Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph

by Swafford, Jan

  What does the Grosse Fuge mean to the whole of the Quartet in B-flat Major, this enigma that crowns the most enigmatic work of Beethoven’s life? Many guesses would be proffered over the next two centuries. The more relevant ones would call the essence of the B-flat Major Quartet irony, disjunction, paradox. The fugue brings the climax of those qualities. Here Beethoven the supreme master of form and unity used all his craft to conjure a vision of disunity unto chaos, comic in tone some of the time, in the end more provoking than joking, but with its own logic, however elusive.

  Op. 130 had its premiere by the Schuppanzigh quartet in March 1826. Because he could not hear the music and also perhaps sensing trouble, Beethoven did not attend the concert. He waited at a tavern for a report. His friends arrived and assured him that much of the quartet had pleased and in fact the second and fourth movements were encored. What about the fugue? Beethoven demanded. One imagines hems and haws, glances exchanged among the friends. It did not go well, they admitted. “And why didn’t they encore the Fugue?” he cried. “That alone should have been repeated! Cattle! Asses!”

  Soon his chosen publisher Artaria began a campaign to convince Beethoven to spin off the finale as a separate piece and provide a kinder and gentler alternative.74 Artaria had paid some 400 florins, unprecedented for a quartet, and was getting a work that threatened to be unsalable. Realizing he had presented a challenge dangerous to the future of the quartet, Beethoven, when Holz presented him with the idea, took exactly one day to agree—and to name his price for the alternate finale.75 Artaria commissioned a four-hand piano arrangement to be published along with the separate string version. Thus the Grosse Fuge would be saved, and at the same time the B-flat Quartet saved from the Grosse Fuge. Beethoven lived just long enough to write the new finale. The first publication of the quartet, in any case, had the Grosse Fuge. Beethoven agreed to the alternative, but he did not disavow the original version.

  In any case the fugue is the true finale. However strangely, it enfolds motifs, rhythms, tonalities, gestures, styles from each of the other movements. Most of all it pays off the contradictions that were first put forth on the first page—though in the end, without trying to resolve the dichotomies and ambiguities. But though the “Great Fugue” begins in violence, as if a return and revenge of the old contrapuntalists, near the end it arrives at its gentle and good-humored allegro molto e con brio. The gentleness and brio last to the end, and maybe there is the point: this epic, mad fugue begins in fury, but it ends in beauty.

  What was Beethoven after in op. 130, his supreme enigma? Was he working toward some new kind of order in his music, in radically new, call them Romantic, directions? If so, in the time left to him he never wrote anything else like it.76 Had he despaired of the models of organic form and logic he learned from the past? Surely not; in the next quartet he drew closer to those models again. The Quartet in B-flat Major stands as an ultimate, the furthest extension of the Poetic style, an unanswered question. One of the first reviewers called the fugue “incomprehensible, like Chinese.”77

  When he finished the three quartets for Prince Galitzin, Beethoven was not done with the medium. With no commission now, simply for himself, he went on to the Quartet in C-sharp Minor, which he intended to place at the opposite pole of the B-flat Major: after ultimate disintegration, ultimate integration. The opening fugue of the next quartet would be in itself the opposite pole of the Grosse Fuge. When he finished the B-flat Major he called it his favorite of his quartets.78 When he finished the C-sharp Minor, he called it his greatest.

  33

  Plaudite, Amici

  AS THE END of 1825 approached, Beethoven seemed to have no awareness that his clock was running down, though it would hardly have surprised him. He had said long before that he knew how to die. He had come close any number of times, most recently from an inflamed colon. “Beethoven is now well again,” his publisher friend Tobias Haslinger wrote composer Johann Hummel, “but he is aging very much.”1 If Beethoven noticed that, he did not mention it. He may not have owned a mirror anyway. Starting in December, his attention was taken up by the new string quartet, in ­C-sharp minor. Riding on the energy of the Galitzin Quartets, this one was done without commission, for himself.

  In November he was made an honorary member of Vienna’s leading musical organization, the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde. It was a touching honor, especially since he had long owed the group either a refund of a commission or an oratorio to be titled The Victory of the Cross. (To try to accommodate him the directors suggested a new Biblical libretto, Saul.2 It did no good.) The directors who approved his membership included composers Luigi Cherubini and Louis Spohr, neither of whom much approved of Beethoven’s music, but they could not deny his position in the art.

  His health gave him no respite. By January his eye inflammation had returned, on top of abdominal troubles—either his long-standing ones or a new variety. In fact his liver was failing, an ailment to which he contributed by drinking more wine than usual. In that, he seems to have been abetted by Karl Holz, his current chief factotum. In other respects, Holz served Beethoven well. He was an able musician, second violin in the Schuppanzigh quartet, and a devoted and insightful friend.

  Holz wrote in a conversation book, “I would explain the difference between Mozart’s and your instrumental works in this way: For one of your works a poet could only write one poem; while to a Mozart work he could write three or four analogous ones.”3 Beethoven probably liked that. It speaks to the consistency of his narrative line—though it applies more to the early and middle music than to the late, which is more poetic than narrative. Mozart and Haydn are less allusive and more elusive. As Goethe observed, with works by “the newest composers” (mainly meaning Beethoven), “one cannot add anything more to such works from one’s own spirit and heart.”4 He meant that Beethoven gave listeners less room to respond in their own terms, to find their own meanings and stories.

  Holz recalled walking with Beethoven when he was working on the quartets, stopping to jot down an idea. Once Beethoven joked, “But that [idea] belongs to the quartet after the next one [the C-sharp Minor] since the next one [the B-flat] already has too many movements.”

  Holz admired the B-flat Major Quartet the most of the Galitzins, or at any rate told Beethoven he did, despite the Grosse Fuge. He asked which of them Beethoven liked most and got the reply, “Each in its own way! Art demands of us that we don’t stand still . . . You’ll find here a new kind of voice-leading, and, as to imagination, it will, God willing, be less lacking than ever before.” This was spoken “in an imperial style.”5 Did Beethoven really worry that he had been deficient in imagination?

  Beethoven sent the last quartet to Prince Galitzin in early 1826. He had gotten a partial advance, and waited for the 600 florins he was owed as final payment (it included 150 florins for a copy of the overture Die Weihe des Hauses, which Beethoven dedicated to Galitzin). The money never came. When an emissary was deputized to ask for the payment in person in St. Petersburg, Galitzin put him off.6 At the end of 1826, the prince wrote Beethoven a flowery excuse: “You must believe me very inconsistent and very thoughtless to leave you hanging for such a long time without a response, especially since I have received from you two new masterpieces of your immortal and inexhaustible genius.”7 Galitzin had suffered family losses and one of the extravagant bankruptcies aristocrats were given to. He finally paid his bill in 1852, to Karl van Beethoven. But he did not do it in good humor. Galitzin had arranged for the premiere of the Missa solemnis in St. Petersburg and after it reported to Beethoven, “I doubt if I exaggerate when I say that for my part I have never heard anything so sublime.”8 Years later the prince snarled, “Who acted more nobly, Beethoven or I? He sends me without warning a useless score [the mass] for which I had not asked. He then makes me pay fifty ducats for it when I could have bought a printed copy a few months later for only five thalers.”9

  In the world outside Beethoven’s own labors and obsessions, Ro
manticism continued to define his music on its terms. In an Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung article of January 1826, critic Gottfried Wilhelm Fink wrote an article titled with a perennial question: “Is It True That Our Music Has Declined So Far That It No Longer Can Stand Comparison with the Old and Oldest Music?” His review of the immediate past includes familiar tropes: “Haydn lifted up a great people into the new, friendly course of his life. Mozart arose with splendor. His light is clear like the light of reason, which, like a good father, allows the children of his heart to play around him.” When the critic reaches Beethoven his metaphors reach for the mythological, while in their enthusiasm they threaten the incoherent: “Beethoven ascended like youth decorated with all the colors of spring. He seats himself upon mountains. Wildly his steeds rush forth. Brooding, he holds the reins firmly so that they rear at the precipice. He, however, peers into the abyss as if he had buried something down there. Then he bounds across the gaping crevices and proceeds home, playing as if in mockery or blustering as if in a storm. And that something in the depths strangely gazes after him—that is also life.”10

  In the spring Beethoven had a visit from piano pedagogue Friedrich Wieck, who had decided before his daughter Clara was born that any child he fathered was going to be one of the greatest pianists in the world. (He later resisted but failed to prevent Clara, at eighteen already famous across Europe, from marrying Robert Schumann.) Wieck reported that Beethoven improvised for him for more than an hour on a piano with an amplifier on the sounding board. He listed the topics of Beethoven’s conversation, or rather his soliloquies. They included his abominable housekeeper, music in Leipzig, the Leipzig Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung editor Friedrich Rochlitz, walking, the Schön­brunn Palace and grounds, his idiot of a brother, “Viennese fools,” the aristocracy, democracy, the French Revolution, Napoleon, the perfection of Italian opera, Cardinal Rudolph. As for his style, Wieck reported, “He expressed himself rather crudely, but gave the impression of being a noble, sympathetic, and sensitive character, friendly and enthusiastic in his attitude but politically a pessimist.” Wieck noted that Beethoven often took his head or hair in his hands.11 It is the posture of a man exhausted, or in pain.

  Another visitor that summer reported Beethoven’s punningly exclaiming over Sebastian Bach, “His name ought not to be Bach [‘brook’] but Ocean, because of his infinite and inexhaustible wealth of combinations and harmonies.” He declared that the purest church music should be a cappella, without instruments, and the highest example of that style was Palestrina. But he added, “It was folly to imitate [Palestrina] unless one had his genius and his religious beliefs.”12 Beethoven had made good use of the old polyphonist as a model, but he admitted by implication that even if he had the genius, he did not have that purity of faith.

  Besides the Quartet in C-sharp Minor, more or less his only other project of this period involved the four-hand piano arrangement of the Grosse Fuge, commissioned from pianist Anselm Halm. When Beethoven received the arrangement, Halm enclosed a note saying that for the sake of convenience he had had to break up some of the lines among the hands. Beethoven was not interested in convenience. He rejected Halm’s arrangement and did a new version himself. The manuscript shows massive revisions and struggles on the page; at some points the erasures have dug holes through the paper.13 Publisher Artaria was not pleased. He was expected to pay for the new finale, and when Beethoven threw out the keyboard arrangement of the fugue and redid it, Artaria had to pay for that too. In effect, the publisher paid for the unsalable Grosse Fuge three times.

  Beethoven finished the C-sharp Minor String Quartet and went on to the next, in F major. During those months, relations between him and nephew Karl reached their inevitable smashup. For the first time since the 1790s, in the summer of 1826, Beethoven had stayed on in Vienna as the hot weather came on, mainly to keep an eye on his nephew. Karl, now nineteen and staying in a boarding house, had counted on his uncle’s going away so he could have some relief from suspicions and accusations. At one point, Karl struck Beethoven and fled to his mother.14 In June they had a violent argument over Karl’s laundry bill.15

  At the end of July 1826, around the time he finished the C-sharp Minor Quartet, Beethoven received a note from Karl’s landlord, Wenzel Schlemmer: “I learned today that your nephew intended to shoot himself at latest next Sunday.”16

  Secretly Karl had been seeing his mother more often and carousing with his forbidden friend Niemetz. He told a teacher, “My uncle! I can do with him what I want, some flattery and friendly gestures make things all right again right away.” He told Karl Holz that he could wrap his uncle around his finger.17 In fact the nineteen-year-old was desperate, unraveling.

  When Karl’s landlord got wind that the boy was intending to shoot himself, he searched Karl’s room. In a chest he found two pistols, one of them loaded, and lead and powder. Schlemmer reported to Beethoven, “I was given to understand only that it was to be on account of debts, but not quite for certain, he admitted them only in part, as the consequence of former sins.” Beethoven dispatched Holz to fetch his nephew, but somehow Holz let him slip away. He reported to Beethoven, “I believe that if he intends to do himself harm, no one can stop him . . . He said, what good will it do you to keep me, if I do not get away today, it will happen another time.”18 Karl pawned his watch and bought another pair of pistols.

  Soon after, Beethoven received word that Karl had disappeared. Frantic, he ran to Niemetz’s house, then to Johanna’s. There he found his ward lying in bed with a bullet lodged in the left side of his forehead. As the story trickled out, on August 6 Karl had gone to Baden and climbed to the ruins of Castle Rauhenstein on a cliff looking down into the Helenenthal. The wooded valley with its ancient ruins was a landscape he knew from walks with his uncle. Which is to say, Karl planned his end in a famous and picturesque setting: a Romantic suicide. He put one pistol to his head, shuddering, pulled the trigger, and missed or misfired. His feelings can be imagined as he raised the second pistol. That bullet knocked him down and out but did not penetrate his skull. A carter found him barely conscious. He asked to be taken to his mother’s.

  A later time would understand that a miss with two pistols indicates a cry for help rather than a determined attempt.19 But in those days there were no such categories, and attempted suicide was a crime. The police were notified, as they had to be. Karl, slipping in and out of consciousness and effectively under arrest, was taken to the General Hospital. Under interrogation he told a policeman he had done it “because my uncle harassed me so.”

  Beethoven showed up at the hospital in a lather. “Is my nephew with you, the dissolute fellow, the scoundrel?” he demanded of a Dr. Seng, who reported his voice as “dull.” Beethoven went on, “I really did not want to visit him, for he does not deserve it, he has made too much trouble for me.” He told the doctor he had spoiled the boy. It appeared to Seng that Beethoven’s main fear was that Karl would go to jail.20

  The conversation books of the next weeks record Karl’s responses to his uncle as he lay in bed. “Don’t torment me now with reproaches and complaints. It is past,” read one entry. When Beethoven began to berate his mother, Karl stood up for her: “I do not want to hear anything that is derogatory to her. It is not for me to be her judge. If I were to spend the little time I shall be here [in the hospital] with her, it would be only a small return for all that she has suffered on my account.”21 Beethoven could not allow that. He wrote a magistrate, “I urgently request you to arrange that my nephew, who will have recovered in a few days, shall not leave the hospital with anybody but myself and Herr von Holz—It is out of the question to allow him to be much in the company of his mother, that extremely depraved person. My anxieties and my request are warranted by her most evil, wicked and spiteful character, her enticement of Karl for the purpose of getting money out of me . . . and that she also was intimate with Karl’s dissolute companion [meaning Niemetz].”22 In the event, Karl was in the hospital for more th
an a month.

  Beethoven ran into Stephan von Breuning’s wife in town and cried to her, “Do you know what has happened to me? My Karl has shot himself!” Is he dead? Frau von Breuning asked. “No, he only grazed himself, he is still alive, there is hope that he can be saved—but the disgrace that he has caused me. I loved him so much!”23 Schindler wrote that after the disaster Beethoven seemed overnight to look like a man of seventy. “To add to his suffering he was compelled to learn that many persons placed part of the blame for the rash act upon him.” But his circle closed around him. Young Gerhard von Breuning wrote Beethoven, “You must come to us for all your meals so that you will not be alone.”24 Stephan von Breuning took over Karl’s guardianship. Beethoven’s friends blamed Karl alone.

  These responses of Beethoven’s are another testament to his incapacity to see the disaster beyond his own pain, his own reputation. Here is where the solipsism that had been with him since his youth, which his friends and admirers had always understood and largely forgiven, turned on him with devastating effect. And yet, now, finally, he bent. Holz and Stephan von Breuning pressed him to let Karl join the army as he wanted to. “A military life will be the best discipline for one who cannot endure freedom,” Stephan told Beethoven. And Holz: “Here you see ingratitude as clear as the sun . . . A soldier at once!” Soon after this discussion, from his bed Karl wrote to his uncle in a conversation book, “My present condition is still such that I would ask you to make as little mention as possible of what has happened and cannot be altered. If my wish concerning a military career can be fulfilled I will be very happy, in any case I consider it the thing in which I could live and be satisfied.”25