In October 1825, Beethoven returned to Vienna from a long cure in Baden after sending more fulminations to Karl, who was moving their things to a new apartment: “Continue this way and you will rue the day! Not that I shall die sooner, however much this may be your desire; but while I am alive I shall separate myself completely from you.”45 In Vienna he had taken four spacious and attractive rooms in an apartment building called the Schwarzpanierhaus, fronting on the Alservorstadt Glacis outside the gates of the city. (It was called the Black Spaniard House because it had been built by black-robed Spanish Benedictines.) In the bedroom he installed his Broadwood and the new Graf piano. A maid and an old cook named Sali, a rare servant who seemed devoted to him, had a room for themselves. The floor of another room was piled with heaps of music in manuscript and print; its dust was rarely disturbed. After a lifetime of restless wandering, mostly within the confines of Vienna and its suburbs, the Schwarzpanierhaus was Beethoven’s final residence.
His building lay diagonally across from the one where his childhood friend Stephan von Breuning lived, in the same flat the two had shared long ago before a fight broke up the arrangement. Since then there had been further breakups and reconciliations, the last estrangement flaring when Stephan objected to Beethoven’s becoming Karl’s guardian. Stephan worked in the Viennese bureaucracy as a councillor in the War Department, and he was ailing seriously. Now they had a warm reconciliation. The renewal of their friendship sparked Beethoven’s nostalgia about Bonn, his yearning to see the Rhineland he left when he was twenty-two. He was fond of Stephan’s son Gerhard, then on the verge of his teens. The boy got the inevitable Beethoven nicknames: Hosenknopf (“trouser-button”), because Beethoven said the boy stuck to him like one; and “Ariel,” after Shakespeare’s sprite in The Tempest, because Gerhard was given to capering about on their walks.
Gerhard von Breuning was with his father’s famous friend often in his last years, and he left a trenchant and intimate memoir. He recalled that Beethoven commandeered Frau von Breuning to oversee his housekeeping and servants. There was only so much one could do. Beethoven’s quarters remained a spectacle of dust and confusion, which is why Gerhard’s mother resisted his invitations to meals at his flat. When walking with her husband’s groaning and mumbling friend she was distressed to find that people took him for a tramp or a madman. Gerhard remembered that once, during a dinner at the Breuning flat, his sister let out a shriek over something, and Beethoven laughed with delight because he heard it. During walks with Gerhard, Beethoven commented on the sights. On a Versailles-style row of trees in the Schönbrunn Palace grounds: “All frippery, tricked up like old crinolines. I am only at ease when I am in unspoiled nature.” On a passing soldier: “A slave who has sold his freedom for five kreuzers a day.” Gerhard became familiar with Beethoven’s sarcasm, in his words and his tone of voice. As visitors noticed, even in his fulminations and pontifications there was an energy, a gusto, a mind steadily and creatively at work.
Beethoven told Gerhard about his projects, among them the Tenth Symphony that existed mainly in his mind as he worked on his string quartets. There would be no chorus in this symphony, he said. With it he wanted to create “a new gravitational force.” History would like to know what Beethoven meant by those words, if Gerhard remembered them right (like most Beethoven anecdotes, this one was written down years later).46 Whatever that new gravitational force in a symphony was to be, likely it came from what he had learned working on the new quartets, each of which has its own gravity, its own mode of exploration.
If his rapprochement with Stephan von Breuning turned Beethoven’s mind back to his roots in Bonn, that nostalgia was amplified by a letter from another of his oldest friends, Franz Wegeler, now a much-honored physician living in Koblenz. He was still married to Stephan’s sister Eleonore, one of Beethoven’s early loves. They had both been part of the artistic, intellectual, and progressive circle that gathered around her and Stephan’s mother, Helene von Breuning, who practically adopted the teenage Beethoven. Later it had been to Wegeler that Beethoven first confessed his deafness. They had a friendship preserved by distance; there had never been a fight except for a short period of friction long before, when Wegeler was staying in Vienna. Yet they had not corresponded in years. At the end of 1825, Wegeler’s long, affectionate, nostalgic letter arrived out of the blue. He addressed his old friend by his first name in French, as he had done when they were teenagers:
My dear old Louis! I cannot let one of the 10 Ries children travel to Vienna without reawakening your memories of me. If you have not received a long letter every two months during the 28 years since I left Vienna, you may consider your silence in reaction to mine to be the first cause. It is in no way right and all the less so now, since we old people like to live so much in the past and especially take delight in scenes from our youth. To me, at least, my acquaintance and my close youthful friendship with you, blessed by your kind mother, remains a very bright point in my life . . . Now I view you as a hero, and am proud to be able to say: I was not without influence upon his development; he confided to me his wishes and dreams; and when later he was so frequently misunderstood, I knew well what he wanted. Thank God that I was able to speak about you with my wife and now later with my children, although my mother-in-law’s house was more your residence than your own, especially after you lost your noble mother.
Wegeler’s admiration for Maria van Beethoven echoed her son’s; he does not mention father Johann. In the letter Wegeler catches Louis up on his doings since they were last in touch. He is sixty, the family is healthy, his daughter plays Beethoven on piano, his son studies medicine in Berlin. Mama Helene von Breuning is seventy-six, living in her parents’ house in Cologne. Patriarchs Ries and Simrock are “two fine old men.” Then Wegeler turns to a more serious matter, prodding his friend concerning the rumor that Beethoven was the bastard son of the king of Prussia. Beethoven knew about the story and had never publicly denied it. Wegeler asks, “Why have you not avenged the honor of your mother, when in the Conversations-Lexikon and in France, they make you out to be a love child? . . . If you will inform the world about the facts in this matter, so will I. That is surely one point at least to which you will reply.”47 The rumor about Beethoven’s paternity had appeared first in a French historic dictionary of musicians, naming the father Prussian king Friedrich Wilhelm II. The Konversations-Lexikon in Leipzig changed the father to the even more absurd Frederick the Great.48
Wegeler enclosed a letter from his wife. Eleonore and Louis had parted on a sour note when he left Bonn in 1792. She entreats him to visit them and his homeland. Her mother Helene, she says, “is grateful to you for so many happy hours—listens so gladly to stories about you, and knows all the little details of our happy youth in Bonn—of the quarrels and reconciliations. How happy she would be to see you!” She downplays their daughter’s musical talent but says the girl can play his sonatas and variations. She adds that Wegeler picks through his friend’s themes for variations (the easiest part) “with unbelievable patience” at the piano, and he likes the old ones the best. “From this, dear Beethoven, you can see how you still live among us in these lasting memories. Just tell us once that this means something to you, and that you haven’t completely forgotten us.”49
Beethoven was surely pleased to get letters from his old friends, but he felt no haste about replying to them or about squelching the rumor concerning his paternity. He replied to Wegeler only a year later.
In January 1826, Beethoven sent the String Quartet in B-flat Major to Artaria for publication. It was the third and last of the Galitzins he finished. The B-flat ended up as op. 130, the second-finished A Minor as op. 132. With these three works he brought the Poetic style to the medium of string quartet and pushed the evolution of his late music into new territories. Part of what that says is that each of the quartets is even more a departure from tradition than the middle quartets and late piano sonatas. As a group they are distinct, and they are no less dist
inct from one another.
Still, there are threads holding the Galitzins together. One of those threads is the result of a change in working habit: having always sketched out pieces largely on a single line, for the late quartets Beethoven did the sketching on four staves.50 That indicated his intention to be steadily contrapuntal and to find new textures and new kinds of part writing. On virtually every page, the quartets show that kind of attention to the individuality of the voices. At the same time that he sought a broader spectrum of color with the medium, Beethoven continued his quest for fresh ways of putting pieces together and, in keeping, new shades of feeling, new approaches to the human.
Among other developments as he made his way through these works, he veered further from the norms of logic and continuity he had learned from the Viennese Classical tradition, delved further into effects of juxtaposition and discontinuity. Here is a new intensification of the Poetic style, reaching toward conceptions that were to galvanize composers of the coming generation. In the Galitzins one finds more overt autobiography than before; finds Romantic irony of the self-reflecting kind (music about music, a theme about a theme); finds digressions and sudden passionate outbursts. In a review of op. 132, the critic called Beethoven “our musical Jean Paul,” citing that Romantic writer noted for his volcanic fantasy, his formal and logical eccentricities. Along with Hoffmann, Jean Paul was a key inspiration of Robert Schumann and his generation.
The op. 127 Quartet is in E-flat major, the key purged of a heroic tone. It is a study in lyricism expressed in the most delicate and amiable passages—but they are new kinds of delicacy and amiability, with little trace of the eighteenth century. It begins with six bars of robust, bouncing chords in rich double-stops that in the first measures fool the ear about the meter—we hear a downbeat in the middle of the actual first beat:
Before the first theme proper, those six introductory bars embody another of Beethoven’s games of these years with familiar formal functions: is this opening a theme or a micro-introduction? In practice it is more or less the latter, but it turns up a couple of times further in the movement, so it might better be called some sort of motto passage. The significant melodic element is the violin’s rise of a sixth from E-flat to a trilled C in bar six. That sixth is going to be the compass of most themes to come, and C is going to be the main tonality of the development section. The first theme appears, warm and flowing, in the violin line, handed off to viola, with a fine lyrical charm. The rich contrapuntal web of these bars is going to return in various guises and permutations some two dozen times.51
In a compact exposition, the G-minor second theme flows lyrically like the first, and soon makes its way back to the first-theme idea. After a brief closing section we find ourselves returned to the opening “introduction,” as if the exposition has made the usual repeat back to the beginning. But the introductory idea is now in G major, and it ushers in the development without a repeat of the exposition. The development slips almost imperceptibly back into a transformed recapitulation, as if the recap were a continuation of the development. The coda, almost as long as the other sections, is pensive, to prepare the slow movement.
At one point in composing op. 127, Beethoven thought the quartet might have six movements, one of them called La Gaieté—as if in response to La Malinconia in op. 18. That plan receded to four movements, and the lively Gaieté theme metamorphosed into the theme of the Adagio.52 That movement begins with a long, slow-arching theme as subject for five gently beautiful variations. Here Beethoven’s intensified focus on part writing comes to the front of the stage: unlike anything before, these verge on texture variations, some of those textures made of several distinct figures in the instruments:
The fourth variation is an endless melody in the first violin, accompanied by pulsing chords. In the last variation the violin leads the way into a liquid texture of sextuplets. While the first movement was just over six and a half minutes, the variations are some sixteen and a half. The next two movements will each be just under seven minutes, so the slow movement is nearly as long as the other three combined.
The third movement is another of his sui generis outings. Marked Scherzando vivace, lively and playful, it is therefore a scherzo, and in scherzo–trio–scherzo form. Otherwise it sounds nothing like a scherzo, or a minuet either, though it is in 3/4 and in minuet rather than scherzo tempo. All of it is based on a bouncing and ironic tune that goes in and out of fugue, like a parody of a fugue extended to the point of seeming endless. The trio comes on in breathless triple one-beat, like a manic scherzo. Here are the kind of instant changes of direction that marked the late piano sonatas and some of the Missa solemnis, now introduced to the string quartet.
In the finale, after another short, sort-of introduction (which characterizes the beginning of all the movements), the first theme of the sonata form is again warmly lyrical, like most of the quartet, and manifestly derived from the first theme of the first movement:
Here lines in long, flowing phrases alternate with dancing figures in delicate staccato, especially the second theme. As in the first movement, a compact exposition slips without repeat into a compact development that continues unbroken into a highly varied developmental recapitulation and finally into a long coda.53 There is something magical about this coda, which transforms the main theme into passages that recall the liquid last variation of the slow movement. It ends with the kind of heart-filling affability that has marked the quartet from the beginning.
In its innovations, the wonderfully fresh and engaging op. 127 picks up a little down the road from the two quartets of a decade before—the Serioso and the Harp. Then in the Galitzins the serious deconstruction of forms and norms began.
Another mark of Beethoven’s late music is the union of mystery and surprise, even shock, with an inner logic that sinks traditional structure deeper beneath the fantasy-like surface. The quiet opening of the A Minor String Quartet, op. 132, presents us with an effect of a gnomic puzzle continually turning around on itself:
The four-note motive that is turned over and around—a half step up, a leap (primally a sixth) up and a half step down—is the fundamental motive of the quartet, both as intervals and as shape: step up–leap–step down. It will seed every theme, in ways both overt and subtle:
At the same time the opening implies most of the tonal centers in the quartet: the first four notes outline A minor, the first notes in the violin hint at E minor and then C major. The F–E of the second bar is another primal motif; here it foreshadows, among other things, the F major of the second theme. The opening phrase, in other words, virtually contains the quartet in embryo, including the austere contrapuntal texture that will flower in the third movement.
The tone of the first movement is peculiarly poignant; call it poised between yearning and hope. A minor was an unusual key for Beethoven. This quartet defines it not as a tragic tonality but rather as a key of Romantic passion, irony, and mystery. Call it a distant descendant, in another country, of an earlier rhapsodic work in A minor—the Kreutzer Sonata.
After the opening bars turning around the motto, there is a sudden skittering Allegro that as suddenly dissolves. Fragments of a breathless, yearning theme burst out, alternating with driving dotted descents on a B-flat triad. That phrase, constantly shifting among the instruments, is less a theme than a theme about a theme, or a gesture toward a theme that remains in potential. Yearning for the unrealizable: this is Romantic territory.
In its incompleteness the yearning phrase is nonetheless the main material of the movement, with new continuations in endless development. The rest of the matter is the skittering Allegro idea, the driving dotted figures, and a sweetly aching second theme in F major. These leaps among contrasting ideas, from quiet and austere to loud and passionate, foreshadow events all the way to the dichotomies of the third movement. There are no transitions, only sudden juxtapositions, like a character who is prey to manic emotions in a Sturm und Drang tale.
We are n
ominally in sonata form, though there is no repeat of the exposition, and the recapitulation apparently starts in the wrong key (E minor); a page later the music slips back into the proper A minor, but only briefly. From early on, Beethoven looked for fresh harmonic relationships within sonata form, turning away from the usual second theme in the dominant key to ones in mediants (III and VI), which became his norm. This fresh treatment of keys happened in the middle period, while his handling of formal outlines remained relatively traditional. Now, to say what he needs to say he has to bend the old forms a great deal more, to more radical ends. Here, as in the E-flat Quartet but more thoroughly, he often departs from clear and regular Classical phrasing; he writes more than the usual four movements; he suppresses and rearranges familiar formal and tonal landmarks for a through-composed effect; he makes the recapitulation nearly as developmental as the development section.54 In the A Minor the transformation of ideas is so constant from the beginning that it questions the very meaning of “exposition”: when we first hear the yearning theme it enters the scene breathlessly, in fragments, as if it were already a recollection, a passionate wisp of memory known to the character onstage but not to us.
Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph Page 101
