Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph

by Swafford, Jan

  But among Schindler’s less admirable qualities was extravagant fabrication, most of it designed to convince the world and history that he was far closer and more indispensable to Beethoven, and for far longer, than he actually was. The first extant authentic letter from Beethoven to Schindler is dated June 1822, and that probably marks the actual beginning of their association. After Beethoven died, Schindler forged entries from himself in the conversation books dated before 1822 and some others dated afterward (having appropriated the books from the rooms where Beethoven died). He also invented any number of stories of things Beethoven said and did in those years. It is Schindler who reported that Beethoven said of the Fifth Symphony opening, “Thus fate knocks at the door!” and of the background of the op. 31, no. 2, piano sonata, “Read [Shakespeare’s] The Tempest.” Both stories entered legend. Beethoven may have said them, he may not have.

  Schindler went on to write the first major Beethoven biography, a work of the most remarkable mendacity and biographical incompetence. Hardly anything in it can be trusted on its own—a maddening predicament for future historians, because surely some of it is true. In later years, poet Heinrich Heine described Schindler as “a long black beanpole with a horrible white necktie and the expression of a funeral director,” and noted that his business card read, L’ami de Beethoven.66 Beethoven’s old Bonn friend Franz Wegeler had some dealings with Schindler and detested him. Ferdinand Ries wrote in a letter, “From beginning to end he acted like an old house-nag . . . and wrote me a witty, dumb letter to cover it up. He can go to hell.”67 Over and over in their relations, Beethoven echoed that sentiment in one form and another.

  Yet Schindler succeeded in attaching himself to Beethoven. As a sign of that, he began to acquire Beethovenian nicknames. He was Lumpenkerl (“Ragamuffin”), Hauptlumpenkerl (“Chief Ragamuffin”), Samothracian Lumpenkerl (referring to the Mysteries of Samothrace, i.e., member of an occult order). Most tellingly, Schindler was ­“Papageno,” after Mozart’s bumbling sidekick in Die Zauberflöte.68 Clearly Beethoven understood Schindler’s character. One did not have to be paranoid to dislike and distrust him.

  The problem was that Beethoven badly needed an unpaid secretary and general factotum of the kind he had long relied on. Franz Oliva had filled that role for years before he left for Russia in 1820. Beethoven’s longtime helper Baron Zmeskall was incapacitated with gout.69 Brother Johann did a few services, but he had an estate far from town and an unfortunate family to occupy him. Karl helped out increasingly, but he was young and occupied with his studies. Schindler saw his chance, and he took it. He began his connection to Beethoven as the archetypal hanger-on. He ended by making Beethoven his career. In Schindler, Beethoven saw somebody prepared to jump at his beck and call. In Beethoven, Schindler saw his fortune and his immortality.

  At least two good things can be said of Anton Schindler. He was a faithful errand boy to Beethoven for two or three of the last years, and Beethoven made good use of him—including borrowing money from him. And if Schindler put words in Beethoven’s mouth, they were sometimes astute words. Schindler was an able musician and had good instincts about Beethoven’s work—instincts that also illustrate the time’s attitudes toward music. Whether Beethoven actually said “Thus fate knocks at the door” is unknowable, but as a succinct metaphor regarding the first movement of the Fifth Symphony, it survived because it could hardly be bettered.

  By the middle of 1822, Beethoven’s creative juices were flowing as they had not for a decade. He was about to return to the Diabelli Variations, begun in 1819. In July he wrote to Ferdinand Ries in London with his usual mix of affection, flattery, and business: “Have you any idea what fee the Harmony Society [he means the Philharmonic] would offer me for a grand symphony? I am still toying with the idea of going to London, provided my health permits it . . . You would find in me the just critic of my dear pupil who has now become a great master.”70 He already had some sketches toward two new symphonies. This small inquiry among many other schemes was going to have great consequences for Beethoven and for his art.

  In July he wrote brother Johann, “As to my health, I feel better. For the last few days I have had to drink Johannesbrunnen water and take the powders four times a day; and now I am to go to Baden and take 30 baths . . . The Cardinal Archduke is here and I go to him twice a week. I have no hope of generous treatment or money, I admit. But I am on such a good, familiar footing with him that it would hurt me exceedingly not to be pleasant to him. Besides I do believe that his apparent niggardliness is not his fault.”71 A week later he asked “Most Excellent Little Brother! High and mighty landowner!” for a loan. He noted the 3,000 florins that he owed Steiner; the publisher was pushing him to pay up or make a deal for his complete works. Beethoven did not want to agree to that idea until Steiner canceled the debt. Having dealt with Beethoven, the publisher was not foolish enough to agree to that proposal. Karl, who wrote out the letter to Johann, ended, “I secretarius, embrace you too with all my heart and hope to see you again soon.”72 Karl was a sometime secretary for his uncle now, and to the job brought his fluency in French and English.

  Throughout Beethoven’s career, all the schemes and machinations on which he spent so much of his energy only occasionally bore fruit. Much of the time, the things that turned out to be important in his work were opportunities that fell in his lap. Another of those arrived in November 1822, in a letter from Prince Nicolai Galitzin in St. Petersburg. He was a cellist married to a pianist, and a Beethoven zealot. “As much a passionate amateur in music as a great admirer of your talent,” he wrote, “I take the liberty of writing to you to ask if you would consent to compose one, two, or three new quartets.”73

  Here was a commission that arrived out of the blue that happened to be in tune with projects Beethoven wanted to do—he had already been working on a quartet, his first since the F Minor of 1810. Galitzin may have been inspired by the presence in St. Petersburg of Beethoven’s champion Ignaz Schuppanzigh. If so, it added a chapter to the violinist’s glory in history.74 By the end of 1823, when he agreed to compose the three quartets for Galitzin, after more than a decade of creative searching, moneygrubbing, and comparative loose ends, Beethoven had in the pipeline most of the monumental works that were to occupy his last years: Missa solemnis, Ninth Symphony, Diabelli Variations, and now the set that came to be called the Galitzin Quartets.

  Meanwhile he had agreed without enthusiasm to an offer of composing an oratorio for the Boston Handel and Haydn Society. He was pleased that his reputation had reached North America but no happier with this oratorio project than he had been with the one from the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Vienna. Traditional oratorios did not inspire him. Neither piece would get even begun. In regard to the Boston offer he wrote in a conversation book, “I cannot write what I should like best to write, but that which the pressing need of money obliges me to write. This is not to say that I write only for money—when this period is past I hope to write what for me and for art is above all—Faust.”75

  With the Missa solemnis nearly done and two new symphonies still in the speculative stage, his supreme ambition had turned toward Goethe’s towering drama of human ambition and frailty (no one except perhaps Goethe knew that the second half of Faust was yet to come). More immediately, Beethoven was interested in returning to opera. There had been an acclaimed revival of Fidelio in Vienna the previous year, and the Kärntnertor Theater wanted a new opera from him.

  That 1822 performance marked the debut in the role of another of the first great Leonores, soprano Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient, who was then seventeen. In a memoir she recalled her terror when Beethoven asked to take over the direction. She recalled the spectacle at the dress rehearsal: “With a bewildered face and unearthly inspired eyes, waving his baton back and forth with violent motions, he stood in the midst of the performing musicians and didn’t hear a note!” She continued, “With each number, our courage dwindled further, and I felt as though I were watching one o
f Hoffmann’s fantastic figures appear before me.” Finally, inevitably, the orchestra fell apart and house Kapellmeister Umlauf had to tell him it was not going to work. At the performance the next evening, the singer saw Beethoven sitting behind the conductor, following the performance with his fierce gaze as if he were trying to hear it by force of will.76

  The Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung kept music lovers apprised of Beethoven’s doings. In May 1822, the paper reported, “Our Beethoven seems to be becoming more receptive to music again, which he has shunned almost like a misogynist since his worsening hearing ailment. He has improvised masterfully a few times in a social gathering to everyone’s delight and proved that he still knows how to handle the instrument with power, joy, and love. Hopefully the world of art will see the most exquisite fruits spring forth from these welcome changes.”77 No one could have had any idea of how lavish those fruits would be.

  The year 1823 arrived with little to nothing of political importance happening around Europe. It remained that way for the rest of the decade, a testament to how thoroughly governments, above all in German lands, had shut down dissent, freedom of the press and of assembly, and as much as possible had drawn boundaries around speech, imagination, thought itself. In such times, instrumental music remained the only truly free art (only in the next century would demagogues address that matter as well). From the 1780s on, a generation had been inspired and troubled and devastated by a wave of revolution and war. That wave had crested and retreated. For artists, where was left to go but inward?

  Despite his vocal hatred for the Metternich regime, Beethoven continued to go about his business without interference, his main order of business still taking the Missa solemnis to market. His first extant letter to Anton Schindler the previous June had included, “Please be so kind as to send me both the German and the French invitations to subscribe to the Mass.” He had come up with a new scheme for getting money out of this unwieldy work: he would offer subscriptions to crowned heads, high aristocracy, any person or organization in Europe and Russia willing to part with the money. Each subscriber was to receive a deluxe hand-copied score, not made by the composer but autographed by him. His own final score was now getting done—though he tinkered with details for months to come.

  It was an entirely legitimate idea, but to bring it off required further dissimulation. Beethoven had to assure his potential subscribers that the mass would not be published in the near future, if at all, while at the same time keeping his row of publishers on the hook. He wrote the subscription pitch letters himself, each carefully crafted for its recipient including lavish helpings of flattery. For this initiative he had plenty of incentive. His debts had gotten to the point that in early 1823 he cashed in one of his eight bank shares, which had been sacred, not to be touched, intended as a bequest for Karl. But he had to keep his creditors at bay. Publisher Steiner and a tailor had threatened to sue (the latter from Beethoven’s recent campaign to upgrade his threadbare wardrobe). The 1,250 florins he claimed from the bank share did not all go to his debt, however—he needed some of it for the expenses of copying the enormous mass scores for the subscribers.78 In March he formally made Karl his heir. From that point, no matter how desperate he was, he did not touch the remaining seven shares.

  His pitch letters went to every acquaintance who was highly placed or knew somebody who was. He kept Schindler, Johann, and Karl busy collecting names and information and running chores. The conversation books buzzed with advice and plans among his circle. In February he wrote Goethe, telling him of his Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage setting and asking humbly for any comment: “Indeed your criticism, which might almost be regarded as the very essence of truth, would be extremely welcome to me, for I love truth more than anything . . . How highly would I value a general comment from you on the composing of music or on setting your poems to music!” He went on to ask Goethe to propose to the Weimar court a subscription to the mass.79 At that moment the titan of German letters was seventy-three and dangerously ill, his attention occupied by fever and delirium. Goethe recovered in the summer, but he never responded to Beethoven’s ­letter.80

  Beethoven wrote Carl Zelter in Berlin, Goethe’s longtime musical adviser and now director of the celebrated Singakademie, asking him to put in a word with the Prussian court and suggesting that much of the mass could be done “almost entirely a la capella”—an absurd idea (the Singakademie performed only a cappella works).81 Having just been named a member of the Royal Swedish Music Academy, Beethoven used that honor as part of a pitch to Karl XIV, the king of Sweden. Years before, the king had made Beethoven’s acquaintance when he was Jean Bernadotte, an officer in Napoleon’s army and disastrous French ambassador to Vienna. No offer came from Sweden.

  Beethoven knew the secretary of the Privy Council of the Prussian court, Friedrich Duncker, author of the play Leonore Prohaska, to which Beethoven had contributed incidental music in 1815. In a long letter he gave Duncker details of his latest illnesses, complained of the expenses his nephew caused him, then got to the point with a touch of philosophy: “Although a man may find his greatest happiness in constantly looking upwards, yet in the end he too is obliged to pay attention to his immediate necessities . . . Well, I am now returning to the grand solemn Mass . . . which could also be performed as an oratorio.” The Prussian king did smile on a subscription.

  As he started thinking about the actualities of performance, Beethoven began to promote the idea that the mass could be performed outside church, like an oratorio. This was a new conception for liturgical pieces, and it was being done increasingly around Europe. Though there were no reports of Beethoven attending a Mass in his adulthood, surely he understood at some point that the Missa solemnis had grown beyond anything imaginable within a sacred service, so secular venues were his best hope for performance.

  By the end of his subscription campaign he had sent out about two dozen proposals. The asking price for each score was 50 ducats, about 250 florins, of which some 85 went for copying. The legwork done by his nephew and friends was, of course, free. In the end he sold ten subscriptions, for a net profit of around 1,650 florins. Combined with the eventual selling price of 1,000 florins from a publisher, his net for the mass amounted to something less than three years of a lower-level civil servant’s income for his four years of labor. Among the subscribers were Tsar Alexander of Russia, the kings of Prussia and Denmark, the grand dukes of Darmstadt and Tuscany, the Cäcelia Verein chorus in Frankfurt, and Prince Galitzin in St. Petersburg—the last of whom actually arranged the premiere of the mass, that and a second one in the city the only complete performances of it in Beethoven’s lifetime. Louis XVIII of France not only subscribed but sent Beethoven a commemorative gold medal, of which the recipient was inordinately proud, pointing out to people that it contained half a pound of gold.82

  During these efforts, his games with publishers continued. In February he assured Peters in Leipzig that “two or three Masses” were forthcoming.83 At about the same time he offered the mass to publisher number five, Anton Diabelli’s new house. Diabelli pressed him hard about it but got only promises.84

  In the middle of all this business Beethoven was still thinking about future projects. In the spring he wrote Franz Grillparzer, Austria’s leading playwright, “to ascertain the truth of the report that you had written an opera libretto in verse for me. How grateful I should be to you for your great kindness in having this beautiful poem sent to me in order to convince me that you really considered it worthwhile to offer a sacrifice to your sublime Muse on your behalf.”85 Beethoven had approached his acquaintance Count Dietrichstein, head of the two court theaters, to query the writer.86 Grillparzer had known about Beethoven since childhood, after his mother ran afoul of him in Heiligenstadt when she eavesdropped on his composing.

  Grillparzer’s well-known plays included Sappho and The Golden Fleece trilogy.87 The names of Beethoven and Grillparzer would come to be linked in history, but the latter was never other than
skeptical, maybe even scared, of Beethoven’s music. The brooding and erratic writer’s musical loyalties lay in the eighteenth century. In his journal he railed at Beethoven’s “unfortunate” influence, his violations of “all conception of musical order and unity,” his sacrifice of beauty to the “powerful, violent, and intoxicating.”88

  At the time Grillparzer and Beethoven communicated, the writer actually had two librettos available, one dark and one light. The serious one was Drahomira, from an old Bohemian legend,89 but he submitted the light one first, saying later that he “did not want to give Beethoven the opportunity to step still closer to the extreme limits of music which lay nearby, threatening like precipices, in partnership with material that was semi-diabolical.” So he put before Beethoven Melusine, from an old folk tale about a mermaid.

  The two men had some memorable meetings that Grillparzer recalled. Arriving with Schindler for the first visit, he first found the composer “lying in soiled nightwear on a disordered bed, a book in his hand . . . As we entered Beethoven arose from the bed, gave me his hand, poured out his feelings of goodwill and respect and at once broached the subject of the opera. ‘Your work lives here,’ said he, pointing to his heart. ‘I am going to the country in a few days and shall at once begin to compose it. Only, I don’t know what to do with the hunters’ chorus which forms the introduction. Weber [in Der Freischütz] used four horns; you see, therefore, that I must have eight. Where will this lead to?’”

  Beethoven was joking, but Grillparzer apparently didn’t get it.90 He suggested that the hunters’ chorus could be omitted. Here began months of consultations and revisions over the Melusine libretto that ended up nowhere. Folk tales about mermaids were not in the least Beethoven’s style, and as he kept Grillparzer dangling for years he hardly sketched a note for the opera. Still, the two men were able to joke together, after a fashion. When Beethoven said he intended to remain unmarried, old bachelor Grillparzer replied with an archetypal male conceit: “Quite right! The intellects have no figures, and the figures have no intellect.”91