Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph

by Swafford, Jan

  His friendships in these years tended to last, but publishers came and went. Beethoven and his Viennese publisher Steiner, whose house had printed his works great and small since the Seventh and Eighth Symphonies, were growing apart, partly because of Steiner’s mounting impatience over the money Beethoven owed him—some 3,000 florins. Beethoven had been stalling Steiner for a long time, and not politely, meanwhile shopping his music elsewhere. The inevitable demand from Steiner to pay up arrived in late 1820: “I am not in a position to lend money without interest; I helped you as a friend in need; I relied upon and believed your word of honor . . . nor have I ever plagued you . . . and must therefore solemnly protest the reproaches made against me.”15 Meanwhile, the folk-song arrangements and variations that had earned Beethoven a steady trickle of income from George Thomson in Scotland dried up, after years of the publisher’s entreating him to write more simply. Thomson had done nothing but lose money on Beethoven.

  As for Karl, he remained the reasonably good student he had been, even with the increase in his laziness and acting out. If Beethoven had gained any understanding or tolerance regarding normal teenage foolishness, it is not evident in his dealings with his ward. In the summer Karl ran away from boarding school to his mother again. Beethoven wrote him, “Little by little you have become accustomed to horrible deeds . . . Now when you are more than 13 years old, goodness must establish itself anew in you. You should not hate your mother, but you cannot view her as another good mother. This is evident, and as long as you are guilty of further violations against me, you cannot become a good person; that is the same as if you rebelled against your father.” The same day he wrote headmaster Blöchlinger detailed directions of what to say to the boy: “Lead back to the pain that he has caused me,” and, “[T]he foundation of his moral improvement is to be based upon the recognition of his mother’s true nature.”16

  Yet compared to the troubles of the immediate past, both Karl and his mother were going easy on Beethoven. His health was not going easy. In January 1821, he contracted a rheumatic fever that kept him in bed for six weeks with violent pain in his joints.17 By March he was up and working, but then in July he came down with a jaundice that lasted some two months. This hepatitis was not painful, but he called it “a disease that is extremely loathsome to me.” If the illness comes from a liver condition, as his likely did, it can lead to mental confusion and cause fluid to accumulate in the abdominal cavity. By this point Beethoven wore a body belt, “owing to the sensitive condition of my abdomen.”18 In the next few years his liver was going to be his undoing. Debility would come and go, but from this point illness would not relent for one day in carrying him toward his grave.

  Beethoven’s life in 1821 left relatively few traces in the record. For some reason no conversation books survived from this year, and relatively few letters. There is no extant response from him, for one example, to the passing of Josephine Deym-Brunsvik-Stackelberg, who had been his obsessive love in the first decade of the century and remained a candidate for his Immortal Beloved. Josephine died in Vienna in March after a miserable second marriage had left her alone and childless. Her sister Therese, once Beethoven’s vivacious young pupil and now a pious old maid, had resisted their connection with all her influence. Yet when her sister died, Therese wrote in her journal, “If Josephine doesn’t suffer punishment [after death] on account of Luigi’s woe—his wife! what wouldn’t she have made out of this hero!”19 Did Beethoven feel any comparable regret at Josephine’s passing?

  But he composed, finishing the new piano sonatas for Schlesinger and adding forests of notes to the mounting pages of Missa solemnis sketches. In the summer he went to Baden for the cure, with its elaborate regime of bathing and medication.

  This summer the local commissioner of police in Baden, dining with a party, was interrupted by a constable who advised him that they had a tramp in the jail who would not shut up. “He keeps on yelling that he is Beethoven; but he’s a ragamuffin, has no hat, an old coat . . . nothing by which he can be identified.” The commissioner said he would get to it in the morning. But in the middle of the night a policeman woke him up, saying the disturbance was unbearable. The tramp was demanding that Herr Herzog, a local music director, be called to identify him. Herzog was dragged out of bed and taken to the jail. “That is Beethoven!” he exclaimed. Herzog took Beethoven back to his own house and gave him his best room.

  As the story emerged, the day before Beethoven had gone out for a walk and, lost in thought, strayed up the towpath of a canal. He kept going until he fell out of his trance and found himself lost and hungry. Trying to figure out where he was and where to find something to eat, he began peering in the windows of houses. This bedraggled Peeping Tom soon caught the attention of the police. “I’m Beethoven!” he told the constable who apprehended him. “Sure, why not?” the constable replied. “You’re a tramp. Beethoven doesn’t look like this,” and hauled him off. Soon the mayor arrived to apologize and provided a state coach to take him back to Baden in style.20

  Along with his burgeoning creative energy and eccentricity, his duplicitous business schemes also accelerated. In November 1821, having over the past year given his old Bonn friend Simrock repeated assurances that he and only he would have the Missa solemnis, he wrote Adolf Schlesinger in Berlin about corrections for the op. 109 Sonata and added, “I am taking this opportunity of writing you on the subject of the Mass about which you inquired. This is one of my greatest works and should you care to publish it, perhaps I might let you have it . . . And now let me ask you to keep this offer secret.” He had meanwhile persuaded Franz Brentano, Antonie’s husband, to advance him Simrock’s offer of 900 florins out of Franz’s own pocket. Certainly he did not want it to get around that he had offered the piece unequivocally to two publishers. Here he began a long, shabby game over selling the Missa solemnis. So far he was only double-dealing. Eventually he worked his way up to quintuple-dealing. And eventually his friendship with Franz broke up over the loan, which Beethoven never paid back.21

  After years of slow and erratic production, the course of 1822 was one of the astonishing periods of Beethoven’s life, a creative flowering that would not have seemed possible if he had not done it. He greeted the new year not with optimism but with reports of a painful “gout in the chest.” The condition bedeviled him for months. That summer another visitor, John Russell from England, added his impressions to the mounting record:

  Wild appearance . . . eye full of rude energy; his hair, which neither comb nor scissors seem to have visited for years . . . Except when he is among his chosen friends, kindliness or affability are not his characteristics . . . [in a cellar] drinking wine and beer, eating cheese and red herrings, and studying the newspapers . . . he must be humored like a wayward child . . . The moment he is seated at the piano, he is evidently unconscious that there is anything in existence but himself and his instrument; and, considering how very deaf he is, it seems impossible that he should hear all he plays. Accordingly, when playing very piano, he often does not bring out a single note . . . The muscles of his face swell, and its veins start out; the wild eye rolls doubly wild; the mouth quivers, and Beethoven looks like a wizard, overpowered by the demons whom he himself has called up.22

  This account sounds suspiciously Romantic, the equivalent of the genius-scowl in so many Beethoven portraits. Earlier reports had his usual expression impassive most of the time, even when playing—except for the fiery eyes. But maybe in his age and in the isolation of deafness his feelings had made their way to his face.

  Another visitor was Friedrich Rochlitz, a poet and writer who had edited Europe’s leading musical journal, the Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung, until 1817. Its critics were a frequent target of Beethovenian tirades, but the editor was a fervent if not slavish Beethoven admirer. Rochlitz’s recollections of his visits in 1822 shed light less on Beethoven’s personality than on his personal style, his way of being in the world that made him endurable and even sometimes lov
able, in spite of everything. He was always thinking, soliloquizing, making phrases when he was not making music: “His delivery was absolutely natural and free of any kind of restraint, and whatever he said was spiced with highly original, naïve judgment and humorous fancies. He impressed me as a man with a rich, aggressive intellect and a boundless, indefatigable power of imagination. He might have been a gifted adolescent who had been cast on a desert island and had there meditated on any experience or learning that he might have accumulated.”

  Rochlitz enjoyed listening to Beethoven sounding off. There was an ingenuous directness to his rants as he strode around the countryside in his shirtsleeves, his coat slung on a stick carried over his shoulder. “Even his barking tirades, such as those against his Viennese contemporaries, were only explosions of his fanciful imagination and his momentary excitement. They were uttered without any haughtiness, without any feeling of bitterness or resentment, simply blustered out lightly and good humouredly . . . He often showed . . . that to the very person who had grievously injured him, or whom he had just most violently denounced, he would be willing to give his last thaler, should that person need it.”23

  The latter hints that Rochlitz knew he himself was one of the people Beethoven regularly denounced—enough to earn him one of the composer’s nicknames: “Mephistopheles,” after Goethe’s elegant demon.24 In their last meeting Rochlitz noted that Beethoven was suddenly dressed cleanly and elegantly—he had begun a campaign to upgrade his wardrobe.25

  Another visitor of 1822 was, as Beethoven knew painfully well, the only composer in the world who in many quarters put him in the shade. Gioachino Rossini’s operas were as wildly popular in Vienna as they were in the rest of Europe. Stendhal, who published a biography of Rossini in 1824, declared, “During the last twelve years, there is no man who had been more frequently the subject of conversation, from Moscow to Naples, from London to Vienna, from Paris to Calcutta.”26 The Italian’s first visit to Vienna in April raised the city’s ongoing Rossini craze to a frenzy. Every important drawing room in town contended for his presence.

  Beethoven and his circle, including Karl, regularly took snipes at this rival. “A pretty talent and pretty melodies by the bushel,” Beethoven said. As for Rossini’s celebrated facility, “His music suits the frivolous and sensuous spirit of the age, and his productivity is so great that he needs only as many weeks to write an opera as the Germans need years.”27 Both quips show that Beethoven had a good sense of the man who between 1815 and 1823 wrote twenty operas full of tunes that stick in the ears.

  Rossini admired Beethoven’s piano sonatas and quartets, as well as the Eroica. He was thirty in 1822, Beethoven fifty-one. The details of their meeting are hazy; it appears that publisher Dominico Artaria first brought Rossini to Beethoven, but he was sick that day and they did not succeed. A second attempt gained him entrance. Rossini was stunned by two things in that visit: the squalor of the rooms and the warmth with which Beethoven greeted this rival who he knew was eclipsing him. There was no conversation; Beethoven could not make out a word Rossini said.28 But Beethoven congratulated him for The Barber of Seville: “It will be played as long as Italian opera exists.” He had also looked over some of the serious operas. “Never try to write anything else but opera buffa,” he continued. “Any other style would do violence to your nature.” After a short meeting he sent him off with, “Write many more Barbers!”

  Rossini left in tears. That night he was the prize guest of a party at Prince Metternich’s. He pleaded with the assembled aristocrats, saying something must be done for “the greatest genius of the age.” They brushed him off. Beethoven is crazy, misanthropic, they said. His misery is his own doing.29

  In February 1822, Beethoven sent off the second two of the three piano sonatas Schlesinger had commissioned, opp. 110 and 111. Op. 109 was already engraved. Two months later Schlesinger got a revised finale for op. 111. In fact, Beethoven made a revised final version of one movement in each of the three sonatas.30

  The last of Beethoven’s thirty-two piano sonatas wrote the final chapters in his epochal series for the keyboard: his equivalent of The Well-Tempered Clavier. Here the divide between his painful and increasingly dismaying life and his increasingly spiritual art reaches an apogee. The last three sonatas mark an end point of his evolution in every dimension: technical, pianistic, expressive, spiritual. Each a distinct individual, the three still share a concern with counterpoint, a juxtaposition of extremes, a climactic finale, and an extraordinary variety combined with extraordinary integration. They combine a constant attention to minutiae in the developing of ideas while often giving the impression of rhapsodic improvisation. At other times they have an almost childlike simplicity and directness.

  In character they range from earthy and comedic to ethereal and otherworldly. To repeat: Beethoven rarely compromised the technical for the expressive, or the expressive for the technical. In his late music he still submitted to the old forms established by his forebears, but now the forms are often sunk beneath the surface, still functioning but not breaking the impression of music unfolding in rhapsodic freedom. In the last sonatas, the technical and the expressive together reach an end point unlike anything before or since, perhaps at the end of what music can be and do—as can be said of The Well-Tempered Clavier as well.

  The first movement of the E Major Sonata, op. 109, begins with a blithe, lilting tune marked Vivace ma non troppo. On an open harmony, as if in midthought, the music veers into a mysterious and improvisatory Adagio espressivo, which serves as the second theme of a tightly compressed sonata form:

  The leading idea apparently began as a bagatelle written for a piano anthology put together by his friend Friedrich Starke. Another friend, Franz Oliva, suggested that Beethoven use this idea for the commissioned sonata.31 Now that theme begins the work on an artless and intimate note. In shape, dimensions, and impact, little op. 109 is the anti-Hammerklavier. Its opening fillip will be a largely constant presence, its “Scotch snap” rhythm contrasting with the pealing, rhythmically amorphous arpeggios of the second theme. The mercurial character established on the first page will persist throughout. The second theme flows directly (without repeating the exposition) into the development, in which the blithe opening idea becomes gradually vehement; that character phases imperceptibly into the recap. After a much-changed second theme, a quiet and touching coda suggests a joining of the themes. With a fortissimo and prestissimo eruption, the E-minor second movement breaks out with a driving, fiery-unto-alarming tarantella.32

  Then comes a variation movement for the finale, the theme a solemnly beautiful sarabande, one of the long-breathed themes that exalt Beethoven’s late music.33 It is marked “Songful, with the most heartfelt expression.” Haydn and Mozart had used variations as inner movements of sonatas, even occasionally as a first movement. Now Beethoven lifted variations (as in the Eroica) to a weight and finality beyond which nothing needed to be said in a work.34 In keeping with what came before in the sonata, these variations have mercurial changes of speed and texture and character, from introspective to jovial to Baroquely contrapuntal.

  In the final variation the music gathers into a shimmering texture of trills, conjuring something on the order of a divine radiance—say, Kant’s starry sky. The trills gather slowly to an ecstatic climax, then the finale concludes with a simple recall of the theme, the effect of which summons a future poet’s line that we return from a journey to where we began and know the place for the first time.35

  All the late music was to take somewhere between decades and a century to emerge fully into the repertoire, free of questions of Beethoven’s sanity and mutterings of the harm that deafness did to his work. In a time long distant from his, because of its warmth and lyricism, the Sonata in A-flat Major, op. 110, became the most popular of the late sonatas.

  It begins with an almost childlike theme of surpassing tenderness, a voice clearly Beethovenian but never quite heard in the world before. To the tempo Moderat
o is added “songful and very expressive.”36 There follow four measures of a soft chordal theme marked “with amiability,” then another expansive and beautiful melody that varies and expands the opening. (As in op. 26, internal variations in the themes foreshadow a later variation movement.) As in op. 109, the songful beginning gives way to rippling arpeggios, but here they are warm, and that warmth continues into the throbbing second theme. Except for a few bars of forte at the beginning of that second theme, the whole movement is soft, piano to pianissimo.

  Here is an example of the capricious surface of much of the late music: from measure 30 there is a high-register, exquisite theme of two bars that is varied in the next two bars; then comes a slow shimmer of six beats, three bars of transition; then the second theme proper sings in the low register for three bars before giving way to another little new idea, then another. There is a sense of the composer picking up an idea, playing with it, then dropping it for a new one equally beautiful, like a child putting down a toy and reaching for another. Yet, unified by inner motifs, the kaleidoscopic train of melodies and textures and feelings does not fall apart but rather flows and sings ceaselessly. Beethoven the consummate master of form and continuity seems now to have the ability to go from anywhere to virtually anywhere else and make it work (a quality he shares with Mozart).