Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph

by Swafford, Jan

  The connection of Beethoven to the brothers and Princess Lichnowsky was a virtually ideal patron-and-protégé relationship, but it could endure only up to a point. The abiding threat to their relations was that Beethoven and Prince Karl were both imperious and proud men and not in the habit of keeping their feelings to themselves. Inevitably, there were clashes, and sooner or later one of their shouting matches was likely to lead to a break. Eventually one did, but not before years of fruitful partnership. Karl’s brother, the more talented and more amiable Moritz Lichnowsky, remained close to Beethoven to the end.

  The Lichnowskys’ Friday musicales were frequented by leading musicians and connoisseurs, and the level of performing was about as good as could be found anywhere. There Beethoven encountered a broad repertoire of chamber music and connected with more musicians and patrons. One was a brilliant violinist and conductor named ­Ignaz ­Schuppanzigh. As a teenager he was already first violin in a string quartet that played at the Lichnowsky musicales. Schuppanzigh’s place in history would be secure twice over. He became a lifelong champion of Beethoven, playing the string quartets, conducting the orchestral music, serving as concertmaster in the premiere of every Beethoven symphony. Meanwhile, with an evolving collection of players, Schuppanzigh established and led the first standing professional string quartet in Europe, which mounted the first public performances.

  Before Beethoven and Schuppanzigh, quartets were designed, like all chamber music, to be played privately, mainly by amateurs. By the time Beethoven and Schuppanzigh were done, they left the medium of string quartet in a quite different place, carried on by specialists. Yet their long collaboration never became a real friendship. Through the years they addressed each other as Er, in third person, a patronizing form used with children and servants. Beethoven relentlessly teased the portly Schuppanzigh about his girth, gave him the nickname “Falstaff,” after Shakespeare’s fat, hard-drinking buffoon. Schuppanzigh was no intellectual companion, and Beethoven was more interested in politics, literature, and ideas than in talking shop. In other words, Beethoven vitally needed Schuppanzigh and at the same time never seemed to regard him as anything but a servant of his will.

  An equally enduring and relatively warmer connection that Beethoven made at the Lichnowskys’ was Baron Nikolaus Zmeskall von Domanovecz. A lifelong bachelor, described by an acquaintance as “a very precise gentleman with abundant white hair,” Zmeskall served as an official of the Hungarian chancellery. Otherwise he was an amateur cellist good enough to sit in with the Schuppanzigh quartet, said to be a capable composer of quartets himself but shy about publishing them.25 In summer 1793, Zmeskall received the first of Beethoven’s wry and affectionate notes summoning him for one task or another. Over the next decades the baron carefully preserved those dozens of notes. With his connections, his cello, his own chamber music soirees, and especially with his deft hand at cutting quill pens, for year after year bustling and efficient Zmeskall felt happy to be at Beethoven’s beck and call.

  A third patron Beethoven gained through Lichnowsky and/or Haydn was the legendary and formidable Gottfried Freiherr van Swie­ten. His father had been a physician brought from Holland by Empress Maria Theresa to be her personal doctor and to reform the Viennese medical establishment. For his success the family was ennobled by the empress. Son Gottfried became a diplomat and finally librarian for the Viennese court. Swieten lived and held forth in his lavish rooms, one a music room, on the third floor of the court library.26

  Another of the crowd of obsessives in the musical landscape of Vienna, another Aufklärer and Freemason, Swieten had a particular obsession with resurrecting old music, forming an aristocratic Society of Associated Cavaliers to produce performances.27 But during that era when most music heard and published was by living composers, “old” music usually meant less than a hundred years old. It had been Swieten who drilled into Mozart, with historic results, the significance of Handel and J. S. Bach. Later he became a friend and patron of Haydn and, with mixed results, Haydn’s librettist.

  In those days, J. S. Bach’s music had something of a cult status among connoisseurs, while Handel’s work had never faded in popularity. He was the first composer in Western history who never had to be “rediscovered.” In other words, Handel, who died in 1759, when Haydn was in his twenties and Mozart a toddler, gave the first inkling that there could be such a thing as a permanent repertoire. One of the things that made Beethoven what he became was the understanding, still relatively novel at the time, that one’s music could not only bring fame in life but also write one’s name on the wall of history.

  That does not happen on its own. Every artist needs champions, needs them when alive and even more when dead. Gottfried van Swie­ten spent his life championing the past. “My consolation,” he declared, “above all is Handel and the Bachs, and with them a few masters of our day, who walk the path of these masters of truth and beauty.”28 Swieten also owned a collection of old-master paintings, one of them An Artist in His Studio, by the then-obscure Vermeer.29 It may well have been that Mozart and Beethoven performed in Swieten’s music room beneath that sublime picture of an artist in the first moment of creation, painting a Muse.

  By the time Beethoven met him, Swieten was an aging, lugubrious, autocratic patriarch of music in Vienna. If he heard someone talking at a concert, he would rise grandly to his feet and stare the person down.30 As he said, though, his devotion to “ancient” music did not keep him from championing living and breathing composers he approved of. In December 1794, Swieten sent a note to Beethoven to come Wednesday evening “with your nightcap in your bag.”31 The occasion may have been to celebrate Beethoven’s name day. He played a great deal in Swieten’s music room—Swieten especially appreciated Beethoven’s Bach playing—and there heard Handel oratorios that helped move him toward his eventual conviction that Handel was the greatest of all, his only superior.

  Haydn, the three Lichnowskys, Zmeskall, Swieten, Schuppanzigh—these musicians and cognoscenti were the leading edge of Beethoven’s triumph in Vienna. Some of them commissioned works, and he dedicated pieces to all of them except Schuppanzigh. Beyond that touch of immortality, the main thing Beethoven bequeathed to these champions in return for their generosity was to be who he was, and do what he did.

  As his reputation ascended in Vienna, Beethoven did not forget friends in Bonn. He appeared to regard those back in the Rhineland—Wegeler and the Breunings, though not Christian Neefe—as his real friends. To him Bonn and the Rhine were still home. They always would be.

  In November 1793, he wrote a long letter to Eleonore von Breuning, daughter of the family that had practically adopted him, once his piano student, whom he had probably loved, from whom he had parted on a sour note—there had been a fight. It is a prime example of the abjectly apologetic letters in which Beethoven specialized in those years.

  He addresses her, “Most estimable Leonore! My most precious friend!” . . . “You have been constantly and most vividly in my thoughts,” he reassures her,

  but—whenever I did so I was always reminded of that unfortunate quarrel; and my conduct at that time seemed to me really detestable. But what was done could not be undone. Oh, I would give a great deal to be able to blot out of my life my behavior at that time, a behavior which did me so little honor and which was so inconsistent with my usual character . . . I am inclined to think that the chief obstacle to a harmonious friendship between us was the fact that third parties were whispering to us the remarks which each of us was making about the other. Each of us thought at the time that he or she was speaking with true conviction. Yet it was only fomented anger; and we were both deceived.

  He tells her she is about to receive a dedication from him. It was some light variations for piano and violin on Mozart’s “Se vuol ballare” from The Marriage of Figaro, which he had begun in Bonn. Now it was being published by Artaria in Vienna—one of Haydn’s publishers, the connection perhaps Haydn’s doing. In the letter Beethoven begs Leon
ore to “please accept this trifle and bear in mind that it comes from a friend who admires you.” The variations are “a small token to recall the time when I spent so many and such blissful hours in your home. Perhaps it will continue to remind you of me until I return to Bonn, though indeed that will not be for some time. But oh! my beloved friend, how happy our meeting will be! For you will then find me a much more cheerful person; and you will see that time and more favorable circumstances have smoothed out the wrinkles produced by my earlier unpleasant experiences.” He asks Leonore to knit him a new angora waistcoat. A coat she had made him earlier “is so out of fashion that I can only keep it in my wardrobe as a very precious token from you, my beloved friend.” Then a coy confession: “There is a touch of vanity fundamentally connected with my request. For I want to be able to say that I’ve received a present from one of the best and most adorable girls in Bonn.”32

  His campaign to get back in Leonore’s good graces did not succeed. The next spring she sent him a handsome knitted cravat, but evidently (the letter did not survive) she was having none of his apologies. “Oh, if you could have witnessed what I felt yesterday on the arrival of your gift,” he wrote her in return,

  you would certainly not think that I exaggerate when I tell you that your remembrance made me tearful and very sorrowful.—However little, in your opinion, I may deserve to be believed, yet I beg you to believe, my friend (please let me continue to call you friend), that I have suffered greatly . . . from the loss of your friendship. I shall never forget you and your dear mother . . . I know what I have lost and what you have meant to me . . . However little I may mean to you, please believe that I entertain just as great a regard for you and your mother as I have always done.

  As always, he dwells on the effect on him, not on her and her family, of their late friendship. All the same, with the letter he enclosed the printed “Se vuol ballare” Variations dedicated to Leonore, and in a PS reverted to his role as teacher, giving her advice, then going on to his trademark paranoia:

  The v[ariations] will be rather difficult to play, and particularly the trills in the coda . . . you need only play the trill and can leave out the other notes, since these appear in the violin part as well. I should never have written down this kind of piece, had I not already noticed fairly often how some people in Vienna after hearing me extemporize of an evening would note down on the following day several peculiarities of my style and palm them off with pride as their own . . . I resolved to forestall those people. But there was yet another reason, namely, my desire to embarrass those Viennese pianists, some of whom are my sworn enemies. I wanted to revenge myself on them in this way, because I knew beforehand that my variations would . . . be put before the said gentlemen and that they would cut a sorry figure with them.33

  Still, as a later wise man would note, even paranoids have enemies. In the roiling competitive arena of Viennese pianists, Beethoven was the new threat, and they would not watch his rise without trying to steal what they could while doing their best to shoot him down.

  In November 1793, Haydn and Beethoven wrote coordinated letters to Elector Max Franz in Bonn, by way of a progress report and entreaty. Beethoven’s letter is gracious and flattering. Haydn’s long, fulsome letter arrived with “several musical pieces, namely a Quintet, an eight-voiced Parthie, an Oboe Concerto, Variations for the Piano, and a Fugue, composed by my dear student.” Haydn adds, “Connoisseurs and nonconnoisseurs must impartially admit, from the present pieces, that in time Beethoven will fill the position of one of the greatest musicians in Europe, and I shall be proud to be able to call myself his teacher; I only wish that he might remain with me a considerable time longer.”

  Then Haydn goes into financial matters. He notes that Beethoven was getting only 500 florins from the Elector and needed 1,000 to get through the year. The young man had been forced to borrow 500 florins from Haydn, which was accumulating interest. Haydn signed the letter with his official title: Kapellmeister of Prince Nikolaus Esterházy.34

  In regard to the “considerable time longer” Beethoven would need for study, Haydn did not mention that in a couple of months he was leaving for a long stay in England. In fact, the situation outlined in both these letters to the Elector was more than a little dodgy. Beethoven sent the Elector what was supposedly the product of his year’s work in composition. All the pieces were minor, hardly anything to promise the glorious future Haydn prophesied. And though Beethoven may have finished or revised the pieces under Haydn’s tutelage, they were mostly things written or begun earlier. Beethoven had spent the year mainly playing piano, going to musicales, and turning out counterpoint exercises.

  Elector Max Franz was not fooled and not happy. His chilly reply to Haydn arrived in December: “I received the music of the young Beethoven that you sent me, along with your letter. Since, however, this music, except for the Fugue, was composed by him here in Bonn, and was performed before he undertook this, his second journey to Vienna, it can be no proof for me of the progress that he has made in Vienna.”

  In response to Haydn’s concern over Beethoven’s inadequate stipend from the court, Max Franz points out that while this student was indeed getting only 500 florins specifically for his Vienna studies, that was in addition to his ongoing court salary of 400 florins. That made a total of 900 a year, which couldn’t be so bad—and which Beethoven apparently had not mentioned to Haydn. The Elector curtly concluded, “I wonder, therefore, whether he should not begin his return journey here . . . for I very much doubt that he will have made any important progress in composition and taste during his present stay, and I fear that he will bring back only debts from his journey, just as he did from his first trip to Vienna.”35

  The Elector had a long memory, though he did not take note of the reason Beethoven had aborted his Vienna visit five years before: his mother had been dying. In any case, it appears that Haydn had been taken for something of a ride by his student, and made to look duped or dishonest before His Serene Electoral Highness.

  Haydn cannot have been pleased about all this. What transpired between him and Beethoven as a result was not recorded. Beethoven may actually have been finished taking lessons by this time anyway, and Haydn was scrambling to finish three symphonies in the weeks before he left for England. Given their more or less placid future relations, Haydn’s departure may have helped calm the situation. In any case, there was no action on the Elector’s threat to bring Beethoven back to Bonn. Max Franz had his own problems. He was desperately campaigning to keep his electorate out of the burgeoning conflict with France, and he went to Vienna to plead his case with the emperor.

  On January 19, 1794, Haydn departed for his second visit to England. He would be gone the better part of two years. Even before Beethoven left Bonn, there had been a suggestion that he might accompany Haydn on this second English trip. In the farewell Stammbuch, Christoph von Breuning had declared in a poem, “Albion [England] long beckons to you, O friend.” It may have been that Haydn decided not to take Beethoven with him because of friction between them.36 In any event, the old man set out accompanied only by his copyist.

  Haydn arranged for Beethoven to begin counterpoint lessons with the Kapellmeister of St. Stephen’s Cathedral, Johann Georg Albrechtsberger. Beethoven understood that Albrechtsberger was a hoary pedant who would never understand somebody like him, but he wanted the old man to hold his feet to the fire more than Haydn had. Al­brechtsberger would attempt to do so. From his own adaptation and extension of Fux’s Gradus, Albrechtsberger drilled this student in more species counterpoint, in fugue, in invertible counterpoint at the octave, tenth, and twelfth.

  In a surviving note, it appears that in handing over his pupil Haydn sent some practical advice to Albrechtsberger: “Another six months in c[ounterpoint] and he can work on whatever he wants.”37 Music in those days remained in many ways a trade like others, in which one did one’s apprentice work, learned the requisite skills and disciplines to attain mastery, and then in the f
ullness of time produced a “masterpiece” to demonstrate one’s competence. Beethoven took it for granted that he must go through that process.

  The lessons with Albrechtsberger went on for more than a year, three lessons a week; 160 exercises would survive.38 Through it all, Beethoven proved just as imperious and recalcitrant with this teacher as he had been with Haydn. Later Albrechtsberger recalled this student as “always so stubborn and so bent on having his own way that he had to learn many things through hard experience.”39 Beethoven, of course, knew no way to learn anything other than his way—the hard way.

  As he seemed to resist everything and forget nothing, Beethoven remembered parts of Albrechtsberger’s counterpoint text, particularly a passage where the teacher lists a series of devices to vary a fugue subject: augmentation (lengthening the theme rhythmically), diminution (shortening the theme), abbreviation, syncopation, and stretto (the overlapping of entries of the fugue subject). Albrechtsberger ends by noting that it is quite rare for all these devices to be combined in a single fugue. Many years later, in Beethoven’s most ambitious fugue, he more or less did so.40 Meanwhile from here on, the old devices of rhythmic augmentation and diminution became a constant feature of Beethoven’s rhythmic style, as they had been with Haydn and Mozart, whether or not the music was overtly contrapuntal.

  Albrechtsberger and Beethoven struggled on doggedly together. Later there were reports of mutual behind-the-back sniping. Al­brechtsberger dismissed one of Beethoven’s op. 18 Quartets as “trash”; Beethoven declared his teacher’s compositions “musical skeletons.”41 Yet as with Haydn, on the surface he and Albrechtsberger stayed friendly. For years Beethoven visited the old pedant and sent him students to be subjected to the tortures of counterpoint.