Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph

by Swafford, Jan

  In hopes of inspiring the troops, Beethoven assembled the quartet players and asked them to sign a document of intent, joking in tone but serious in substance, concerning the premiere: “Best ones! Each one is herewith given his part and is bound by oath and indeed pledged on his honor to do his best, to distinguish himself and to vie each with the other in excellence.” It was signed by everyone present, Linke with the ironic note, “The grand master’s accursed violoncello,” second violin Karl Holz “the last, but only in signing,” and Anton Schindler “secretarius.”

  There the jokes ended. Everyone’s fears were confirmed. The premiere by Schuppanzigh’s quartet was a scrambling affair, and Beethoven and everybody else blamed the violinist. The worst humiliation was that Beethoven used his brother Johann’s critique of the performance to berate Schuppanzigh, when everybody knew Johann was a musical ignoramus.15 Schuppanzigh protested as best he could, saying that he had needed more time to absorb the spirit of the music—a spirit as new to the medium as the Razumovskys had been.

  Instead of waiting for a second try from Schuppanzigh, Beethoven recruited violinist Joseph Böhm to step in as first violin in a performance, with the same men in the other chairs. He hoped Böhm would be more diligent than Schuppanzigh, and indeed Böhm was. Beethoven attended their rehearsals, not hearing anything but following the players with his eyes and listening in his head. At one point, as they reached the ending Böhm felt that an indicated slowing of tempo was not working, so he signaled to keep the tempo steady to the end. Beethoven crouched in a corner, watching. When they finished he said only, “Let it remain so.” Böhm’s performance was received with stormy applause. Beethoven’s old helper Baron Zmeskall reported, rather gleefully, to Therese Brunsvik: “Schuppanzigh received the disgrace and Böhm the victory.”16 The group repeated the quartet twice more that same March and again in April. Steiner, Beethoven’s longtime principal publisher, now in disfavor, offered Beethoven 270 florins for it. Beethoven gave it to Schott.17

  He was already at work on the next quartet for Galitzin. His labors and his general concentration were materially helped by the declining amount of time Cardinal Rudolph had to devote to music. After years of lessons that had taken up several days of the week when Rudolph was in town, Beethoven apparently gave his old patron the last lesson in December 1824.18 Rudolph continued paying his part of Beethoven’s annuity.

  March 1825 saw the British premiere of the Ninth Symphony in London, conducted by Sir George Smart. Excitement ran high for the premiere, which was hoped to inspire Beethoven finally to make his long-delayed trip to London. But the performance turned out a scramble, the reception chilly. British enthusiasm for Beethoven languished from that point on.

  On top of publishing, another chronic distraction, nephew Karl, only became more consuming. Karl was then seventeen and studying philology at the university. When he became guardian, Beethoven had declared he wanted to make his ward an artist or a scholar. It was a common sort of parental dictate in those days. Between his uncle and his other teachers, Karl had learned his way around the piano, but he was clearly not cut out for a musical career. The next choice was scholarship. Now, though he was bright enough, had a gift for languages, and studied well some of the time, he was not happy working toward an academic position.

  In a conversation book of summer of 1824, Karl made an announcement. He told his uncle he wanted a job that he found more exciting, one that he could also start on sooner: “You will find my choice rather strange, but I will speak freely, nevertheless, as I prefer to do. The profession which I would like to choose is not a common one. On the contrary, it also demands study, only of a different kind; and one that is to my liking, I believe.” What would that profession be? Uncle asked. “Soldier,” Karl wrote.19 Beethoven would have none of that, and there the matter rested.

  As Karl reached his late teens he naturally yearned for independence, aspired to a few wild oats, cultivated a taste for beer and billiards.20 Beethoven became more and more alarmed. He was especially terrified that the boy might be frequenting prostitutes, and that his mother Johanna might be procuring them for him. His concern was probably a mix of moral repugnance and his own fear of contracting venereal disease. Johanna was settled in as Beethoven’s bête noire in chief, and she was still steadily scheming to reach her son. From Karl’s point of view, his mother was far less judgmental, willing to let him have his fun. Now and then he ran away to her; a traumatic scene with his uncle invariably followed.

  After one episode involving his mother or wine or both, and an aftermath that got verbally or physically violent, Karl wrote abjectly in a conversation book, “Dearest Father, you can be convinced that the hurt I caused you distresses me more than it does you. Anxiety has restored my reason to me, and I see what I have done . . . forgive me only this once! I will surely drink no more wine, it was all because of it that I could no longer contain myself.”21 He was hardly sincere, and the effect of calming words never lasted long.

  The older Karl got, the more Beethoven lost himself in suspicions, tried to control every part of the boy’s life. Beethoven had a reflexive hatred and jealousy toward anyone else who had a connection to his nephew, saw everybody but himself as a corrupting influence. At one point Karl stood up for a servant Beethoven had mistreated, writing in a conversation book, “I don’t know what you’re angry about. I can’t remember having laughed. At any rate, I must say that on the way she wept and complained that you torture her greatly and that she would rather go than to be so mistreated any longer in her old age. If you ordered her to wash, she only did her duty.” Beethoven kept digging at Karl until he burst into tears. Finally Anton Schindler arrived and Karl fled. Beethoven told Schindler he believed that Karl was defending the old woman because he was sleeping with her.22

  Beethoven relentlessly attacked teenager Joseph Niemetz, Karl’s friend since their time at the Blöchlinger institute. Niemetz was, Beethoven wrote to Karl, “completely lacking in decency and manners . . . rough and common . . . no friend for you.”23 It was true that Niemetz seemed to be the only person on Karl’s side, which made them conspirators by necessity. At some point a note from Karl to Niemetz was discovered: “I had to write in such a great hurry for terror and fear of being discovered by the old fool.”24 Among the circle of acolytes around Beethoven, Karl had no defenders; all of them stoked Beethoven’s suspicions and agreed with his strictures. Schindler, much given to jealously himself, had nothing but contempt for Karl.

  Now the poles of Beethoven’s rage and his smothering affection fell on the person who was least able to escape, understand, forgive. In October 1824, he wrote Karl, who had probably fled to his mother again, “As long as I live I shall cut myself off from you completely without forsaking you, of course, or failing to support you . . . Who will believe you or trust you who has heard what has happened and how you have mortally wounded and are daily wounding me?” A few days later: “My Beloved Son! Stop, no further—Only come to my arms, you won’t hear a single hard word. For God’s sake, do not abandon yourself to misery, you will be welcomed here as affectionately as ever . . . On my word of honor you will hear no more reproaches, since in any case they would no longer do any good.”25 This letter implies that Karl may have threatened to harm himself.

  Between the two of them the road was all downhill. It was impossible for them to confront problems directly. In spring 1825, Karl did not study for his exams at the university. The potential mess was serious enough that Beethoven gave in at least one notch: he still would not accept Karl’s going into the army but conceded that he could withdraw from the university and start studying business at the polytechnic institute.26 Beethoven had given up the dream of his nephew’s being an artist; now he gave up that of a scholarly career too.

  After that Karl stayed in town to study during the summer. He roomed at the house of a Matthias Schlemmer, whom Beethoven expected to keep the boy on a short leash and to spy on him. In one letter he decreed that Schlemmer was �
�not to let Karl leave your house at night under any pretext whatever, unless you have received something in writing from me . . . Indeed one might be led to suspect that perhaps he really is enjoying himself in the evening or even at night in some company which is certainly not so desirable.”27 Later he asked Karl Holz, who had now edged out Schindler as Beethoven’s main helper in Vienna, to play billiards with Karl to see how good the boy was at the game—so to assess how much time he was spending at it. Other friends got similar assignments. In a long, obsessive letter of summer 1825 asking editor friend Joseph Bernard to keep an eye on Karl, Beethoven wrote an archetypal complaint from the father of a teenager, segueing into his own obsessions:

  His manners are greatly deteriorating. His treatment of me is extremely offensive and is also having a bad effect on my health . . . Because I had to correct him on Sunday (and he absolutely refuses to be corrected) I had to face behavior on his part such as I have only experienced in the case of his deceased father, an uncouth fellow, on whom, nevertheless, I showered benefits—I suspect that that monster of a mother is again involved in this little game and that it is partly an intrigue of that gentleman, my brainless and heartless brother, who is already planning to do business with him and who is also out to censure and instruct me . . . because I refuse to have anything to do with his overfed whore and bastard, and still less, to live with people who are so very much my inferiors.28

  Four days after that letter to Bernard, he wrote mildly to Karl, “Dear Son! A little more or less than 21 gulden seems to me the best amount . . . It was hard work to raise it . . . By the way, do not wear your good clothes indoors. Whoever may call, one need not be fully dressed at home.”29

  When Beethoven went to the country in the warm months, he demanded that Karl visit on weekends. At the same time he turned his nephew into another of his Vienna lackeys, giving him shopping to do, music to copy, letters to write publishers. He expected Karl to study hard and at the same time to be at his beck and call. Most of the time Karl performed these chores as ordered. He still had a stratum of pride in his famous uncle. When Beethoven was out of Vienna, most of his constant letters were practical and affectionate. When they were together, there was trouble. In late 1824, when they were living on Johannesgasse in Vienna, the uproars of their arguments in addition to Beethoven’s piano pounding were egregious enough that the landlord threw them out.30

  Yet despite everything Beethoven was working, he reported to Karl, “tolerably well” at the string quartets for Galitzin.31 Or he was until the spring of 1825, when his gut began to act up beyond his chronic episodes of vomiting and diarrhea. He developed a dangerous bowel inflammation. From Baden in April he wrote his doctor that he was bleeding from his mouth and nose.32 By the next month he felt better, if still shaky. Since anything in an artist’s life and health can be of use, he put this brush with death into the current string quartet: a hymn of thanksgiving by a convalescent.

  His doctor at that point was Anton Braunhofer, professor of medicine at Vienna University and an exponent of the fashionable “Brunonian system” proclaimed by Scottish physician John Brown. The idea was to cure by opposites, attacking weaknesses of the body by stimulation, enemas, diet, and the like. In early 1826, Braunhofer ordered, “Two or three times a day you must syringe yourself with warm milk. Cream of rice and cream of cereal will do you much good.” Beethoven should also avoid wine and coffee, which “augments and exaggerates the activity of the nerves.”33 In a time when the causes of disease remained virtually unknown, Beethoven was taken by Brunonian ideas and by Dr. Braunhofer, their distinguished exponent. He bestowed on the doctor one of his little canons on a punning text: “Doctor, close the door against Death; notes [Noten] will help him who is in need [Not].” History would credit Brunonian medicine with killing more people than the Napoleonic Wars.34

  That spring and summer of 1825 Beethoven was taking the equally useless cure in Baden, living alone with an aged servant who was deaf and illiterate. He was working hard, otherwise sick and lonely and, as usual, disgusted with his servant. In August he wrote Johann, “Most Excellent and Worthy Brother! I request you, you you to come here as soon as possible, for I can’t put up any longer with this old witch who 200 years ago would certainly have been burned . . . The evil nature of this female monster is the chief reason why she makes it impossible for herself to show the smallest sign of goodness—So I beg you to turn up in a few days. Otherwise I shall have again to take up with Herr Schott who has already been here and kissed my hand—But I should like to say again, like the Viennese, ‘I kiss my hand’ to Mr. Shitting.”35 Schott, the object of that pun making his name into defecation, remained Beethoven’s main publisher. But as he wrote Karl Holz, as long as he got a good price he felt no loyalty to any publisher at all: “It is all the same to me what hellhound licks or gnaws away at my brain, since admittedly it must be so.”36

  Holz had largely replaced Schindler in Beethoven’s affections and service because he was a livelier and more engaging companion—which included drinking companion. He was second violin in ­Schuppanzigh’s quartet, an active conductor, and he was good at math, which was a gift to helpless Beethoven. Beethoven described Holz in a letter as a heavy drinker. Holz returned the compliment in describing Beethoven: “He was a stout eater of substantial food; he drank a great deal of wine at table, but could stand a great deal, and in merry company he sometimes became tipsy. In the evening he drank beer or wine . . . When he had drunk he never composed.”37 Since the name Holz means “wood,” he had become the object of the inevitable Beethoven puns: “Most Excellent Piece of Mahogany!”; “Excellent Chip! Most Excellent Wood of Christ!”

  As a function of his fame, Beethoven still had his string of visitors. Often as not he showed them a good time, especially if they visited him in the country, where he was usually in a better mood. Admirer Johann Andreas Stumpff, German born but living in London, turned up in Baden in September 1824. Much of Beethoven’s line with visitors by this time had become routine. For Stumpff he rehearsed his humble admiration for Handel—dropping to his knee to illustrate—and for Mozart, and his contempt for the tastes of the Viennese. Hearing that Beethoven had seen no Handel scores outside Messiah and Alexander’s Feast (he had surely seen others here and there), Stumpff secretly vowed to get his hero a complete Handel edition.38 It took him years to find a copy; in the end, with those books Stumpff brightened Beethoven’s last weeks of life.

  Danish composer Friedrich Kuhlau visited Beethoven in Baden in autumn 1825 and found himself caught up in an eating-and-drinking fest. During it the conversation apparently got indecorous enough that several pages of the conversation book from the occasion were ripped out. The list of guests shows how widely sociable Beethoven could be in these days. At the table besides the visiting Dane were the Viennese piano maker Conrad Graf (who lent Beethoven one of his sturdy instruments), Haslinger, Holz, and a local oboe teacher. Beethoven led the party on a hike up and down the slopes of the ­Helenenthal, with its ruined castles. Then they all sat down in an inn and ordered champagne. In a conversation book Beethoven marked the occasion with a canon, beginning with the B–A–C–H motif, its text a pun in honor of Kuhlau: “Kühl, nicht lau,” which means “Cool, not lukewarm.” Next day Kuhlau had no recollection of how he got back to Vienna.39 Beethoven wrote him, “I must admit that the champagne went too much to my head . . . I do not at all remember what I wrote yesterday.” With that he enclosed the canon, which he had forgotten to give Kuhlau. Then to Holz, “Hardly had I got home when it occurred to me what stuff and nonsense I may have scribbled down yesterday.” He added some advice for Holz about spying on Karl: it was always best to catch him in the act, which implies that Holz should be stalking the boy.40

  British conductor and promoter Sir George Smart appeared in Vienna in autumn 1825, the main reason for his visit, he said, to get the tempos of the Ninth and other Beethoven symphonies from the horse’s mouth. He arrived in time to hear the September 9 tryout of th
e A Minor String Quartet, the second of the Galitzin group. In his diary Smart left a recollection of the occasion. It was in the inn Zum Wilden Mann, in a room rented by Paris publisher Mortiz Schlesinger. (He wanted to hear the quartet before he bought it for his firm—but still he didn’t get the piece.)

  The room was stuffy and hot, occupied by what Smart described as “a numerous assembly of professors.” He found the music “most chromatic and there is a slow movement entitled ‘Praise for the recovery of an invalid.’” He understood that the invalid in question was Beethoven himself. Beethoven took off his coat and watched over the performers as they ran through the piece twice: “A staccato passage not being expressed to the satisfaction of his eye, for alas, he could not hear, he seized Holz’s violin and played the passage a quarter of a tone too flat.” Of those attending besides the players and professors, he notes nephew Karl, Tobias Haslinger, and Carl Czerny.41 Holz recalled that at quartet rehearsals Beethoven usually sat between the first and second violinists, where he could hear some of the higher notes. He specified the tempos and tempo changes, and sometime demonstrated passages on the piano—or violin, as Smart witnessed. When Schuppanzigh struggled with the first-violin part, Beethoven might break into pealing laughter.42

  A couple of days later Schlesinger hosted another performance and afterward invited some of the listeners and performers to dinner. Smart observed Schuppanzigh sitting at the head of the table: “Beethoven called Schuppanzigh Sir John Falstaff, not a bad name considering the figure of this excellent violin player.” After dinner Beethoven improvised at the piano. At the end he rose, Smart said, “greatly agitated. No one could be more agreeable than he was—plenty of jokes. He was in the highest of spirits . . . He can hear a little if you halloo quite close to his left ear.”43 A few days later Smart visited Beethoven in Baden and got a dose of Beethovenian hospitality: a walk in the hills and, at lunch, a drinking contest. Smart reported with modest pride that Beethoven “had the worst of the trial.” He did what he could to coax Beethoven to London, patiently answering his row of objections. As he left, Beethoven dashed off a canon for him on “Ars longa, vita brevis.”44 These days Beethoven appeared to be drinking more than usual, not the best course for a man with a bad liver.