Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph

by Swafford, Jan

  Somehow or other Johanna had been seeing or communicating with Karl, who at twelve was on the verge of sowing his oats as a teenager yet still somewhat pliable. Like a teenager too, he was becoming embarrassed to be seen in the company of his shabby, deaf guardian, who looked so peculiar that passersby gawked and street urchins heckled him. Beethoven habitually strode along quick-time, singing and mumbling to himself, muttering insults at passersby. He would not have moderated any of that when the boy was with him.

  On December 3, Karl ran away to his mother. Distraught beyond words, Beethoven went to the Giannatasios. “Never shall I be able to forget,” Fanny Giannatasio wrote in her diary, “the moment when he came and told us that Karl had left him, and had gone to his mother . . . To see this man weeping, who has already had so much sorrow to bear, was one of the saddest scenes I ever witnessed. I remember Beethoven’s exclaiming, with the tears running down his cheeks . . . ‘Ah, he’s ashamed of me!’”50

  But Beethoven dried his tears and next morning went to Johanna to fetch Karl home. She promised to send him back that night; to make sure, he summoned the police, who took the boy to the Giannatasios’. Immediately Johanna made another appeal to the Landrecht, complaining that Beethoven intended to send her son far away.51 This time the court called for a hearing to interview all three principals: Beethoven, Karl, and his mother. It was in this round that Beethoven made a disastrous mistake involving a letter of the alphabet.

  He turned up for the hearing with his editor friend Karl Bernard, who probably wrote down the judges’ questions for him and provided advice. Whether or not Karl and Johanna had been coached, the court record shows their testimony was careful, coordinated, and effective. Examined first, Karl astutely played the middle. Was he getting good grades? Yes, between “eminent” and “first class.” Why, the judges asked, did he leave his uncle? “Because his mother had told him she would send him to public school,” Karl responded, “and he did not think he was getting on under private instruction.” How was he treated by his uncle? “Well.” Did he prefer to be with his mother or his uncle? “He would gladly remain with his uncle if he had someone with him, because his uncle is hard of hearing and he cannot talk with him.” Did his mother persuade him to run away? “No.” Has his uncle mistreated him? “He had often punished him but only when he deserved it . . . After his return [from his mother] his uncle had threatened to strangle him.” Did his uncle encourage him to speak disrespectfully of his mother? “Yes, and it was in his uncle’s presence, whom he thought he would please by it.” Did his uncle exhort him to pray? “Yes, he prayed with him morning and evening.”52

  Presumably the court was not too concerned about Beethoven’s threat to strangle the boy; it was the kind of thing one said in angry moments, and no one expected he was serious. What Karl thought of it was not asked. To what extent his answers were inflected by fear of his uncle cannot be said.

  Johanna testified last. Karl had come to her on his own accord, she said, “because he did not like to live with his uncle.” She had advised Karl to go back, but he was afraid to. Had her brother-in-law forbidden her to see her son? He had told her to meet Karl at various places, then when she arrived he was not there. Had his uncle treated the boy well? Here, remarkably, Johanna did not condemn Beethoven at all—in fact, as far as the record shows, she never did. Echoing Karl’s testimony, Johanna said that his deafness made it impossible for Karl to converse with him and except for the unreliable servants there was nobody who could properly take care of him: “His cleanliness was neglected and supervision of his clothing and washing; persons who had brought him clean linen had been turned back by his guardian.” Had she heard of her son speaking disrespectfully of her? She had not. Was her husband of noble birth? “The documentary proof of nobility was said to be in the possession of the oldest brother, the composer . . . she herself had no document bearing on the subject.” The last question was what, in fact, had already decided the matter for the Landrecht.

  The judges asked the question because of what Beethoven had revealed in his testimony a few moments earlier. After asking him about the circumstances of Karl’s flight, the court asked, In whose actual care was the nephew? Beethoven said he had arranged piano lessons and tutoring. “These studies occupied all the leisure time of his nephew so completely that he needed no care; moreover, he could not trust any of his servants with the oversight of his nephew, as they had been bribed by the boy’s mother.” Had the boy spoken disrespectfully of his mother in his uncle’s presence? “No; besides, he had admonished him to speak nothing but the truth; he had asked his nephew if he was fond of his mother and he answered in the negative.” Beethoven said he did not want Karl to be schooled in the Convict, as Johanna had petitioned for, because there were too many pupils there and too little supervision. For the moment, he said, he could only see hiring a tutor for the boy or sending him back to the Giannatasios’ boarding school for the winter. After that he would send him to the Convict school in Mölk. Of course, he rambled on, ideally he would like to have Karl study at the excellent Theresianum in Vienna, “if he were but of noble birth.”

  Those few words let the cat out of the bag. It was a ruinous bit of information that Beethoven had volunteered unasked. The court pounced. Were he and his brother of the nobility and did he have documents to prove it? “Van,” Beethoven replied, “was a Dutch predicate which was not exclusively applied to the nobility; he had neither a diploma nor any other proof of his nobility.”

  What made one noble was a rather informal matter; if one had a noble name, one was presumed to be so until and unless documents were required. All along, many people had assumed the van in Beethoven’s name made him noble, because in Germany that was often the case: van was the equivalent of von. But as Beethoven admitted to the court before he thought better of it, that was not the case in Flanders, where his family was from.

  A week later the Landrecht, reserved for the nobility, transferred his case to the commoners’ court, the Magistrat.53 Beethoven had to begin all over again.

  That was going to be a dicey matter. The two courts had quite different frames of reference. Inevitably, the court for the nobles tended to favor the case of an aristocrat over that of a commoner, unless the situation was egregious. The Magistrat had no such bias. For this court it was a simple matter of a child being taken from home and from a mother who, though hardly a model parent, seemed to them neither indifferent nor incapable. Clearly Johanna loved her son and wanted him to be with her, as was her natural right. Her conviction for embezzlement from a few years before, the centerpiece of Beethoven’s claim that she was unfit, the court declared to be an old matter for which she had paid her debt.

  In January 1819, the Magistrat decreed that Beethoven was no longer his nephew’s guardian and another had to be found. Meanwhile Karl was to be returned to his mother. Beethoven appealed. A friend of his, magistrate and musical amateur Mathias von Tuscher, agreed reluctantly to become co-guardian.

  What had he been thinking in his testimony? He surely knew that because of the van many people, including the Landrecht, took him for aristocracy, and he had never felt it necessary to deny it. In dealing with the Landrecht he had a vital interest in keeping the question from coming up at all. But it was not simply a matter of deliberately misrepresenting himself. As far as Beethoven was concerned, by his own efforts he had raised himself above the common folk to virtual nobility. This was so ingrained in him that he got fatally careless in his testimony—or maybe he actually assumed that the court would accept his self-elevation. In a conversation book he wrote, “My nature shows that I do not belong among this plebian mass.”54 In a letter: “Since I have raised my nephew into a higher category, neither he nor I belong with the M[agistrat], for only innkeepers, cobblers, and tailors come under that kind of guardianship.”55 He felt himself to be of the aristocracy for moral reasons. That, of course, was absurd. Things had not changed because of the French Revolution and Napoleon. One was noble or com
mon by birth or by royal decree. It was that way because it had always been that way. Napoleon had certified the system when he made himself emperor and set out to found a dynasty.

  Beethoven’s conception of himself as self-made nobility—like Napoleon—was inflected by another matter that on the face of it makes no sense at all. A rumor had gone around, including in print, that Beethoven was the bastard son of Prussian king Friedrich Wilhelm II, or even of Frederick the Great. In 1819, his friend Karl Peters wrote in a conversation book, “I asked Bernard if it hadn’t been corrected that the Conversations-Lexicon said you were the natural son of the King of Prussia. Such things must be corrected, because it’s not necessary for you to have that luster from the king, the reverse is the case.”56 The issue did not go any further at that point. Beethoven seems to have let the matter ride, despite the insult to his mother. (The insult to his drunken father would not have concerned him.) He did not specifically deny the rumor about his paternity until he was more or less on his deathbed. Here was another way for him to imagine himself an aristocrat, when all the rest of the world cared about was the van or the von.57 A Napoleon could ennoble himself because he commanded a great many soldiers and guns. A Beethoven could not.

  On New Year’s Day of 1819, Beethoven wrote his patron and pupil Archduke Rudolph, “All that can conceivably be comprised in a wish, all that can conceivably be called profitable, such as welfare, happiness and blessings, are included in the wish I have expressed for Y.I.H. today.” He touches briefly on his own concerns:

  A terrible event took place a short time ago in my family circumstances, and for a time I was absolutely driven out of my mind. To this alone you must ascribe the fact that I have not called upon Y.I.H. in person nor reported on the masterly variations of my highly honored and illustrious pupil who is a favorite of the Muses. I dare not express my thanks either verbally or in writing for this surprise and for the favor with which I have been honored. For I am too lowly placed and unable, however ardently I may intend to desire to do so, to repay you in the same coin . . . In a few days I hope to hear Y.I.H. yourself perform the masterpiece you have sent me; and nothing can delight me more than to assist Y.I.H. to take as soon as possible the seat on Parnassus which has already been prepared for Your Highness.58

  The “too lowly placed” in his letter shows that Beethoven is still hurting from the Landrecht’s demoting him to the Magistrat, which to him amounted to a humiliating public rebuke. The main point of the letter is to thank his patron for sending the new printing of Rudolph’s magnum opus, Forty Variations on a Theme by Beethoven. For the purpose, the year before Beethoven had supplied the archduke with music and text of a four-bar, chorale-like theme called O Hoffnung: “O Hope! You steel the heart, you soften the pain.” The melody has a distinct and maybe deliberate resemblance to the flowing second phrase in the beginning of the Hammerklavier.

  His communications to Rudolph for a while hereafter would be full of paeans to his patron’s great genius. Rudolph was a good pianist and a competent composer, though not a particularly imaginative, prolific, or ambitious one. By this point his piano playing had largely been wrecked by chronic gout. As a composer he never had the fertility and facility of somebody who has to make a living by his notes. And the archduke needed a leg up on his ascent to Parnassus: the manuscript of his variations shows extensive editing and correcting from Beethoven, the dozens of changes requiring five pages of sketched revisions. Many of the corrections concern mistakes of basic musical grammar and syntax.59 Rudolph’s variations end in high-Beethoven fashion, with a big fugue on the theme; Beethoven had to fix many problems there. All the same, his changes on the whole are in technical details; like any good teacher, he does not try to change his student’s style.60

  Now with the Hammerklavier going into print with its dedication to Rudolph, Beethoven had begun to think about writing a High Mass for the archduke’s impending investment as archbishop of Ölmutz. Foreordained for that post, Rudolph had put it off in favor of his musical studies. For Beethoven, composing a mass could continue his long search for a new kind of sacred music. No less was it a practical project; he reasoned that the new archbishop ought to have a Kapellmeister for his ecclesiastical post. A big mass would be a tour de force to promote that idea. It could also crown his work with an ancient genre at the summit of sacred music. The Mass in C had been notable for its restraint. Now Beethoven wanted to expand everything to giant size and ambition.

  The new project got no help from his life. He had finished the Hammerklavier with the Karl struggle in abeyance. Now with Johanna’s determination reawakened, for him the situation was more dangerous and more maddening than ever. The Magistrat wanted to give the boy back to his raven-mother once and for all. Beethoven’s main legal adviser now was a Vienna lawyer named Johann Baptist Bach—no relation to the famous musical Bachs but well placed, like most of Beethoven’s friends, and an amateur cellist. He and Beethoven had an unclouded relationship to the end. On the same New Year’s Day that Beethoven wrote his greetings to Rudolph, he wrote to Bach. He had drafted a long statement for the Magistrat, putting forth his case in detail:

  It is obviously of great importance to me that I should not be placed in a false position. That is why the written statement which I am delivering is so long-winded . . . There is no self-interest in my being a guardian. But I want by means of my nephew to establish a fresh memorial to my name. I do not need my nephew, but he needs me . . . The just man must be able to suffer injustice also, without swerving in the very least from what is right. In this spirit I will endure every test and no one shall make me waver—Whoever tries to remove my nephew entirely from me will have to shoulder a great responsibility. Disastrous consequences, both morally and politically, would be the result for my nephew . . . PS, As I have been very busy and also rather unwell, my document will surely be considered with indulgence.61

  He knew the document he wanted Bach to submit to the court was “long-winded” and needed “indulgence”; there is his clear-sightedness. That there was no self-interest in his fight, that Karl needed him more than he needed Karl; there is his capacity for self-delusion. He believed that to rear Karl to a notable place in the world would add new luster to his own glory; there is his solipsism. As he prepared his blast to the Magistrat, Karl went back to his mother’s and attended an institute run by Johann Kudlich, finally boarding there. Beethoven was at first satisfied with Kudlich’s institution, but when he found that Johanna was being allowed access to Karl, this educator in turn became another “scoundrel or a weak person.”62

  His twelve-page report to the Magistrat dated February 1, 1819, was one of five documents he submitted to the court that year. That is what he was doing, rather than composing. This first is mostly a tempered and coherent statement that took him who knows how long to draft before he gave it to lawyer Bach for editing. But in the document he could not suppress his rage entirely. “I confess,” he writes, “that I myself feel that I am better fitted than anyone else to inspire my nephew by my own example with a desire for virtue and zealous activity.” As for his opponent,

  If the mother could have repressed her wicked tendencies and allowed my plans [for Karl’s education] to develop peacefully, then an entirely favorable result would have been the outcome of the arrangements I have so far adopted. But when a mother of that type tries to initiate her child into the mysteries of her vulgar and even perverse surroundings and in his tender years induces him . . . to bribe my servants, to tell lies, inasmuch as she laughs at him when he speaks the truth, nay more, even gives him money in order to arouse lusts and desires which are harmful to him . . . then this affair, which in itself is difficult, becomes even more complicated and dangerous.63

  Johanna had her own champion to represent her, civil servant Joseph Hotschevar, husband of her mother’s stepsister. Beethoven’s statement to the court responded to a comparably long-winded one of Hotschevar’s in which he asserted that Karl could not remain with his uncle �
�except at great risk to his well-being and with the danger of being morally and physically warped.” (That sounds rather like Beethoven’s terms.) As for Beethoven’s relations with and responsibility to his brother, Hotschevar continues, “It will not be asserting too much if I say that Herr Carl v. Beethoven was only on good terms with his brother . . . when he [Carl] was in need of money.” Hotschevar claims that Ludwig made a disreputable bargain, securing the 1,500-florin loan to Carl from his publisher in return for the boy’s going to Ludwig when Carl died. Hotschevar submitted a letter from Carl saying he agreed to his brother’s terms for the loan only out of desperation. Hotschevar also submitted the codicil to the will, with its unequivocal statement that Karl must not be taken from his mother. “The matter at stake,” Hotschevar concludes, “is the salvation of a talented boy.”64 (To add to the shabbiness of the whole business, when Johanna turned up pregnant in 1820, Hotschevar distanced himself from her.)65

  His petitions got Beethoven nowhere with the Magistrat. In April he and new co-guardian Tuscher came up with another scheme, to send Karl to the Bavarian town of Landshut and the school of the celebrated Catholic canon, liberal theologian, and teacher Johann Michael Sailer. Beethoven’s distant friend Antonie Brentano knew Sailer personally. On Beethoven’s request she wrote a plea to the educator asking him to accept Karl in his school. She cites the current “unforeseeable evil consequence upon morality throughout all the classes” in her beloved Vienna. Karl is “an ardent boy, 10 to 12 years old, the only son of parents without means—his father dead, his mother publicly [known] as a thief, with a very low style of living.” In reality Johanna did have means, and Antonie had never met either mother or son. As for Beethoven, she wrote, “This great, excellent man . . . is even greater as a human being than he is an artist. He has made it the greatest concern of his life to provide the best conditions possible” for Karl. She is sure Sailer will agree to take the boy, for his guardian “is natural, simple, and wise, with pure intentions; and the finest and surest approach would be if you write to him . . . as if you had known him for a long time, this singer of pious songs.”66