Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph

by Swafford, Jan

  He who has been my friend from youth is often largely to blame that I am compelled to neglect the absent ones. You cannot conceive, my dear Wegeler, what an indescribable, I might say fearful effect the loss of hearing has had upon him. Think of the feeling of being unhappy in one of such violent temperament; in addition, reservedness, mistrust (often toward his best friends), and in many things indecision! For the greater part . . . intercourse with him is a real exertion, at which one can hardly trust oneself . . . I took him into my rooms. He had hardly come before he became severely, almost dangerously ill, and this was followed by a prolonged intermittent fever. Worry and the care of him took quite a lot out of me. Now he is completely well again. He lives on the ramparts . . . and since I am running my own household, he eats with me every day.42

  Beethoven was not as well as Stephan thought. By that point, still beset by fevers, he had spent most of the summer in Oberdöbling. In the fall he moved into a large, grand apartment building called the Pasqualati House, on the Mölkerbastei. From the fourth floor he had a view over the eponymous Mölker bastion, across the broad green Glacis to the Vienna suburbs and the mountains beyond. Ries had found the place for him.43 Lichnowsky lived a few houses away. Beethoven would keep that apartment for years as he continued his restless roaming.

  Apparently that summer saw the first private Eroica readings at Prince Lobkowitz’s palace.44 The orchestra of twenty-five to thirty and the listeners were crowded into the narrow music room with gray marble walls and golden-painted ceiling, twenty-four by fifty-four feet, intended mainly for chamber music.45 The orchestra sat on a low podium behind a balustrade. The invited guests lounged on red-upholstered benches, sat in adjoining rooms, strolled around as they listened to the players stumble through the strangest music any of them had ever heard. At the rehearsals it was noticed that Beethoven sometimes had trouble hearing the wind parts.46

  Ries was present and recalled that the first reading of the symphony went “appallingly.” It may have been this occasion when Beethoven began conducting one of the hemiola passages, superimposed on the three-beat meter in a two-beat pattern that confused the orchestra so much that they had to start the movement over again. It did not help when the orchestra came to the first movement’s peculiar retransition, when a solo horn seems to come in with the theme early, over the wrong chord, and Ries exclaimed to Beethoven, “That damned horn player! Can’t he count!—It sounds terrible!” Ries said Beethoven looked close to hitting him, and “he was a long time in forgiving me.”47

  Before the Third Symphony, symphonies and concertos had largely been considered public and in some degree popularistic pieces written to be put together in a hurry, sometimes more or less sight-read in performance. Haydn and Mozart had written tremendous works under those constraints. Beethoven was in the process of changing that pattern. Gradually, through reading after reading, this unprecedented music sank into the players’ minds and fingers. Other works were read over—the Triple Concerto, a piece by Salieri—while the listening connoisseurs murmured and stroked their chins. In the Third Symphony, so much was being put before them for the first time: difficulties of playing, difficulties of understanding for the audience. It seemed as if this piece demanded new kinds of musicians and listeners, new kinds of criticism and poetry and philosophy. And this symphony seemed in some way the embodiment of the revolutionary spirit, coded in instrumental music and so lying beyond the clutches of the ubiquitous Viennese censors. The private readings went on in various Lobkowitz palaces, Beethoven in no hurry to put the symphony before the public until the players knew it thoroughly. In any case, the prince owned the piece exclusively for six months.

  Meanwhile, that August there was another turnover of regime at the Theater an der Wien, Schikaneder being reinstated and Beethoven’s contract with him likewise. Beethoven moved back into the theater, still paying rent for his new flat at the Pasqualati House, and went at Leonore with renewed vigor aided by his recovery—not a lasting one—from months of debilitating illness. As if he did not already have enough trouble that year, he had also fallen in love.

  As a virtuoso of passionate cast, Beethoven naturally attracted female attention. Wegeler and Breuning both left testimony to his “success” with women, his “conquests.” What they meant by success and conquest was left unsaid. Bachelors in those days tended to visit brothels and Beethoven likely did, but there is no record of that in these years, or of who his conquests were, or what they amounted to. As has been noted before, it was a discreet age on matters sexual and romantic.

  One speculation is that when women were drawn to Beethoven because they were aroused by his music, he responded but did not take them seriously. His ideas about women were puritanical, but his instincts robust. Ries remembered that “Beethoven very much enjoyed looking at women; lovely, youthful faces particularly pleased him. If we passed a girl who could boast her share of charms, he would turn around, look at her sharply through his glass, then laugh or grin when he realized I was watching him. He was very frequently in love, but usually only for a short time.”

  Ries’s definition of “love” is more flexible than Beethoven’s. His real loves were few; the rest were passing. One day in Baden, Ries stumbled into a situation that gives a portrait of Beethoven’s style with amours of the moment. Ries appeared for a lesson and found his master sitting on the sofa with an attractive young woman. Embarrassed, he turned to leave, but Beethoven cried, “Sit down and play for a while!” Ries did as ordered, facing away from the pair and playing bits of Beethoven pieced together with his own transitions. Suddenly Beethoven called out, “Ries, play something romantic!” Then, “Something melancholy!” Then, “Something passionate!” Finally Beethoven jumped up and theatrically exclaimed, “Why, those are all things I’ve written!” This, hoping the young lady would be impressed. Instead, she seemed offended by something and left abruptly.

  Amused, nonplussed, whatever he felt, Ries asked the lady’s name. Beethoven had no idea. She had knocked on his door wanting to meet him, and in the heat of the moment he never got around to asking. The two set out to follow her, but she was lost in the darkness. They continued their walk into a moonlit valley, talking of all sorts of things, but Beethoven’s last word was, “I must find out who she is, and you must help me!” Ries proved not much help. Afterward he learned she had been the mistress of a foreign prince in Vienna. To this recollection Ries added that he never had so many visits from Beethoven as during a period when he lived in a house owned by a tailor with three daughters, all beautiful but unfortunately “irreproachable.” Beethoven wrote Ries in a teasing letter, “Do not do too much tailoring, remember me to the fairest of the fair, send me half a dozen sewing needles!”48 There were presumably other female enthusiasts who turned up at Beethoven’s door, and presumably not all of them fled.

  The women Beethoven fell for seriously were a different matter. The pattern was clear: most of them were quite young, all of them musical in some degree, most of them celebrated beauties, all of them highborn. The one who obsessed him in the middle years of the decade was Josephine Deym, née Brunsvik. He had met the three musical Brunsvik sisters in 1799, when Therese showed up at his door, and he was soon giving long lessons to the sisters during their family’s short visit to Vienna. Their cousin was Julie Guicciardi, Beethoven’s love of 1801. Besides his varying attractions to Therese and Josephine Brunsvik, Beethoven also became a friend and mentor of their brother Franz, who was an expert amateur cellist.

  The Brunsvik children had been shaped by an idealistic, music-loving, Americanophile father; they were brought up, Therese wrote, “with the names of Washington and Benjamin Franklin.”49 Hampered by a deformed spine, Therese became fiercely religious, never married, vowed to make herself a “Priestess of Truth.”

  From the beginning, sister Josephine, an excellent pianist, was ecstatic about the Beethoven works that she heard at family musicales. She declared the op. 18 String Quartets “the non plus ultra of musical c
ompositions”; later she said the op. 31 Piano Sonatas “annul everything he has written until now” (overstated, but astute). With her marriage in 1799, at age twenty, Josephine’s life took a downward slant from which it never recovered. Her mother had pressured her to marry the supposedly rich Count Joseph Deym, who was nearly thirty years older. A forced marriage based on money and position was an old, ordinary story among the aristocracy. When it was too late, they discovered Deym was heavily in debt and anxious to claim her dowry—which her mother refused to give him.

  Count Deym opened a wax museum next to St. Stephen’s in the middle of town, modeled on Madame Tussaud’s in London. His exhibits included an effigy of Emperor Joseph II in his tomb and a mechanical organ for which Mozart had composed pieces (Beethoven also wrote for it, in 1799). More morbidly, Deym exhibited a wax impression of the dead Mozart.50 His waxworks became celebrated and popular but never made enough money to support the family. Josephine did find a place in her heart for Deym, and for a while, in defiance of his situation, they lived the elegant aristocratic life, full of balls and fine clothes and musicales, in some of which Beethoven performed. Therese’s diary reports that on their promenades, onlookers would call out to ­Josephine, “Beautiful as an angel and ready to paint!”51

  After more than four years of an anxious and financially disastrous marriage, Josephine’s husband died of pneumonia in January 1804, before the birth of their fourth child.52 She fled to stay with sister Charlotte in Hietzing. Beethoven was summering nearby and visited, solicitous for Josephine. He wrote her in autumn, sending a copy of the op. 31, no. 3 Sonata that she requested, asking, “I must earnestly beg you not to give it to anyone. For, if so, it might fall into the hand of a Viennese publisher . . . All my best greetings to Count Franz.”53 Beethoven and Josephine’s musical brother Franz had a du (“thou”) relationship, showing a closeness not common among Beethoven’s aristocratic friends. Then and later, though, in letters he and Josephine used the formal Sie. For a male commoner to use the intimate form with an aristocratic woman was beyond the pale, except in the unlikely event they were actually engaged.

  The widowed Josephine returned to Vienna and took up the exhausting task of running her late husband’s business; at the same time, she rented out some eighty rooms in the building, all as she reared four young children. Surely she had no idea what she was in for when she welcomed Beethoven’s attentions. In September 1804, she wrote him, “Dear kind Beethoven! According to my promise, you are receiving a report from me on the first post day after my arrival. How are you? What are you doing? These questions occupy me rather often, very often.” The letter is cheery and affectionate, but that month Josephine fell into what Charlotte reported to Therese as a “dreadful nervous breakdown; sometimes she laughed, sometimes wept, after which came utter fatigue and exhaustion.”54 Later in a memoir in her old-maid years, Therese ruefully recalled her and her sisters’ earlier life, in the time when they first met Beethoven, before everything came down on them: “We were young, cheery, beautiful, childish, naïve. Whoever saw us, loved us.”55

  In November some musical evenings with Beethoven in attendance helped lift Josephine’s spirits. Now he was giving her lots of lessons. This was not the first time that teaching led to his falling for a student. The situation began to alarm Charlotte. “Beethoven comes quite frequently,” she wrote Therese. “[H]e is giving Pepi lessons, it is a bit dangerous, I must confess.” Soon after: “Beethoven is with us almost daily, gives lessons to Pipschen—vous m’entendez, mon coeur!”56

  As winter came on, Josephine still seemed to be encouraging, or Beethoven convinced himself she was. Nonetheless, he did not neglect passing fancies. Around that time he wrote to Willibrord Joseph Mähler, who had finished his painting of Beethoven: “I most urgently request you to return my portrait to me . . . I have promised it to a stranger, a lady who saw the portrait at my place, so that she may have it in her room during her stay of a few weeks in Vienna—and who can resist such charming advances?” The charming lady was apparently not Josephine, who nonetheless had begun to obsess him. In the same period he wrote her, “Yesterday I did not pay proper attention to what you were saying. Did you not say that I was to dine with you?—If you really said it, then I will come.” The note is friendly and only that, but he impulsively signed it, “Your BEETHOVEN who worships you.”57

  In January 1805, he wrote asking if Josephine would give a recommendation of his brother Carl for a job “in some quarter . . . Although wicked people have spread a rumor that he does not treat me honorably, yet I can assure you that all that is not true, but that he has always looked after my interests with sincere integrity. He used to have something uncouth in his behavior and that is what put people against him. But he had completely lost all that as the result of some journeys he has undertaken on behalf of his office.” (Since 1800, Carl had been working in a government tax bureau.)58

  By then Beethoven was courting Josephine in earnest. Courting as a composer, he presented her with a song: An die Hoffnung (To Hope). Now the family was truly alarmed, Josephine feeling herself under siege. She admired Beethoven as much as any man alive, maybe more than any, but she was in delicate shape, desperately trying to hold the museum and boardinghouse and family together. Her feelings for Beethoven seem to have been spiritual and admiring, not romantic, still less sexual. Moreover, Josephine was of the nobility. If she were to marry a commoner like Beethoven, she would lose her title and privileges. Legally he could not even serve as guardian to her children.59 This was the way of the world. In great anxiety Therese again wrote Charlotte: “But tell me, Pepi and Beethoven, what shall become of it? She should be on her guard! . . . Her heart must have the strength to say No, a sad duty, if not the saddest of all!!!”60

  An die Hoffnung, his song for Josephine, is simple, polite unto decorous, strophic (three verses to the same music), setting stanzas by Christophe August Tiedge. It is a song for a young woman to play and sing, designed not to frighten her away in the sense that the setting is not as fervent as the text, which addresses a personification of hope in the same way that An die Freude addresses a personification of joy: “O Hope, let the patient sufferer, uplifted by You, understand that up above an angel counts his tears!” This follows an introduction that babbles up heavenward. The relation of poem and setting is not unlike his polite and practical letter to Josephine signed “BEETHOVEN who worships you.” Because of the dedication, the pretty little song would become another element raising consternation in the ranks of his patrons and friends, not to mention his beloved. But even as he lost himself in love, there was still the matter of the public premiere of the Third Symphony.

  The premiere was set for April 7, 1805, at the Theater an der Wien. It was part of a benefit for violinist Franz Clement, a friend of Beethoven’s and director of the house orchestra. By the premiere there had been four or more readings of the piece in Lobkowitz palaces and at least one in another music lover’s house, all before invited guests.61 During the rehearsals, Beethoven had made a number of experiments and revisions. A letter of Carl van Beethoven to Breitkopf & Härtel, trying once again to sell the score, says, “Before he had yet heard the Symphony, my brother believed it would be too long if the [exposition] of the first movement were repeated, but after several performances he found it disadvantageous if the first part were not repeated.”62 Beethoven had worried that the length of the movement would weary listeners, but in the end he went with what he decided the music needed.

  Word went around that something unusual was coming. Old Haydn friend and new Beethoven acquaintance Georg August von Griesinger wrote a report to publisher Gottfried Härtel: “The Symphony has been heard at Academies at Prince Lobkowitz’s and at an active music-lover’s named Wirth, with unusual applause. That it is a work of genius, I hear from both admirers and detractors of Beethoven. Some people say that there is more in it than in Haydn and Mozart, that the Symphony-Poem has been brought to new heights! Those who are against it find that
the whole lacks rounding out; they disapprove of the piling up of colossal ideas.”63 The first critic of the Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung to comment on it, still before the official premiere, was less generous:

  This long composition, exceedingly difficult to perform, is actually a very broadly expanded, bold, and wild fantasia. It is not at all lacking in startling and beautiful passages in which the energetic and talented spirit of its creator must be recognized; however, very often it seems to lose itself in irregularity . . . The reviewer certainly belongs to Mr. v. Beethoven’s most sincere admirers. However, in this work he must confess to finding much that is strident and bizarre, so that an overview of the whole is obscured and the unity is almost completely lost.64

  Once again Beethoven was accused of writing a fantasia, a formless and rambling piece full of bizarre ideas, in a genre where such freedom was not appropriate. Most of the early reviews would follow suit.

  At the public premiere in the Theater an der Wien on April 7, 1805, the audience had to have been befuddled. One could not have imagined how much of the future of music lay in this puzzling and profligate work. There were no program notes to give them a handle on it, and at this point it had neither the name Bonaparte or Eroica. As always, Beethoven’s conducting was outlandish: during loud passages, he rose up on his toes, windmilling his arms as if he were trying to take wing; in soft passages he all but crept under the music stand. The playing, by the house orchestra laced by Lobkowitz’s musicians, who knew the piece well by then, would have been better handled than at most of his premieres. The audience sat through the strange, epic first movement that then and later was nearly impossible to digest at first hearing. Connoisseurs lost track of the seemingly half-formed themes bustling past, waited for familiar formal landmarks that never clearly appeared, for resolutions and climaxes that never quite happened. They heard the horn entrance over the wrong chord before the recapitulation and assumed it was an embarrassing mistake. Carl Czerny was present and reported that somewhere in the middle somebody yelled, “I’ll give another kreuzer if the thing will only stop!”65 Since a kreuzer was worth hardly more than a penny, however, it was not a serious offer.