Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph

by Swafford, Jan

  Finally, with no enemy to fight and winter coming on, Napoleon had no choice but to retreat with his gigantic and unwieldy army. Tsar Alexander enforced a ruthless and devastatingly effective scorched-earth policy in the path of the French as they struggled west in the brutal cold. The retreating troops began to die in the tens of thousands from freezing, starvation, disease, and enemy harassment. Napoleon had lost battles before, but by the time this campaign guttered out, the greatest self-made conqueror in history had directed, in statistical terms, one of the worst military debacles in history. As many as four hundred thousand of his army were dead. The conqueror was no longer invincible; he was running out of soldiers. His enemies stirred again.

  In June 1813, Napoleon and the Austrian foreign minister, Clemens von Metternich, made an attempt at negotiation in Dresden. A few days before, a French army fleeing Madrid had been shattered near the town of Vittoria by the duke of Wellington’s Anglo-Portuguese forces. The battle effectively marked the end of the Peninsular War that had been boiling since 1808, and so ended French rule in Spain. The constant drain of men and matériel in that war turned out, in the end, to be the main engine of Napoleon’s downfall. “It was that miserable Spanish affair,” he said later, “that killed me.”71

  Metternich knew his opponent intimately from his years as ambassador in Paris; that intimacy had included an affair with Napoleon’s sister, among other adventures. Later as a minister back in Vienna, Metternich conceived and engineered the marriage of Napoleon and Marie-Louise, daughter of his emperor, which provided Napoleon with a son and heir. Metternich was not a general, but he was every bit as wily and treacherous a tactician as his opposite. In person and in power, Metternich would survive Napoleon by many years.

  At this moment, Metternich knew something the Frenchman did not realize yet: in the game of conquest, Napoleon had put most of his remaining cards on the table in Spain and Russia, and he had lost. In Paris, Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand, a trusted adviser of Napoleon, had in fact been spying for the enemy for years; he assured Metternich of broad French support for Austrian demands. (Talleyrand had also been keeping Metternich apprised of secret military orders sent to French commanders.) No one could have precisely known or believed it yet, but Napoleon was headed on a trajectory toward a nondescript village near Brussels called Waterloo, whose absurd name was going to be, for the rest of history, a symbol of ultimate defeat.

  The encounter in Dresden raged for nine hours and got nowhere. If France wanted a peace treaty, Metternich demanded, it would return Austrian and German territories that amounted to everything France had conquered since 1796. Pacing up and down, Napoleon ranted, bullied, cajoled. “So you want war? Well, you shall have it . . . I know how to die . . . but I shall never cede one inch of territory.” Knowing he held the cards, Metternich stayed calm. In a transport of rage, Napoleon threw his hat across the room and cried, “You know nothing of what goes on in a soldier’s mind! I grew up on the field of battle, and a man such as I cares little for the lives of a million men!” Metternich replied that he wished the whole of France could hear what Napoleon had just said. He reminded the general of his stupendous losses in Russia. Napoleon waved that away. Most of the dead, he declared, were only Poles and Germans, not French.

  There Metternich lost his composure: “You forget, sire, that you are addressing a German!”

  “I may lose my throne,” Napoleon snarled, “but I shall bury the whole world in its ruins.”

  “Sire,” replied Metternich, “you are a lost man.”72

  Having overseen a decade of negotiations with Napoleon including his marriage into the Austrian ruling family, the elegant, indolent, handsome, womanizing, utterly ruthless Clemens von Metternich was now going to lead the movement to erase Napoleon from power. Then he would lead the attempt to erase from the world everything Napoleon had done and stood for. The military part of it resolved the next October. In the Battle of Leipzig, Napoleon’s 185,000 men fought off 320,000 allied troops for three days before being forced into retreat. Beethoven’s old admirer and former French general Jean Bernadotte, now crown prince of Sweden, led the Swedish contingent against the French. This defeat was the end of the French Empire east of the Rhine and the effective deathblow for Napoleon’s career as a conqueror. The next objective for the allies was Paris.

  For Beethoven perhaps all this was mainly an annoyance that delayed his mail and his annuity payments. But he entered this tide of history as a sideshow when a brilliant inventor and forthright huckster named Johann Nepomuk Maelzel approached him with a proposal to compose a piece for a mechanical instrument he had built. The music was to depict in the most graphic possible terms Wellington’s victory over the French in Spain. Beethoven agreed immediately. In the abyss of the greatest depression of his life to date, this outlandish commission galvanized the period of his artistic nadir, and also the greatest triumph of his life.

  26

  We Finite Beings

  THE YEARS 1814–15 would be splendid for Beethoven’s fortune and fame, but his depression was hard to crack. He was still harried by illness, and his yearly stipend from the three aristocrats—Kinsky now dead, Lobkowitz teetering on bankruptcy—had become a millstone. “Oh, fatal decree, as seductive as a siren,” he wrote in one of his laments to friends. “To resist it I should have had my ears plugged with wax and my arms bound fast, like Ulysses, to prevent me from signing.”1 The stipend that had been intended to give him freedom to work had become a snare preventing him from working.

  Desperate for cash, Beethoven succumbed to Johann Nepomuk Maelzel’s temptation of a battle piece, which as a genre was a cliché of clichés. In those days, major military engagements were regularly fought over again in the concert hall. Trained in music, Maelzel was the son of an organ builder, which perhaps explains his gift for mechanisms. The eighteenth century had seen a craze for “living machines,” the most famous of them Vaucanson’s mechanical duck, which appeared to eat food, then to digest and excrete it. After Maelzel came to Vienna in 1792, he taught music and pursued his mechanical inventions, including spectacular effects for local theaters. For a production of Haydn’s Seasons he engineered snow, avalanches, rain, thunder, and lightning.2 Maelzel purchased the celebrated chess-playing “Turk” of Wolfgang von Kempelen. This apparently all-but-supernatural machine was a fraud: the clockwork Turk could move chess pieces around a board well enough, but the actual playing was done by a small human chess master concealed in the base. After the Battle of Wagram, Napoleon had a round with the Turk at the Schönbrunn Palace.3

  For years Maelzel experimented with devices for keeping time in music. For an article in a Vienna paper, his current version, called the chronometer, was endorsed by Beethoven, Hummel, and Salieri, among others.4 It evolved into the classic Maelzel metronome, used under his name for the next two centuries. One of the most elaborate of his inventions was the Panharmonicon, a mechanical orchestra with imitations of strings, brass, winds, and percussion, powered by bellows and played by means of revolving cylinders, like a music box. Its first repertoire included pieces by Haydn, Handel, and Cherubini.5 The device made Maelzel famous; he was named imperial court mechanician.

  At some point Beethoven and Maelzel had gotten acquainted in Vienna. Beethoven liked to visit Maelzel’s workshop and watch him fashion his contraptions.6 For his new friend Maelzel made four ear trumpets, ranging from simple horns to more fanciful and probably useless designs. After the duke of Wellington’s Anglo-Portuguese army ended French rule in Spain at the Battle of Vittoria, Maelzel primed Beethoven with the idea of writing a commemorative piece for his Panharmonicon. The result was a victory symphony that set Maelzel’s machine whooping, piping, and drumming at the limit of its capacity. Contemplating the results, the two men settled on the idea of using that music as the conclusion of a more extensive orchestral piece whose instruments would include artillery and small arms. With the inevitable success of this orchestral Wellington’s Victory; or, The Battle of Vitt
oria in hand, Maelzel could take the Panharmonicon on the road with the “Victory Symphony.” Maelzel made various suggestions about the orchestral version, including its realistic bugle calls. How much of the final product was Maelzel’s and how much Beethoven’s is not clear. That question was a dispute waiting to happen, and soon enough it did.7 “It is certain,” Beethoven wrote in the Tagebuch, “that one writes most prettily when one writes for the public, also that one writes rapidly.” He seemed not to mind composing the piece with Maelzel looking over his shoulder.

  The premiere took place in December 1813, at a benefit concert for the war wounded that coincided with the approach of the largest diplomatic conclave in history, the Congress of Vienna. University Hall was crowded and ready for excitement, less for the new Seventh Symphony than for the patriotic pandemonium that Wellington’s Victory promised. For another novelty, Maelzel’s mechanical trumpeter played a couple of marches accompanied by the orchestra.8 The musicians looked at the show as a grand lark. Beethoven’s old friend and celebrated virtuoso Domenico Dragonetti stood in the bass section, longtime champion Ignaz Schuppanzigh headed the violins, Louis Spohr sat in the violin section. Composers Antonio Salieri and Johann Nepomuk Hummel handled the big drums that represented cannons, and future famed opera composer Giacomo Meyerbeer pounded a bass drum. Laughing, Beethoven recounted that he had to give Meyerbeer what for, because he was always late: “I could do nothing with him; he did not have the courage to strike on the beat!”9 Besides the drums standing in for cannons, the performances also required special rattles that were used in theaters to represent musket fire.

  The score was another of Beethoven’s last-minute sprints in the tradition of Christus am Ölberge and the Choral Fantasy. In Wellington’s Victory, two wind-and-brass bands plus strings represent the French and British forces. In the battle section, each side has its cannons and each its own tune: Rule Brittania in E-flat for the British, Malbrouk in C for the French.10 One after another the armies are pictured marching into place announced by drums and fanfares and their respective marches (all realistic in the day of parade-ground battles). Then, insofar as is possible with an orchestra and a battery of drums and rattles, all hell breaks loose.

  Call Wellington’s Victory the ultimate parody and nadir of Beethoven’s heroic style.11 There are three phases to it: battle, charge, and “Victory Symphony.” In the first two sections the muskets and cannons rattle and roar—each explosion precisely marked in the score—and meanwhile the orchestra rages, modulating furiously and making itself heard as best it can. It is a battle of guns and bands: in the course of the hullabaloo the British guns, march, fanfares, and key of E-flat major overcome the French equivalents, and the battle gutters to a close with scattered gunfire from the British. Call the ensuing “Victory Symphony” a low-rent rehash of the familiar Beethovenian joyous finish, featuring God Save the King in glory and, near the end, as a fugue. “I want to show the British what a treasure they have in ‘God Save the King,’” Beethoven wrote in the Tagebuch. All in all, Wellington’s Victory is a colossal piece of opportunistic, gimmicky, fortissimo hokum, which is to say that it is exactly what Beethoven intended it to be. He wrote most of the notes, but the inspiration and the spirit came from Maelzel the huckster. Beethoven remained the consummate professional; he knew how to produce twaddle on demand.12 The Viennese went berserk over it.

  While many of the cognoscenti took the piece as good patriotic fun, others were troubled by it. Czech pianist Johann Wenzel Toma­schek was present at the premiere and found himself “very painfully affected to see a Beethoven, whom Providence had probably assigned to the highest throne in the realm of music, among the rudest materialists. I was told, it is true, that he himself had declared the work to be folly, and that he liked it only because with it he had thoroughly thrashed the Viennese.” Tomaschek voiced his regret to Beethoven’s friend Sonnleithner, who replied that “the crowd would have enjoyed it even more if their own empty heads had been thumped the same way.” In his usual laconic fashion, Beethoven largely declined comment on Wellington’s Victory and promoted it vigorously to patrons and publishers. But he had no illusions about it. Years afterward he scrawled on a condemnation of the piece in a journal: “Nothing but an occasional work . . . Ah you pitiful scoundrel, my shit is better than anything you’ve ever thought.”

  If the applause for the Seventh Symphony at its premiere was less thunderous than that for Wellington’s Victory, it was still received more noisily than any symphonic premiere of Beethoven’s life to that time—part of the reason being that this time the orchestra was well prepared. During rehearsals, the violins had balked at a passage in the Seventh, called it too hard, refused to play it. Instead of erupting in rage, Beethoven told them to take the music home and practice, and it would work. The violinists did as directed, the next day the passage went well, and everybody was pleased with the results.13

  Beethoven had finished the Seventh in 1812, four years after the Sixth. Since he required each symphony to be a leap in a new direction from what he had previously done, for the new one he again took a tack no one could have predicted. In the Bonaparte/Eroica Symphony he had attached a work to the dominating spirit of the age and to the coming of the ideal society as the gift of a benevolent despot. In the Fifth Symphony he turned his subject inward, to an evocation of each person’s struggle and triumph. The Sixth was likewise inward, the experience of nature and its divine essence. If not the heroic or the sublime, what would he do for the Seventh? Less than at any point in his lifetime was there a progressive spirit alive in the age, a great hope to evoke in a great symphony. Beethoven was turning away from the heroic style and from that ethos—but turning toward what, he did not know yet.

  In the Seventh Symphony in A Major, op. 92, he took another humanistic direction, not contemporary but eternal: a kind of Bacchic trance, dance music from beginning to end. By all accounts Beethoven was a laughable dancer in person, completely unable to stay on the beat, but here he proposed to dance for the ages. With that he again touched his roots in the Viennese Classical style, because the Seventh rises from something innate in it. The music of Haydn and Mozart and their time is often laid out in dance patterns, dance phrasing and rhythms.14 But that hardly encompasses the Seventh. It dances unlike any symphony before, dances in obsessive rhythms fast and slow. Nothing as decorous as a minuet here. Rather it’s shouting horns and strings skirling like bagpipes. The last movement resembles a Scottish reel. Whether there was a direct connection in Beethoven’s mind of the dancing Seventh to the Viennese passion for dancing is impossible to say, but it turned out that quality and its general ebullience made the symphony a reflection of the celebrating and dancing Congress of Vienna.

  The Seventh begins with an expansive, grandiose, even Napoleonic introduction, the longest Beethoven ever wrote. It is the magisterial overture for the dances to come. From the introduction’s slow-striding opening theme many other melodies will grow. But mostly the introduction defines the symphony in brash and audacious harmonies, with a tendency to leap from key to key by nudging the bass up or down a notch. (The opening harmonic move from I to V6 will have echoes throughout in the symphony’s massive bass lines. The moaning chromatic basses in the first-movement coda are an expansion of that opening move.)15 The introduction defines key relationships striking for the time but by now thumbprints of Beethoven: around the central key of A major he places F major and C major, keys a third up and a third down. That group of keys will persist through the symphony, added to them D major, another third down from F.

  A coy transition from the introduction leads into the first-movement Vivace, quiet at first but with mounting excitement. The Vivace is a titanic gigue. This is Beethoven’s third symphony in a row whose first movement is dominated by a monorhythm. Its dotted figure is as relentless as the Fifth Symphony’s tattoo, as mesmerizing as the Sixth’s loping rhythms, but now the effect is propulsive and intoxicating rather than fateful like the Fifth or gentle like
the Sixth. Rhythm plays a more central role than melody here, though there is a piping folk tune in residence. The second theme amounts to a passing interlude before the first theme is picked up again. The development proper has no real theme at all; it’s scales, arpeggios, and rhythm. The music is steadily engaged in its quick changes of key in startling directions, everything propelled by the élan of the rhythm. From the first time one hears the symphony one never forgets the lusty and rollicking horns, which at the time were valveless instruments pitched high in A. Low, epic basses and shouting horns: these are the distinctive voices in an orchestral sound more massive and bright than in any of his earlier symphonies (each with its own orchestral color).

  Also few listeners forget the first time they hear the stately and mournful, sui generis dance of the second movement, in A minor.16 It was a hit from its first performance. Here commences, as much as in any single piece, the history of Romantic orchestral music. The idea is a process of intensification, adding layer on layer to the inexorably marching chords in the low strings (with their poignant mix of major and minor) until the music rises to a sweeping, sorrowful lament. Once again, in a slowish movement now, the music is animated by an irresistible momentum. For contrast comes a sweet, harmonically stable B section in A major (plus C major, a third up). Rondo-like, the opening theme returns in variations, lightened, turned into a fughetta, the last variation serving as coda.17