Cipriani Potter became another in the string of foreigners who turned up at Beethoven’s door and found themselves warmly received. Potter had hoped for composition lessons. As usual, Beethoven declined; he sent the young composer to his old string-quartet mentor Aloys Förster. Having looked over Potter’s music, Förster told Potter that he didn’t need teachers anymore. Potter relayed to him Beethoven’s response to that: “Tell Förster he’s an old flatterer.” The quip got a laugh from the old man.
Beethoven invited the Englishman to join his rambles in the Vienna woods. To Ries in London Beethoven reported, “Botter [sic] visited me several times, he seems to be a good man and has talent for composition—I hope and wish that your prosperity may grow daily; unfortunately I cannot say that of myself. My unlucky connection with this Archduke has brought me to the verge of beggary. I cannot endure the sight of want.”20 The very generous Rudolph may have been leaning on Beethoven to give donations to the poor.
Potter was treated to the usual harangues. Still, if Beethoven complained incessantly, most of the time he did it with a certain entertaining gusto. They mostly conversed in Italian, in which Potter reported Beethoven to be fluent. Their time together seems to have been jolly, yet in this same period Beethoven reported to Zmeskall, “Owing to a chill I am now feeling very much worse . . . I now know what it feels like to move daily nearer to my grave.”21 The next day, he thanked Zmeskall for the gift of a Maelzel chronometer: “We must see whether with its help one can measure all eternity.”22
Potter noted Beethoven’s Anglophilia and his determination to visit England. Among other things he wanted to see the Houses of Parliament. “You have heads on your shoulders in England,” he told Potter; England, that is to say, was not a reactionary monarchy like Austria. There were the inevitable questions from the young musician. Potter asked about the new crop of virtuosos, among them Ignaz Moscheles, who had done the piano arrangement of Fidelio. Now Beethoven dismissed him: “Don’t ever talk to me again about mere passage players.” He declared the Englishman John Cramer—who he knew disliked his music—to be the finest pianist he ever heard. Outside yourself, Potter asked, whom do you call the greatest living composer? As usual, Beethoven answered Cherubini. And the ancestors? Once he had put Mozart first, Beethoven said, but now it was Handel.23
With the occasional socializing, Beethoven spent a productive, even relatively pleasant summer of 1818 in Mödling. He arrived in June in good spirits and feeling well, as shown in an outsize response he wrote his friend Vincenz Hauschka, a director of the new Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde. It was by way of agreeing to the society’s offer of a commission for an oratorio, something the two had already discussed:
Most Excellent Leading Member of the Club of the Enemies of Music [a pun: Gesellschaft der Musikfeinde] of the Austrian Imperial State! [Below he writes a Handelesque fugue subject to the text Ich bin bereit!—“I am ready!”] The only subject I have is a sacred one. But you want a heroic subject. Well, that will suit me too. But I think for such a mass of people [also a pun] it would be very appropriate to mix in a little sacred stuff. [He writes a fugue subject on “Amen.”] Herr von Bernard would suit me [as librettist] quite well. But you must also pay him . . . Now all good wishes, most excellent little Hauschka. I wish you open bowels and the handsomest of close-stools. As for me, I am rambling about in the mountains, ravines, and valleys here with a piece of music paper . . . In order to gain some leisure for a great work I must always scrawl a good deal beforehand for money so that I can stay alive while I am composing the great work. Let me add that my health has greatly improved and that if the matter is urgent I can easily contrive to serve you.24
He finishes the letter with a line of music combining Ich bin bereit and Amen in counterpoint.
The subject settled on for his friend Bernard’s libretto was Der Sieg des Kreuzes (The Triumph of the Cross). It took Bernard years to finish the libretto,25 after which Beethoven never got around to writing the oratorio. It is hard to imagine that that piously creaky subject would ever have inspired him. In June he received from the Gesellschaft an advance of 400 florins—in devalued paper currency—for the oratorio. The polite fiction that he was actually working on it was sustained for years.
The “scrawling” he refers to in the letter to Hauschka is more piecework for Thomson in Scotland. “My songs with your ritornellos and accompaniments do not sell!” Thomson wrote Beethoven this summer. A friend of his in London had advised the publisher, “Although a great and sublime artist, Beethoven is not understood, and his arrangement of your songs is much too difficult for the public.” In practice, Thomson had Beethoven’s arrangements played over by his daughter Annie. If she found them too hard, he concluded they were too much for any young lady.26 “Tell me, my dear sir,” Thomson entreated, “is it not possible for you to demonstrate the enchanting power of your art in a simpler form?”27 Yet he was willing to commission a new experiment, some sets of folk-song variations that Beethoven produced, and some easy quartets and trios that never came to pass.
Shortly after his rambunctious letter to Hauschka, Beethoven wrote an enormous one to Nannette Streicher telling her he’d chucked out the servants for colluding with Karl and even with his mother, who had bribed them with sugar, coffee, and cash. And so forth and so on, in page after page detailing with grim satisfaction the servants’ “horrible treachery.” (Yet Beethoven rather liked “elephantine” young Peppi and her cooking.) When Karl was not forthcoming about all the plots and treasons, “I pounced on him . . . I often give him a good shaking, but not without a valid reason.”
Yet in his moil of feelings Beethoven adds about Johanna, “K[arl] has done wrong, but—a mother—a mother—a bad mother is still a mother.” He was torn between dueling obligations: his duty to rear his nephew properly, and his and Karl’s natural duty to a mother. That second duty explains his occasional spasms of generosity and regret concerning Johanna. It all weighed on him badly. He assures Nannette about the servant squabble, “This affair has given me a dreadful heart attack from which I am not yet completely recovered . . . Still it won’t be necessary to take me to the madhouse . . . Please send us a comforting letter about the art of cooking, laundering, and sewing.”28 He announces he is sending Karl to a village parson for tutoring. His nephew was to be kept at his studies daily while Beethoven was busy working. He tells Nannette he has heard disturbing reports of this Parson Frölich but hopes for the best.
From there things took a precipitous turn downward. Beethoven got word from the parson that Karl was acting up, disturbing the other students. By this point Karl was revealing a gift for playing the people who were jerking him around. He told the parson that his uncle egged him on to revile his mother either by writing it down or by shrieking into his uncle’s ear. Karl said further that he agreed to do this only to get in his uncle’s favor and avoid punishment. In turn, Beethoven reported to the parson with “malicious joy” that Karl had picked up his uncle’s term for Johanna, “raven-mother.”
The parson was shocked at these violations of the fourth commandment, to honor thy father and mother. To Beethoven, meanwhile, Karl reported that Frölich would line up students on a bench and have them whipped by the strongest of their classmates.29 Within a month the instruction with Frölich ended in mutual outrage. “There are human brutes indeed,” Beethoven wrote Nannette, “and one of them is the parson here, who ought to be thrashed.”30 All three of these letters concerning the saga of Karl and the servants and the parson were produced in June 1818.
Nannette Streicher gave Beethoven patient-unto-heroic service in those years. She was, however, no blind acolyte. Nannette understood Beethoven at his best and his worst. Later she told the British publisher Novello, in her flavored English, “[A]s a beggar he was so dirty in his dress, and in manner like a bear sulky and froward, he laughed like no one else it was a scream, he would call people names as he passed them . . . he was avaricious and always mistrustful.”31
Yet somehow, again, that summer of 1818 was splendidly productive. Beethoven generally felt healthier and cheerier in the country. It was his first stay in picturesque Mödling, a medieval-to-Renaissance town south of Vienna, its hoary stone buildings arranged along a street that stretched up to hills topped with ruined castles. It was a prospect to inspire a Romantic, and a Beethoven. He became a regular at the Three Ravens pub, lived in the fifteenth-century Hafner-Haus on Herrengasse (later Haupstrasse). His flat had cozy, groin-vaulted rooms facing trees and vineyards in back, reached by an arched balcony that looked down on the courtyard. Mödling’s hills and woods were a few minutes’ walk away.
It was probably during this first of his three summers in Mödling that he was approached by another portrait painter. By then Beethoven, a man not enamored of his own physiognomy, looked at the species of painter as something to which he had to submit from time to time as a kind of penance for his fame. This artist, August von Klöber, left some sharp-eyed memories of their encounter. He had been advised by a Viennese musician who knew Beethoven that it was best to deal with this subject in the country, where he was usually more approachable. Beethoven agreed to the sittings if they did not take too long.
Klöber was first shown into Beethoven’s rooms by a servant; she said he could occupy himself with the resident books by Herder and Goethe until Beethoven got home. Finally Beethoven arrived with Karl. Klöber found he had to communicate by writing or via Karl, who shouted into his uncle’s ear trumpet. Karl sat down at the piano to practice. Klöber noticed that deaf as he was, Beethoven could sense every mistake Karl made, corrected each one, and had him repeat passages.
The artist observed his subject professionally, as a figure he had to capture in his surface and in his essence. “Beethoven always looked very serious,” Klöber recalled. “His extremely lively eyes usually wandered, looking upwards somewhat darkly and low-spiritedly, which I have attempted to capture in the portrait.” Eventually that look became mythologized as Beethoven’s blick nach oben, raising his eyes to heaven. In fact it was the characteristic stare of a deaf man straining to hear.32 “His lips were shut, but the expression about the mouth was not unfriendly.” Klöber noted that one of Beethoven’s favorite topics was the overweening vanity and perverted taste of the Viennese aristocracy, “about whom he never had a good word to say, for he considered himself neglected by them, or not sufficiently understood.” More and more as he got older, Beethoven despised the nobles he depended on to pay his rent. Archduke Rudolph, around whom there was no hint of scandal, was spared some of that contempt, but not all of it.
Klöber found that Beethoven could manage to sit still for only some three-quarters of an hour. The artist was agreeable to that, so Beethoven in turn became agreeable to him. That gave the painter a lot of free time. “You must have a good look at Mödling,” Beethoven told him, “for it’s quite lovely here, and as an artist you must certainly be a nature lover.” Klöber took the advice. In his tramps around the countryside he occasionally saw Beethoven striding along with sketchbook in hand; he would stop as if listening, and with a stub of pencil jot down something on the page. Once, the artist caught sight of his subject climbing a hill across the valley, a broad-brimmed felt hat under his arm. At the top of the hill Beethoven lay down under a pine tree and watched the sky for a long time.
“Beethoven’s dwelling in Mödling was quite simple,” Klöber recalled, “as indeed was everything about him. In those days he wore a light blue frock-coat with yellow buttons, white waistcoat and a fashionable necktie,” but all of them “in a quite neglected state. His complexion was healthy and robust, the skin somewhat pockmarked; his hair was the color of blued steel . . . When his hair was tossed about by the wind he had something absolutely Ossian-like [meaning bardic] and demoniacal about him. In friendly conversation, however, he took on a genial and mild expression . . . Every mood of his spirit was immediately and violently expressed in his countenance.”33
Klöber’s final oil portrait placed Beethoven, holding a sketchbook and pencil, in the Mödling countryside with Karl lying under a tree behind him. At some point that painting was lost. All that survived is a preparatory drawing Klöber made of Beethoven’s head, the eyes looking into the distance, the hair wild. Despite a certain stiffness, it is one of the essential Beethoven renderings. He looks formidable but not forbidding—just as Klöber, Potter, and others found him in person. The portrait has none of the glowering scowl of the Klein life mask and the Romantic sculptures and paintings that followed from it. Klöber made Beethoven an imposing, powerful, utterly self-possessed presence, but also a person standing before you in the company of his nephew. It is one of the few renderings of Beethoven in the Romantic era that did not make him into a demigod. Beethoven complimented Klöber on the treatment of his hair. Most portraits, he said, made him look too tidy.34
That summer of 1818, Beethoven had his new Broadwood in Mödling to work on the piano sonata that was becoming Brobdingnagian. This year he also added to his sketches for two symphonies intended for the London Philharmonic Society. As always, he wanted to take the two works in contrasting directions. Some of his sketches had always been in the form of prose. A speculation toward one of the planned symphonies shows him improvising in words. It amounts to a portrait of the early, speculative stages of the creative process:
Adagio Cantique—
Solemn song in a symphony in the old modes—Lord God we praise you—alleluja—either as an independent piece or an introduction to a fugue. Perhaps the entire second symphony [the Tenth] will be characterized in this manner, whereby singing voices will enter in the finale, or even in the Adagio. The violins, etc., in the orchestra will be increased tenfold in the finale. Or the Adagio will in a distinct way be repeated in the finale, with the singing voices introduced one by one. In the Adagio text, a Greek myth, the text of an ecclesiastical song—in the Allegro, a celebration of Bacchus.35
This does not quite describe what became the Ninth Symphony, was perhaps intended for the Tenth that was never finished, but it still foreshadows elements of the Ninth and other works. By “a symphony in the old modes” he means the ancient church scales outside the usual major and minor scales; they go under the names Dorian, Lydian, Phrygian, and so on. The eighteenth century had abandoned all the church modes other than major and minor, but it was traditional to use the others in contrapuntal studies because they were based on modal sacred music going back to Palestrina. Beethoven wanted to draw Palestrina and the other Renaissance polyphonists within his grasp.
Moreover, the prose sketch shows he was thinking about a symphony with voices. Whether or not he already imagined them singing Schiller’s “An die Freude” cannot be said at this point nor for a while to come. “Greek myth . . . a celebration of Bacchus”: he had sketched ideas for an opera libretto concerning Bacchus, the Roman avatar of the Greek god Dionysus. Both of them were divinities not just of wine but of ecstasy, of being taken out of oneself, of possession with divine dancing joy. One can hear the eventual scherzo of the Ninth Symphony in those terms. His prose improvisation toward the new symphonies describes no specific piece to come but hints at several including the Missa solemnis.
In autumn 1818, Beethoven and Karl returned to Vienna, the twelve-year-old beginning at the Akademisches Gymnasium, with extra instruction in music, French, and drawing.36 With Karl settling into a new situation, Beethoven finished the epic Piano Sonata in B-flat Major, op. 106, that he had been working on over the last two years. Having decided for both nationalistic and practical reasons to put away the standard Italian terms in music, he called it Grosse Sonata für das Hammerklavier, the latter a German name for pianoforte, which is Italian. (Beethoven believed, mistakenly, that the piano had been invented in Germany. In fact it was invented by the Italian Bartolomeo Cristofori, in the early eighteenth century.) He had directed that the title page of the previous sonata, op. 101, should also designate it as für das Hammerklavier. But the future would know op. 106 as
the one and only Hammerklavier, because even in other languages that name seems to convey something of the formidable and intractable quality of the music. The first of his piano sonatas to use the four-movement pattern since op. 31, no. 3, this was Beethoven’s ultimate hammer thrown at the pleasing, popular, amateur tradition of the piano sonata.
“What is difficult,” he wrote to the publisher Haslinger about the far tamer (but still plenty difficult) op. 101, “is also beautiful, good, great and so forth. Hence everyone will realize that this is the most lavish praise that can be bestowed, since what is difficult makes one sweat.”37 Here is another moment in a letter where Beethoven revealed something essential about himself: What is difficult is beautiful and good. His life and career, his struggles with technique and with counterpoint, his struggles with his health were a testament to that credo. He found writing counterpoint, to name one example, supremely difficult. He never achieved true facility at it. Partly for that reason, as a challenge for himself and for listeners, in his last years he pursued counterpoint of burgeoning complexity and ambition.
The Hammerklavier was his supreme challenge to players and listeners alike. Counterpoint lies at its core, along with the ne plus ultra of his abiding determination to make the whole of a piece a single conception. The Hammerklavier is one of the most obsessive works anybody had ever attempted. The future would be duly obsessed with it. To the degree that what is difficult is good is true, this is the greatest of Beethoven’s piano sonatas—just as he told Carl Czerny it was going to be, well before he finished it. Clearly part of “great” to Beethoven was its great size—this is the longest of his sonatas, at some forty-five minutes—and its outsize demands. The formula would be the same in his mass and his next symphony. Shrewd in his understanding of performers as he was in every other dimension of his craft, he knew the commitment, the intensity, even the anxiety that have to be marshaled for a performer to handle challenges like these. The trials inflicted on the performer become part of the music.
Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph Page 82
