Once in Vienna, Trémont set out for the visit with little hope of success. To make things worse, when he reached Beethoven’s street he found French troops trying to blow up stretches of the city walls under Beethoven’s windows.23 Neighbors gave the French officer directions but warned, “He is at home . . . but he has no servant at present, for he is always getting a new one, and it is doubtful whether he will open.” After Trémont had rung Beethoven’s bell three times and was about to give up, the door opened and “a very ugly man of ill-humored mien” asked what he wanted.
“Have I the honor of addressing M de Beethoven?” Trémont asked.
“Yes, Sir!” Beethoven answered in German. “But I must tell you that I am on very bad terms with French!” Hoping Beethoven meant the language, not the people, Trémont assured him that his German was equally bad. For some reason, Beethoven let him in. They spent the next hours talking pidgin German and French, the Frenchman shouting because of Beethoven’s bad hearing. Trémont observed a good deal and wrote one of the most vivid firsthand descriptions of the Beethoven household style (worse than usual at that point because he had no servant):
Picture to yourself the dirtiest, most disorderly place imaginable—blotches of moisture covered the ceiling; an oldish grand piano, on which the dust disputed the place with various pieces of engraved and manuscript music; under the piano (I do not exaggerate) an unemptied chamber pot; beside it, a small walnut table accustomed to the frequent overturning of the secretary placed upon it; a quantity of pens encrusted with ink . . . then more music. The chairs, mostly cane-seated, were covered with plates bearing the remains of last night’s supper, and with wearing apparel, etc.
Taken with this enemy diplomat or anyway intrigued by him, Beethoven invited Trémont back several times and spent hours improvising for him at the piano. “I maintain,” Trémont recalled, “that unless one has heard him improvise well and quite at ease, one can but imperfectly appreciate the vast scope of his genius.” They talked philosophy, Greek and Latin authors, and Shakespeare, “his idol.” Trémont noted Beethoven’s style of conversation, animated and full of singular conceits—always on, always thinking and shaping to his own designs: “Beethoven was not a man of esprit, if we mean by that term one who makes keen and witty remarks . . . His thoughts were thrown out by fits and starts, but they were lofty and generous, though often rather illogical.”
Their conversations showed that Beethoven had never stopped thinking about the man whose name he removed from the Third Symphony: “His mind was much occupied with the greatness of Napoleon, and he often spoke to me about it. Through all his resentment I could see that he admired his rise from such obscure beginnings.” The baron tried to get Beethoven to agree to a French visit, which he had the power to facilitate. Beethoven said he was tempted, but produced a row of objections that Trémont tried to answer. Finally, they shook hands on the promise of a visit. Then the baron’s work took him away from Vienna for good, war continued, and Beethoven never got to France.24
In July 1808, Napoleon inflicted a devastating defeat on the Austrians at Wagram, smashing the fifth coalition against him. In an all-out battle between the two largest armies in European history, the Austrians lost fifty thousand killed or wounded. Having been lenient in his previous victories, with the ensuing Treaty of Schönbrunn Napoleon intended to cripple and humiliate this enemy that would not stay prostrate. He demanded a massive indemnity that would necessitate imposing new taxes on an Austrian population already reeling from inflation. Bits of Austria including Salzburg and the southern Tyrol were hacked off and taken over by France and its subject states. Austria was required to join the Continental System.
All this impacted everyone in the country, including artists. But inevitably some profited from the war, and that included Ludwig’s brother Johann, who had spent his last florins to buy a pharmacy in Linz. He secured some contracts to furnish the French army with medical supplies and from them made a small fortune.
Still, in victory Napoleon did not unseat the Habsburgs. After all, now he was at the peak of his power and confidence, made emperor by his own hand, and really lacked only two things: a truly unshakable grip on the Continent, and an heir to take the throne of France. Napoleon’s wife, Josephine, had been unable to conceive. He attacked both problems in a startling but characteristic way: he made himself part of the Habsburg family.
In 1810, having brought Austria to heel, Napoleon put Josephine aside and married Marie Louise, the eighteen-year-old daughter of Emperor Franz I. “I am marrying a belly,” he observed with incomparable cynicism.25 Already wed by proxy, Marie Louise arrived in Paris with three hundred attendants in eighty-three equipages. Napoleon all but raped her on the stairs leading up to the nuptial chamber. (He claimed that her response to this greeting was, “Do it again.”) Yet somehow their union turned out affectionate. Marie Louise gave him the son he demanded, François Joseph Charles Bonaparte.
If Beethoven’s response to the shelling, occupation, and military defeat of Austria was mostly related to himself, he was not entirely oblivious to the general suffering. Having finally succeeded in placing major works with Breitkopf & Härtel, he began writing Gottfried Härtel as if the publisher were a friend and confessor. After finishing the Fifth Piano Concerto in April, Beethoven found himself at loose ends. He wrote Härtel a long, rambling letter:
You are indeed mistaken in supposing that I have been very well. For in the meantime we have been suffering misery in a most concentrated form. Let me tell you that since May 4th I have produced very little coherent work, at most a fragment here and there . . . The existence I had built up only a short time ago rests on a shaky foundation—and even during this last short period I have not yet seen the promises made to me completely fulfilled—So far I have not received a farthing from Prince Kinsky, who is one of my patrons . . . What a destructive, disorderly life I see and hear around me, nothing but drums, cannons, and human misery in every form . . . I had begun to have a little singing party at my rooms every week—but that accursed war put a stop to everything.26
At the singing parties he and his friends had been going through repertoire, Beethoven looking not only for pleasure but for ideas. In the letter he asks Härtel for scores from the publisher’s catalog and offers to pay for them—whatever Härtel has of Haydn’s masses. He asks Härtel to send greetings to a writer he admires, adding, “One thing more: there is hardly a treatise which could be too learned for me. I have not the slightest pretension to what is properly called erudition. Yet from my childhood I have striven to understand what the better and wiser people of every age were driving at in their works. Shame on an artist who does not consider it his duty to achieve at least as much—” There is no exaggeration in that. He had always sought out the best of its kind, in every medium.
Instead of the regular and comfortable income Beethoven had hoped for from the annuity, his patchwork career continued. He sent the finished score of the Fifth Piano Concerto to Breitkopf & Härtel in April 1809, and in November received new editions from the same publisher of the Fifth and Sixth Symphonies and the op. 70 Trios. (He found everything distressingly error-ridden.) Meanwhile, another publisher stepped up with an offer of piecework not extravagantly paid but at least steady. Scottish publisher George Thomson, having stalked Beethoven for years, sent him forty-three mostly Welsh and Irish folk songs that Beethoven had agreed to arrange, including preludes and postludes and parts for optional violin and cello. Thomson noted in his letter that he had sent twenty-one melodies to Beethoven nearly three years before but had no idea whether they were received.
Likely what most appealed to Beethoven about the folk-song settings was the idea of something regular in the midst of his freelance uncertainties, which were particularly unpleasant at this point. Prince Kinsky had not paid his part of the annuity (his being the largest contribution), and Beethoven still had not been paid for the six pieces Clementi published three years before. Clementi was outraged about the de
lay, writing his business partner, “A most shabby figure you have made me cut in this affair!—and with one of the foremost composers of this day!”27 Beethoven finally received his money from Clementi in 1810.28
Besides the attractiveness of steady work for Thomson, Beethoven clearly enjoyed these Welsh, Scottish, and Irish tunes, all of which he generally referred to as “Scottish.” They gave him a supply of classic melodies to work with, and like anything else musical, they might serve as grist for the mill. When it came to sheer beauty and facility, his melodic gift was not the equal of Mozart’s and Handel’s, at least, and with his fine judgment he may have understood that. But eventually melody was going to have to carry more weight in his work than it had before. The folk-song arrangements helped him along in that direction.
In his letter Thomson offered 100 ducats (over 500 florins) for the forty-three airs, plus 120 ducats more for three quintets for varied instruments and three violin sonatas. Nothing came of the latter commission. Thomson added a caution that was to become an invariable refrain: “I permit myself the liberty to request that the composition of the accompaniment for the piano to be the most simple and easy to play, because our young ladies, when singing our national airs, do not like and hardly know how to play a difficult accompaniment.”29 Beethoven had written plenty of music playable by young ladies of modest skill, including the first movement of the Moonlight Sonata, but he had never done it to order. He replied patiently but firmly to Thomson: “You are dealing with a true artist who likes to be paid honorably, but who likes glory and also the glory of art even more—and who is never content with himself and tries always to go further and make yet greater progress in his art.” He got to work on the songs right away but did not finish them until the next year. He finally sent the lot in July 1810, noting in his cover letter that he had done them “con amore.”30 Perhaps. In any case, many of his accompaniments did prove too hard for the young ladies who were Thomson’s main concern.
Beethoven had every reason to worry about money. In Vienna prices had inflated some 300 percent in the last years. War taxes and requisitions affected everybody, and there was little hope of relief.31 In addition to taking on this piecework in a time of mounting financial catastrophe in Austria, Beethoven decided to reduce his expenses by eating at home rather than in restaurants. This would entail hiring an extra servant as cook. Restaurant food was relatively cheap, but servants were cheaper. Beethoven wrote Zmeskall, “Cursed tipsy Domanovetz—not count of music, but Count of gluttony—Count of dinner, Count of supper and the like . . . I must have someone to cook for me, for as long as our food continues to be so bad, I shall always be ill.” (He was suffering from abdominal miseries that went on for weeks.)32 A couple briefly and unhappily worked for him, the husband doing the chores and the wife the cooking. Before long he was writing Zmeskall, who had handled their pay, “I simply cannot see that woman at my rooms again; and although she is perhaps a little better than he is, I don’t want to hear anything more about either of them . . . Both of them are wicked people.”33 This period marks the beginning of an endlessly frustrating search, which lasted to the end of his life, for servants whom he found to be other than contemptible.
Creatively speaking, war-troubled 1809 was not the nearly wasted year Beethoven declared it, even if his output was modest by his standards of the last eight years. Quick on the heels of completing the Emperor Concerto, at Baden in the fall, he finished the gentle and agreeable String Quartet in E-flat Major and six songs, op. 75, that he dedicated to Princess Caroline Kinsky, wife of the benefactor who was too busy at war to see to his part of the annuity. Also in this year Beethoven finished four piano works including his first sonatas since the epic Appassionata of 1805.
Around the end of 1809, Beethoven spent a good deal of time collecting instructional material to use for Archduke Rudolph’s lessons in piano, theory, and composition. Beethoven had a broad knowledge of the musical theoretical literature. Now he put together a thick pile of material including works of his old teacher Albrechtsberger; of Fux, who devised the study of counterpoint in species; of the theorist and J. S. Bach disciple Kirnberger; and from the classic True Art of Clavier Playing, by C. P. E. Bach.34 For the archduke, the only student he had left, he intended to be as good a pedant as Albrechtsberger.
Rudolph was not only the most generous and loyal patron of Beethoven’s life but also the most powerful. Beethoven was determined not to estrange an important patron again. If he was resentful of the demands on his time, if he was careless about proper etiquette in visiting the residence of the archduke (who told his servants to ignore it), Beethoven would, as best he could, humble himself when appropriate. There would be no blowups between them, something that could be said of few people in Beethoven’s life. In that regard it helped that Rudolph was one of the less imperious examples of his class. It also helped that he had some talent, more than most students. With Beethoven’s coaching and meticulous editing, he eventually produced a trickle of respectable work.
How much of Beethoven’s relations with Rudolph rose from fondness and how much from calculation is impossible to untangle. After Rudolph returned to town with the royal family, at the end of January 1810, Beethoven finished the three-movement sonata he called Das Lebewohl, “The Farewell,” and presented the archduke with the manuscript inscribed to him: “The Farewell, Vienna, May 4, 1809, on the departure of his Imperial Highness the revered Archduke Rudolph,” and at the finale, “The Arrival of His Imperial Highness the revered Archduke Rudolph, January 30, 1810.”35
The Lebewohl had been preceded by two relatively low-key but not inconsiderable piano sonatas. Surrounded by war and occupation and bedeviled by digestive miseries toward the end of 1809, Beethoven did not try to outdo the Appassionata, which he called his best sonata, but produced some works of youthful, almost dewy freshness. Creatively, he had begun a period of marking time, but marking time at the height of his powers.
In this period he also fulfilled Muzio Clementi’s commission for a piano fantasia. The one-movement Fantasia, op. 77, begins with two startling swoops down the keyboard, like the clusters of notes Beethoven sometimes smashed out before beginning an improvisation. The swoops return as a kind of curtain device in a work of playful and enigmatic charm. The key is given as G minor, that being more or less where it starts, but the Fantasia goes through a patchwork of keys and ideas and ends up with a long stretch of quasi-variations in B major. The capricious spirit of C. P. E. Bach hovers in the background. For Beethoven this potpourri also might have represented a portrait of his scattered life at the time. In any case, it does what a fantasia is supposed to do, which is to be exploratory and quasi-improvisational.
Beethoven still had his French Érard. Though he had paid twice, without success, to have its touch lightened to the style of Viennese pianos, he still appreciated the more robust sound of the Érard, which was close to the sound of British pianos. He had been leaning on local piano maker Streicher to depart from the more delicate Viennese build and sound. Wrote J. F. Reichardt, “Streicher has abandoned the soft, overly responsive, bouncing, and rolling [character] of the other Viennese instruments and—upon Beethoven’s advice and request—has given his instruments more resistance and elasticity in order to enable the virtuoso . . . to have more control over the instrument’s sustaining and carrying [power], and for the subtle emphases and diminuendos.”36 Behind England and France as usual, and with Beethoven’s prodding, Vienna took another belated step toward the future, in this case the future of an instrument.
At some opposite extreme from the Fantasia is the tightly woven op. 78 Sonata, in two movements and in the eccentric and finger-tangling key of F-sharp major. With the music as evidence, for Beethoven this key possessed great charm and melting tenderness. The dedication to Therese Brunsvik, the more ascetic sister of Beethoven’s hopeless love Josephine, might explain some of its singular spirit. It begins with four adagio cantabile measures that are part introduction, part a source
of motivic material, part an almost prayerful meditation that inflects everything that follows, starting with the wistful and flowing theme of the Allegro non troppo. The second theme is largely butterfly flutters. Both movements make their points succinctly and exquisitely and move on. In the second movement, alternately dashing and absurdly chirping, Czerny saw wit and childlike mischief.37 Beethoven was fond of this sonata, not because it was heroic or ambitious but because it was unique—“really something different,” he said. He preferred it to the Moonlight, which lies in the equally eccentric key of C-sharp minor.
Like the two sonatas of op. 49 from ten years before, the three-movement Sonatine in G Major, op. 79, is nominally a short, attractive, reasonably easy outing for amateurs. But for Beethoven, simple in 1809 is not the same thing as it was ten years before: there is more depth, more personality, more quirkiness, and it’s not all that easy to play. A folksy mood predominates. The first movement is a vivacious and headlong Presto alla tedesca, a tedesca being a fast German dance in triple time. The second movement, in G minor, is a sort of song without words, like an aria in a “Turkish” opera, the melodies exotic and infectious. The last movement is a breezy, charming, finally laugh-out-loud rondo Vivace.
His piece for Archduke Rudolph, Das Lebewohl, op. 81a in E-flat Major, is one of the few overtly autobiographical works of Beethoven’s life. It can be added to the list of his “characteristic” pieces and to his responses to E-flat major that depart from a heroic tone. The sonata forms a simple story of departure, absence, and return, each movement so labeled in the manner of the Pastoral Symphony, but the music is not as ingenuous as the Pastoral. In any case, what on the surface appears to be an occasional work for a patron becomes a distinctive form, a narrative that as always with Beethoven is addressed not just to a particular occasion but to the ages. The music is inspired by the story, but the story does not entirely generate the music.38
Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph Page 61
