nearly every major effort leaping beyond the last. He knew that as well as anyone. Since his childhood, people had told him he was extraordinary, and he never had reason to doubt it.

  So he carried to Vienna an ineradicable sense of his gift, the conviction that someday he would have momentous things to say in music and that people would listen to him. They always had. Yet he seemed in no hurry to find what he had to say, feeling that eventually it would be there. Likewise there is no sign that he ever worried about his performances, ever had to contend with nerves. He appeared to be devoid of doubts about himself. He was capable of self-criticism, in fact ruthlessly self-critical, but his terms were his own.

  Part of his gift was the raptus, that ability to withdraw into an inner world that took him beyond everything and everybody around him, and also took him beyond the legion of afflictions that assailed him. Improvising at the keyboard and otherwise, he found solitude even in company. Solitude his steadiest and most welcome companion.

  Beethoven’s worldly ambitions matched his gift. But if he was determined to rise in the world, he also believed, as Christian Neefe and his other mentors had taught him, that it was his sacred duty, not only to God but to the world, to place his gift at the service of humanity. His duty was to take in the whole of life and embody it in music, then to give that music back to its source so humanity might better know who and what it is. In his last, wretched decade, he would write this consolation: “God, who knows and understands my deepest self, you know how I fulfill my sacred duties presented by mankind, God, and nature.” There was his personal trinity. In return for performing his duty to humanity, he expected applause, fame, a good living, and that relatively new ambition for a mere musician: immortality for his work and his name. It was a legitimate bargain and he largely achieved it. But the applause and fame and the livelihood were not enough, never enough.

  He left Bonn believing that his capacities made him the equal of anyone, one of the world’s elite. He looked at the aristocracy not just as his equals but also as his patrons and his natural milieu. The aristocracy he had known had largely been musical, liberal, approving, and generous. When it came to religion, his attitudes were open, evolving, emotional rather than rational. If not a conventional Enlightenment deist, he was still no churchgoer or conventional Catholic. Already in youth he had come to feel closer to the divine in nature than in church or scripture. For the rest of his life he would have little to do with churches and priests. He preferred to deal with God directly, man to man. If he believed in eternal life, he did not unequivocally speak of it. Like most progressives of his time, he had no use for dogma concerning religion, art, or anything else. Dogma was a
variety of tyranny, and as an Aufklärer he despised tyranny.

  Humanity, as the philosophers of the day taught him, had to find its own way upward, as individuals and as a species. Freedom was the vehicle. As someday he would put it, “Man, help yourself!” and, “Only art and science can raise man to the level of gods.” As far as the record shows, the day of his baptism may have been the last time before his deathbed that he was subjected to the ancient shibboleths, submitted to the old spells. In the end he would return on his own terms to the Latin rite by way of a titanic musical mass, his own credo, and turn to God as consolation and companion.

  He had been taught that the path to greatness starts inside, with the cultivation of morality, duty, discipline, and courage. The Masons and the Illuminati said that the rise of humankind to Elysium begins by remaking oneself and then goes out into the world. So personal virtue, rather than skill and technique, was the true foundation of any worthy endeavor. In practice, however, he was obsessed with his craft and always would be, although the effort to sustain his moral convictions would require him constantly to believe that he was more virtuous than he actually was. When he arrived in Vienna he was not a complete man or musician, and he knew that perfectly well.