Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph

by Swafford, Jan

  In the op. 35 Variations, Beethoven took up the bass line and englische melody from the end of the Prometheus ballet (by then also used as a theme in a set of contredanses). The unique idea here, as he labeled the first sections in the score, is to start the piece with only the naked bass line of the theme: Introduzione col Basso del Tema. Then follow a series of variations adding a voice at a time, labeled a due, a tre, a quattro, until we arrive in variation 4 at music under the heading Thema (aus dem Ballet “Die Geschöpfe des Prometheus”).

  Here again in pieces of summer 1802, the nature of the form poses a fundamental question: what actually is the theme—the bass line, or the treble englische melody that does not turn up until the fourth variation? Or to put it another way, this is a singular set of variations that amounts, in the beginning, to a bass line searching for its melody as a kind of fulfillment. The rest of the piece proceeds with a sense that the abiding, generating presence is the basso that flaunts its elemental simplicity. For Beethoven, that blunt and ingenuous little bass theme already seemed to possess an iconic significance, not just in its structure but in its character—not just a dance but some kind of ethos.

  The next variations spin Bachian counterpoint around the bass theme, which rises an octave on each iteration. A neo-Bachian flavor turns up again in the canonic variation 7.47 When the englische melody turns up it is presented straightforwardly, as a lilting dance with oompah accompaniment. As with op. 34, the tone of the set is generally cheerful; Beethoven gets some high comedy out of the thumping B-flats in the theme’s refrain. The pianism is as brilliant and imaginative as anything he had done. It ends with a grand Bachian fugue on the Prometheus theme. In the middle of the last section, the unadorned englische theme puts in a final, nostalgic appearance before the bravura finish.

  When he first sent the new variations to Breitkopf & Härtel, Beethoven included some uncharacteristic but not exaggerated boasting about their innovations:

  As my brother is writing to you, I am just adding the following information—I have composed two sets of variations . . . Both sets are worked out in quite a new manner, and each in a separate and different way. I would infinitely prefer to have them engraved by you, but on no other condition than for a fee of 50 ducats [ca. 250 florins] for both sets— . . . Usually I have to wait for other people to tell me when I have new ideas, because I never know this myself. But this time—I myself can assure you that in both these works the method is quite new so far as I am concerned—

  This was perhaps the worst way to pitch the piece to this publisher. Härtel had already revealed himself as uninterested in taking risks, and his offers had been low. Much as Beethoven wanted the Breitkopf & Härtel logo on his music, however, he was having none of that: “What you wrote to me once about the endeavor to sell my works I cannot endorse. Surely it is an outstanding proof of the excellent sale of my works that nearly all foreign publishers are continually writing to me for compositions, and that even those who pirate engraved works, about whom you rightly complain, are to be found among this number.”48

  In the midst of all this work, a letter arrived from publisher Hoffmeister in Leipzig. An aristocratic lady had offered to commission the famous composer to write a “revolutionary sonata.” Clearly the musical world had come to associate Beethoven with that spirit. In his high-ironic, figuratively or literally intoxicated reply to Hoffmeister, full of dashes like hiccups, Beethoven first scoffs at the lady’s offer, then accepts it:

  Has the devil got hold of you all, gentlemen?—that you suggest that I should compose such a sonata—Well, perhaps at the time of the revolutionary fever—such a thing might have been possible, but now, when everything is trying to slip back into the old rut, now that Bonaparte has concluded his Concordat with the Pope—to write a sonata of that kind?—If it were even a Missa pro Sancta Maria a tre voci, or a Vesper or something of that kind—In that case I would instantly take up my paintbrush—and with fat pound notes dash off a Credo in unum. But, good heavens, such a sonata—in these newly developing Christian times—Ho ho—there you must leave me out—you won’t get anything from me—Well, here is my reply in the fastest tempo—The lady can have a sonata from me, and, moreover, from an aesthetic point of view I will in general adopt her plan—but without adopting—her keys—The price would be about [250 florins].49

  When his reply including the asking price was relayed to the lady, a Countess von Kielmansegge, she took back the offer indignantly, writing to Hoffmeister’s partner, “You yourself will see, dear Herr Kühnel, how much Herr Beethoven has demanded and how unreasonable this is.”50

  Beethoven’s puckish letter about the proposed sonata is remarkable on the face of it and, in some immeasurable degree, historic in its aftermath. As far as he was concerned, the revolutionary period was dead; that was the 1780s, his youth, climaxed by the French Revolution. Now it seemed to him pointless to write a piece of music on a social or political theme that was old news—and that also might draw the attention of the police in Vienna. If he was going to write a politically inspired piece, he wanted the political import to be current.

  It seems also that for the moment he was not buying the idea of Napoleon as the fulfillment of the Revolution. Things were going back to “the old rut.” With his anticlerical instincts, Beethoven scorned the Concordat signed by Pius VII in July 1801, in which Napoleon declared that the French government would end the official separation of church and state that the Revolution had imposed. While not agreeing to a state religion as such, and reserving the right of the government to appoint bishops, Napoleon conceded Catholicism to be “the religion of the majority of the French people.” With the Concordat, Napoleon adroitly took from French conservatives and counterrevolutionaries their main issue, the suppression of the church.51 Privately, Napoleon said, “They will say I am a papist, but I am nothing at all. In Egypt I was a Muhammedan; here I will be a Catholic, for the good of the people.”52

  Beethoven hints that he’d be ready to write a sacred work if commissioned, even though he also has minimal personal interest in that idea “in these newly developing Christian times”—developing, he appears to mean, in the direction of cynical expediency. In this analysis of the current state of politics—what an acquaintance called his “favorite subject”—he was, as usual, informed and astute.

  Yet the lady’s offer had money attached; he was not ready to reject it out of hand. She could have her sonata not about revolution specifically but along those lines, “aesthetically,” in the tone of the music. So the historic part of the lady’s offer and Beethoven’s reply is that they may have brought him another step toward a characteristic piece with a revolutionary flavor but a more contemporary subject. In those days he was finishing his Second Symphony, perhaps working on a piano concerto in C minor, taking up the Prometheus material again for some piano variations, and writing piano works that showed the world what his New Path amounted to. Likely by the time he finished the Prometheus Variations he had decided to use the theme of Prometheus as the finale of another work, not a sonata but a symphony, with which he intended to show the world what a revolutionary symphony was.

  Beethoven had come to Heiligenstadt full of hope, and there in the summer of 1802 he was breathtakingly productive. His letters in those months reflect his usual tone, being businesslike, chipper, wry, and full of beans. He was jousting with publishers more than ever, trying to parlay the boiling fever of his inspiration into fortune and fame. He was creating some of the most extraordinary music of his life, or anyone’s life. But all that together could not save him from the crash that was waiting for him. The medical advice to rest in the country came to nothing. His hearing got worse. After years of denial and defiance and desperate appeals to doctors, his curtain of defenses slipped, fate turned its full malevolent gaze on him, and his spirit filled with despair unto death.

  16

  Oh, Fellow Men

  THE LETTER BEETHOVEN wrote in Heiligenstadt to his brothers Johann and Caspar
is dated October 6, 1802. The three pages and later addendum, written in his upstairs room looking out to autumnal fields and hills, were apparently never mailed. Though the letter was torn from his heart, it was not scribbled down like most of his correspondence, but considered, sketched, then written out in fair copy. It may have been intended to be found after his death from age or illness or accident, or sooner by his own hand. After it was read by his brothers he hoped it would be published, to enlighten people about how they had scorned and misunderstood him. So it was a letter to the world too. Three times he left a blank space representing the name Johann. Always Ludwig detested writing a name or even a word that pained him, so it seems that at the time brother Johann pained him.

  The letter became one of the talismans he kept always with him, perhaps the most important of those talismans. The others were keepsakes from lost loves. This was a keepsake from lost joy in life. Likely over the years he took the letter out of its hiding place in his desk, unfolded it, and read it over to remind himself what he had resolved his life was to be and why, and how close he had come to death before he created his true work.

  He begins the letter with a review of his goodness, his bitterness, his ambition, his loneliness. His state of mind at that moment is that of the human soul he had painted earlier that summer, in the D Minor Piano Sonata: a moment of intense despair in contemplating the mechanism of fate, and also a moment of intense clarity:

  For my brothers Karl and Beethoven.

  Oh you men who think or say that I am malevolent, stubborn or misanthropic, how greatly do you wrong me. You do not know the secret cause which makes me seem that way to you. From childhood on my heart and soul have been full of the tender feeling of goodwill, and I was ever inclined to accomplish great things. But, think that for 6 years now I have been hopelessly afflicted, made worse by senseless doctors, from year to year deceived with hopes of improvement, finally compelled to face the prospect of a lasting malady (whose cure will take years, or perhaps be impossible). Though born with a fiery, active temperament, even susceptible to the diversions of society, I was soon compelled to withdraw myself, to live life alone. If at times I tried to forget all this, oh how harshly was I flung back by the doubly sad experience of my bad hearing. Yet it was impossible for me to say to people, “Speak louder, shout, for I am deaf.”

  Ah, how could I possibly admit an infirmity in the one sense which ought to be more perfect in me than in others, a sense which I once possessed in the highest perfection, a perfection such as few in my profession enjoy or ever have enjoyed.—Oh I cannot do it, therefore forgive me when you see me draw back when I would have gladly mingled with you. My misfortune is doubly painful to me because I am bound to be misunderstood; for me there can be no relaxation with my fellow-men, no refined conversations, no mutual exchange of ideas . . . I must live almost alone like an exile.

  . . . Thus it has been during the last six months which I have spent in the country. By ordering me to spare my hearing as much as possible, my intelligent doctor almost fell in with my own present frame of mind, though sometimes I ran counter to it by yielding to my desire for companionship. But what a humiliation for me when someone standing next to me heard a flute in the distance and I heard nothing, or someone heard a shepherd singing and again I heard nothing. Such incidents drove me almost to despair, a little more of that and I would have ended my life.

  It is no surprise that his affliction brought him to the brink of suicide. It would be surprising if it did not. If he was to live, he must understand that he would live in misery, and there must be a reason to endure that misery:

  It was only my art that held me back. Oh, it seemed impossible to me to leave this world before I had produced all that I felt capable of producing, and so I prolonged this wretched existence—truly wretched for so susceptible a body that a sudden change can plunge me from the best into the worst of states.

  He recapitulates what he had written to Wegeler and Amenda about his illness: the pathetic consolation of patience is his only choice. He drifts back to the feeling that he is wronged and misunderstood. He invokes God, turns the letter into a will, becomes the wise and magnanimous big brother, recalls other friends and his most valued worldly possessions, the quartet of string instruments Prince Lichnowsky had given him. At the moment, he believes he is three years younger than he actually is.

  Patience, they say, is what I must now choose for my guide, and I have done so—I hope my determination will remain firm to endure until it pleases the inexorable Parcae to break the thread. Perhaps I shall get better, perhaps not, I am ready.—Forced to become a philosopher already in my 28th year, oh it is not easy, and for the artist much more difficult than for anyone else.—Divine One, thou seest my inmost soul, thou knowest that therein dwells the love of humanity and the desire to do good—Oh fellow men, when at some point you read this, consider then that you have done me an injustice . . .

  You my brothers Carl and as soon as I am dead if Dr. Schmidt is still alive ask him in my name to describe my malady, and attach this written document to his account of my illness so that so far as it is possible at least the world may become reconciled to me after my death.—At the same time I declare you two to be the heirs to my small fortune (if it can be called that); divide it fairly: bear with and help each other. What injury you have done to me you know was long ago forgiven.

  To you, brother Carl I give special thanks for the attachment you have shown me of late. It is my wish that you may have a better and freer life than I have had. Recommend virtue to your children; it alone, not money, can make them happy. I speak from experience; this was what upheld me in time of misery. Thanks to it and to my art I did not end my life by suicide—Farewell and love each other.

  I thank all my friends, particularly Prince Lichnowsky and Professor Schmidt—I would like the instruments from Prince L to be preserved by one of you, but not to be the cause of strife between you, and as soon as they can serve you a better purpose, then sell them. How happy I shall be if I can still be helpful to you in my grave—so be it—

  He would not kill himself—not yet—but still, with great clarity, he understood how much death could relieve him of, even at the moment when he knew he was rising toward his best work:

  With joy I hasten to meet death—If it comes before I have had the chance to develop all my artistic capacities, it will still come too soon despite my harsh fate and I should probably wish it later—yet even so I should be happy, for would it not free me from a state of endless suffering?—Come when thou wilt, I shall meet thee bravely—Farewell and do not wholly forget me when I am dead, I deserve this from you, for during my lifetime I was thinking of you often and of ways to make you happy—please be so—

  Ludwig van Beethoven

  Beethoven folds the letter the world will someday name the Heiligenstadt Testament and presses his seal to the wax. He notes the place and time. He addresses it “For my brothers Carl and to be read and executed after my death.” Three days later, he adds a frenzied addition on the outside of the letter. He falls into his dashes, his breathless mode, as if gasping—or drunk. This has not been part of the draft, part of the plan. This is the true cry from the cross:

  Heiglnstadt [sic], October 10th, 1802, thus I bid you farewell—and indeed sadly—yes, that fond hope—which I brought here with me, to be cured to a degree at least—this I must now wholly abandon. As the leaves of autumn fall and are withered—so likewise my hope has been blighted—I leave here—almost as I came—even the high courage—which often inspired me in the beautiful days of summer—has disappeared—Oh Providence—grant me at last but one day of pure joy—it is so long since real joy echoed in my heart—Oh when—Oh when, Oh divine One—shall I feel it again in the temple of nature and of mankind—Never?—No—Oh that would be too hard.1

  He means the joy that was more than the pleasures of a good life. For an Aufklärer, joy was at the center of everything: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; Schiller
’s god-engendered daughter of Elysium. Or call it peace, hope, joie de vivre, joy in work and in love. The things chronic pain and disease rob you of. That is the subject of his frantic last words, because that is what he feared most.

  This was his last word, after he had written into the letter proper the idea that would sustain him: It was only my art that held me back. Oh, it seemed impossible to me to leave this world before I had produced all that I felt capable of producing, and so I prolonged this wretched existence. There was no posturing in those words. It was the truth. At some point he would no longer be able to function properly at the keyboard. He could have little hope for an end to deafness and painful illness. He had no children or anyone who truly needed him. Art was all he had left.