Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph

by Swafford, Jan

  What seized the imagination of his contemporaries in the mournful harmonies of the Grave introduction is that sense of intimate pain. The opening passage flows into a rising, hopeful song, outlining the essential dramatic narrative of the Pathétique: varying responses to melancholy. Then erupts the furious, relentless Allegro di molto e con brio. From that point there is no break in the surging energy, except that twice, in the middle and near the end, the music of the Grave interrupts. Which is to say: for all the sound and fury of the Allegro, the inner melancholy remains.15

  Bringing back the slow introduction in the course of a fast movement was a striking formal innovation. Yet Beethoven had already done that, innocently, at age eleven in the F Minor Electoral Sonata that was the predecessor of the Pathétique. Now he bent a formal tradition knowingly. Meanwhile the second theme of the first movement is the seed of the finale’s main theme. Beethoven would be increasingly concerned with tightening connections among movements.

  The A-flat-major slow movement of the Pathétique is one of Beethoven’s uncannily beautiful stretches, noble and resigned in tone, its material simple and songful. (As such, it is foreshadowed from the beginning, in the hopeful, rising E-flat-major passage of the opening Grave.) That movement defines what would become his familiar A-flat-major mood. Its form is a slow rondo: ABACA Coda. Triplets enliven the return of the A theme: for the moment, melancholy is defeated. The rondo finale, however, turns out neither triumphant nor lighthearted. Returning to C minor and to the driving intensity of the first movement, the tone now is of defiance, a shouting refusal to give in. There are moments of peace, notably in the coda, with its gentle recollection of the middle movement. The very end, though, takes no hopeful turn but races to a pealing, angry C-minor cry.

  The Pathétique made an immediate and enduring sensation. Played in parlors and private halls, it helped carry its composer’s name around Europe. It would endure as the first fully formed avatar of the tension and dynamism Beethoven found in C minor. Still, for him there was no epiphany, no sense that at the time he said, Eureka! This is who I am. For the time being, this voice would be one of several Beethoven wielded—some current, some prophetic, some backward-looking. And he never entirely stopped looking backward for inspiration and instruction.

  The idea that a given key had a particular emotional resonance was hardly unique to Beethoven. Just as there were long-standing associations of musical gestures with particular emotions, like the mournful descending half steps in the Pathétique, there were also associations with keys. This was not entirely an arbitrary matter, because it had partly to do with the tuning of keyboard instruments. Nature perversely makes it impossible to get more than one key at a time even near in tune on a keyboard. For abstruse physical reasons, when it comes to tuning, nature’s math does not add up: stacking a series of mathematically perfect intervals does not produce a perfect interval. If you tune a piano with perfect intervals of a fifth up the keyboard, the fifths get sharper and sharper until they are impossibly out of tune.

  The only way around this situation is to cheat somehow. Systematic adjustments are required to temper the tuning of intervals. The musical term for this is temperament.16 In the most common tuning systems from the eighteenth into the nineteenth centuries, a given interval, say, a whole step, ended up being slightly different sizes in different parts of the keyboard. Thus “unequal temperament.” The result of all the older tuning systems was to give each key a subtle coloration, a personality of its own.

  For centuries, the dominant philosophy of keyboard tuning had been to get a certain range of keys passably well in tune and simply not use any other keys, because they were unbearably out of tune. So for centuries, most keyboard music was written in keys between three sharps and three flats. But the unavailable keys were a standing frustration for composers. The long-known tuning called “equal temperament,” in which the intervals between notes are mathematically the same, makes every scale equally in, and slightly out of, tune. J. S. Bach may have had equal temperament in mind when he wrote in all possible major and minor keys in The Well-Tempered Clavier—but probably not. It is more likely that Bach intended a tuning system that was serviceable but not equal, preserving some of the old individual personalities of keys but still making all of them usable. The name for Bach’s kind of unequal tuning is “well-tempered.”17 Well-tempered tunings would have been familiar to Beethoven since childhood, when he was playing The Well-Tempered Clavier.18

  There were many unequal tuning systems around in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, each with fierce partisans and enemies (tuning has always been a spur for fanaticism). Beyond loose traditions of emotional associations, a good deal of the contemporary theorizing about the characters, call them the “colors,” of the various keys came from the nature of unequal temperament. An eighteenth-century theorist said of his preferred tuning, “If an organ or clavier is tuned according to this temperament . . . each key receives its own special character, on account of its individual chords.”19

  Traditional expressive associations had collected around the keys, though in practice commentators interpreted them differently. Most tended to see D major, for example, as a bright, pure key for bright feelings. It was, wrote one theorist, “the perfect key for funny pieces and joyful dances . . . The key of triumph, of Hallelujahs, of war-cries, of victory-rejoicing.”20 Theorists’ responses to G minor are more varied and flowery: “It is suited to frenzy, despair, agitation, etc.”; “the lament of a noble matron, who no longer has her youthful beauty.”21

  Italian violinist and pedagogue Francesco Galeazzi published an interpretation of keys in 1796. C major, said Galeazzi, was “a grandiose, military key, fit to display grand events, serious, majestic.” As for C minor, it was “a tragic key . . . fit to express grand misadventures, deaths of heroes, and grand but mournful, ominous, and lugubrious actions.” D minor was “extremely melancholy and gloomy”; B-flat major, “tender, soft, sweet, effeminate, fit to express transports of love, charm, and grace”; E major, “very piercing, shrill, youthful, narrow and, somewhat harsh”;22 E-flat major, “a heroic key, extremely majestic, grave, and serious: in all these features it is superior to that of C”; A major, “totally harmonious, expressive, affectionate, playful, laughing, and cheerful.” Whether or not Beethoven studied Galeazzi’s characterizations, they are close to the way he tended to interpret those keys.23

  So partly because in unequal keyboard temperaments C major is usually the key most nearly in tune, it was widely seen as a key of equanimity, of the grand but also the placid. (This surely also has to do with how it looks on the page, innocent of sharps or flats.) C, D, and G majors, all close to ideally in tune, were called “pure” keys. These, wrote one theorist, “are little suited to pathetic expressions; on the contrary, they are best used for amusing, noisy and martial expressions, for pleasing, tender and playful expressions, or often for merely serious expressions. The less pure keys are, [they are] always more effective for mixed feelings.”24 Beethoven’s First Symphony in C Major is often noisy and martial. His tragic and passionate pieces are typically in more flavorful keys, usually ones in the flat direction, with an unusual preference for deep-flat keys like A-flat minor and E-flat minor. Here and there a phrase ends up in the outlandish key of C-flat major (which no theorist mentioned at all).

  When it came to A-flat major, theorists tended to throw up their hands in dismay. That was the key usually least in tune on a well-tempered keyboard. Galeazzi called it “a gloomy key, low, deep, fit to express horror, the silence of night, stillness, fear, terror.”25 Another theorist is even more aghast: “Death, grave, putrefaction, judgment, eternity lie in its radius.”26 Yet A-flat major was a favorite key of Beethoven’s, his interpretation of it his own. He saw it as a tonality of noble and resigned emotions, as in the slow movement of the Pathétique and the solemnly beautiful opening of the op. 26 Piano Sonata. As for Beethoven’s much-loved E-flat minor, Galeazzi echoes those few who deal with it
at all: “little practiced on account of its great difficulty in performance, it is extremely melancholy and induces sleep.”27 Keys with a number of sharps and flats tend to get the fingers snarled in the black keys of the piano, but that impracticality never seemed to concern Beethoven.

  In other words, like most things in his art, Beethoven’s sense of keys was partly traditional and partly personal. In his mind and ear C minor, the key of the Pathétique, was the most charged and dynamic. That sonata also shows his sense of C minor in fast tempo as driving, relentless, implacable, like some great mechanism of will, fate, or rage. In slow tempos, his C minor is tragic: the funeral march of the Eroica is an example. His E-flat-minor mood seems close to Galeazzi’s description, which in turn is close to the mood of the E-flat Minor Prelude in The Well-Tempered Clavier: melancholy, inward, peculiarly shadowed not only in keyboard tunings but also on string instruments, where the E-flat-minor scale involves only one open string (D, the leading tone). E-flat major, meanwhile, was rich in associations: a heroic mode, as Galeazzi says, the key of one of the greatest of Mozart’s late symphonies, No. 39, the preferred key in his music for Masonic services, the home key of Die Zauberflöte. Many issues, in other words, affected a composer’s sense of the characters of keys. It was not a question of objective reason but a mingling of individual responses to tunings and a matter of tradition, habit, presence in the repertoire, and instinct.

  So 1798 was a busy and prolific year, Beethoven’s confidence and reputation ascending together. He appeared chipper and optimistic; socially he was very much part of the Viennese musical fraternity and a favorite of the music-loving aristocracy. He kept in touch with Haydn, visiting the master and showing him new work. Probably in this year, he began to study vocal composition in Italian with court Kapellmeister Antonio Salieri, then forty-seven, once called “the musical pope of Vienna” and famously a rival of Mozart. Salieri was still turning out old-school operas and was active as a conductor and teacher.

  The reason for this surprising study was pragmatic: Beethoven was looking toward opera, planning someday to take on the medium Vienna loved beyond all others. Opera was considered essentially an Italian art, so he went to an Italian-born master to study it. As thanks to Salieri, Beethoven dedicated the op. 12 Violin Sonatas to this, his last teacher. As with his counterpoint masters, in his dealings with Salieri Beethoven was a willful student even as he dutifully set his assigned old-fashioned Italian texts in a suitable style. One day Beethoven ran into Salieri in the street after the teacher had thrashed one of those efforts. Salieri complained that he hadn’t been able to get the tune out of his head. “Then, Herr von Salieri,” Beethoven grinned, “it can’t have been so utterly bad.”28

  He enjoyed being generous. One of his nonmusical friends was the celebrated actor J. H. F. Müller, at whose house Beethoven met a young aristocratic amateur pianist named Carl Friedrich, Baron Kübeck von Kübau. Beethoven agreed to hear the youth play, to which he responded as kindly as possible, “My dear fellow, you have no particular talent for music. Don’t waste too much time on it. You do not lack, however, a certain facility.” He hired the baron to coach one of his students, a thirteen-year-old girl who was a few years too young to arouse Beethoven’s special interest.

  Kübau retained vivid and unsentimental memories of Beethoven: “He was a small man with unkempt, bristling hair with no powder, which was unusual. He had a face deformed by pock-marks, small shining eyes, and a continuous movement of every limb in his body . . . Whoever sees Beethoven for the first time and knows nothing about him would surely take him for a malicious, ill-natured and quarrelsome drunk who has no feeling for music . . . On the other hand, he who sees him for the first time surrounded by his fame and his glory, will surely see musical talent in every feature of an ugly face.” Years after their association, the baron was surprised to see Beethoven hustling toward him “in his loping genius-gait, and [he] expressed his pleasure at seeing me again. We talked about all sorts of things . . . he embarked on his favorite subject, politics, which bores me very much.”29 All this he recalled with a certain affection.

  It appears to have been in the midst of this sociable and productive bustle that fate’s hammer fell.

  It began, he would recall, with a transport of rage. In his flat he had been arguing over some music with a tenor, who left and then returned to pound on the door as Beethoven was busy composing. He jumped up from his desk, so furious that he was struck with a fit and fell facedown to the floor, landing on his hands. When he got up, he said, “I found myself deaf, and have been so ever since.”30

  That fit of rage would have been the trigger, not the cause, of his deafness. By that point he may have had lead poisoning, maybe gotten from the lead salts commonly added as a sweetener to cheap wine, or from lead wine containers, or from the waters of spas. Lead or something equally insidious was ravaging his gut. But lead does not usually attack the ears. That had another cause. Beethoven was doomed to go deaf by something that occurred before, maybe typhus or one of the other illnesses of his past years, or childhood smallpox—in any case, something that had passed but left behind a terrible legacy.

  If that moment of fury was when deafness first manifested itself, he was not entirely deaf, or only briefly. His hearing returned, but not all of it. Now what he heard was accompanied by a maddening chorus of squealing, buzzing, and humming that raged in his ears day and night. Frantic, he fled to doctors. They reassured him, gave him medicine. One doctor after another, one remedy after another. None of it accomplished anything.

  Medicine was half a century or more away from being able to treat or understand a disability like his. Doctors in those days knew virtually nothing about the true sources of disease. Despite the advent of the scientific method, medicine had made little progress since the Middle Ages. Viruses and the effects of bacteria were unknown, antiseptics unknown, the structure of the nervous system and function of the digestive system unknown. The stethoscope was not invented until 1816. There was no anesthetic for operations; surgeons cut open their patients with furious speed, trying to finish before the screaming victims died of shock. Most medicines did no good at all, and some did great harm.

  For Beethoven, the horror in his ears came on top of old, chronic miseries, the periods of vomiting and diarrhea that had assaulted him since his teens. In his profession he saw enemies all around him. Now his body became his most virulent, most inescapable enemy. His livelihood, his creativity, his spirit were under siege by a force that did not care about his music, his talent, his wisdom: the force of fate that had claimed his infant brothers and sisters in childhood, his teacher Franz Rovantini, his mother.

  He was twenty-seven years old. At first there had to have been disbelief, a young man’s refusal to countenance what was happening to him. It was imperative to hide the decline of his hearing, to hide his panic and depression. He feared it would ruin his career if it came out, and that fear was entirely reasonable. He had to hide everything, turn the old confident and robust face to the world. For the moment he told no one—not Amenda, not Franz Wegeler or Stephan von Breuning. When he did not respond or hear properly, people would think he was absentminded, lost in thought. Let them think that. Meanwhile he would find a cure. He must find a cure.

  So he went to doctors, one after another. Beethoven was the worst imaginable patient, unable to maintain any regime of medicine or diet for long, furious if results were not immediate. Doctors resorted to leeching, bleeding, lukewarm baths and cold baths, painful and dangerous applications of tree bark tied to his arms, little of it with any solid scientific basis.31 Medicine had learned, at least, that cheap wine with lead salts could have terrible effects on the digestive system and on the personality: it could make a victim irritable and paranoid (and Beethoven was irritable and paranoid enough already). Leaded wine was illegal but still common. Maybe Beethoven knew about these dangers, maybe not. If he did know, it was too late.

  Inevitably, the burden of his health en
tered his music. Perhaps the slow movement of the op. 10 D Major Sonata was a first intimation, or the Pathétique. He had composed tragic pages before, but not as intense as those. As a teenager, in the Joseph Cantata he wrote powerfully about death because he had seen it. His teacher and a row of siblings had died; he watched his mother succumb by inches. For everyone in that era, death was all around, everyone’s life like a battlefield. But for Beethoven this new threat was different, a decay from within: a slow death, the mind watching it, helpless before the grinding of fate. Fate would become an abiding theme for him, its import always hostile.

  There must have been days, his ears howling and his body racked by vomiting or diarrhea or both, when he lay in a blinding transport of misery and despair. Beyond the specter of deafness, the kind of incessant and maddening tinnitus Beethoven suffered can by itself drive victims to suicide. Yet when he could work at all he worked with his old energy, with undimmed brilliance and confidence. He met extraordinary suffering with extraordinary endurance and courage. He needed that strength. Other than death itself, going deaf is the worst thing that can happen to a musician. That is easy to understand, terrible to bear.

  After the first onslaught, it was some time before he arrived at the realization that there could be no cure, only a steady slide into silence. His days as a virtuoso were numbered. It was well that he did not understand that right away. It is well that a sick man cannot see the future.