Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph

by Swafford, Jan

  In the Waldstein Beethoven invented fresh colors and textures for the piano and at the same time took a fresh look at C major. As the key most in tune on the keyboards of the time, it usually represented the mean, the restrained, a tonality suitable for equanimity or for grandeur, even military pomp, but not for passion or excitement. Now Beethoven made it sonorous and intense, partly by surrounding it with surprising tonalities. The drop to B-flat in the beginning foreshadows a sonata written largely in flat keys. Into that mix of darker flat keys he drops two brilliant sharp ones: the E major of the second theme, which comes around in the recapitulation in an equally breathtaking A major. (Only in a reminiscence in the coda does the second theme find its resolution into C major.)

  As a second movement he drafted a long, tranquil, quite beautiful Andante grazioso con moto that he was especially fond of. But when he played the completed sonata for one of his friends (it is not recorded which one), the friend declared the middle movement too long. Beethoven responded angrily. Soon after, he decided the friend was right. He took the long movement out of the Waldstein and published it as Andante favori (“favorite andante”), because it was a piece he liked to play at soirees.8 With its warmly proto-Romantic tone, it became a favorite of many besides the composer.

  With that friend’s help, he had realized that the long Andante would have been a critical miscalculation. In the first movement he had deposited a great deal of energy in a kind of savings account, waiting to pay off. A long middle movement would have dissipated that energy. So to replace the Andante he wrote a short, transitional slow movement in F major—a shadowed, minorish major. As counterpoise to the driving and extroverted outer movements, this middle passage is inward, chromatic, searching, full of silences, unfolding like an improvisation. Midway it finds an exquisitely poignant melody, only to see it evaporate. It is a short stretch of reverie and anticipation.

  That short slow movement or long introduction segues into the rondo finale, the long-delayed climax that unfolds as one of the most ecstatic of all movements for piano. It begins, again, quietly, in a surging whisper that slowly rises to a series of climaxes that mount higher and higher until it seems they can go no further—then they go further. The climaxes of this movement are physical, like a gust of wind that shocks the listener into a sense of the joyous effervescence of life. With its simple, folklike main theme surrounded by sparkling figuration, Beethoven completes the sonata’s process of pushing the expressive and sonorous possibilities of the piano further than they had ever gone, the searching energy of the beginning paying off in the finale with pealing rapture, a resplendent and unprecedented texture of trills and whirling scales.9

  The Waldstein took its place as one of the defining works of the Second Period in its heroic mode, but it is much more than that. For Beethoven in the white-hot years of his full maturity, this sonata was a feat of disciplined craftsmanship that would have been practically unimaginable if he had not done it. Enforcing a relentless economy of material, he marshaled every element of music—melody, harmony, rhythm, volume, register, timbre, form, proportion, key—to create the effect of a twenty-minute crescendo of intensity and excitement on an instrument of limited pitch, color, and volume. In every dimension—expressive, technical, pianistic—here is a defining demonstration of what musical composition is about. Only Beethoven was capable of doing it, and only he was capable of surpassing it. A year later, with a work called Appassionata, he did just that.

  By December 1803, Beethoven was busy sketching the opera he owed Schikaneder by contract, on the impresario’s ancient-Rome libretto Vestas Feuer. At the same time, he told friend George August Griesinger, a diplomat, agent for publisher Breitkopf & Härtel, and longtime Haydn devotee, that he was keeping an eye out for “reasonable texts.”10 It could not escape his attention that Vestas Feuer lacked anything close to aesthetic or ethical depth. Perhaps as he contemplated setting the text to music, he rationalized that not so long ago Mozart had taken on an outlandish Schikaneder idea called Die Zauberflöte and made something out of it. Still, he pushed Schikaneder to find a better writer to tone up the text.

  Meanwhile the more tangible business of the profession went on. Toward the end of November, Carl van Beethoven wrote Breitkopf & Härtel, having offered the firm the Second and Third Symphonies, “At this time I cannot accept your recent offer of 500 florins. I am sorry about this, but you may regret it in the future, because these symphonies are either the worst that my brother has written or the best.”11 This was another bit of evidence that Ludwig, himself so careful and patient in cultivating publishers, exercised no oversight in how Carl pitched the music. A few weeks later, pupil Ferdinand Ries was writing Simrock in Bonn, “Beethoven will absolutely not sell his new symphony, and will reserve it for his tour, for which he is also composing another one now.”12 The tour in question seems to have tapped Beethoven’s ongoing determination to go to Paris, which as late as the next spring he declared “irrevocable.” Those sorts of declarations, so dependent on financial and political matters, rarely work out, and that one did not.13 But as a further element of his French campaign, at the end of the 1803 sketchbook where he had laid out most of the Third Symphony, he began sketching a triple concerto in French style.

  It was in this period that a practical joke went awry, with unpleasant results. Beethoven had played over the Andante favori for Ries and Wenzel Krumpholz, who liked it so much they pressed him to play it again. On the way home, Ries stopped by Prince Lichnowsky’s to tell him about this new piece, and played as much of it as he could remember for the prince, who picked up some of it. Next day Lichnowsky visited Beethoven and in the course of their conversation said he’d composed a little number of his own. Over Beethoven’s groans, he insisted on playing it.

  When Beethoven heard Lichnowsky start the Andante favori he was not in the least amused. Innocently, Ries and Lichnowsky had inflamed his deep-lying paranoia about his ideas being stolen—a not entirely irrational fear in Vienna. Beethoven took his rage out on Ries, refusing ever again to play when his student was present. If Beethoven was asked to perform in company, Ries had to leave the room. Beethoven held to that policy from then on.14 For well and for ill, when he got something into his head, there was no budging it unless somebody could convince him he was in the wrong.

  Still, for all the friction, there was no break between composer, student, and patron. The latter two understood that with Beethoven, friction was going to be part of the picture. Ries was functioning as an assistant now, probably in exchange for lessons (they remained purely piano, not composition). The following year, the student took a calculated risk in their relationship when he soloed in the Third Piano Concerto. To that point the solo part of the Third Concerto had never been written down. Beethoven wrote it out especially for Ries’s performance.

  For Ries this was a defining moment: his first public appearance as Beethoven’s pupil, with Beethoven conducting. The occasion was one of the public concerts produced by Ignaz Schuppanzigh in the Augarten pavilion. Ries asked his teacher to write a cadenza for him. Beethoven declined, saying Ries was a composer and ought to write his own, but that he would vet it. When Ries showed his cadenza to Beethoven, he was told to rework a particularly hard passage. Ries didn’t; then in a play-over he bungled the passage and again was ordered to change it. He duly wrote an easier version but did not feel happy with it. At the concert, as Beethoven settled into a chair to listen to the first-movement cadenza, Ries decided on the spot to play the harder version. When he launched into it he saw Beethoven nearly jump out of his chair. Ries managed to bring it off well enough. Beethoven joined the bravos at the end, then afterward said, “But you’re stubborn all the same! If you’d missed that passage I would never have given you another lesson.”15 Ries knew he meant it, that their relationship turned on that cadenza.

  Ries in those days was spending perhaps more time with Beethoven than anyone else. He recorded a number of such moments. At one point Beethoven got hi
s student a job for Count Johann Georg Browne and his wife, for years some of his most generous patrons. Ries’s duties consisted largely of playing Beethoven’s music hour after hour for the couple and their guests. One night in Baden, tired of it all, he improvised a little march of his own. A visiting “old countess” fell into raptures, thinking it was a new work of Beethoven’s. Ries went along with it as a joke on her. Then to Ries’s horror Beethoven arrived in Baden the next day, appeared at the Brownes’, and found the countess raving about his wonderful new march.

  With no other choice, Ries pulled his master aside and told him he had intended to “make fun of her foolishness.” Since Beethoven couldn’t stand this particular lady, who was always after him about something, he didn’t mind at first. Ries was forced to repeat the march and fumbled through it, Beethoven standing beside him. When a new chorus of praises broke out at the end, Ries saw Beethoven’s fury rising—then he suddenly dissolved in laughter. “There you see, my dear Ries!” he said later. “Those are the great connoisseurs who aspire to judge all music so correctly and astutely. Just give them the name of their darling; more than that they do not need.” In a more productive response to that bit of comedy, Count Browne commissioned Beethoven to write four marches for four-hand piano that became op. 45.16

  These episodes were all symptomatic. Beethoven could ride roughshod over people, he could be thoughtless, he could be distracted and forgetful, his responses were always unpredictable, but he was not intentionally mean and he liked to be generous. Yet as his old teacher Haydn fell into a sad decline, Beethoven was not notably thoughtful, visiting the ailing and depressed master less and less. Already in 1799, Haydn had written publisher Gottfried Härtel, “Every day the world compliments me on the fire of my recent works, but no one will believe the strain and effort it costs me to produce them. Some days my enfeebled memory and the unstrung state of my nerves crush me to the earth to such an extent that I fall prey to the worst sort of depression, and am quite incapable of finding even a single idea for many days thereafter; until at last Providence revives me, and I can again sit down at the pianoforte and begin to scratch away.”17

  The failing and forgetful old man was disappointed that Beethoven made himself increasingly absent. Haydn opined to their mutual friend Griesinger that it was “on account of his great pride.” Even so, Haydn still asked his musical visitors what the Great Mogul was up to. In 1803, Haydn sent Beethoven a libretto for a proposed oratorio, asking what he thought of it. Beethoven looked it over and advised against taking it on. He may have understood that the old master did not have another oratorio in him. In fact, Haydn’s work had drifted to a halt except for some folk-song arrangements for Scottish publisher George Thomson, who also aspired to have Beethoven working for him.18

  By the latter part of December 1803, Beethoven, after drafting eighty-one pages of the first scene, had given up Schikaneder’s Vestas Feuer in favor of a new story that had seized him.19 He wrote Friedrich Rochlitz, editor of the Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung, who had just plied him with a libretto of his own,

  If the subject had not been connected with magic, your libretto might have extricated me this very moment from a most embarrassing situation. For I have finally broken with Schikaneder, whose empire has really been entirely eclipsed by the light of the brilliant and attractive French operas . . . I hoped at least that he would have the verses and the contents of the [Vestas Feuer] libretto corrected and considerably improved by someone else, but in vain . . . Just picture to yourself a Roman subject . . . and language and verses such as could proceed only out of the mouths of our Viennese apple-women—Well, I have quickly had an old French libretto adapted and am now beginning to work on it.

  This “old French libretto” had been floating around since the mid-1790s and had already been set by three composers.20 It was Leonore, ou l’amour conjugal, by J.-N. Bouilly, librettist of Luigi Cherubini’s Les deux journées, which had made a sensation in Vienna a couple of years before. The same composer’s Lodoïska and Faniska had fared the same. These works initiated a craze for French opera in Vienna. Bouilly claimed that both his librettos were based on actual incidents during the Reign of Terror. They were part of a genre that came to be called “rescue opera,” which with its themes of heroism and liberation had a connection in the public mind with the French Revolution. This story concerned a woman named Leonore whose husband Florestan is a political prisoner. In the dungeon he is being starved to death on the orders of the prison’s governor, Pizarro, whose crimes Florestan has denounced. Leonore dresses up as a young man named Fidelio, gets a job at the prison, and finally manages to expose Pizarro to the minister Don Fernando and liberate her husband. Librettist Bouilly claimed that the story was based on a real incident, and he himself had played the part of Don Fernando in the event.21

  For Beethoven, taking up this fashionable libretto accomplished several things at once. The Bouilly gave him an alternative to Vestas Feuer that he could actually embrace with pleasure—a story of triumph over tyranny. (He said later that he considered Bouilly’s Les deux journées to be one of the best librettos ever written.)22 Schikaneder’s annoyance he would deal with in due course, but Leonore would also fulfill his contract. Rescue operas were now the rage in Vienna; he counted on that to help launch the piece. At the same time, this French story and the influence of Cherubini gave him another route of escape from, on the one hand, the conventions of Italian opera he had studied with Salieri, and on the other, the influence of Mozart that he had been trying to hold at bay for years. Neither of those influences had done much good for Christus am Ölberge. Now for opera and theater music Beethoven could embrace a current, fresh, popular model: Cherubini, Italian born but long in Paris, whom Beethoven admired more than any other living composer, whose brilliant orchestral style he appropriated as part of his own theatrical voice.23 In one more medium, he had found his way around the looming presence of Mozart: instead of Mozartian domestic comedy or fantastical singspiel, he would compose revolutionary French opera.

  Finally, in its story Leonore galvanized Beethoven. Here was a woman whose devotion to her husband leads to an extraordinary act of heroism, who stands up to tyranny as an individual and triumphs. It was a contemporary, realistic tale; he could use spoken dialogue—like a singspiel—rather than the traditional operatic recitative that he found artificial. Around the time he took up the Leonore libretto, two other composers produced versions of it in Italian. As part of his general preparation he got himself a copy of one of those, the Leonore of Ferdinando Paer, though what his study of it contributed to his own version would be harder to detect than the pervasive influence of Cherubini—with, inevitably, contributions from Mozart as well.24

  As for the whole idea of taking on an opera, Beethoven seems to have pursued it the way he pursued every other genre, as a problem to attack and solve with the help of models in other composers. But opera was going to make demands on him that he never had to cope with before. He knew a great many operas, his experience starting with his years in the orchestra pit and rehearsal stage of the opera in Bonn. In Vienna he constantly attended the theater in search of entertainment and ideas. Still, for all that experience Beethoven was not a man of the theater in the way Mozart had been. Where Mozart had started writing opera at age eleven and worked up step by step to the climactic productions of his last years, Leonore was Beethoven’s first attempt. The oratorio Christus had been his closest approach to opera, and from it he had mainly learned what not to do.

  Beyond all that, Mozart’s letters document a man fascinated with people and their doings, full of arch, catty, earthy observations of parties and musicales and their denizens. That sensitivity to character and behavior flowed into Mozart’s operas, along with his innate comic and theatrical instincts that Beethoven did not possess. Beethoven mastered instrumental music quickly because that was where his gifts and his instincts lay. He could shape a gripping dramatic line in a string quartet or a piano sonata, but the
pacing and the arc of a story in words and actions onstage were nearly a closed book to him. Likewise, other people, their passions, their lives, their ideals and quirks—also virtually closed to him.

  What is emotionally profound and universal in Beethoven’s music is what he observed in himself. He approached opera the same way. In the story of Leonore he was interested in ideas, ideals, feelings, not so much in behavior or in characters, though he knew he had to portray those elements and he did, with spotty results. In the first act he resorted to Mozartian conventions of comic opera that hardly suited the story. Still, from the beginning he kept his eye on where the opera’s dramatic climax lay and knew what would express it. The whole story would turn on a single transformative moment: a bugle call.

  Meanwhile he always had more trouble writing vocal music than instrumental. In a sketchbook for Leonore there are eighteen different beginnings to Florestan’s aria “In des Lebens Frülingstagen” and ten for the chorus “Wer ein holdes Weib.”25 From choosing a key to shaping a melody, he struggled with setting words. Partly for just that reason, as with counterpoint, he attacked the problem with implacable determination. When all was done, his commitment to write opera, for reasons both careerist and personal, was one more decision he made and stuck to wherever it took him and whatever it cost him. Like other such decisions in his life, it cost him a great deal.