Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph

by Swafford, Jan

  As for “Bethofen,” “a musical genius who has chosen to live in Vienna for the last two [sic] years,”

  He is generally admired for his extraordinary speed and the ease with which he plays extremely difficult [music]. He seems recently to have entered deeper into the inner sanctum of music, and one notices this particularly in the precision, feeling, and taste of his work. It has heightened his fame considerably. His true love of art is revealed by the fact that he has become a student of our immortal Haydn, to be initiated into the sacred mysteries of composition . . . We already have several beautiful sonatas from him; the most recent are particularly outstanding.25

  It is hard to imagine Beethoven could have been anything but pleased about this sort of attention, but given his nature, that is no guarantee that he actually was.

  The year 1797 started with another concert. It was a benefit for the string-playing and composing cousins Andreas and Bernhard Romberg, more refugees from Bonn, the French occupation, and the breakup of the court Kapelle. There had been friction over planning the program, as there tended to be when Beethoven was involved. Apparently Haydn had promised to supply a symphony and then reneged. Beethoven wrote Lorenz von Breuning, “We spoke yesterday, although I almost find it shameful that he might give a symphony of his or not.”26 After the concert, Lorenz von Breuning reported to Franz Wegeler, who had returned to Bonn, “Beethoven is . . . the same as of old and I am glad that he and the Rombergs still get along . . . Once he was near a break.”27

  In February 1797, the cello sonatas were published, and soon other products of the previous year: a four-hand piano sonata, op. 6; and Twelve Variations on a Danse Russe, dedicated to Countess von Browne, who as a token of thanks gave Beethoven a horse. Beethoven found a stable for the horse, rode it a few times, then forgot about it. In the absence of the owner, a stable hand began renting out the horse and pocketing the profits. Some time later, Beethoven received a huge feed bill, at which he was astonished and infuriated.28

  Another publication that winter would turn into one of the abiding successes of his life, the song Adelaide. Beethoven obviously loved the sentimental verses of poet Friedrich von Matthisson. He labored on the setting of the poem “Adelaide” for more than two years. The poem’s four stanzas conjure up images of the beloved inspired by nature, each verse ending with a rapturous refrain of her name: “Adelaide!” In the last verse, the poet imagines his tomb and a purple flower growing out of the ashes of his heart, each petal inscribed “Adelaide.” Beethoven laid out the song through-composed in three sections, like a small solo cantata. For it, he created a singular style, limpid and direct, though with far-roaming modulations.29 Like the cello sonatas and other works of his early maturity, it is a style if not quite “Beethovenian,” not derivative either. Matthisson received the dedication and, in 1800, a copy of the song with an admiring and pleading letter from Beethoven: “My most ardent wish will be fulfilled if my musical setting of your heavenly ‘Adelaide’ does not altogether displease you and if, as a result, you should be prompted to write another similar poem . . . I will then strive to compose a setting of your beautiful poetry.”30

  Beethoven’s romantically themed songs would sometimes be addressed to women in his life. Was he singing to a woman with the perfervid Adelaide? Possibly, in his fashion. As is perennial with bards and musicians, Beethoven had begun to attract female attention. When Franz Wegeler was in Vienna, he was amazed at his old friend’s romantic life. In his teens Beethoven had been quick to fall in love, though also prudish, and in any case unsuccessful in his attempts. Wegeler had found, as he would recall, “Beethoven was never not in love and was usually involved to a high degree.” In Vienna he “was always involved in a love affair, at least as long as I lived there, and sometimes made conquests which could have been very difficult indeed, if not impossible, for many an Adonis.”31 How platonic or otherwise Beethoven’s “affairs” and “conquests” were, Wegeler does not note. At least among Bonners, it was a discreet age.

  Adelaide might, in fact, have been written as part of Beethoven’s courting of Magdalena Willmann, a beautiful and talented contralto whom he had known in the Bonn Kapelle and who had come to Vienna to sing at Schikaneder’s theater. Beethoven began the song around the time Willmann arrived in Vienna, and she sang a song of his, likely the recently published Adelaide, at a concert of April 1797. Around the same time, he wrote a combined setting of two poems, “Sighs of an Unloved One” and “Reciprocated Love.” (He would recycle the tune of the latter years later, in the Choral Fantasy.) But the adorable Willmann would not be one of his conquests. He proposed to her that year and she turned him down, one would hope with more gentle reasons than the ones she gave her daughter years later: when he courted her at age twenty-six, she said, Beethoven had been “ugly and half crazy.”32 These would be recurring themes among women he was in love with.

  In later 1796 and into the next year, the French were devouring Austrian territory in Italy. Kaiser Franz II sent a giant army south, but Napoleon outgeneraled the Austrians in a series of battles. At Arcole in November, he raced alone ahead of his army to plant the flag on a bridge, then, surrounded by the enemy, was rescued by his troops (or so the myth ran). The climactic disaster was the Battle of Rivoli, in January 1797, when the Austrians lost fourteen thousand men to France’s five thousand. When afterward Franz II rejected the terms of surrender, Napoleon declared to his troops, “Soldiers! You have been victorious in 14 pitched battles, 70 actions; you have taken 100,000 prisoners . . . Of all the foes who conspired to stifle the Republic in its birth, the [Holy Roman] Emperor alone remains before you.”33 With the hated Austrian yoke off their backs, many Italians cheered the French army as liberators. Of that moment Stendhal wrote in The Charterhouse of Parma: “The departure of the last Austrian regiment marked the collapse of the old ideas . . . It was necessary to love one’s country with real love and to seek heroic actions. They had been plunged in the darkest night by the despotism of the Habsburgs; they overturned it and found themselves flooded with daylight.”34

  For those who had hailed the French Revolution, Napoleon was becoming its embodiment and fulfillment, the man who would liberate nations and spread republicanism across Europe. Taking shape at the same time were the fever and mythology called nationalism that would inflame the next two centuries. While Italians erupted in nationalist and Jacobin sentiments, planning revolutions, harassing priests, threatening to disenthrone the pope, Napoleon set his army marching for the Austrian border.

  In Vienna there was a convulsion of Austrian patriotism, to which Beethoven contributed with a pair of war songs. In the autumn of 1796, he wrote Farewell of Vienna’s Citizens to the troops. In the spring came the Kriegeslied der Oesterreicher: “We are a great German people; / we are powerful and just. / You French, do you doubt it? / You French, you understand us badly! / For our prince is good, our courage sublime.” That spring, the not-so-sublime Austrians and the French struck a deal that, for the moment, staved off an invasion. (Lacking enough reinforcements made Napoleon conciliatory.) In October, the Peace of Campo Formio declared, among other provisions, that the east bank of the Rhine, including Bonn and most of the former Electorate of Cologne, now belonged to France.35 A Bonner wrote sadly, “With the Court, both luster and employment have gone.”36 What no one could have imagined is that the Treaty of Campo Formio also served as overture to the finish of the thousand-year history of the Holy Roman ­Empire.37

  Beethoven’s war songs were unapologetic exercises in popular patriotism. The more enduring musical responses to the time were Haydn’s. He had been commissioned to write masses for the name day of Prince Nikolaus Esterházy; two of them would be the Mass in Time of War (also known as the Paukenmesse [Mass with the Kettledrum], for the drums of its beginning) and the Missa in Angustiis (Mass for Times of Distress). The latter became known as the Nelson Mass, in honor of British admiral Horatio Nelson, who shortly before the piece premiered destroyed the French fleet in the B
attle of the Nile. Nelson heard the premiere of the mass while visiting the Esterházy Palace, and he and Haydn struck up a friendship. In a larger sense, what Haydn had done was to join his music to a historical moment. Beethoven would not miss the implications of that.

  Previously, at the Burgtheater on February 12, 1797, Franz II had been greeted on his birthday by an anthem newly composed by Haydn: God Protect Franz the Kaiser. It was inspired by the British national anthem, God Save the King, which Haydn had admired during his time in England. His song would become the unofficial Austrian national anthem. Its melody is one of Haydn’s finest, with a quality of timelessness, naturalness, and a touching and noble simplicity, like so much of his work. France had La Marseillaise, and now Austria had its anthem. Haydn’s pride in having written it would be a solace for him in his sad last years. For Beethoven, the fact that Haydn and not Beethoven had written such an anthem would burn in him until his own last years.

  In February 1798, General Jean Baptiste Jules Bernadotte arrived in Vienna as the new French minister. He had been Napoleon’s aide-de-camp in the Italian campaign.38 Young, handsome, and fiery, a zealot with a revolutionary tricolor plume on his hat and pistol-shaped sideburns, Bernadotte was well received by everyone at court, including the kaiser, and he raised a sensation among the ladies. Bernadotte had been ordered that he was not to recognize “any other official rank than that of citizen.” In theater performances he ordered his staff to hiss at every cry of “Long live the emperor!”

  Bernadotte’s service in Vienna would last only a couple of months, up to the point when he ordered the tricolor to be flown over his hotel. It was a deliberate provocation, and the results followed suit. A stone-throwing mob of Viennese gathered while Bernadotte grasped his sword and cried, “What’s this rabble up to? I’ll kill at least six of you!” He was saved by Viennese cavalry, while the crowd burned the French flag in the Schottenplatz. Napoleon wrote one of his generals, declaring that if the Viennese government was involved, such behavior might leave him “only one course of action, and that would be to blot out a number of Europe powers, or to blot out the house of Austria itself.”39 But Napoleon had already declared Bernadotte to be somewhere between hotheaded and crazy, and ordered him back to Paris.40

  Bernadotte was a connoisseur of music and had in his entourage the famous French violinist and composer Rodolphe Kreutzer. Prince Moritz Lichnowsky introduced the general and the violinist to Beethoven.41 The three struck up a friendship, Beethoven soaking up Bernadotte’s stories of Napoleon and armies and battles. Naturally they talked music too, and Kreutzer had something interesting to show Beethoven: a published collection of works written for revolutionary fêtes by composers including F. J. Gossec, E. N. Méhul, and Kreutzer himself.

  This music was aimed for broad appeal, some of it part of outdoor celebrations that might include thousands of performers and tens of thousands of listeners. Given that this was music of revolution and struggle, funeral marches were a favored genre. The style was straightforward and powerful, with clear lines and no counterpoint, often martial in tone, with much use of wind instruments. It enfolded elements of folk and military music, the straightforward operatic music of Gluck, and the sober, simple, nobly humanistic music Mozart wrote for Masonic ceremonies and for the enlightened brotherhood in Die Zauberflöte.42 The central element was strong, memorable melody designed to be grasped and sung by the people. It was massive music to elicit mass emotions, art as communal ritual.

  For the Festival of the Supreme Being, part of the Revolution’s campaign to replace the church with a state religion, Robespierre had wanted not only the chorus of twenty-four hundred but every citizen present to join in singing Gossec’s Hymn to the Supreme Being. He sent music teachers all over France to impart the words and melody to as many people as possible: “Father of the Universe,” went the deistic text of Marie-Joseph Chénier, “Your temple is on the mountain, in the heavens, on the waves. / You have no past, you have no future; / And living not in time, you fill the entire universe, / which cannot contain you.”43

  In a way no government had done before, the French Revolution placed music near the center of public life as an essential element of education, morality, enlightenment, and propaganda. During the Revolution, the spine-chilling melody and words of La Marseillaise (“Let impure blood water our furrows,” and so on) had been a galvanizing force, a virtual weapon. Poring over the music for fêtes with Rodolphe Kreutzer and General Bernadotte, Beethoven found not only a monumental humanistic style but something like an ethos of music—an ethos exalted but secular, epic in its ambitions: music as revolutionary ritual, part of the remaking of humanity. Here joined together were art, life, progress, history. “The basis of all human institutions is morality,” wrote Chénier, “and the fine arts are essentially moral because they make the individual devoted to them better and happier. If this is true for all the arts, how much more evident is it in the case of music.”

  A train of thought began to take shape in Beethoven’s mind and eventually in his work. By 1798, the first parts of a great puzzle were falling into place for him. The parts included the enlightened and revolutionary ideals of his childhood in Bonn, the French Revolution, the rise of Napoleon, the new idea of revolutionary and national anthems, Haydn’s masses reflecting the historical moment, and the collection of revolutionary music shown to him in Vienna by Kreutzer and Bernadotte. These things would contribute to solving a looming crisis in Beethoven’s work: How and in what terms could he get past the plateau where he was languishing? How could he lift his art to a new level, to the territory of scope and ambition where he had always expected it to live? How could he step out of the role of entertainer and into the stream of history?

  13

  Fate’s Hammer

  BY THE END of 1797, Beethoven had gone through a serious illness, what may have been typhus. That would have meant weeks of pain, fever, coughing, stupor, even delirium. The disease is a terrific shock to the body and nervous system, in those days often a killer. And it can affect the hearing.

  But he remained basically robust and, when he was not prostrate, apparently indefatigable. Once back on his feet, he leaped back into composing and performing. He finished some smaller pieces—light variations on Mozart’s “La ci darem la mano” from Don Giovanni, and an easy piano sonata, later op. 49. A symphony in C major and a long-planned piano concerto in C minor were simmering. In a rush, he completed what became four opus numbers: three string trios; three piano sonatas op. 10; a clarinet trio; and violin sonatas op. 12. The patterns of relative boldness and cautiousness in these pieces are complex. Collectively, they may have cleared the decks for a bombshell of a piano sonata that he called Pathétique.

  Earlier in 1797, he had finished the Grande Sonate, op. 7, in E-flat major, dedicated to a piano student, the teenage countess Babette Keglevics. She lived across the street from Beethoven and recalled that he would show up for her morning lessons in a peaked sleeping cap, dressing gown, and slippers. Later she got the dedication of his variations on a Salieri theme; the First Piano Concerto; and, after she had married the musical prince Innocenz d’Erba-Odescalchi, the important op. 34 Variations. If that were not enough to indicate Beethoven’s feelings toward her, there was the character of op. 7. The longest piano sonata he would write until his later years, it is rich in texture and innovative in its pianism. Its turbulent emotions earned it the nickname Die Verliebte, “The Beloved.” The soulful dissonances and eloquent silences of its second movement foreshadow his slow movements long into the future. In these years, Beethoven remained more often prophetic in slow music than in fast.

  Before undertaking the perilous journey of writing string quartets that were going to be competing with those of Haydn and Mozart, Beethoven studied writing for strings by way of the less fraught ensemble of string trio. As op. 3, he had published a light and lively six-movement Trio in E-flat, in the spirit of eighteenth-century divertimentos in general and Mozart’s great E-flat Di
vertimento in particular. Beethoven’s op. 8 Serenade for String Trio in D major, finished early in 1797, was another multimovement divertimento. The glory of op. 8 is a movement in which a quasi-aria of tragic cast alternates with a scherzo. This juxtaposition of comic and tragic was much on Beethoven’s mind in those days.

  In duration, the three string trios of op. 9 are all shorter than op. 8 but manifestly more serious. All are four-movement pieces whose ambition is on the order of the op. 1 Piano Trios. Though Mozart had written splendid string trios, there was no extensive and intimidating repertoire Beethoven had to bow to. So as in the cello sonatas, his op. 9 Trios are all fresh, looking toward his mature voice. He wrote them fast and fearlessly.

  Trio No. 1 in G major is lively and ingratiating, a touch bold if not yet “Beethovenian,” at times gently poignant; No. 2 in D major is more sober, stylistically more current than forward-looking; No. 3 is an intense piece in C minor, a key Beethoven was defining in a way unique to himself.1 This C-minor outing echoes the raging C-minor piano trio of op. 1—less demonic but still driven and dynamic, though its finale turns up in a good-humored, entirely undemonic C minor.

  When he sent the op. 9 Trios to their dedicatee, Count Johann Georg von Browne-Camus, he called them “la meilleure de [mes] oeuvres” and declared the count, for the moment, “the foremost Maecenas of my muse.” Browne came from an old Irish family. An acquaintance described him as “one of the strangest of men, on the one hand full of excellent talents and splendid qualities of heart and mind, and on the other full of weaknesses and depravity.” He was headed eventually for a mental breakdown and a sojourn in an institution, but he and his wife would be steady supporters of Beethoven and repeated dedicatees.2 The countess received the dedication of the op. 10 Piano Sonatas.