Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph

by Swafford, Jan

  Beethoven left Bonn with a sense that revolution was under way in the world—in motion both figuratively, within the human spirit, and literally, in new societies and marching armies. His art would be called revolutionary, but for himself he never expressed any such intention. He wanted to make art better, thereby humanity better. While absorbing ideas and influences from around Europe and beyond, he would remain true to his heritage in the forms and genres of the Viennese masters: Mozart his prime model, Haydn his mentor and rival.

  These were his foundations. Though in the course of his life Beethoven grew and changed as much as any creator ever has, he never slipped off those foundations in the Bonn Aufklärung. What they added up to was this: when young Beethoven left Bonn, he already had ideals and ambitions about being a composer that no one had ever had before, and he knew beyond doubt that he had the gifts to realize those ideals and ambitions.

  There was one more thing Beethoven carried inside that would never leave him: the source of a lifetime of illness and physical misery, and the ruin of his most precious faculty, his hearing. This physical and mental suffering would mount a sustained assault on his sense of discipline and duty, his gigantic ambition.

  There was little medical science worthy of the name in those days, so the reasons for Beethoven’s physical trials may never be known for certain. One possibility is that from cooking utensils, or from adulterated wine, or from spa waters or some other source he may have ingested a great deal of lead. If so, it came to rest in his bones and slowly leaked out, ravaging his digestive tract. In his teens he was already familiar with the lacerating seizures of stomach pain and diarrhea that would never leave him, exacerbating his incipient tendencies to paranoia and misanthropy. He served humankind but never understood people, and though he yearned with all his heart for love and companionship, year after year he could bear humanity less and less in the flesh.

  His own flesh became a fearful and relentless enemy. “Already,” he wrote at age thirty, “I have cursed my Creator and my existence.” If the main source of his misery was not lead poisoning, it was something else, or a combination of assaults with similar effects of chronic and painful illness, on top of which would be laid a progression of passing illnesses. So as Beethoven left Bonn with confident and entirely justified hopes for glory, he was destined both for triumph and for anguish.

  After he left in December 1792, University of Bonn professor and Kant scholar Bartholomäus Ludwig Fischenich wrote Charlotte, wife of his friend Friedrich Schiller:

  I am enclosing with this a setting of the “Feuerfarbe” on which I would like to have your opinion. It is by a young man of this place whose musical talents are universally praised and whom the Elector has sent to Haydn in Vienna. He proposes also to compose Schiller’s “Freude” . . . I expect something perfect, for as far as I know him he is wholly devoted to the great and sublime. Haydn has written here that he would put him at grand operas and soon be obliged to quit composing. Ordinarily he does not trouble himself with such trifles as the enclosed, which he wrote at the request of a lady.30

  In October of the next year a notice appeared in the Berliner Musik-Zeitung: “Ludwig van Beethoven, assistant court organist and now unquestionably one of the foremost pianoforte players, went to Vienna at the expense of our Elector to Haydn in order to perfect himself under his direction more fully in the art of composition.” It cites a letter from Beethoven to his teacher saying, “I thank you for your counsel very often given me in the course of my progress in my divine art. If I ever become a great man, yours will be some of the credit.” The notice was placed by Christian Neefe.31

  Some two weeks after Beethoven arrived in Vienna, Elector Maximilian Franz and his court fled Bonn for the second time as the French overran the Rhine and occupied Mainz. Following a French retreat, Max Franz would return again in the spring, but the Electorate of Cologne, more than five hundred years old, and the Bonn Beethoven knew were nearing their last days. The Aufklärung ideals that had brought Bonn to its splendid brief flowering led to little in the world except in the individual lives they had shaped. In history the most significant of those individuals would be Beethoven.

  9

  Unreal City

  “GERMANY,” WROTE A British visitor in the eighteenth century, “claims the pre-eminence for badness of roads & the most tormenting construction of vehicles.”1 Heading southeast toward Vienna with oboist Georg Liebisch from the Bonn Kapelle, Beethoven tracked his journey of December 1792 in a notebook where he kept minute accounts of their expenditures. When they parted, their joint expenses had been a frugal 35 florins.

  Jolting over rutted roads in freezing weather, the coach hauled the travelers through storied and picturesque towns. At Koblenz, Beethoven crossed to the east side of the Rhine for good; at Maria van Beethoven’s hometown of Ehrenbreitstein, her son saw his beloved river for the last time. Soon the coach was picking its way around a French army. On the road to Montabaur their driver was fearless when he found German troops filling the road. Beethoven wrote in his notebook, “Tip because the fellow drove us at the risk of a beating through the Hessian army going like the devil—one small thaler.” Now Beethoven had seen armies bustling and rattling on the march. He would not forget the sight and sound. As the coach rolled on, more old towns passed before his weary eyes: Limburg, with its half-timbered houses; Würges, where his companion went his way; Regensburg, where he again saw the Danube; Linz, just over the Austrian border. From there it was some 130 long miles to Vienna.2

  After Linz, the roads ran along the meandering Danube. For a traveler from the west the great sight on the way to Vienna was the Wachau Valley, starting below the looming cloister at Melk. Along the road lay medieval towns and villages and the fortress of Dürnstein, where once Richard the Lion-Hearted was imprisoned. In summer, in that landscape where someday Beethoven would spend the last summer of his life, the Wachau would be covered with flowers and grapevines and apricots. Now as the coach started the long downhill to Vienna, the valley was locked in winter and a cold wind stirred the sluggish Danube.

  Around December 10, he was watching the suburbs of Vienna flow past. From Bonn, he had traveled more than 550 miles, his journey with overnight stops at inns averaging about three miles an hour. He would never travel that far again. As he crossed the southern arm of the Danube and approached Vienna, the bastions of the fortress city loomed in the winter gray. The coach bounced across the open meadow of the encircling Glacis, passed through a gate, and stopped at the customs office. Police examined this foreigner’s papers and belongings and scrutinized him to see if he looked like a Jacobin. Then he could find someplace to lie down.

  That place turned out to be what Beethoven would recall as a miserable garret, owned by a bookbinder on the Alservorstadt.3 Immediately he got down to business equipping himself, made an appointment for a lesson with Joseph Haydn, looked over his list of contacts gleaned from Count Waldstein and other patrons. He knew most of the people he needed to meet in Vienna would be Freemasons, like his Bonn patrons; several were friends and relatives of Count Waldstein. He also knew that if these people were truly musical, all he needed to do was sit down at the piano and play, and they would know what he was worth.

  When it came to musical matters he seemed to take no time to think or to plan. He already knew what he was going to do. In a new city one is usually a stranger feeling one’s way, but Beethoven seems to have felt no uncertainty. He was used to quick conquests. As it turned out, his teenage successes in the provinces along the Rhine would be duplicated in the most musically sophisticated city in the Western world.

  Meanwhile he discovered that, having spent his life in the Rhineland hearing his name pronounced Biet-hoffen, in Viennese dialect he was going to be Herr Be-toof-fen.4 He would not have liked the sound.

  In Beethoven’s notebook the expenditures of the journey were followed by a shopping list: “wig-maker, coffee, overcoat, boots, shoes, pianoforte-desk, seal, writing-desk, pianofor
te-money.” Then a note: “Andreas Lindner, dancing-master, lives in the Stoss am Himmel, No. 415.” He had been advised that if you wanted to get ahead in Vienna, you had to know how to dance. (There would be no record of whether he actually took lessons. Later Carl Czerny reported that Beethoven could not for the life of him keep time while dancing, any more than he could sing or play the violin in tune.) In his notebook follows another list of expenses: “Black silk stockings, 1 ducat [ca. 4½ florins], 1 pair of winter silk stockings, 1 florin, 40 kreuzers [60 kreuzers to a florin]; boots, 6 florins,” and so on. He bought a piano for a modest 6 florins, 40 kreuzers.5 On December 12, he noted the price of his first lesson: “Haidn 8 groschen.” As he tended to do with nonaristocratic students, the old master was teaching this youth for a token sum.

  Beethoven’s obsession about money down to the last groschen came from the uncertainty of living in a foreign city on a tight budget. Vienna was far more expensive than Bonn. The only saving grace for an austere income was that food in the city was blessedly cheap. In a restaurant one could have a meal of two meat dishes, soup, vegetables, unlimited bread, and a quarter liter of wine for 31 kreuzers, about half a florin.6 But for a lower-middle-class man to get by for a year without frills, in Bonn a matter of some 300 florins, Vienna required at least 1,000.7 And Beethoven was still responsible for his brothers back home. He got a shock when the first stipend he received from Bonn was his quarterly salary rather than what he had expected, his full yearly 400 florins, to get him settled in Vienna. At least he had brought from home some money saved from lessons, gifts, and the like.8 While he was trying to cope with finances that December of 1792, he received more bad news: his father had died on the eighteenth. The cause was given as “dropsy of the chest,” probably indicating heart failure, surely rising in some degree from a lifetime of indulgence.9

  Johann van Beethoven was around fifty-three when he died. He had lived his last years on his slim pension, his wife dead, his famous son supporting the family, his life a shambles. Memoirist Gottfried Fischer remembered sad encounters with the specter of the once vigorous and vivacious Johann weaving down the street, always in the same shabby brown topcoat.

  “Where’ve you been?” the old man would ask.

  “I’m coming from school,” Gottfried would answer.

  “Well, you learn, then you can do something. Give my greetings to your father Theodor Fischer and your mother.”10 And that would be that.

  Johann’s death was commemorated by Elector Max Franz in a sardonic note to Court Marshal von Schall: “The revenues from the liquor excise have suffered a loss in the deaths of Beethoven and Eichhoff.” Ludwig did not return home for the funeral. After his mother died, Beethoven had written an anguished letter to an acquaintance. After his father died, there were probably no tears and a quite different sort of letter. He wrote the Elector, hoping to seize this opportunity to improve his finances. The letter reviews how a few years before, he and his father had split Johann’s original court income. Now he petitioned to have his father’s share paid to him, for the support of himself and his brothers.11

  There followed months of uncertainty and extensive borrowing from Haydn. The Elector’s reply to Beethoven’s petition did not arrive until the following May, because of the second significant piece of news Beethoven received that December. When the French overran the Rhine and took Mainz that month, Max Franz and much of the Bonn court fled for the second time. Since his electorate was not far from the French border, Max Franz was desperately trying to keep Bonn neutral. Given that he ruled a strategically significant German territory on the crucial artery of the Rhine, that option was a forlorn hope.

  By May 1793, the Elector was back in Bonn and on the job, bestowing his grace on his future Kapellmeister in Vienna. He granted Beethoven the requested additional 300 florins in quarterly payments, and “he will further receive the three measures of grain most kindly bestowed upon him for the education of his brothers.”12

  As regards money, Beethoven may have felt on the verge of desperation as he turned twenty-two in December 1792. But it would take him less than a year to establish a reputation in Vienna comparable to what he had enjoyed in the Rhineland. And a reputation in Vienna was worth far more in the city Mozart once described to his father as “Clavierland.”

  Beethoven’s new home was a legendary capital city of stone palaces, of parks and churches, all still enclosed in the old walls built to keep out the Turks. (The question of the hour was whether they would keep out the French.) Said a British visitor, “I never saw a place so perfectly delightful as the faubourg of Vienna. It is very large and almost wholly composed of delicious palaces.”13 The aristocracy spent their winters in the city, then departed for summer palaces in the country. In fact, anyone who could afford it left the city in the summer, when the traffic and the heat became nearly unbearable. Horse-drawn fiacres were taking over from the old sedan chairs, and in the summer their traffic and the horses’ leavings covered the city with choking brown dust.14

  The Hofburg, the emperor’s residence in the city, was not an integral design like the Electoral Residence in Bonn but a sprawling complex of buildings from different eras—a hodgepodge, like the polyglot empire itself. Most Viennese lived along dark, cramped, muddy streets, where there was a chronic shortage of living space. But the parks were open to all, including the wooded Prater between the Danube arms, once the emperor’s hunting preserve but given to his people by Joseph II, for which his people were briefly grateful at best.

  Vienna was the most musical city in Europe, perhaps in the world. For musicians themselves, it was the best and the worst of places. While the Viennese loved music extravagantly, most of them didn’t care what kind of music it was: an opera, a song in the street, an organ grinder, a concerto in the park—it was all the same. For all the music demanded by the Viennese, there were still too many musicians in residence, among them too many virtuosos. As had once afflicted Mozart, competition was merciless, complete with rivalries and feuds and cabals.

  When Beethoven arrived, Vienna had some two hundred thousand people, twenty times more than Bonn. The capital of the Holy Roman Empire had Poles and Bosnians and Turks parading the streets in native garb, gypsies playing soulful music in the parks and cafés, diplomats and nobles in residence with names like Lichnowsky, Razumovsky, Zmeskall, Esterházy, Guicciardi, Swieten. The absurd title “Holy Roman” reflected the sprawling pointlessness of the empire and Habsburg holdings accumulated haphazardly over the centuries. Emperor Franz II, who had ascended when his father, Leopold II, died after two years on the throne, ruled over twenty-seven million people in Bohemia, Moravia, Hungary, Croatia, Slavonia, part of Poland, the future Belgium and Luxembourg, and parts of Italy. He was meanwhile the nominal head of the myriad small German states.

  Franz II had been tutored by his uncle Joseph II in the enlightened ideals that came to be called Josephinism. Not notably intelligent or curious, by nature conservative and fearful of change, the boy absorbed some of that spirit, but not the more progressive parts. Franz took the throne in 1792 opposed to democracy and fascinated by the potential of secret police and censorship to keep his subjects in line. When King Louis XVI was beheaded in Paris in January 1793 and the Terror rolled into motion, Franz responded by declaring any hint of freedom of speech or popular rule a spark to be stamped out. Vienna became the first modern police state, less murderous than later ones but just as relentless, and more efficient than most.

  Viennese officialdom lived in fear of “Jacobins,” the term coming to designate anyone who believed in popular constitutional rule or who leaned left in any fashion. In fact, there was a cadre of French sympathizers in Austria, but they were not murderously inclined toward the aristocracy like the French. Some of them were highborn themselves. In any case, authentic German Jacobins were few and powerless. Still, the very existence of French sympathies was perceived as a mortal threat to the throne and to the privileges of the aristocracy. Soon anyone wearing sid
e-whiskers was viewed as a potential revolutionary. The emperor complained that too many people were reading newspapers.15 The police would establish relentless control over the newspapers, too.

  Eventually Austria became a place where intellect, creativity, any kind of independent thought was officially held to be somewhere between suspect and criminal. One day the emperor declared, concerning Beethoven, “There is something revolutionary in that music!”16 In practice, though, Viennese composers would be among the few beneficiaries of the all-encompassing repression. Try as they might, the police could find no grounds to censor instrumental music, which had always been the city’s chief glory. In the end, symphonies, string quartets, piano concertos, and the like became virtually the only kind of free speech left in Austria.

  For the middle class and up, Vienna remained on the surface prosperous and merry. Emperor Franz appreciated that a fun-loving people devoted to appearances is easier to keep in line. He made a point of mastering Wienerisch, the town dialect made up of bits and pieces of languages from around the empire; he rode his carriage modestly in the Prater alongside the grandees of the town. The city called him “Franz the Good.” While once Emperor Joseph’s benevolence had left his people unsatisfied, Franz’s show of modesty and generosity screened a true despotism fixed on suppressing all opposition and preserving the powers and privileges of the throne.

  Beethoven grasped the city’s style soon enough. In a time of mounting repression, censorship, and arrests in 1794, he wrote Nikolaus Simrock in Bonn, “We are having very hot weather here; and the Viennese are afraid that soon they will not be able to get any more ice cream. For, as the winter was so mild, ice is scarce. Here various important people have been locked up; it is said that a revolution was about to break out—But I believe that so long as an Austrian can get his brown ale and his little sausages, he is not likely to revolt.”17