Still, he wrote another song that appears to relate to Josephine: Als die Geliebte sich trennen wollte (When the Beloved Wished to Part), with its lines “The last ray of hope is sinking” and “Ah, lovely hope, return to me.”10
A quietly historical moment was caught in an Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung of March 1805: “Last winter a musical institute was formed . . . which in its way is truly perfect. These are quartets, which are played in a private house in such a way that the listener always pays five gulden in advance for four productions. Schuppanzigh, the entrepreneur, knows how to enter precisely into the spirit of the composer with his superb quartet performance and how to bring that which is fiery, powerful, or finer, tender, humorous, lovely or playful so significantly to the fore that the first violin [part] could hardly be better occupied.”11 Here was the formation of the first professional string quartet presenting a more or less public subscription series. The rest of the group were musicians who had been performing with Schuppanzigh for years. The series later moved out of the private house to a restaurant, a common venue of the time. Given the size of the spaces, audiences numbered less than a hundred.12 The subscription series did not last long, but change was coming to the way chamber music was presented. Haydn’s string quartets had been directed to players as much as to audiences.13 Schuppanzigh was intruding on the long-standing tradition of private amateur quartet playing; Beethoven’s contribution to that evolution would be his first quartets in years.
Publication remained an ongoing necessity and misery for him. For months he had been pushing Breitkopf & Härtel to publish his backlog of large works; he sent them three sonatas, the Third Symphony, the perhaps-still-unperformed Triple Concerto, and Christus am Ölberge. They balked at the oratorio and were not offering what he wanted for the rest. Moreover, Gottfried Härtel was fed up with brother Carl’s machinations and rudeness. In June, Härtel washed his hands of the current business: “Approximately nine months have passed since your first negotiation with us concerning the five new works that you offered us, without reaching our goal . . . Although our esteem for your art remains great, this dubious situation has become very unpleasant for us . . . Hence we prefer to relinquish these works . . . We repeatedly assure you that it will give us honor and pleasure to publish your works, only we must request . . . that it be done without the intercession of a third party.”14 In other words, no Carl. Beethoven replied with due heat but still, for him, great restraint:
Though I can fully understand the connection between your Paris letter and the long delay in your latest reply—Yet the whole procedure is altogether far too humiliating for me to waste even one word on it . . . If any mistake was made, then it was due to the fact that my brother was wrong about the time which the copying took—The fee is much lower than what I usually accept—Beethoven is no braggart and he despises whatever he cannot obtain solely by his art and his own merits—Send me back, therefore, all the manuscripts you have had from me . . . I cannot and will not accept a lower fee.15
All the pieces but Christus went to the Bureau des arts et d’industrie, owned partly by Beethoven’s friend and operatic collaborator Joseph Sonnleithner. This earned the short-lived publishing company its place in history. Breitkopf & Härtel dropped out of contention for the moment but still hoped to secure something. Critics of its journal, the Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung, were still boggling at Beethoven’s bolder productions, as seen in a virtually schizophrenic August 1805 review of the newly published Kreutzer Sonata:
This strange work . . . has extended the boundaries of the type . . . The reviewer believes, after becoming carefully acquainted with this composition, that one has to have limited one’s love of art to just a certain realm of the more ordinary, or be strongly prejudiced against Beethoven if one does not recognize this piece of music . . . as a new demonstration of the artist’s great genius, his vivid, often glowing fantasy, and his broad knowledge of deeper harmonic art. Also, however, one must be possessed by a type of aesthetic or artistic terrorism or be won over to Beethoven to the point of blindness, if one does not find in the work a new, blatant proof . . . that for some time now this artist had indeed been dead-set on using the most exquisite gifts of nature and his diligence to simply shift toward the greatest arbitrariness, but above all else to be entirely different from other people.16
This review could not have improved Beethoven’s mood, given that he was temperamentally incapable of enjoying critical incomprehension.
After a period of avoiding people because of his deafness, he was getting sociable again. He wrote on a manuscript this year, “Just as you are now plunging into the whirlpool of society—just so is it possible to compose works in spite of social obstacles. Let your deafness no longer be a secret—even in art.”17 At a Sonnleithner soiree in July, he met his current operatic hero, Luigi Cherubini. One report of the meeting said he doted on the French master, but Cherubini told Czerny that he had not gotten a friendly reception.18
Just before Beethoven left Vienna for the summer, he met another celebrated figure in old Ignaz Pleyel, a publisher and piano maker in addition to a composer, considered by some a rival of his teacher Haydn. At a Lobkowitz soiree, Beethoven listened to new Pleyel string quartets, after which some ladies dragged him to the piano. Annoyed as usual in those situations, he did the same thing he had once done to his would-be rival Daniel Steibelt: on the way to the piano, he picked up a Pleyel second-violin part and based his improvisation on a few notes chosen at random. Czerny was present and reported it as one of his more remarkable efforts. Meanwhile, Czerny said, “Throughout the whole improvisation the quite insignificant notes . . . were present in the middle parts, like a connecting thread or a cantus firmus, while he built upon them the boldest melodies and harmonies in the most brilliant [concerto] style.”
It was another demonstration of how Beethoven composed on the page as well as how he improvised: never lose sight of das Thema, and emphasize its elements in the playing; but what it gives birth to, the whole of the piece, is more important than the Thema itself. The last time he pulled that trick before a composer at a party, his rival Daniel Steibelt had left in outrage. This victim responded quite otherwise. Czerny recalled that Pleyel “was so amazed that he kissed Beethoven’s hands. After such improvisations, Beethoven used to break out laughing in a loud and satisfied fashion.”19 Beethoven wrote Zmeskall of the occasion, “I wanted to entertain Pleyel in a musical way—But for the last week I have again been ailing . . . and in some ways I am becoming more and more peevish every day in Vienna.”20
He was generally less peevish in the country, and friends liked to visit him there. For his summer sojourn in 1805, he headed to Hetzendorf, another suburb of Vienna, where his main project was to finish Leonore. One frequent visitor was Ferdinand Ries, who came for lessons and for company. In early 1805, Beethoven may have finished work on the op. 57 Piano Sonata that would be named (by a later publisher) Appassionata.
The previous summer in Baden, Ries had watched him at work on it. He arrived at his teacher’s door for a lesson and heard Beethoven inside playing short passages at the piano over and over with improvised adjustments. When he got up from the keyboard to open a window, Ries knocked and entered, finding his master in a fine mood. “We won’t have a lesson today,” Beethoven said. “Instead let’s take a walk together, the morning is so beautiful.” They were soon strolling in the hills around Baden, enjoying the day and letting the words and the paths find themselves. Then Beethoven stopped talking, began humming tunelessly to himself, the swirling contours reminding Ries of what he had heard earlier from the piano.
They sat down in a meadow, Beethoven sunk in thought. Suddenly from the opposite hillside rose the keening of a shawm, an oboe-like folk instrument. A herder or a shepherd was playing it. Moved by this unexpected rough music, Ries called Beethoven’s attention to it. He watched as Beethoven listened intently, clearly not able to hear a thing. It was the first time Ries witnessed his teacher’s d
eafness, though he had suspected it. To try to protect Beethoven’s feelings, Ries declared the playing had stopped, though in fact he still heard it clearly. They returned home, Beethoven once again humming and singing to himself, Ries feeling oppressively sad. When they reached the house, Beethoven sat down at the keyboard and said, “Now I’ll play something for you.” With what Ries remembered as “irresistible fire and mighty force,” he tore through the vertiginous last movement of the Appassionata, which he had just pulled together in his head. It was a moment Ries never forgot.21
As revolutionary as the Waldstein in its expression, its pianism, its relentless power, its dramatic unity from tragic beginning to malevolent end, the Appassionata, op. 57, is the shadowed counterpart to the earlier sonata. The Waldstein ended at the height of joy music can contain; here it comes to the deepest anguish. The Appassionata is a story of voids, abysses, dashed hopes. In those years, in the middle of his all-but-superhuman productivity, holding at bay the gnawing miseries of his health and deafness and his frustrated love for Josephine Deym, incipient despair was Beethoven’s most intimate companion. But he had vowed to live for his art, and as long as his art ran strong he never contemplated breaking that vow. Now as with all artists, his own suffering became grist for the mill.
A pianissimo F-minor arpeggio plunges down to the bottom note of his keyboard and rises back up, answered by a little ambiguous turn figure. Together these constitute the essential Thema; the whole Appassionata flows from them, along with a fateful four-note tattoo on D-flat–C in the bass.22 From the beginning this piece neither sounds nor looks on the page like any other work for piano. While the Waldstein filled up the texture with brilliant figuration, much of the Appassionata first movement is involved in emptying out the texture with ominous silences, murmurs, pulsations with enigmatic wisps of gestures above and below. There are three themes in the exposition: call them fateful in F minor, briefly hopeful in A-flat major, driving and demonic in A-flat minor. For the first time in a Beethoven sonata, there is no repeat of the exposition, as if such sorrows would be unbearable to revisit. The end is a stride up to the top of the keyboard, then back down to the abyss, and a whispering exhaustion. (One sketch had been for a fortissimo conclusion, but likely that seemed too defiant, too hopeful for this piece.)
As happens other times in Beethoven (the Pathètique an example), the response to suffering is a noble, hymnlike middle movement, this one Andante con moto variations on a somber and almost immobile D-flat-major theme. The four variations describe an upward rise to the brilliant top of the keyboard, but after a coda returning to the opening theme there is no harmonic resolution. Instead the slow movement flows into the finale, which begins with an angry, dissonant pounding on a diminished-seventh chord. Then a consuming whirlwind rises and seems to steadily gather momentum in its rush deathward.23
Beethoven had an incomparable skill for raising a movement to what seems an unsurpassable peak of excitement or tension, then to surpass it. He did that at the end of the Waldstein finale; he will do it in the coda of the Fifth Symphony’s first movement. So it is at the end of the Appassionata as well. In the coda a weird, stamping dance breaks out, like a maddened attempt at defiance, but the whirlwind rises again, more furious than ever, as if it were beating the piano to pieces. With that, the last hope is snuffed out.24 There ends one of the supreme tragic works in the piano literature: the dark side of the heroic. Beethoven would have read a relevant sentiment in his Shakespeare, from King Lear: “As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; / they kill us for their sport.” The critic of the Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung seemed divided between shock and awe regarding this piece:
In the first movement of this sonata [Beethoven] has once again let loose many evil spirits, such as are already familiar from other grand sonatas of his. In truth, however, it is here worth the effort to struggle not only with the wicked difficulties, but also with many a sudden impulse of indignation over learned peculiarities and bizarreries! These oddities of the master’s fancy have been discussed so often, however, that the reviewer does not wish to say another word more about them. He will only remark that precisely for that reason he also can say nothing about the details of this entire long movement, because almost everything is saturated by these oddities.25
In relation to the new piano music and in all else, Beethoven’s own self-criticism was as relentless as his creativity. On a Leonore sketch of this period he wrote, “Finale always simpler. All pianoforte music also. God knows why my pianoforte music always makes the worst impression [on me], especially when it is badly played.”26
On August 9, 1805, England, Russia, and Austria formed a Third Coalition and declared war. It was destined to be the shortest and, for the allies, the most humiliating of eight coalitions against the French. Quickly the fighting bore down on the Viennese, the price of food going up and availability going down. In Vienna a mob stormed a bakery, breaking down the fence and door and cleaning out the shop. On August 25, Napoleon’s army left Boulogne for Germany. Poet Heinrich Heine remembered the spectacle of troops marching through Düsseldorf that he saw at age five: “The drumming in the streets continued, and I stood before the house door and looked at the French troops marching, those joyous and famous people who swept over the world singing and playing, the merry serious faces of the grenadiers, the bearskin shakoes, the tricolor cockades, the glittering bayonets.”27
To his horror Ferdinand Ries, as a citizen of Bonn now under French rule, found himself conscripted into the French army. Beethoven wrote a letter to Princess Josephine, wife of Field Marshal von Leichtenstein, asking her to help: “Poor Ries, who is a pupil of mine, must shoulder his musket in this unfortunate war and—as he is a foreigner, must also leave Vienna in a few days . . . He is compelled to appeal for help to all who know him.”28 He asks her to give the young man some money. Ries reported for duty as ordered but, to his immense relief, was turned down because childhood smallpox had claimed the sight in one eye. Soon he fled to Paris, where he subsisted for nearly three years in poverty and depression.29
Out in rural Hetzendorf, Beethoven kept his attention on Leonore. In late summer of 1805, he prodded librettist Sonnleithner: “I’m quite ready now—and am waiting for the last four verses—for which I have already thought out the theme provisionally—It is my definite purpose to write the overture during the rehearsals and not until then.” (This in fact was the usual procedure for opera composers.) He returned to Vienna in September, the opera nominally ready for rehearsal. He arrived in no better mood than he had left in, and he had not forgotten his anger at Ries over the Andante favori joke. One day after a breakfast including Lichnowsky, Ries, and Beethoven, the company retired to Beethoven’s flat to hear him play through the opera. Once there, he refused to play until Ries left the room. Ries, about to leave for Bonn and an uncertain fate, exited in tears. Lichnowsky followed Ries and told him to wait, he’d settle the matter, but his angry remonstrations with Beethoven had no effect.30
All the same, next month Beethoven wrote Josephine, “My dear L[ichnowsky] is leaving tomorrow—In spite of many rough passages which we are encountering on the path of this friendship, yet now that he is leaving Vienna I feel how dear he is to me—and how much I owe him.” He ends on a note of affection and hope: “Tomorrow evening I shall see my dear, my beloved J[osephine]—Tell her that to me she is far more dear and far more precious than anything else—.”31
Uncertain fate was the motif of these weeks. Before the court opera production of Leonore could go forward, as with every opera in Austria, every play, novel, poem, painting, any artistic production involving words or stories or images, the libretto had to be approved by the censors. Their rules were many and intricate. There were to be no religious or current political themes. The military must be treated in a positive manner; the very mention of cowards and deserters was forbidden. A couple could not leave the stage together without a chaperone. Certain words, such as freedom, equality, and enlightenment, co
uld be permitted only in particular and rare circumstances.32 Everyone involved knew that Leonore was going to be a hard sell, given that it had to do with prisoners, tyranny, liberation, climaxes on the word Freiheit (“freedom”), and other subversive elements. Inevitably, the setting of Bouilly’s original story was changed from France to Spain.
Sure enough, the change didn’t help. The censors banned the production. At that point librettist Sonnleithner, who was Imperial Royal Court Theater secretary at the time, pulled strings as Beethoven surely counted on him to do. Sonnleithner submitted a petition to the censors with a series of points, starting with his best: the empress herself knew the libretto and “had found the original very beautiful and assured me that no opera subject had ever given her so much pleasure.” Second, the Paer version of the story had already been given in Prague and Dresden. Third, “Herr Beethoven has spent over a year and a half with the composition of my libretto and . . . has already held rehearsals, and all other preparations have been made, since this opera is supposed to be given on the Name Day of Her majesty the Empress.” Fourth, the story after all took place in Spain in the sixteenth century. Fifth, it presented “the most touching description of wifely virtue, and the malicious governor exercises only a private revenge.”33
At the same time, Sonnleithner went over the censors’ heads with an urgent plea to a well-placed friend, State Councillor von Stahl, concluding, “This piece, which is moral in the highest degree, will make a good impression, and recommend it to your love of justice.”34 On October 5, the censors approved the production. They decreed minor changes in “the most offensive scenes,” which Beethoven and Sonnleithner duly made. They had no choice. A police official would be present at all performances, libretto in hand, to make sure the text was performed to the word as the censors approved it (no alteration of any text was allowed on a public stage). The holdup had set back the copying, rehearsals, and other preparations, so it forced a delay of five weeks for the production. Beethoven kept working on the music. In November, he wrote stage manager (and first Pizarro) Friedrich Meyer: “The quartet in the third act is quite correct now . . . I’ll send again for Acts I and II because I also want to go through these myself—I can’t come, because since yesterday I have been suffering from colic pains—my usual complaint.”35
Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph Page 48
