Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph

by Swafford, Jan

  What I have often vainly wished for, that Beethoven should come to our house, has at length happened. Yesterday afternoon he brought his little nephew to see the Institute; and today everything is arranged. Of my childish embarrassment I will say nothing . . . I cannot describe the delight I feel at being thus brought into communion with a man whom I honor so much as an artist, and esteem so highly as a man . . . How delighted I should be if we could really enter into friendly relations with Beethoven, and if I might hope to make a few hours of his life pleasant to him—to him who has banished so many dark clouds from mine.12

  Fanny and her family could not have imagined what sort of saga they were entering into with the great man. As Beethoven’s feelings surged up and down in the coming months, their feelings—and particularly Fanny’s—were obliged to surge as well. Beethoven’s intention was to control absolutely Johanna’s access to her son, and as soon as possible to send him off to a boarding school far away from her. Soon it became clear that Johanna wanted to see Karl nearly every day, and for the moment Giannatasio had no authority to stop her.13 “[After] the interview of the mother and your charming nephew today,” the schoolmaster wrote, “I have to insist that you, as guardian, show me formal authority in a few lines, by which power I can . . . refuse to allow her to take the son with her . . . It will also not do for her to visit the child too much, for he always mourns her departure.”14

  Beethoven obliged: “Under no pretext whatsoever may Karl be fetched from the boarding school without his guardian’s permission; and the mother is never to visit him there—if she desires to see him, she must apply to the guardian.” Now he had given Johanna one of his nicknames: the “Queen of the Night,” after the evil mother in Mozart’s Zauberflöte. He continued to Giannatasio, “Last night that Queen of Night was at the Artists’ Ball until three A.M. exposing not only her mental but also her bodily nakedness—it was whispered that she—was willing to sell herself—for 20 gulden! Oh horrible! And to such hands are we to entrust our precious treasure even for one moment?”15

  Who was this woman whom Beethoven held in such holy horror? The most substantial testament to Johanna van Beethoven’s person and personality to remain in the record is Beethoven’s, and he was ready to believe anything about her: adulteress, thief, prostitute, poisoner of her husband, perverter of her child. The first two, at least, were probably true.

  She was born Johanna Theresia Reiss, her father a well-to-do upholsterer. When she married, he gave her 2,000 florins as a dowry. In 1813, Johanna and Carl moved into a big house on the Alservorstadt that he bought with her father’s money. The house had as many as a dozen rooms that they rented out.16 Their son Karl grew up watching what had to have been a fractious marriage. Johanna was flighty and careless with money; Carl had an even more violent temper than Ludwig. He beat the boy, as his father had beaten him. Johanna would also not have escaped Carl’s temper. Beethoven claimed to have protected Johanna from her husband’s wrath, and that might well be true. There is a story that once during an argument at dinner, Carl drove a knife through Johanna’s hand into the table. She liked to show off the scar.17

  A few surviving stories leave some clues to her style. Later Karl recalled his mother saying that in her childhood her father would not give her any money, but she said that if she could steal it without his noticing, it was hers.18 When she and Carl married, she was five months pregnant. Some four years before Carl died, she was convicted of embezzling a pearl necklace worth 20,000 florins. She tried to shift the blame to somebody else but was convicted and sentenced to a year in detention. After her husband’s pleas to the court, the sentence was reduced to a month, most of which she never served.19 In time, Karl’s wife wrote of Johanna in her indigent later years, “By her letters she moved heaven and earth, and understood how to present her poverty and despair in burning colors and with dramatic effect.”20 Beethoven described her “sauciness and impertinence” when she first came to see him about Karl.21 Those were the nicest terms he ever used about Johanna. Yet her letters and her appearances in court show her to be fairly articulate on the page and in person.

  So Beethoven’s sister-in-law seems to have been reasonably intelligent, also flighty, flirtatious, in some degree sexually loose—though when it came to the last, she was hardly in the virtuosic league of nobles at the Congress of Vienna. But Johanna wanted to be a mother to her boy. In those years she was fairly comfortable from her rentals, from what Carl had left her, and from her widow’s pension, and she was entirely at leisure. When Beethoven tried to stand between her and Karl, she had nothing better to do than find ways to get around him. It appears that she made something of a game of it. At one point she apparently dressed as a man in order to see Karl on the school playground at Giannatasio’s.

  As for Karl himself, little record survives of what he was like in these years while his mother and his uncle battled over him. He had been traumatized watching his father die; he needed love and understanding. He got a boarding school and conflict and confusion. Beethoven’s circle of friends largely took his side against Johanna and, eventually, against Karl as well. Johanna had her own champions. The only more or less objective observers of all this were the courts. For the moment the Landrecht accepted Beethoven’s petition that the mother was unfit, and awarded the guardianship to him.

  “You regard Karl as your own child,” Beethoven jotted on a sketch. “Heed no gossip, no pettiness, in comparison with this sacred goal.”22 Why did he insist on claiming Karl and sticking to this decision whatever the cost to the boy, to his mother, to himself? At one point after Johanna had sent him a “disgusting scrawl” of an entreaty, he wrote Giannatasio, “I have replied to her this time not like a Sarastro but like a Sultan.”23 Here he identifies himself with two Mozart heroes: the exalted Sarastro in Die Zauberflöte, who kidnaps the daughter of the evil Queen of the Night out of disinterested concern for her welfare; and the Turkish pasha Selim in The Abduction from the Seraglio, who shows clemency to his Christian enemies.

  The moral conceptions Beethoven imbibed in Bonn were still with him. “Nobility of character must in its turn produce what is noble,” he wrote, “and virtue should not merely tolerate vice but not hesitate to check its evil effects.”24 The German Aufklärung believed that morality was an obligation, its cultivation a matter of will and reason. The laws of morality were self-evident; morality was the first measure of one’s worth; self-improvement was every decent person’s duty. One’s personal morality was the foundation of value of one’s task in life, whatever that might be: in order to be good at anything, one had first to be a good person. And these lessons were best imbibed in childhood. Beethoven had ambitions for Karl to become a good person and a figure in the world. He sent him to an excellent school, to piano lessons with Carl Czerny. He told a friend, “Karl must become an artist or scholar in order to live a high life.”25 For Beethoven, Karl was to be another creation of his own that would add luster to his name.

  In his own mind Beethoven was like Sarastro, who does right not because it is expedient but because it is right. He felt a sacred duty—for him not an empty phrase but a binding imperative—to his departed brother to get Karl away from the Queen of the Night and to rear him properly. The poison of Karl’s mother had to be purged from the boy’s system. This was all a matter of ingrained conviction—the same conviction that informed Beethoven’s music.

  For well and ill, what Beethoven had been in his teens had not fundamentally changed. He had never grown into social maturity. He was not able to understand anything through another person’s eyes, could see the world only through his own lens. When he made up his mind about a person or an issue, that was that, unless he could be persuaded that he had misjudged. There was no possible way Johanna could convince him he had misjudged her, so that was that. Just as in his music he demanded that the material must submit to his will, in his personal life he demanded that the world submit to his convictions about how things ought to be.

  H
is solipsistic view of the world, his blinkered ethics, his ironclad sense of duty, his relentless discipline and tenacity of purpose had served him well as an artist. They had saved him from suicide, kept him working through times of physical and mental suffering. In the case of Karl, that same blinkered tenacity fueled a struggle that ate up years of his creative life.

  Of course, there was more to what Beethoven was doing than what he claimed, what he believed he was doing. As with any person’s life, much of this is unsearchable, but some of it seems evident. After the collapse of the Immortal Beloved affair, Beethoven gave up on the love of women, on companionship and family. This is a sad watershed in the life of a lonely man. He had little outlet for his sexual yearnings other than the grim solace of the brothel. Through Karl he could find companionship and family, fulfill his frustrated desire for fatherhood. Desperately he wanted love, the simple, elemental thing that had always escaped him. For all his paroxysms of emotion over women, true reciprocal love was something he had not experienced since his mother died, or at best had found only briefly in his affair with the Immortal Beloved.

  Now for the first time since his childhood he believed he could have someone in the house whom he loved and who loved him in return. He loved Karl hopelessly. Over and over he said of his nephew, Karl is my son, I am his true father. The phrase “my son” moved him to his core. He tried to shape his son’s life in the same way that he shaped a piece of music, because he did not truly understand the difference.

  There is another element to this relationship, this perhaps the deepest-lying of all. Even though Beethoven remained physically robust when he was not actually prostrate in bed, for years he had been afflicted by a train of illnesses on top of his chronic digestive torments and the hopeless decline of his hearing. By 1816, he was not far from having sound and music entirely shut off from him. And again, as his fame reached new heights, his health declined and his creativity languished. If he had truly known where he wanted to go with his music, scarcely anything in heaven or earth could have stopped him. But in the years around 1815, he did not know where he was going, not yet.

  So the problem with his music was only partly the result of pain and deafness and the endless career botherations that had been heaped on him, to which Karl now added a huge claim on his time and emotions. Added to all that was creative uncertainty. In his work he had reached the end of a train of thought he had once called the New Path, which had led him to the Eroica and beyond. Now that train of thought, with an image of the hero at the center of it, appeared to be played out. The benevolent despots he once exalted—Joseph II, Napoleon—had failed or betrayed his hopes. In German lands it was an era of mindless repression. The 1819 Carlsbad Decrees of the German Confederation deepened the reach of the police state, setting up a system of regulations and surveillance on all university students and faculties and suppressing political societies. Any professor removed for “subversive” opinions was banned from teaching for life, and no student expelled from one school could be accepted to any other university. Any published material more than twenty pages long had to be submitted to censors. A central investigating committee was set up with virtually Inquisitional powers.26

  After the Congress of Vienna, the advent of the reactionary and conformist Biedermeier age across German lands and Metternich’s police state in Austria, there were no heroes left. For Beethoven the end of heroes had arrived when his life appeared to be running out of hope. The Heiligenstadt crisis of 1802 had struck him when his creative juices were at high tide. Now a row of pieces had collapsed in the sketch stage: a piano concerto, a piano trio, an opera or two, and more. He cared about glory, and his glory had never ridden so high. But he had never been as sick, deaf, depressed, creatively uncertain, and perhaps suicidal as he was in the year his brother died.

  A little boy gave Beethoven a reason to live. That inevitably meant, when he could get his feet under him again, that Karl gave him a reason to compose. His duty was clear to him, and it was unthinkable to neglect it. He had to live and he had to provide for his son. That could have meant more of what he called “scribbling,” of the kind he had done in large and small forms for the last several years, from the folk-song settings to Wellington’s Victory and Der glorreiche Augenblick. But there remained his ambition and his sense that his gift was owed to humanity. Now he needed to discover yet another new path, but until it presented itself he could only wait and feel his way toward it.

  For Beethoven the fight for Karl, then, was in the most direct way a fight for his own life and work, even though he justified it in terms of his duty to his brother and the boy. He could not give up this connection to his life and work, no matter what it cost. But he never realized that a child cannot be shaped like a piece of music. He never understood that the world could never be malleable to his will. To the degree that the world was not as he demanded it to be, the world was contemptible.

  But if Beethoven proved to be not the worst parent in the world, he was nearer the worst than the best. And though Johanna van Beethoven was something less than a paragon of motherhood, she was hardly the depraved beast her brother-in-law called her. Both of them loved Karl passionately and possessively, and neither of them would give him up.

  To the people in Beethoven’s circle, most of whom admired him more or less as much as any man who ever lived, he had always been a great musician and a great spirit. They discerned the generous, warm, world-embracing heart that lay under so much rage, cynicism, paranoia, solipsism, and human incapacity. A large part of that incapacity was an increasingly shaky self-knowledge, which allowed him to write to publisher Steiner, unbelievably, “[M]y character does not allow me to be distrustful.”27 Most who knew him were able to forgive all that. They forgave him, in other words, for never growing up in his relations with the world. He remained the child for whom the world was himself. The people around him were willing to take care of him and try to save him from himself. Often their efforts failed. He broke with one of his oldest friends, Stephan von Breuning, who entreated him not to take on the guardianship.

  Karl was the first person in Beethoven’s adult life who could neither get away from him nor understand him—nor, when Karl became a teenager, forgive him. The results were predictably terrible. Yet in the end Karl and his mother got out of it in one piece, if not unscathed. Beethoven did not. All this is to say that he had gotten himself and his nephew into a morass from which his needs and convictions appeared to allow them no escape except death.

  As Fanny Giannatasio had hoped, when Karl started at her father’s school, Beethoven embraced her family and became a regular visitor in the house. For a while they saw the best of him, the part that was open, voluble, funny, generous—even lovable. In the family parlor and around the table he reminisced, rhapsodized, dispensed his singular puns and verbal notions, talked music and politics, played with the children. Like many eccentrics Beethoven had his own language and his own humor. Everybody he knew got a nickname. Fanny was “the Lady Abbess”—presumably he found her to be sober as a nun. He told the family that he had received a commission from the new group of amateur enthusiasts in town called the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde, Association of the Friends of Music. His name for them was the “Gesellschaft der Musikmörder,” Association of the Murderers of Music.28

  In her diary Fanny tracked Beethoven’s visits and her burgeoning emotions:

  January, 1816: Beethoven’s appearance pleases me greatly . . . The day before yesterday he was with us in the evening and won all our hearts. The modesty and heartiness of his disposition please us extremely. The sorrow which his unhappy connection with the boy’s mother entails preys upon his spirits. It afflicts me too, for he is a man who ought to be happy. May he attach himself to us, and by our warm sympathy and interest find peace and serenity! . . . I fear greatly that when I come to know this noble excellent man more intimately, my feelings for him will deepen into something warmer than friendship, and that then I shall have many unhappy hours
before me. But I will endure anything, provided only I have it in my power to make his life brighter.

  February 26th: He . . . allowed us to see in him the goodness of heart which is his special characteristic. Whether he spoke of his friends, or of his excellent mother, or gave his opinion on those who are contemporaries in art with himself, he proved to us that his heart is as well cultivated as his head . . . Has he already become so dear to me that my sister’s laughing advice, not to fall in love with him, pains and troubles me beyond measure.

  March 2nd: How can I be so vain as to believe or imagine that the power of captivating such a soul as his is reserved to me? Such a genius? and such a heart . . . Beethoven was with us the whole evening. In the afternoon he had been gathering violets for us, as he said himself, to bring spring to us . . . I spoke with him about walks, baths . . . and Karl’s mother. His pure, unspoiled admiration for nature is very beautiful!

  March: We entreated him so warmly to remain and take supper with us that he consented, and we intensely enjoyed listening to his rich, original remarks and puns. He gave us also many decided proofs that he is beginning to have confidence in us. He did not leave till nearly twelve o’clock.

  March 21st: Yes, it must be confessed, Beethoven interests me to the selfish point of desiring, nay, longing, that I, and I alone may please him! . . . When I returned home, I found that Beethoven had passed the whole evening there. He had brought Shakespeare with him, and played with mother and the children at ninepins. He told them a great deal about his parents, as also of his grandfather, who must have been a true and honorable man.29