Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph

by Swafford, Jan

  In July he wrote Rudolph that his infection was improving—“I have been able to use my eyes again”—and he was composing the symphony for England that he hoped to finish in less than a fortnight. His outlandish misconceptions of the time he needed to finish big pieces continued, even when he was not writing publishers. Still, the Ninth Symphony would be done by early the next year.

  A new pot of trouble arrived that month in an excruciatingly detailed letter from Schindler. Johann’s wife and daughter were back to their amusements while Johann was laid up in bed:

  About your brother and the people dear to him, I shall confine myself to telling you as much as circumstances now allow.

  He is weak, unfortunately a far too weak man, though greatly to be pitied . . . He has two vipers at his side . . . These persons, despite their most venerable name, are worthy of being locked up, the older woman in prison, the younger in a correction house. How they can treat a husband and father in such a manner during his illness can only be imagined among barbarians . . . It is more than barbaric, when the wife, while her husband lies ill, leads her lover into his room to [meet] him, gets herself all gussied up like a sleigh horse in his presence, then goes driving with [the lover] and leaves her sick husband languishing at home.110

  Schindler goes on to practical business and ends, “I am, in deepest submission, Your unalterably loyal, A. Schindler.” Beethoven’s hanger-on detested Johann, and here he was playing to Beethoven’s prejudices about Therese and her daughter. Beethoven had dubbed them, respectively, “Fat Lump” and “Little Bastard.” Still, storming over to Johann’s house in Ludwig’s usual fashion would not be advisable this time. In a conversation book, Schindler reported that Therese had declared that if Ludwig showed up at her house, she would be waiting for him in the hall with an iron poker in hand.111

  Taking the route of discretion, Ludwig wrote Johann a stern letter:

  Now you’ve gotten into a fine mess: I am informed of everything that Schindler has observed at your house. He was useful to me, so that I can learn about you and also help you.

  You see how right I was to hold you back from this, etc. . . . I advise you to come out and stay here, and later to live with us all the time. How much more happily you could live with an excellent youth like Karl, and with me your brother.112

  In August he returned to full big-brother mode: “However little you may deserve it so far as I am concerned, yet I shall never forget that you are my brother; and in due course a good spirit will imbue your heart and soul, a good spirit which will separate you from those two canailles, that former and still active whore, with whom her fellow miscreant slept no less than three times during your illness and who, moreover, has full control of your money, oh, abominable shame, is there no spark of manhood in you?!!!”113

  Johann recovered from his illness and the issue died down without further theatrics from either side. From August 1823, Beethoven spent two months taking the cure in Baden. Shortly after he got there he received word that Wenzel Schlemmer, his main copyist for the last thirty years, had passed away. Schlemmer had possessed well-honed skills in divining the scrawls and blots and erasures of Beethoven’s manuscripts. Beethoven had long counted on him for that so he did not have to recopy his more battle-scarred pages. (Contrary to legend, though, most of his final manuscripts are quite clean and clear.) Now to his longtime struggles with sloppy engravings from publishers were to be added struggles with underpaid and indifferent copyists.

  He also wrote Johann, “I am delighted to hear that you are in better health. As for me, my eyes are not yet quite cured; and I came here with a ruined stomach and horrible cold, the former thanks to that arch-swine, my housekeeper, the latter handed on to me by a beast of a kitchen-maid.”114 In fact, Beethoven was in fairly fine fettle that summer, grousing away vigorously. The Ninth Symphony was going well. A British visitor found him capable of following conversation without an ear trumpet—so his hearing seemed to be in a relatively better phase.115 Things were going better with his ward too. Beethoven’s letters to Karl in these months are avuncular and affectionate: “Goodbye, little rascal, most excellent little rascal . . . Don’t indulge in gossip at [Schindler’s] expense, for it might injure him. Indeed he is sufficiently punished by being what he is.”116

  To Franz Grillparzer he wrote, “As you must have noticed at Hetzendorf, this obtrusive hanger-on of a Schindler has long ago become extremely odious to me.”117 Nonetheless, this summer Schindler was living in Beethoven’s flat in Vienna.118 Beethoven had come to rely on this coattail-hanger and for the moment did not want to send him away. For his part, Schindler also detested Karl, as he generally did anyone closer to Beethoven than himself. If it had not been so much the case before, with the advent of Schindler the dynamic of the circle around Beethoven began to be inflected by the question of who hated whom.

  Grillparzer visited Beethoven in Hetzendorf to further share ideas for the Melusine libretto that neither man realized was foredoomed. In a conversation book the playwright made some suggestions about the music that foreshadow a composer of the next generation named Richard Wagner: “I have been thinking if it might not be possible to mark every appearance of Melusine or of her influence in the action by a recurrent and easily grasped melody. Might not the overture begin with this and after the rushing allegro the introduction be made out of the same melody.” Their discussions were calm and professional, but Grillparzer still found their meeting odd in the extreme. At table with the playwright and, as it happened, Schindler, Beethoven left the room and returned with five bottles of wine. One flask he put before Schindler, three before Grillparzer. As the latter remembered, this was “probably to make me understand in his wild and simple way that I was master and should drink as much as I liked.”

  When Grillparzer had to return to town, Beethoven got in the open carriage with him and rode all the way to the gates of Vienna, where he got out to return to Hetzendorf on foot—a walk of some hour and a half. Seeing he had left some kind of paper on the seat, Grillparzer shouted at Beethoven, who turned with a laugh and sprinted away. A befuddled Grillparzer unrolled the paper to find the cab fare inside. “His manner of life,” the poet concluded, “had so estranged him from all the habits and customs of the world that it probably never occurred to him that under other circumstances he could have been guilty of a gross offence.”119 In their meeting, Grillparzer recalled, Beethoven had told him Melusine was “ready.” Again, not one note of sketch intended for the opera was ever found.120 Beethoven had fallen into the habit of promising anything to anybody, trying to keep all his prospects on the hook.

  In Vienna in the winter of 1823–24, Karl lived with his uncle as he began philology studies at the university, to make use of his gift for languages toward an academic career. As is familiar in teenagers, Karl was also turning his intelligence to manipulating his uncle, disparaging the people he knew Beethoven would enjoy hearing disparaged, flattering him about his adulation from the public.121 Beethoven played Karl sketches and listened to his opinions. In 1823, when Beethoven was working on the slow movement of the Ninth Symphony, Karl wrote in a conversation book, “I’m glad that you have brought in the beautiful andante.” It was the second theme of the movement, which Beethoven had sketched while he was working on the opening movement.122

  Beethoven still felt relatively well, though in a letter he begged off lessons with Rudolph, saying he was weakened by the purgatives he was taking. He added some more inspirational words, of a kind he hardly wrote anybody but Rudolph: “There is nothing higher than to approach the Godhead more closely than other mortals and by means of that contact to spread the rays of the Godhead through the human race.”123 Here was a new or at least revised credo, confirming the turn from the humanism of the Eroica and Fifth Symphony to the atmosphere and ethos of the Missa solemnis.

  Two pressing issues turned up that winter. After years of waiting, the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde again made inquiries concerning its commissioned oratorio
The Victory of the Cross, for which it had long since given him an advance of 400 florins. Surely by this point Beethoven had no illusions that he would ever actually produce the thing, but he was also not interested in returning the money. Instead, he pushed the mass on them: “The great Mass is really rather in the oratorio style and particularly adapted to the Society,” which often mounted oratorios. He assured the group of “my zealous desire to serve the Society in whose benevolent deeds in behalf of art I always take the greatest interest.” In the end, both parties let the commission slide, and the society never got its money back.

  Around the end of the year Beethoven received a letter from his editor friend Bernard saying Johanna van Beethoven was ill and desperate. She had resumed sending half her pension for Karl’s support. Beethoven’s generosity to anyone in need came to the fore: “Assure her at once through her doctor,” he wrote Bernard, “that from this month onwards she can enjoy her full pension as long as I live . . . I shall make a point of persuading my pigheaded brother also to contribute something to help her.” He wrote a friendly New Year’s greeting to Johanna, assuring her of “both my and Karl’s sincerest wishes for her welfare.”124

  His beneficence didn’t last. In another letter to Bernard, his moralistic dudgeon intervened: “Since Hofbauer . . . believes that he is the father of [Johanna’s] child, he is probably right. And as she has become such a strumpet I consider that after all I should make Karl realize the guilt of her wicked behavior.”125 He had learned that the confessed father of her illegitimate daughter was paying her support for the child, so he rescinded his offer to let Johanna keep her whole pension. (Eventually her payments lapsed anyway.) These days Karl was running down his mother bitterly in the conversation books—whether from real disgust or by way of playing up to his uncle.126

  In February 1824, Beethoven wrote out the final score of the Ninth Symphony. Then he got busy pitching it to publishers and planning a gala premiere of the symphony and the complete Missa solemnis. The conversation books broke out with schemes and proposals. Lying over the deliberations like a pall were Beethoven’s indecisiveness and suspicion of everything and everybody. Among the voices trying to counter his resistance was alto Karoline Unger, who wrote in a conversation book in sopranoesque vexation, “If you give the concert, I will guarantee that the house will be full. You have too little confidence in yourself. Has not the homage of the whole world given you a little more pride? Who speaks of opposition? Will you not learn to believe that everybody is longing to worship you again in new works? O obstinacy!”127

  Unger had no hope of cracking Beethoven’s animus toward Vienna that had boiled in him for more than thirty years. He decided to make inquiries about holding the premiere in Berlin. When his friends and patrons in Vienna got wind of that, they realized something dramatic had to be done: they must prostrate themselves in the name of Music and of God and Country.

  The circle drafted a long, flowery, abject letter begging Beethoven to keep the premiere in Vienna. It begins, “Out of the wide circle of reverent admirers surrounding your genius in this your second native city, there approach you today a small number of the disciples and lovers of art to give expression to long-felt wishes, timidly to proffer a long-suppressed request.” They plead “in the name of all to whom art and the realization of their ideals are something more than means and objects of pastime.” They plead in the names of Mozart and Haydn, “the sacred triad in which these names and yours glow as the symbol of the highest within the spiritual realm of tones, sprung from their fatherland.” The thirty signers included publishers Artaria, Steiner, and Diabelli, Beethoven’s onetime pupil Carl Czerny, the piano maker Streicher, Beethoven’s old unpaid secretary Baron Zmeskall, and Count Moritz Lichnowsky, who had been the moving force in getting the signatures.

  The letter was published in two journals. When he heard about it Beethoven responded furiously because he believed the public would think he was behind it. But he said he wanted to read the letter carefully, alone. Schindler wrote that he found Beethoven with the letter in hand, much moved. “It is very beautiful,” he said. “It rejoices me greatly!”128 It would be nice to believe that this time Schindler was telling the truth.

  As of March Beethoven had agreed that the concert would be in Vienna. Then began the haggles and struggles over venue and arrangements. He wanted the Theater an der Wien, and the directorate was agreeable. But he also wanted Ignaz Schuppanzigh to head the violins. After all, Schuppanzigh had not only performed Beethoven’s quartets from the beginning and championed his orchestral music, he had also headed the strings in the premiere of every Beethoven symphony so far. This request in favor of Schuppanzigh was entirely reasonable, a testament to an old colleague, but the management of the Theater an der Wien was not immediately agreeable. So speculation shifted to the barnlike Kärntnertor Theater, which had seen its share of Beethoven performances.

  By that point Beethoven was waffling unbearably over arrangements, soloists, program, ticket prices. To get him back on track, ­Lichnow­sky, Schindler, and Schuppanzigh cooked up a scheme to appear at his flat as if by accident and to prod and kid him into making some decisions in writing. This worked, until Beethoven realized he had been duped. Thereupon each of the friends received an insulting note canceling everything. The one to Count Moritz Lichnowsky read, “I despise treachery—Do not visit me anymore. There will be no concert—”129 The count being high aristocracy, Beethoven could have been sent to jail for this insult, but the count retained his composure. The friends knew they were dealing with the most volatile of spoiled children. They let him calm down and went back. This time they had a cheery meeting commemorated by Schindler in a conversation book, starting with a list of those present:

  Herr L. van Beethoven, a musikus [the term for a workaday musician].

  Herr Count v. Lichnowsky, an amateur.

  Herr Schindler, a fiddler.

  Not yet present today:

  Herr Schuppanzigh, a fiddler representing Mylord Falstaff.130

  As the conversation books spun out with plans, the Theater an der Wien offered generous terms, but the orchestra members declared they would play only under their concertmaster Franz Clement, an old Beethoven friend. That finished that venue. At virtually the last minute, just over a month before the mounting of what were intended to be the premieres of the gigantic Ninth Symphony and the Missa solemnis, the Kärntnertor was engaged. In the utmost haste, the soloists and a huge orchestra of amateurs and professionals were assembled.

  None of that ended the discord. “After talks and discussions lasting for six weeks,” Beethoven wrote Schindler, “I now feel cooked, stewed, and roasted.”131 He demanded unprecedented ticket prices, which the management resisted. The censors announced that the Missa solemnis could not be included because it was forbidden to perform sacred music in secular spaces. Beethoven hastily arranged a German text to replace the Latin and promised the mass sections would be listed as “hymns.” When the rehearsals began he realized that attempting the complete mass would be impossible, so he cut it back to the first three movements. In a rehearsal of the symphony the lady soloists, alto Karoline Unger, then twenty-one, and soprano Henriette Sontag, eighteen, protested the high notes in their parts. Beethoven refused to budge. Unger called him a “tyrant over all the vocal organs.” Turning to Sontag, she declared, “Well, then we must go on torturing ourselves in the name of God!” Just before the concert the bass soloist withdrew because he could not reach his high notes, and he had to be replaced.

  Three rehearsals were planned, but because of a schedule conflict with a ballet performance only two were possible. Meanwhile there were sectional rehearsals with the orchestra and separate rehearsals for the choir and soloists. It was agreed that Michael Umlauf, who had served this function several times before, would be the actual conductor while Beethoven stood in front of him marking the tempos. As he had also done before, Umlauf told the orchestra to follow him and ignore Beethoven. At the last rehearsal
Beethoven dissolved in tears at the performance of the Kyrie from the Missa solemnis, even though he likely could hear it only through his eyes. At the end he stood at the door and embraced all the amateurs who had donated their service.

  Shortly after 7 p.m. on May 7, 1824, Umlauf and Beethoven together gave the first downbeat.

  30

  Qui Venit in Nomine Domini

  THE KÄRNTNERTOR THEATER was full that May 7, 1824, when the Ninth Symphony was unveiled. Curiosity about the new symphony claimed most of the attention, even though three movements of the Missa solemnis were also to be heard. The turnout was a testament to how many Viennese still admired Beethoven, how many were ready to buy tickets for a big premiere. Beethoven’s old devotee Baron Zmeskall, prostrate with gout, had himself carried into the hall in a sedan chair.1 The imperial box lay empty, Archduke Rudolph absent, but the aristocracy was well represented, along with friends and patrons and enthusiasts, and a sprinkling of the random and the curious. The random and curious would not be the ones applauding wildly. They were bewildered by these works, as would be most of the musical world for a long time to come.

  While Beethoven had his usual inflated expectations for the receipts, still it was remarkable that the hall was packed. The concert season was over, many Viennese off to their summer sojourns. Rossini fever still raged in the city, decimating the audience for any other music.2 The Viennese appetite for pleasure was never more voracious than now, when entertainment helped keep a dark political reality at bay. With his string of operas filled with pretty tunes, Rossini satisfied that need. Beethoven, with his strange profundities and his overtones of bygone revolutionary times, was threatened with the most merciless of fates for an artist: being out of fashion.