Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph

by Swafford, Jan

  For all he learned in Vienna, Beethoven never forgot the people he had known and the ideals he had absorbed in Bonn, or the high-Aufklärung talk he loved there. He had not dropped his determination to set Schiller’s “An die Freude,” and was possibly working on a setting. In May 1793, in the album of a merchant named Volcke, he wrote an entry with a quote from Schiller’s Don Carlos: “I am not wicked—Hot blood is my fault—my crime is that I am young. I am not wicked, truly not wicked. Even though wildly surging emotions may betray my heart, yet my heart is good—/ Precepts. To do good whenever one can, to love liberty above all else, never to deny the truth, even though it be before the throne.”42 He signed it “Ludwig Beethoven from Bonn near Cologne.” (His Bonn friends had often skipped the van.) His inscription is echt Aufklärung, echt Bonn.

  Count Waldstein showed up in Vienna in early 1794, and presumably they had a reunion.43 But their relations did not revive. For Beethoven by that time, Waldstein appears to have been a figure of his past, not his future.

  As 1794 appeared, Beethoven was working on some piano trios intended to be his most ambitious works yet. Around the beginning of that year, perhaps on New Year’s Day, he wrote down a memo for himself: “Courage. In spite of all weaknesses of the body, my spirit shall rule. You are 25 years old [in fact, he was 23]; this year must determine the complete man—nothing must remain undone.”44

  He had been taught that to be a complete artist he must be a complete man. Now he willed himself to become that man. This is the first recorded sweeping resolution of his life. There would be more. Unlike most such resolutions by most people, Beethoven’s would mark turning points in his life and his work. All of them are a summoning of discipline and determination, despite all obstacles to remake himself and to do something new in music, new in the world.

  11

  Generalissimo

  AT THE BEGINNING of 1793, Beethoven had been one more new virtuoso in a town teeming with the species. By the beginning of 1794, he was the hottest pianist in Vienna and protégé of the powerful Lichnowskys—the definition of a lionized and cocky young artist. Now with something like a generalissimo’s strategy, he turned the full fury of his attention to showing the public what he was made of as a composer.

  Artaria published the “Se vuol ballare” Variations as op. 1 against his wishes. This coup, a piece placed with the leading house in Vienna, the main publisher of Haydn and Mozart, only annoyed him. Beethoven would never have a problem putting minor rent-paying items in print, but more than any composer before him he crafted the progress of his first opus numbers. (He would also be the first composer to be published constantly from the beginning to the end of his mature work.) The pieces with opus numbers were to be only serious ones, the choice of medium and genre and the order and variety of pieces within each opus carefully calculated. In 1794, the main project was to finish the three piano trios slated to be the real op. 1.

  As he moved forward in the early Vienna years, Beethoven composed with reference to the past, and not only in terms of studying traditional form and craft. He was intensely aware of where the past left him more room and where less. The most pressing parts of the past were the immediate ones: the superb Mozart, always looming over him as a model and challenge but safely dead; Haydn, still alive and evolving in unpredictable and potentially threatening directions.

  Beethoven understood which media and genres Haydn and Mozart were supreme in, and which ones had been less important for them. He charted his path with that in mind, genre by genre. Both his predecessors had spent much of their careers composing for harpsichord, while Beethoven was a pure pianist and piano composer. There he could be bold. When it came to idiomatic piano writing—exploiting the full range of touch, articulation, volume, texture, and color available to the piano as opposed to the harpsichord—one of his prime models was Muzio Clementi, who wrote one of the first substantial bodies of work for piano. At the same time, as a composer in general Clementi posed no threat to Beethoven. Clementi wrote attractively and idiomatically for the piano, Mozart and Haydn beautifully in general, but as far as Beethoven would have been concerned, the first truly significant repertoire for the piano as such was waiting to be written. He intended to write that repertoire.1

  At the same time, as a young composer finding his way in the 1790s, Beethoven knew excruciatingly well that when it came to the string quartet, Haydn owned that territory, had all but singlehandedly created the genre in its modern form. Mozart’s mature quartets and string quintets followed in Haydn’s footsteps and were likewise virtually unchallengeable. With quartets, Beethoven had to step carefully. If he could not outdo Haydn and Mozart here, he had to wait until he could find a path of his own. Sometime in 1793–94, he copied out the whole of Haydn’s String Quartet op. 20, no. 1, to see what he could learn. But finding a territory of his own in quartets would not happen soon.2 As for symphonies—well, he would have to wait and see what Haydn came up with. Haydn had fathered the modern symphony as well.

  When it came to the medium of piano trios, Beethoven felt himself on relatively firm ground. Haydn and Mozart had written delightful ones, but for those men the trio was not a particularly ambitious effort. Here also, he had room. It helped that the trio was founded on the piano, his own instrument. He would make his piano trios expansive and ambitious. All the same, Beethoven did not barge in but stayed on a line. First in op. 1 would be two cautious and accessible trios, in E-flat and G major; then he would finish the opus with a bold work in C minor. That one, as it turned out, left him and Haydn at a greater distance.

  In January 1794, Beethoven said farewell to Haydn, who set off on his second visit to England. Probably at some point during the first months of the year, Beethoven paid his respects to Elector Max Franz, who was in Vienna to plead for his regime’s neutrality, trying to act as a mediator between Austria and France.3 That initiative would get nowhere. Holy Roman Emperor Franz II was part of an international coalition against France and spoiling for a fight. Soon the Electorate of Cologne would be forced to contribute troops to the coalition.4 That marked the end of Bonn’s neutrality, and soon the end of the electorate. In March Beethoven’s support from Bonn stopped, though not his nominal connection to the court: an autumn 1794 memo from the exiled Elector described Beethoven as “without salary in Vienna, until recalled.”5 Beethoven showed no anguish at losing his Bonn stipend of 900 florins a year. He had his own resources now, including the generous Prince Lichnowsky.

  That spring Carl van Beethoven, Ludwig’s red-haired and choleric middle brother, moved to Vienna. Likely with Ludwig’s help, he first set up as a piano teacher, trying a little composing himself, though he was not cut out to be a professional musician. Before long Carl became Ludwig’s agent and go-between with publishers, to unfortunate effect. When he arrived, Carl told Ludwig that back home, Nikolaus Simrock, once a horn player in the Bonn Kapelle and now proprietor of a music-publishing house, was putting into print some four-hand piano variations that Ludwig had written on a theme of Count Waldstein. For the second time, this time without his knowledge or approval, a set of variations Beethoven considered a trifle was going to come out before he had put anything ambitious into print.

  Simrock was an old family friend, so in a letter Beethoven settled for a gentle chiding: “I am inclined to think that you should have taken the trouble to consult me about this. What would you think of me if I were to act in the same way and sell these v[ariations] to Artaria, although you are now engraving them? However, do not let this cause you any anxiety.” He said he would send Simrock a manuscript with some improvements. “The fact is,” he added, “I had no desire to publish any variations at the present moment, because I wanted to wait until some more important works of mine, which are due to appear very soon, had first been given to the world.”6 He meant the piano trios. Nothing this composer of age twenty-three said shows more succinctly the boundlessness of his confidence.

  Beethoven had settled in as one of the stars of the
Friday-morning musicales at the Lichnowskys. In that sociable and informal atmosphere, with food and wine and conversation accompanying the music, he played his pieces, improvised, tried out works in progress for an audience of leading dilettantes and professionals, probably read through other composers’ works. Among the pieces played were his new trios, with Beethoven on piano and probably Ignaz Schuppanzigh on violin and one of the father-and-son Krafts on cello. After one reading, the elder Kraft said that the finale of the G Major would be more lively and effective if written in 2/4 rather than 4/4, and a couple of passages in the finale of the C Minor should indicate sul C for the cello, because the passages would sound best on the C string.7 Beethoven took both pieces of advice.

  One of the visitors in the Lichnowsky soirees of those years was a Frau von Bernhard, who left a description of the scene and of Beethoven’s style in it. She describes a man “small and plain-looking with an ugly red, pock-marked face, dark shaggy hair and commonplace clothes,” with a provincial dialect spoken in “a rather common manner.” By that point, Beethoven had shed the old courtly wig and was wearing his hair in the fashionable French neoclassic style.8 On arrival, he would stick his head in the door of the music room to see if anyone he hated was present. If someone was, he vanished. This new virtuoso was “unmannerly in both gesture and demeanor.” On one occasion, the mother of the hostess, Countess Thun, once admired by Mozart, got down on her knees begging him to play, and Beethoven haughtily refused.

  Frau Bernhard remembers legendary visitors to the salon, Haydn and court Kapellmeister Antonio Salieri, who had once been a rival of Mozart (and was rumored to have poisoned him): “I still remember clearly both Haydn and Salieri sitting on a sofa on one side of the small music-room, both carefully dressed in the old-fashioned way with peruque, shoes and silk hose, whereas even here Beethoven would come dressed in the informal fashion of the other side of the Rhine, almost ill-dressed.”9

  In Viennese salons of those years, war competed with art in conversations. The French were a threat not only in their armies but also in the march of the democratic and republican ideals they represented. After the Terror broke out and the French turned to conquest, Holy Roman Emperor Franz II’s hatred of democracy or of any change in the status quo, and his fear of secret societies, became an obsession. The Freemasons and all other secret societies had already been effectively banned in 1793.10 Now writings on politics were seized, some private social and intellectual salons shut down. The discovery of a conspiracy was announced, Jacobins were arrested, some of them publicly pilloried for three days and some hanged, others given life terms in prison. The emperor ordered the police to set up a system “to secure the most absolute stability which ingenuity could devise.”11

  During this time Beethoven wrote Nikolaus Simrock in Bonn, with political matters passing through his letter as lightly as the practical and romantic: “I promised to send you some of my compositions, and you treated my statement as if it were merely the fine phrase of a courtier . . . Fie, who in these democratic times of ours would indulge in that kind of talk . . . Well, in order to clear myself of the epithet . . . you are to receive . . . something which you will certainly engrave.” He goes on to another pressing subject: “If your daughters are now grown up, do fashion one to be my bride. For if I have to live at Bonn as a bachelor, I will certainly not stay there for long.”12 If he was not entirely serious about Simrock’s daughters, now that he had found some success he was thinking about marriage.

  His expectation of returning to Bonn was in the process of becoming moot. With the French advancing in the Rhineland again that autumn, Max Franz readied his third departure. This time it was clearly a more serious matter. He called up seven ships on the Rhine, onto which palace servants loaded records and treasures of the Electoral Court: furniture, silver, the library, the cream of the wine cellars. At the beginning of October 1794, from the steps of the Rathaus in the market, the last Elector of Cologne said farewell to his people and vowed to return. Most of the nobility and well-to-do commoners who could afford to escape fled to various havens on the east bank of the Rhine.13 On October 8, the French marched unopposed into the town. Two weeks after the Elector fled, his sister Marie Antoinette went to the guillotine in Paris. Killing first a king and now a queen, the Revolution was burning its bridges.

  Now every person in Bonn was of the same rank: citizen. The French authorities decreed the assignat as currency, and with military pomp erected a Freedom Tree in the market. Few townsfolk attended the ceremony, though in fact there was a good deal of sympathy for the Revolution. Religion was roughly handled; the French turned the Jesuit church into a horse stall. The inevitable requisitions began. Before long, it sank in that Max Franz was never going to return and the town’s only real industry, the court, was finished. The Electorate of Cologne, more than five hundred years old, had evaporated like a summer cloud.

  The French made a mess of the occupation.14 Between their harsh and incompetent rule and the collapse of the economy with the fall of the court, within a year Bonn was in shambles. So was the career of Christian Neefe, whom the French drafted to be a municipal official and paid starvation wages. Neefe was seriously ill. He and his wife began selling their possessions to stay alive. In 1795, Neefe wrote a friend that he was “weak in my limbs, apprehensive in my breast, alarmed at every sound, my arm and leg trembling—I’m almost useless for anything.” Finally allowed to leave Bonn in 1796, he went to work for the court theater in Dessau. But Neefe the well-regarded composer and writer, the Schwärmer and leader of the Illuminati, the teacher of Beethoven the phenomenon of his generation, was a broken and nearly forgotten man. He died in Dessau in January 1798.15 There would be no record of Beethoven’s response to the news.

  Among other refugees from the French was Beethoven’s oldest friend, physician Franz Wegeler. He had experienced a remarkable rise and a disastrous fall. In 1793, at age twenty-seven, Wegeler had been elected rector of the University of Bonn. At the approach of the French army, he signed a resolution forbidding students to have any contact with French prisoners being marched through town. The order was issued for health reasons, in fear of students catching typhus. But the resolution was interpreted as antirevolutionary, and as the French approached, Wegeler had to flee to keep his head.16 In Vienna, he and Beethoven had a warm reunion. Among other things, Wegeler served as somebody Beethoven could vent his complaints to: “He developed . . . an aversion to being asked to play at social occasions. Many times he came to me, gloomy and upset, complaining that he was forced to play even if the blood burned under his nails.”17

  Soon enough there was a blowup between them, followed by one of Beethoven’s hyperbolic apologies:

  What a horrible picture you have shown me of myself! Oh, I admit that I do not deserve your friendship. You are so noble and well-meaning; and this is the first time that I dare not face you, for I have fallen far beneath you. Alas! For eight weeks now I have been a source of distress to my best and noblest friend. You believe that my goodness of heart had diminished. No, thank Heaven, for what made me behave to you like that was no deliberate, premeditated wickedness on my part, but my unpardonable thoughtlessness . . . Yet, oh do let me say this in my defense, I really was always good and ever tried to be upright and honorable in my actions. Otherwise how could you have loved me?18

  It should not be doubted that this letter, and all the letters like it that Beethoven wrote over the years, was sincere. It was characteristic of him that when the fury passed he was, sometimes, ready to listen to the remonstrations of a friend. Whether or not his goodness of heart was exactly as he painted it in the letter, Beethoven was nonetheless correct that there was nothing premeditated in his rage and vituperation. There is no record that he ever deliberately set out to hurt or betray a friend, though he fought with most of the friends he ever had. In Wegeler’s case the prodigal was forgiven, the friendship restored. Nothing shook it again before Wegeler left Vienna, in 1796; after that he never saw Be
ethoven in the flesh again. At that point of complete separation their friendship became, for Beethoven, perfect and unassailable.

  All of Beethoven’s testimonials to his goodness had to do less with what he truly was than with what he believed he had to be. If he was not mean, he was still proud, suspicious, paranoid, contemptuous of much of humanity. In youth he had been taught by the ancients and by the Freemasons and Illuminati around him that the foundation of wisdom is “know thyself.” As his letters show over and over, his self-knowledge ranged from insightful to delusional. Even less did he understand anybody else. What he did understand, as fully as anyone ever had, was music and its connection to the heart and soul.

  In his diary, Beethoven had decreed 1794 as the year when he must become a whole man, which also meant getting his career properly under way not only as a virtuoso but also as a composer. The collapse of the Bonn court lost him a good deal of income but was otherwise a gift, freeing him from having to account to anybody for anything he was doing. He would never have to report upward again. For better and for worse, he was his own man, with patrons and income from publishers and performers. Though he disliked teaching, he took on piano students, especially aristocratic ones who could pay well, also particularly talented ones whom he would teach for little or nothing. Young female students, talented or not, he taught with special attention.