Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph

by Swafford, Jan

  The scherzo is racing, eruptive, giddy. Its main theme, beginning in F major and ending up a third in A, from one flat to three sharps in a flash, echoes harmonic patterns set up in the first pages of the symphony. The music is back to brash shifts of key animated by relentless rhythm. The trio, in D major (a third down from F), provides maximum contrast, presenting a kind of majestic tableau around an A drone, frozen in harmony and gesture like a painting of a ballroom. The trio returns twice and feints at a third time before Beethoven slams the door.

  The intention of the Allegro con brio finale is to ratchet the energy higher than it has yet been. Few pieces attain the brio of this one. If earlier we had exuberance, stateliness, brilliance, those moods of dance, now we have something on the edge of delirium: a stamping, whirling two-beat reel, with the horns in high spirits again. Does any other symphonic movement sweep listeners off their feet and take their breath away so nearly literally as this one? Perhaps the most intoxicating moment in the finale is the closing section of the exposition in C-sharp minor, with its natural-minor B surging against the simultaneous harmonic-minor B-sharp. The symphony ends with the horns shouting for joy.

  Among musicians the Seventh became famous for the daring and freshness of its modulations and the unity of its key scheme with its chain of thirds, C, A, F, and D major the central ones. Beethoven always had reasons for his keys in a piece, and this is one of his most subtle. Those four tonalities are chosen not just to make a dazzling effect. The keys C, A, F, and D major have three and only three notes in common: A, D, and E—the tonic, subdominant, and dominant notes of A major. Which is to say that Beethoven made his central complex of keys related by thirds into a symphonic expansion of the three most important notes in his home key of A major.18 (Whether by coincidence or design, E, D, and A are also the first three downbeat notes in the vivace theme of the first movement.)

  Among Beethoven’s symphonies, the Seventh also marks the point when he largely left behind the heroic style and ethos. It is his first symphony since the Second to have no overt sense of dramatic narrative—something he was also slipping away from. Instead of narrative unity there is a unity of theme: the moods of dance.19 One senses the influence of Beethoven’s folk-song settings on the piece, including the “Scotch-snap” rhythm in the first-movement theme. More specifically, the main theme of the finale echoes his arrangement of the Irish tune Nora Creina that he made for Thomson. At the conclusion of that 6/8 folk tune—as much fiddle tune as song—Beethoven added this tag of his own:

  From Travis, Celtic Elements

  For the finale of the Seventh he turned that idea into 2/4 to make his main theme:

  So the dozens of folk tunes Beethoven was “scribbling”—his term—in those years to pay the rent were also, surely as he hoped, turning out to be useful in his more ambitious music. Of course, for an artist anything is potential material: an emotion felt or endured, a book read, a person or a tune encountered, suffering emotional or physical.

  The premiere of the Seventh and Wellington’s Victory under Beethoven’s baton was one of the most triumphant moments of his career before the public. For the first of many times, the audience demanded an encore of the slow movement of the Seventh. The orchestra was fiery and inspired, suppressing their giggles at Beethoven’s antics on the podium. The paper reported from the audience “a general pleasure that rose to ecstasy.” By popular demand, the concert was repeated four days later, with Maelzel’s mechanical trumpeter again on hand. The celebratory music played into the celebration of Napoleon’s fall and hopes for the end of so many years of war. The Seventh went on to become one of the most popular items in Beethoven’s portfolio, issued in transcriptions for everything from two pianos and piano four hands to string quartet, piano trio, winds, and septet.20 The two performances garnered 4,006 florins for wounded veterans.21 Beethoven sent a copy of Wellington’s Victory, with its hallelujahs for England and the king, to the prince regent in England with a dedication, hoping the future king would respond generously.22

  True, the trashy and opportunistic Wellington’s Victory got the most applause. It also set the tone of much of the music Beethoven was to write in the coming months. No amount of success could save him from rankling illness and creative uncertainty. Nor did the Seventh make clear the new path he was searching for. But for the moment he was not too proud to bask a little, to look forward to handsome proceeds from his own benefit concerts, even to enjoy with a sardonic laugh the splendid success of the bad piece and the merely bright prospects of the good one. The Seventh Symphony after all celebrates the dance, which lives in the ecstatic and heedless moment.

  Beethoven told Goethe he believed that artists mainly want applause, and he was receiving extraordinary applause these days. It hardly lightened his mood. Soon after the triumphant charity concert he wrote yet another lawyer yet another rant about the stipend and the detestable Viennese and, for good measure, his brother Carl, over an issue that is not recorded:

  Many a time indeed I have cursed that wretched decree for having brought innumerable sorrows upon me . . . the best course would be to hand in the application first to the Landrechte [the court for the nobility]. Please do your share and don’t let me perish. In everything I undertake in Vienna I am surrounded by innumerable enemies. I am on the verge of despair—My brother, whom I have loaded with benefits, and owing partly to whose deliberate action I myself am financially embarrassed, is—my greatest enemy! Kiss Gloschek for me. Tell him that my experiences and my sufferings, since he last saw me, would fill a book.23

  Around the same time, he wrote his old patron and delinquent stipend contributor Prince Lobkowitz, then the object of some of his legal initiatives, “The profound regard which for a very long time I have sincerely cherished for Your Highness, has in no wise been affected by the measures which dire necessity has compelled me to adopt.”24 In Beethoven’s recent letters to others, Lobkowitz had been the “princely rogue” and “Prince Fizlypuzly.”25 Lobkowitz had known Beethoven long enough not to expect much gratitude.

  Right after the premieres Beethoven got busy producing another concert, this one for his own benefit, in the large Redoutensaal of the Hofburg. It was to include a dramatic coup in the style of Wellington’s Victory. “All would be well,” he wrote Zmeskall, “if the curtain were there, but without it the aria will be a failure. . .Without a curtain or something of the kind its whole significance will be lost!—lost!—lost! . . . The Empress has not said yes [to attending] but neither has she said no—Curtain!!!!” For this concert of January 2, 1814, Beethoven included a bass aria from The Ruins of Athens. At the end of the aria a curtain was to sweep aside revealing a bust of Austrian emperor Franz I, the effect sure to bring down the house. The benefit repeated Wellington’s Victory, already a sensation in Vienna.

  This time Beethoven’s berserk conducting nearly ran aground because he could hear so little of what he was directing. The orchestra had gotten used to the idea that he was going to swell up in the loud passages and more or less disappear under the music stand in soft ones. But when he got lost and jumped up at a soft moment and sank to his knee at a loud one, confusion and hilarity threatened. House Kapellmeister Michael Umlauf, prepared for this sort of thing, stepped behind Beethoven and restored order. When Beethoven realized the orchestra was not following him anymore, it is reported that he produced a smile. Amused? Embarrassed? Horrified? After the concert he placed a notice in the newspaper thanking “the most admirable and celebrated artists of the city” for their contribution to a splendidly successful evening.26 Among the listeners at the concert was young violinist Anton Schindler, who met Beethoven this year when he delivered a note from violinist Ignaz Schuppanzigh. They met occasionally in the next years. It is not clear at what point Schindler determined to make a career out of his connection to the great man, to become what Beethoven called “an importunate hanger-on.”27

  This last concert produced considerable proceeds and inaugurated what in financial a
nd critical terms became the most profitable year of Beethoven’s life. The immediate practical result was that three singers from the court opera approached him about a revival of Fidelio, and George Friedrich Treitschke, manager of the Kärntnertor Theater, signed on to the idea. Treitschke had seen the first version, had been part of the group who pressured Beethoven to do the initial revision. Beethoven agreed to the revival but insisted on making many changes first, with Treitschke’s help.28 This time he found the ideal collaborator. Treitschke was a man of the theater; he had begun as an actor and went on to be a playwright and manager.29 As usual the project mushroomed and became another cross for Beethoven to bear, but the results for his orphaned opera were enormous. At least now there appeared a detectable lightening in his mood. He wrote his friend Count Franz Brunsvik in Buda of the recent successes, declaring, “In this way I shall gradually work my way out of my misery . . . My opera is also going to be staged, but I am revising it a good deal . . . As for me, why good heavens, my kingdom is in the air. As the wind often does, so do harmonies whirl around me, and so do things often whirl about too in my soul.”30

  A new wrangle in his endless series of them was with Maelzel. Because the inventor had originated the idea for Wellington’s Victory and contributed ideas for the orchestral version, he naturally felt that he had a stake in the music. When Beethoven refused to give him a score for out-of-town performances, Maelzel stole some orchestral parts and put on the piece in Munich. From his point of view, it was a matter of Beethoven’s intending to keep all future profits from the orchestral version for himself—as indeed Beethoven did.31 From Beethoven this sort of thing usually brought out the heavy artillery. First he cancelled a newspaper statement that included more thanks to Maelzel.32 Then he went to the courts. To a lawyer in Vienna he sent a massive, point-by-point statement of the kind that was to become a specialty of his. Among other things, it claimed that Maelzel’s hearing aids were useless; in fact Beethoven often used one or two of them.33 In the end, the dispute with Maelzel stalled and never came to the dock.

  The Beethoven vogue in Vienna continued to run high. While juggling his legal wrangles over Maelzel and the stipend, he continued to satisfy the demand. The end of February 1814 saw another successful concert for his own benefit, which like all his concerts (except the ones with Maelzel’s help) he produced, financed, rehearsed, and conducted himself. It repeated the Seventh Symphony and Wellington’s Victory and introduced the Eighth Symphony, op. 93.

  Like the Sixth, the Eighth is a sort of vacation, this time into the past: a beautiful, brief, ironic look backward to Haydn and Mozart. Like the Sixth it is in F major, often a high-spirited key for Beethoven. Here is another symphony, like the Second and Fourth, with an operatic atmosphere. It begins with a grandly dancing 3/4 theme that sets up a movement relaxed and good-humored (it was originally a sketch for a piano concerto that he diverted into a symphony).34 If the themes and style recall the eighteenth century, he made the orchestral sound big and rich—on the way toward the sound of his next symphony. In keeping, the forces he arranged for his February 1814 concert were huge: eighteen each at first and second violins, fourteen violas, twelve cellos, seven basses, and winds to match. As usual, about half were paid professionals, the rest amateurs who played for the pleasure of it.

  Only part of the humor of the Eighth rests on its surface. Much of it is comedy for connoisseurs. The second theme takes the stage with a dancing gait on an inexplicable C-sharp, leading to a second theme in the (according to tradition) “wrong” key of D major. This is a third down from F, like the kinds of key relations by thirds he wielded in the Seventh, but the game here is quite different. Soon the second theme rights itself into C major, the “proper” key for the second theme in an F-major piece, and the music proceeds with its lacy and ironic little tune. A development mainly given to fortissimo blasts of the opening theme on changing harmonies flows smoothly into a much-varied recapitulation and a long, developmental coda in which that errant C-sharp, sometimes masquerading as D-flat, keeps turning up.35

  The short second movement is one of the most Mozartian outings he had written in years. Its ticktock tread and its theme conjure up Haydn’s Clock Symphony and no less the gait and personality of one of Mozart’s comic sidekicks—say, Leporello in Don Giovanni. That the third movement returns for the first time in a Beethoven symphony to the eighteenth-century minuet is another clue to his intentions. It looks back at the old courtly dance with music robust rather than delicate, freed of frills but still in the kind of trance of nostalgia that marks this symphony: Beethoven, with epics and tragedies behind him, looking over music itself with serene benevolence.

  The lighthearted atmosphere carries into the scurrying, capering finale, in form a mingling of sonata and rondo. It includes one of the most elaborate of his jokes (again, a joke for the initiated). Having largely stayed out of sight in the middle movements, the errant C-sharp of the first movement returns as a rude offbeat blat in the basses.36 Here, according to Beethovenian musical logic, is a gesture that must have consequences. The joke is that it has no consequences. It just keeps blundering into the main theme like a drunken uncle at a party. Which is to say, here Beethoven lampoons his own craftsmanship.

  Still, the payoff has to come sooner or later. After an unprecedented second development section that continues to ignore the C-sharp, Beethoven convinces us that the piece is coming to a close. About the time the audience are reaching for their coats, the drunken uncle runs amok. The errant blat returns as D-flat, wrenching the music into the key of D-flat; then again as C-sharp, turning the music to C-sharp minor; then again as the dominant of F-sharp minor, forcing the music into a potentially catastrophic clash—because the brasses, still tuned to F major, are picking up their instruments. Just as a horrendous tonal pileup looms, the music simply slips down from F-sharp minor to F major with the entry of the brass. Much of the rest of the music is F-major chords rendered droll by what came before. Here in a comic context is another example of the way Beethoven invests a single element, this time a simple tonic chord, with a significance that resonates with everything that came before.

  In its premiere, though, the Eighth did not find much resonance with listeners, especially in the company of the Seventh Symphony and Wellington’s Victory. Those pieces played into the mood of celebration after decades of war. The audience was not in the mood for subtlety and nostalgia. The new symphony, reported the Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung, “did not create a furor”; at the same time, the reviewer called the second movement of the Seventh “the crown of modern instrumental music.” He was generous enough to suggest that if the Eighth were not presented following the more showy Seventh, it might succeed.37 Czerny said that on hearing a report that the Eighth had not been received as well as the Seventh, Beethoven growled, “That’s because it’s so much better!”38 Did he mean that? He probably meant it when he said it and contradicted it later. As for the audience response, besides the problem of the Eighth being flanked by more splashy works, his audience was apt to be disappointed now when they found Beethoven not being “Beethovenian” enough.

  Still, he appreciated applause from whatever quarter. It became a favorite story of his that after the concert when he was walking on the Kahlenberg above Vienna, two young girls gave him some cherries, and when he offered to pay, one of them said, “I’ll take nothing from you. We saw you in the Redoutensaal when we heard your beautiful music.”39

  In the spring of 1814, going furiously at the revision of Fidelio for its revival, Beethoven had little time to take note that on March 30 the French Senate, under duress by the allies, voted to dethrone Napoleon and place the Bourbon dynasty back on the throne. The porcine and obtuse Louis XVIII prepared to reclaim his dynasty’s glory. Symbolically, the return of the French monarchy was the final negation of the Revolution that had tried to wipe aristocracy from the earth.

  The previous autumn’s Battle of Leipzig had been the defeat that appeared to finish o
ff Napoleon. Paris was next. On March 31, Tsar Alexander I, dubbed “the Great Liberator” after the Russian campaign, rode with his teeming retinue through the streets of the French capital. First came the tsar’s personal regiment, called the Red Cossacks, then royal Prussian hussars and the Russian Imperial Guard.40 Finally Alexander appeared in the uniform of an officer of the guards, heavy gold epaulets across his shoulders, sporting an enormous hat with a cascade of feathers, his feet thrust in stirrups of wrought gold. He waved benevolently to the dazed Parisians as he headed to the house of the turncoat Talleyrand, who in a secret note had exhorted the hesitant allies to march on Paris immediately: “You are groping about like children . . . You are in the position to achieve anything that you wish to achieve.”41

  On April 12, Napoleon signed the Treaty of Fontainebleau, which mandated his unconditional abdication and banishment to the island of Elba, twelve miles from the Tuscan coast. There it was granted that he would reign as the sovereign of his own little principality, with extensive property, a division of sixteen hundred troops complete with artillery, and a toy navy of five ships. (He was disgusted when his promised stipend of 2 million francs a year from the restored French throne never appeared.) A few days after signing the treaty, he made a halfhearted attempt at suicide. His Austrian wife Marie Louise was spirited back to Vienna and never saw Napoleon again, despite his constant entreaties in letters. Marie Louise and their son were now held as family prisoners of the Habsburgs at the Schönbrunn Palace in Vienna. The ex-empress felt conflicting loyalties, but she had always done as she was told. Their son Napoléon François Joseph Charles Bonaparte, in his cradle named the king of Rome, would for the rest of his short life be officially a nonexistent person.