Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph

by Swafford, Jan

  Fanny’s diary records a young woman falling in love, imagining herself nurturing and rescuing one of the greatest of men. As a sign of the intensity of her feelings, Fanny is the only woman on record to declare that she liked how Beethoven looked. Otherwise she observed him astutely, noting among other things that his hearing had better and worse days. But as her feelings overcame her, Fanny could not fail to notice his attraction to her prettier and more vivacious sister Nanni, whose very presence could lighten his spirits. He passed over, in other words, the available sister for the more desirable but unavailable one—his old pattern.

  April 11th: I saw Beethoven again, for the first time since he has been suffering from the illness we feared was hanging over him. At first I was quite alone with him, but as nothing I said seemed to interest him, I began to feel discouraged. Presently Leopold [Nanni’s fiancé], Nanni, and mother came in, and then he brightened up . . . He remarked that one of those attacks of colic would carry him off some day; upon which I said that that must not happen for many a long year yet, and he replied, “He is a bad man who does not know how to die! I knew it when a lad of fifteen.”

  His charm and wit could burst out at any moment, even in the middle of practical matters. He wrote Frau Giannatasio, “The highly born and very well born Frau v G etc., is most politely requested to let me know very soon, so that I need not keep in my head so many pairs of trousers, stockings, shoes, pants, etc., I repeat, to let the undersigned know how many ells of cashmere my upstanding and worthy nephew requires for a pair of black trousers; and . . . I ask her to reply without my having to remind her again. As to the Lady Abbess [Fanny], a vote is to be taken this evening about the question which concerns Karl, namely, whether he is to remain with you.”30 Despite the social pleasantries with the Giannatasios, his mood remained bitterly depressed. In the spring, he wrote Countess Erdödy:

  My brother’s death caused me great sorrow; and then it necessitated great efforts to save my nephew . . . from the influence of his depraved mother. I succeeded in doing this. But so far I have not yet been able to make a better arrangement for him than to place him at a boarding school, which means that he is separated from me; and what is a boarding school compared with the immediate sympathetic care of a father for his child? For I now regard myself as his father . . . Moreover, for the last six weeks I have been in very poor health, so much so that frequently I have thought of my death. I do not dread it. Yet I should be dying too soon so far as my poor Karl is concerned . . . Man cannot avoid suffering; and in this respect his strength must stand the test, that is to say, he must endure without complaining and feel his worthlessness and then again achieve his perfection, that perfection which the Almighty will then bestow upon him.

  Written to his old “father confessor,” this is a point of honor that he meant seriously: endurance is the road to exaltation. As his mother had taught, “Without suffering there is no struggle, without struggle no victory, without victory no crown.” But his prevailing depression remained, and that in turn afflicted the depressive Fanny. In her diary she began to confess her jealousy of her sister. By November 1816, she was enduring an archetypal turmoil:

  I am childish enough to feel wounded because he seems to prefer Nanni to me, although I have told myself a thousand times that I have no right or pretensions to his showing a preference for me. I do not quite like his calling me the “Lady Abbess” when I am busy with my housekeeping . . . It does not please me at all for him to regard me simply in the light of a good housekeeper . . . He had been talking to me for about half an hour when she came in, and immediately he brightened up, and seemed to forget my presence. What more do I want, silly girl that I am? . . . What I feel is the need of loving and being loved, the right of being sympathized with, my soul infused in another soul. That this wish should arise from knowing a man like Beethoven, seems a natural thing to me, and because the wish is there, I do not think I am so unworthy of him.31

  By then, as they did sooner or later with nearly everybody, Beethoven’s relations with the Giannatasio family had become fraught. The process began, as usual, with his becoming indecisive, going sour on people. Johanna kept finding ways to see Karl. The boy must be got out of town. “Beethoven’s manner towards us has altered,” a distraught Fanny wrote in her diary. “He is cold now for the first time, and I find myself grieving over it . . . His conduct is at times so very moody and unfriendly that I feel shy with him . . . He said his life was of no worth to himself, he only wished to live for the boy’s sake.”32 Karl was his reason to live, his reason to compose. But composing was not going well. Ideas, rhymes and reasons, were eluding him.

  That spring he wrote Ferdinand Ries in London, including one of the lists of his income and expenses that over time became a compulsion with him: “Until now he [Karl] has been at a boarding school. That costs up to 1,100 [florins] and, even so, it is not a good school. Hence I shall have to start a proper household where I can have him live with me.” He ends, “My best greetings to your wife. Unfortunately I have no wife. I have found only one whom no doubt I shall never possess. Yet I am not on that account a woman-hater.”33

  If Karl was to live with him, he needed reliable servants. That became another obsession of the next months and years. “Please give up the idea,” he pleaded to old friend Baron Zmeskall, “that no servant can ever put up with me.”34 This was a forlorn hope. Another request to Zmeskall for a male servant was symptomatic of his attitude: “He need not be physically attractive. Even if he is a bit hunchbacked I should not mind, for then I should know at once the weak spot at which to attack him.”35 This may have been a joke, but it was not far from the reality of how he managed servants. Meanwhile, in signing off letters he took to designating himself “a poor Austrian musical drudge.”

  This year Dr. Carl von Bursy, a friend of Beethoven’s long-departed friend Karl Amenda, met Beethoven and contributed his impressions to the record. He found a man “small, rather stocky, hair combed back with much gray in it, a rather red face, fiery eyes which, though small, [were] deep-set and unbelievably full of life.” Bursy had to shout to be heard and was often misunderstood.

  By now Beethoven had a practiced line with visitors. “I never do anything straight through without pause,” he told Bursy. “I always work on several things at once, and sometimes I work on this one and sometimes on that one.” (This was neither untrue nor entirely accurate: the sketchbooks show he usually concentrated on one piece at a time, though others could be in progress and he might break off work on one piece for a more pressing project.) This stranger found Beethoven “venomous and embittered. He raged about everything, and is dissatisfied with everything, and he curses Austria and Vienna in particular. He speaks quickly and with great vivacity. He often banged his fist on the piano and made such a noise that it echoed around the room . . . He complains about the present age, and for many reasons . . . Art is no longer held in such high esteem and particularly not as regards recompense.” Bursy found Beethoven’s rooms pleasant, with a view out over the bastions. This visitor did not cite the usual squalor. He noted “two good oil portraits . . . on the wall, a man and a woman.”36 The man would have been his grandfather Ludwig. The identity of the woman did not turn up.

  In the summer another crisis arrived when Karl developed a hernia that required an operation. In those days any operation was a great trauma, performed on a fully awake and usually writhing and screaming patient. The good surgeons were the ones who could work fast, before the patient died of shock. Beethoven arranged for the operation to be performed at Giannatasio’s by Carl von Smetana, a leading Viennese surgeon; afterward Smetana became one of Beethoven’s regular medical consultants.37

  For some unexplained reason—possibly a “feverish cold” that struck him in October and lasted for months—Beethoven was in Baden and left it up to the Giannatasios to oversee Karl’s operation and recovery. The procedure went blessedly well. After the operation Beethoven wrote Karl some practical items: “So far
as I can see, there is still a certain amount of poison in your system. Hence I do entreat you to note down your mental and bodily requirements. The weather is becoming colder. Do you need another blanket or possibly your eiderdown? . . . The truss-maker has . . . promised to call again.”38

  But his relations with the boy were more emotional than practical. As always his feelings gushed out in a jumble, almost crazed sometimes, his mood depending on his health, his success in keeping the mother away, the state of Karl, all on top of his eternal capriciousness and volatility. His self-awareness, however inconstant, was one of the things that helped him survive and work. In July, he wrote to Frau Giannatasio, “I have all this time been really ill and suffering from a nervous breakdown.”39 His breakdowns tended to the manic more than depressive; he was rarely prostrate and helpless. Among the rants and paroxysms he tried to be a dutiful father, writing to the Giannatasios about Karl’s shoes, stockings, coats, pants, and underwear. He did not ignore Fanny completely. In the summer his Lady Abbess was ill, and he went to visit her twice.40 The sight of pain usually brought out his best.

  In September 1816, Beethoven deposited 4,000 florins, earnings from his successes during the Congress of Vienna, with his publisher Steiner, with whom it would earn 8 percent interest. That money was earmarked for Karl’s inheritance. In the coming years, however desperate for cash he became, however enraged toward the boy, he resisted touching it.

  Surges of hope and high spirits were also part of his emotional tides. Fanny Giannatasio was buffeted by those tides again and again. She wrote in August that Beethoven came back from Baden “grumbling, as usual, over his expenses. When I saw him, and heard him speak so kindly of us, the wish of my heart again asserted itself that he would attach himself to us . . . He seems quite well, and says that he knows he shall be strong enough soon, his constitution is so healthy.” She and her sister had visited him in Baden while he was taking the baths and peeked in his Tagebuch, the diary, which “appeared to contain many significant things.” In that visit to Baden the sisters saw firsthand the kind of battles Beethoven was having with servants. He turned up with a scratch on his face, explaining that it had happened in an argument with one of them. “Look how he has marked me!” he cried.

  As he had earlier to Ries that year, he told Fanny’s father about the love of his life—surely the woman he had called Immortal Beloved. Fanny wrote, “Five years ago he made the acquaintance of a lady, whom to marry would have been the highest happiness life could have afforded him. It was not to be thought of, was quite impossible, in fact, and was a chimera. But still his feelings remain the same now as then. ‘I cannot put her out of my thoughts,’ were words which pained and hurt me beyond measure.”41

  In the spring of 1816, around the time Beethoven made that confession to Giannatasio and in a letter to Ries (“I have found only one whom no doubt I shall never possess”), he completed what amounted to a more lasting memorial to his lost love, a song cycle called An die ferne Geliebte (To the Distant Beloved). For all this work’s unmistakable grounding in his own pain, however, he remained Beethoven. No matter how self-pitying he could be in person, he was not so in his art. In this work no less than in any earlier ones, he thought abstractly as well as emotionally, universally as well as personally.

  Here in the guise of little tunes in folk style, in An die ferne Geliebte he created a new kind of unity, a cycle in which the story is unified and the whole greater than the parts. To take what on the surface appears to be a series of songs and make them into a structure of interdependent elements is an echt-Beethoven way to go about things, even when his own sorrows were involved. No song can be detached; each segues into the next. As in his instrumental music, there are internal motifs and interrelated keys and a return at the end.42

  Beethoven had known folk music German and otherwise since his childhood, as well as songs written in folk style by composers including his teacher Christian Neefe. He had wielded the style himself here and there.43 More recently he had made the dozens of folk-song arrangements for Thomson, which had recently departed from the original British Isles tunes to include Continental ones. Any effort that extensive was going to have an impact on his more ambitious work. He copied down a folk song, like a touchstone, on one of the sketches for An die ferne Geliebte.44

  Part of the folk style he adopted for the cycle was a certain emotional restraint. The lyrics of true folk songs contain a full measure of passion and tragedy, but they do not treat those emotions operatically—especially since most folk songs are strophic, meaning each verse is sung to the same melody. In a strophic song one verse may concern love and another death, and the tune has to encompass them evenhandedly. The first five of the six numbers in An die ferne Geliebte are strophic, varied en route; the variety is in the evolving piano accompaniment, in the contrast from song to song, in the unfolding of emotions from joy in nature to sorrow in love.

  The verses came from a young Jewish medical student named Alois Jeitteles, who wrote poetry and plays with some success. How Beethoven ran across this cycle of six verses is not clear, but they could not have been better suited to his frame of mind at the time, or to his requirements as a composer.45 The poems themselves enfold a pattern of echoes and returns and foreshadowings that are Beethovenian in their motivic structure.

  For him An die ferne Geliebte was an address to his own distant, lost beloved, expressed in terms not of operatic anguish but of hope and gentleness, in the artless style of folk song: “What sounded from my overflowing heart, / Without the trappings of art, / Conscious only of its longing.”46

  The cycle begins with a simple E-flat chord and a simple strophic tune stretching over five stanzas. This will be one of his nonheroic works in E-flat. The evolving accompaniment subtly paints the poet’s changing feelings: “I sit on the hill, peering / Into the blue mist-shrouded landscape, / Seeking those distant country pastures / Where I first found you, my beloved.” Mountains, valleys, clouds, brooks, birds, longing in the midst of nature: those high-Romantic images return and develop through the course of the cycle. The end of the first number tells us that these are songs ultimately about songs—all songs, all music—and also about themselves as an emblem of love and remembrance: “For all space and time recedes / At the sound of songs, / And what a loving heart has consecrated / Will reach another loving heart.” Here in essence is Beethoven’s poetic definition of music itself. The composer’s loving heart consecrates his gift to the world.

  In the second number, as the poet looks out over the mountains the accompaniment conjures hunting horns and the singer’s voice echoing in the cliffs. Again there is an underlying sympathy between nature and his feelings as he looks to the western horizon: “Where the sun’s rays fade, / Where the clouds gather, / There I long to be!” The clouds return in the fourth song, gliding above birds whose calls drift into the music. (Here and in most of his vocal works, whatever his objections to literalistic tone painting, Beethoven paints every possible word, image, and feeling.) In the fifth number spring awakes, the swallow “busily fetches from every nook and cranny / Soft scraps aplenty for her bridal bed,” and she and her mate make their nest. The music here is a beautiful, simple C major whose purity sets up the poignancy of a turn to C minor at the last words: “Our love alone beholds no spring, / And its net profit is tears.”

  The last song is no lament but rather returns to the gentle hope and resignation of the opening in the way it captures the potency and timelessness of music itself: “Accept them then, these songs / Which I sang for you, my love. / Then sing them again at eventide / To the sweet sound of the lute.” That image of the singer’s beloved taking up the melodies he has created leads to a heart-tugging molto adagio on “You sing what I sang.” On a small scale, that is as distilled a musical and symbolic moment as the trumpet call that announces liberation in Fidelio. Two loving hearts drawn apart are united in music, the poet’s song and his heart echoing in the song and heart of the beloved. In the most direct y
et profound way, in that moment Beethoven is united with his own lost beloved in the only way he can be, and no less with all beloveds and all lost loves—which is to say, with all humanity.

  At the last verse the opening melody of the cycle returns, and again we hear the consoling couplet that ended the first song: “What a loving heart has consecrated / Will reach another loving heart.” As in all his best music, here is form at the service of intense emotion. With those lines the music speeds to a racing, almost operatic coda. From gentle beginning to triumphant end, An die ferne Geliebte is what its verses say it is: private anguish universalized and transcended in its singing.

  The cycle is less than fifteen minutes long, its style deliberately simple and restrained. All the same, in conception and structure it is innovative unto revolutionary. An die ferne Geliebte marks the beginning of the integral Romantic Liederkreis, song cycle, as Beethoven dubbed it in his first edition. It was written when a young man named Franz Schubert had already written some of his first important freestanding lieder. This little set of songs by Beethoven would show Schubert the way toward his own song cycles—likewise toward the broadening possibilities of the new pianos as an accompanying instrument.47

  For Beethoven, at the same time that one hopes this music helped put to rest an emotional calamity that still gnawed at him, it also played its part in his rebirth as a composer. Simplicity and directness had always been ideals for him, but here he expressed them in terms of folk music, of the kind that by now he had been working with for years in his folk-song arrangements. The folk style and a new emphasis on lyric melody were going to play a part in the complex of forces that shaped his late music. So was the kind of overt musical recall that happens at the end of the cycle.