Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph

by Swafford, Jan

  This largely rings true except for the last detail, which Bettina misheard or misremembered. Beethoven might have guessed forty-three for his age; in fact, he was thirty-nine. In her later account of their meeting not all the pianos are legless, because he was playing one of them. She says that he accompanied her back to where she was staying with her half brother Franz Brentano and sister-in-law Antonie. They managed to induce him to play for them. Bettina hardly comments on the music. She goes on to report that for the rest of her stay in Vienna Beethoven came to see her every night.

  In the letter she contrasts Beethoven’s way of working with another composer she has been studying with: “He does not follow Winter’s method, who sets down what first occurs to him; but [Beethoven] first makes a great plan and arranges his music in a certain form in accordance with which he works.”17 Whether Beethoven had told her how he proceeded or she observed it herself, Bettina had grasped one of the central elements of his method: the plan for a piece was made early in the process, and the material he invented had to submit to it.

  Before that matter-of-fact letter, though, Bettina had written Goethe in the rhapsodic mode she reserved for him:

  When I saw him of whom I shall now speak to you, I forgot the whole world . . . It is Beethoven of whom I now wish to tell you, and how he made me forget the world and you . . . I am not mistaken when I say—what no one, perhaps, now understands and believes—he stalks far ahead of the culture of mankind. Shall we ever overtake him? . . .

  Everything that he can tell you about is pure magic, every posture is the organization of a higher existence, and therefore Beethoven feels himself to be the founder of a new sensuous basis in the intellectual life . . .

  He himself said: “When I open my eyes I must sigh, for what I see is contrary to my religion, and I must despise the world which does not know that music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy, the wine which inspires one to new generative processes, and I am the Bacchus who presses out this glorious wine for mankind . . . I know that God is nearer to me than to other artists; I associate with him without fear; I have always recognized and understood him and have no fear for my music . . . Those who understand it must be freed by it from all the other miseries which the others drag about with themselves . . .

  “Speak to Goethe about me . . . tell him to hear my symphonies and he will say that I am right in saying that music is the one incorporeal entrance into the higher world of knowledge which comprehends mankind but which mankind cannot comprehend . . . The encased seed needs the moist, electrically warm soil to sprout, to think, to express itself. Music is the electrical soil in which the mind thinks, lives, feels. Philosophy is a precipitate of the mind’s electrical essence; its needs which seek a basis in primeval principle are elevated by it . . . Thus every real creation of art is independent, more powerful than the artist himself and returns to the divine through its manifestation. It is one with man only in this, that it bears testimony of the mediation of the divine in him . . . Everything electrical stimulates the mind to musical, fluent, out-streaming generation. I am electrical in my nature.”

  Bettina ends, “Last night I wrote down all that he had said; this morning I read it over to him. He remarked: ‘Did I say that? Well, then I had a raptus!’”

  In time those lines written to Goethe became the most celebrated words Beethoven ever spoke about music, a cornerstone of the myth for which Bettina Brentano, E. T. A. Hoffmann, and other high Romantics were laying the foundation. But whose words were they? If they were Beethoven’s, they have a tone of visionary Schwärmerei that he never, as far as history would know, quite wrote or spoke with anyone else: “I am the Bacchus who presses out this glorious wine for mankind.” As a matter of principle, he rarely spoke or wrote about his music at all. In some degree, then, all this has to be the Romantic spirit speaking through Bettina: music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy; it unifies the sensuous and the intellectual; it electrifies and liberates the spirit and the soul.

  And yet, and yet: Bettina adjusted, she embroidered, but not as much as history accused her of. In his heart Beethoven was as extravagantly idealistic as the man she painted, but ordinarily he articulated it only in music. To Goethe she cites his raptus, a word Beethoven and his friends used for his creative seizures. Bettina could have learned about his raptus only from Beethoven, just as he told her about his compositional process. That raises still another provoking, unanswerable question: as Bettina claims, did he actually read over those words of his that she reported to Goethe? If he did not actually speak those high-flown phrases but signed off on them, was he letting her speak for him?18

  There is no way finally to know. When Bettina entered Beethoven’s life, she brought an element of mystery that would endure. But again, while she had a creative sense of reality she did not tend to make up things out of whole cloth. A number of the letters she later published between her and Goethe, and two she said were written to her from Beethoven, did not survive; all of hers to Beethoven were lost. But the Goethe letters she published that did survive reveal that her adjustments were partly to make a better and more coherent story, partly to attribute to him some of her own politics, partly to weave in a fascination with herself more outspoken than Goethe actually expressed.19 The one letter to her from Beethoven that survived is exactly as she published it. In other words, the essence of what she published, invented or not, was not so far from the truth.

  All this is to say that Bettina’s embroideries were founded on an uncommon understanding of the lives and minds of her subjects, interwoven with her conviction that she was born to be adored by great men. Did Beethoven imagine a new integration of the sensuous and the intellectual, or was that Bettina speaking? If those were her words and he read and consented to them, did they strike a chord in him?

  Beethoven had made the acquaintance of an endlessly fascinating and ambitious young woman, a virtuoso muse. How did she feel at this point about him? Was he a friend, a lover, a prospective mate? What can be said for certain is that Bettina made it her project to bring together the two demigods of her acquaintance, Goethe and Beethoven. Beethoven was excited to meet the man he felt to be the greatest of Germans, because he believed poetry to be a higher calling than music. And he had more than one offering to Goethe, not only three lieder on Goethe lyrics but also a new overture and incidental music for the play Egmont. That summer Goethe wrote Bettina saying he and Beethoven might get together at the Karlsbad spa.20 “It would give me great joy,” he concluded, “if Beethoven were to make me a present of the two [sic] songs of mine which he has composed.” (They would be played for him by his friend and musical adviser, composer Carl Friedrich Zelter—in those days not the Beethoven admirer he later became.) Plans for a meeting of the titans went forward sporadically for the next two years.

  Beyond achieving the opening to Goethe, had Beethoven fallen for Bettina? Ordinarily, men who were not frightened by her might well fall for her, and at the time she met Beethoven she was available. But when he met Bettina, in May 1810, Beethoven was not exactly available. He was still in the middle of courting Therese Malfatti, had just written Für Elise for her, was sending her warm letters, had asked Wegeler in Bonn to find his birth certificate in preparation for an offer of marriage. Not until July did he write Gleichenstein, who had been deputized to convey the marriage offer, “My pride is humbled . . . if you would only be more candid.” Around the end of that summer Stephan von Breuning wrote Wegeler, “I believe his marriage project has fallen through.”21

  All these frustrations and uncertainties contribute to an accumulating mystery. Even for Beethoven, whose emotions were as fickle as the breeze, it was not like him to fall in love with one woman while he was seriously courting another. At the same time, it is hard to imagine he was not fascinated by Bettina. However these questions took shape in his mind, however much Bettina had to do with it, that spring and summer he began an emotional odyssey that came to its bitter climax in
the spa of Teplitz in the summer of 1812.

  Another part of the emotional turmoil of those months was that through Bettina, Beethoven met another woman who would become important to him. He may already have known Antonie Brentano, Bettina’s sister-in-law, through her family in Vienna.22 Antonie, called Toni, had been born Antonie Birkenstock, daughter of a distinguished Austrian statesman and art collector. As so often happened in those days, her father married her off to a prosperous man fifteen years older, Frankfurt merchant Franz Brentano. He was half brother of Bettina and Clemens, to both of whom Antonie became close. As corollary of the familiar, sad story, Antonie’s was a largely loveless marriage, though it amounted to less of a disaster than Beethoven’s old love Josephine Deym’s two marriages, or the misery of the womanizing Prince Lichnowsky’s home life.

  Antonie Brentano at least appreciated her husband, called him “the best of all men,” but she felt no passion for him.23 Franz was absorbed in his business and often went back to the office after dinner. She hated living in drab Frankfurt and longed for her hometown of Vienna. As the years went by she slipped into a trance of frustration and sorrow. Clemens Brentano wrote in 1802, “Toni is like a glass of water that has been left standing for a long while.” From 1806 on, her health declined; she was tormented by headaches and a nervous condition. She wrote to Bettina’s sister, “A deathly silence reigns within my soul.”24 In only one of her several portraits is there a hint of a smile trying to break through. The earliest portrait, painted when she was twenty-eight, just after her marriage, shows a melancholy beauty with a long, pale neck.25 Not so charitably, Bettina wrote in 1807, “Toni . . . has rouged and painted herself like a stage set, as though impersonating a haughty ruin overlooking the Rhine toward which a variety of romantic scenes advance while she remains wholly sunk in loneliness and abstraction.”26

  In 1809, Antonie’s father lay dying. She moved to Vienna with her four children, back into the grand house of her childhood that was crammed with art and memorabilia. Franz followed and set up a branch of his business in town. There were concerts and parties. After connecting with the couple through Bettina, Beethoven became a regular visitor and played piano regularly, something people found increasingly harder to coax him into.

  It was Antonie’s task, after her father died, to organize his collection, get myriad items appraised, and auction them off. The process took more than three years. The whole time she dreaded the return to Frankfurt that would come when the house was empty. In that period, she recalled late in life, her main consolation was Beethoven. She had touched his abiding vein of empathy—at least that, if not something deeper in him. They found a “tender friendship,” she recalled. He would “come regularly, seat himself at a pianoforte in her anteroom without a word, and improvise. After he had finished ‘telling her everything and bringing comfort’ in his language, he would go as he had come.” He presented her with manuscripts including the song An die Geliebte (To the Beloved). The manuscript bears a note in her hand: “Requested by me from the author on March 2, 1812.”27

  Antonie was not the only admired woman friend Beethoven comforted with music in a time of sorrow whether or not he felt a romantic interest in them. He did the same with Baroness Dorothea Ertmann, who was not an intimate but a pianist he admired. What sort of intimacy did Antonie and Beethoven form in this hectic period when on top of his work he hopelessly courted Therese Malfatti and met Bettina Brentano, all while coping with overlapping illnesses? What place in his heart was open to ailing, melancholy Toni? Was it love and hope for reciprocation? He knew and liked her businessman husband Franz. Was he capable of making a play for the wife of a friend, even if the marriage was unhappy? The unanswerable questions of his relations with Antonie Brentano only intensify the mystery of those years that for him were brimming with pain and disappointment, perhaps also touched by hope.

  If Beethoven was not a Romantic artist setting out mainly to express himself, it is still hard not to connect his emotional storms of 1810 with the String Quartet in F Minor, completed that summer and eventually published as op. 95. It is one of the singular works of his life. After the warm and engaging Harp Quartet of the previous year, now he produced a challenge and an enigma. There was no commission; op. 95 is dedicated not to an exalted patron but to his old Viennese helper Baron Zmeskall. It is one of the handful of works to which he gave titles: Quartetto serioso.

  The Serioso is beyond “bold,” deeper than “experimental.” For Beethoven F minor seems to have been a darkly expressive key, more raw, more nakedly tragic than tumultuous C minor. It is the key of the Appassionata, of the dungeon scene in Fidelio, of the overture to Goethe’s Egmont written that year. The distilled essence of his sense of F minor is the first movement of the Serioso, which seems to involve something on the order of a confrontation between love and rage.

  A simple description may be the best representation in words. A grinding furioso phrase answered by a violent silence. An eruption of stark octaves in jolting dotted rhythms. Another glowering silence. A wrenching harmonic jump from F minor to G-flat major, the key of the Neapolitan chord but in a tender phrase, quickly shattered by the return of the furioso figure.28 After a first theme of twenty bars, which contain those three distinct, starkly contrasting ideas with only silence as transition, there is a short bridge to a second theme in D-flat major that sounds evanescent, breathless, unreal.29

  That moment of melting beauty is again invaded by the grinding figure and by the intrusion of uprushing fortissimo scales in inexplicable keys.30 In this movement there is more confrontation than transition, no normal key relations, wrenching jumps from key to key, the sonata form so condensed as to be desiccated. There is no repeat of the exposition before the development, because in this movement the material is always volatile, all development. At the same time the music cannot escape from the opening furioso figure, which grinds through most of the twenty-two bars of a truncated development. The coda jumps from F minor to D-flat major, rising to a scream and a fall to exhaustion.

  A startling jump from F minor to D major, beginning with an enigmatic lone cello stride, begins the Allegretto ma non troppo second movement. Its main theme is of a profound but fragile beauty.31 In its middle comes a strange fugue whose falling chromatic subject feels like an endless descent into melancholy. Among fugues it is one of the most poignant, a quality rarely heard in that disciplined contrapuntal form.

  There is no slow movement, nor a scherzo or minuet. In meter and tempo the third movement stands in place of a scherzo. So that there can be no mistake about its import, it is marked Allegro assai vivace ma serioso, very lively but seriously. The movement has an aggressive drive, with its relentless dotted rhythms and blunt silences. In contrast, the two trios are lyrical and soaring, recalling in their tone and keys (G-flat and D-flat) the tender moments of the first movement.

  A softly poignant phrase introduces an Allegro agitato finale that is nearly as tight and taut as the first movement. Its main theme begins curt, desiccated, half made of rests, until it reaches a surging, quietly agitated song. The penultimate page dies into silence, stasis, whispers. Then as perhaps the strangest stroke of all comes a coda that seems intended to wipe away all sadness. It is a burst of F-major ebullience like the end of a comic opera, yet still short and curt, ending with an uprushing scale that recalls the peculiar ones in the first movement. If the coda is a resolution to hope, it is an oddly choked-off one—but hope all the same.

  Whether the fury and the tenuous moments of hope in the Serioso represent Beethoven’s state of mind that year is another of that year’s elusive questions. But there is no question that the Serioso sounds like a cry from the soul. In 1810, he had experienced his second devastating marriage rejection. At the same time, in two new women acquaintances, both of them named Brentano, he perhaps found some possibility of the emotional and family life he yearned for. He knew this quartet was going to be a puzzle for listeners, perhaps enough to do him harm. He did not publ
ish it for six years and in an 1816 letter made an extraordinary declaration: “The Quartet is written for a small circle of connoisseurs and is never to be performed in public.”32

  In any case, if the Serioso is a cry from the soul that seemed to him too intimate to be made public, it is a tightly disciplined cry, a systematic experiment with the musical norms and forms Beethoven in­herited. In that respect it amounts to something he could not have understood yet: a prophecy of music he was going to be writing a decade later. Surely the music of that coming decade rose in part from the issues and feelings of the Serioso brewing in his mind.

  In his work Beethoven was entering a protracted search for a second New Path, a new vision of the nature and purpose of music—which is to say, a new vision of the human. Whether or not he ever realized it, the Serioso was a clue, a step toward that path. But more than ever before, his struggle toward a new vision would have to be carried on alongside a still more grueling struggle with his health, his hearing, his state of mind.

  If 1810 was fertile for Beethoven, his productivity still did not approach the all-but-superhuman years before 1808 and never did again. Except for the Serioso, which had no immediate ramifications, there were no great bold strides but rather works exercising the imagination and mastery he could always rely on.

  The less music he wrote, meanwhile, the more letters. As always most of them were practical, like the prodding one of this year to Viennese piano maker Johann Andreas Streicher, who apparently had asked for endorsements: