Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph

by Swafford, Jan

  While the doctors cut at him, Johann, Schindler, Stephan, and Karl Holz began an anxious search for his papers. After some hours, they were about to give up when Holz pulled on a nail projecting from a cupboard. A collection of papers and other objects tumbled out of a hidden drawer.91 As hoped, they included the bank shares left to Karl. The rest was his collection of talismans: the Heiligenstadt Testament, the letter to the Immortal Beloved, ivory miniatures of two young women. One portrait was identified as Julie Guicciardi. The other remained mysterious. If this was the face of the Immortal Beloved, her identity would never be fully resolved.92 From that point, hour by hour, day by day, object by object that left the Schwarzpanierhaus, the tangible reality of Beethoven’s life began to pass into legend.

  In the confusion of the next day, Schindler spirited away a good deal of important material: four bundles of conversation books, manuscripts and letters, Beethoven’s alabaster clock, his eyeglasses and ear trumpets.93 In later years, before he sold the conversation books for a handsome price, Schindler forged a great many entries in the books to make it look like he was close to Beethoven years longer than he actually was. He also destroyed pages and perhaps whole books. All the same, if Schindler had not lifted those effects, they would have been scattered to all and sundry, as many of the musical manuscripts and sketchbooks were.

  After the autopsy came the lying-in, in high style. In front of the door to his study, facing the door, the body was placed in a polished oak coffin resting on gilded supports. Beethoven’s head was crowned by a wreath of white roses and laid on a white silk pillow; in the crossed hands were placed a cross and a white lily. All the hair on his head had been cut off by strangers, for souvenirs. Eight candles burned on each side of the coffin. And so on. Maid Sali, one of few servants he ever had whom he did not drive away with his violence and contempt, received the stream of visitors coming to view the body in state.94

  The funeral of March 29 would be remembered as one of the grandest Vienna ever put on for a commoner. Schools were closed. The coffin was brought down to the courtyard of the Schwarzpanierhaus covered with a richly embroidered pall and laid with wreaths. Priests droned, and a choir sang. When the door of the courtyard was opened the press of people streaming in made it difficult to lift the coffin and start the procession. Finally it got under way. Among the pallbearers was Johann Hummel, among the torchbearers Carl Czerny, Franz Grillparzer, Tobias Haslinger, Karl Holz, Ignaz Schuppanzigh, and Franz Schubert—the last destined to die the next year.

  The cortege took shape among a welter of crosses, flowers, trombones, priests, singers, friends and members of the family, and a crowd of some ten thousand. As the procession turned onto the Alsergasse, brass instruments played the Funeral March from op. 26. At St. Stephen’s Cathedral candles flickered in every altar, chandelier, and bracket. Again the press was so thick that friends and relatives had trouble getting inside.

  After the service the procession to the cemetery began, thousands falling off but more thousands taking up the slow march. There was a stop at the parish church of Währing for more music and blessings. By now the procession included schoolchildren from the town and a convocation of the poor. Before the gates of the cemetery the coffin was laid down, and the tragedian Heinrich Anschütz stepped up to give the funeral oration written by Franz Grillparzer. Such orations were forbidden inside the cemetery. At the grave were more blessings, and the coffin descended into the ground. Johann Hummel dropped three flower wreaths on the coffin. By Viennese custom, friends and family threw handfuls of earth into the grave, and then it was done. The simple monument said only BEETHOVEN.95 It needed no further inscription.

  Then the aftermath and the legacy. Before Beethoven was buried, a grave digger in Währing came to Schindler and said he had been offered 1,000 florins for Beethoven’s head. (After Haydn was buried, his body was exhumed and his head severed and spirited away by a phrenologist who wanted to study the skull.) The police were notified.96 In November Beethoven’s musical effects were auctioned off, bringing in a pathetic 1,140 florins. The autograph of the Missa solemnis sold for 7 florins, the score of his still-popular Septet for 18 florins. The total amount of his estate including Karl’s bank shares was 10,000 florins. The bank official found the Philharmonic Society’s 100-pound note intact. The society wanted its money back, but Moscheles persuaded its members to give up their claim, and the money was used for posthumous expenses.97

  In April there were two memorial services packed with people, the music for one Mozart’s Requiem and for the other Cherubini’s Requiem. Beethoven would have approved of both. His family and circle went their ways, each to his or her own life and fate. At the Schwarzpanierhaus in April, an auction of his furnishings and belongings was chaos, used-clothes dealers pushing and shoving and the furniture jerked about. Graf reclaimed the piano he had lent Beethoven. After the stress and dismay of overseeing the auction, Stephan von Breuning suffered a relapse of his liver condition. In turn he took to his bed and never rose. He died two months and nine days after Beethoven and was buried steps from his childhood friend’s grave.98

  Karl van Beethoven left the military as a second lieutenant in 1832 and spent most of the rest of his life living comfortably in Vienna on the money he inherited from uncles Ludwig and, later, Johann. He married and he and his wife had five children; their only son Ludwig Johann died in America sometime after 1910. Karl died in 1858 at age fifty-two, from liver disease.99 Johann van Beethoven’s wife Therese died the year after Ludwig. She had secretly changed her will to leave her estate to her daughter, who therefore inherited half of Johann’s estate—or at least the 41,000 florins he claimed at the time. In the winter months in Vienna over the next years, Johann became a familiar figure at concerts of his brother’s music, sitting in the front row, at the end trying to cry the loudest bravos while he clapped in his oversize gloves with flapping fingers.100 He lived on until 1848 and left his fortune of 42,000 florins to Karl as his brother had wanted him to. (That was worth more than 1 million in the dollars of a century later.)101 Johanna van Beethoven, widow of brother Carl and Beethoven’s bête noire, came into possession of the original Heiligenstadt Testament. In 1840, Franz Liszt helped her find a buyer for the letter. It eventually made its way to soprano Jenny Lind, herself a living legend. Johanna died destitute in 1868.102

  In 1863, Beethoven’s body was exhumed—along with Schubert’s—studied by doctors, and reburied in a metal coffin, all financed by the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde. In 1888, when the Währing cemetery was long deserted, he was exhumed again, and he and Schubert were given graves of honor side by side in the giant Zentralfriedhof, the city’s main burial ground. In 1897, Brahms joined them.

  After Beethoven died the first necrology appeared in the Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung, written by its former editor Johann Friedrich Rochlitz. He had met Beethoven and long championed him, if not uncritically. “To him belong the greatest, richest, and most unusual qualities that modern instrumental music possesses,” Rochlitz wrote.

  He is the foremost inventor of his contemporaries. In his works, so numerous and significant, he disdained to resemble even himself; rather, he wanted to appear as a new man in each work, even at the risk of making an occasional blunder, or of sometimes being scarcely understood by even a few people. Wherever his most bold, powerful, and energetic works are not yet revered, enjoyed, and loved, the reason is a lack of a noteworthy number of people who are capable of comprehending them and forming a public. The number will grow and with it his fame will increase . . .

  He did not understand people and for approximately the last fifteen years not even their words, and as he did not understand them, neither did they understand him, except in his musical notes . . . He created in his own world, wonderfully made up of musical notes that were only thought and not heard. He gave his world life and made it complete. That is truly the meaning of being what one can be through nature, providence, and one’s own power of the will! . . .

&n
bsp; He will be remembered gloriously in every history of music . . . by having provided the essential content for its present period, and by having made it, this period and its history, his own personal domain.103

  A longer and broader survey from Dr. Wilhelm Christian Müller in the May AMZ concludes,

  He was called the Jean Paul of composers [which is to say, an echt Romantic]. We would rather compare him with Shakespeare in regard to original sublimity, profundity, strength, and tenderness with humor, wit, and his constant, new fantastic variations. Occasionally he also loses himself in excesses, but he is more organized and has more diverse character, and exhausts every idea: the most sublime majesty, the deepest melancholy, the warmest delicacy, the most capricious jesting, the most childlike simplicity, and the craziest merriment.104

  The speech Franz Grillparzer wrote to be declaimed at the gates of the cemetery is more passionate and literary, as befit a poet and Austria’s leading playwright. Grillparzer apparently held no resentment that Beethoven never got around to setting his opera libretto. But if the writer was fascinated by Beethoven the man, he never quite reconciled himself to the music, any more than he did to the whole of the Romantic era. Grillparzer’s sensibility stayed in the eighteenth century. As he once wrote, “The path of modern culture leads from humanity, through nationalism, to bestiality.”105 For him, Beethoven was part of that modern culture.

  But it was Grillparzer’s job to pull out all the stops for the funeral, to wax enthusiastic about works he could not digest. He did his job memorably, sounding chords nationalistic, Romantic, and Aufklärung, and also slipped in his cautions and complaints. Grillparzer called Beethoven the last of his line, the extreme end of art, because he wanted him to be that.

  Standing by the grave of him who has passed away we are in a manner the representatives of an entire nation, of the whole German people, mourning the loss of the only highly acclaimed half of . . . the fatherland’s full spiritual bloom. There yet lives . . . the hero of verse in German speech and tongue [Goethe]; but the last master of tuneful song, the organ of soulful concord, the heir and amplifier of Handel and Bach’s, of Haydn and Mozart’s immortal fame is now no more, and we stand weeping over the riven strings of the harp that is hushed.

  The harp that is hushed! Let me call him so! For he was an artist, and all that was his, was his through art alone. The thorns of life had wounded him deeply, and as the castaway clings to the shore, so did he seek refuge in thy arms, O thou glorious sister and peer of the Good and the True, thou balm of wounded hearts, heaven-born Art! . . .

  He was an artist—and who shall arise to stand beside him? . . . from the cooing of doves to the rolling of thunder, from the craftiest interweaving of well-weighed expedients of art up to that awful pitch where planned design disappears in the lawless whirl of contending natural forces, he had traversed and grasped it all. He who comes after him will not continue him; he must begin anew, for he who went before left off only where art leaves off . . .

  Because he withdrew from the world, they called him a man-hater, and because he held aloof from sentimentality, unfeeling . . . He fled the world because, in the whole range of his loving nature, he found no weapon to oppose it. He withdrew from mankind after he had given them his all and received nothing in return. He dwelt alone, because he found no second Self. But to the end his heart beat warm for all men, in fatherly affection for his kindred, for the world his all and his heart’s blood . . .

  He whom you mourn stands from now onward among the great of all ages, inviolate forever . . . And should you ever in times to come feel the overpowering might of his creations like an onrushing storm, when your mounting ecstasy overflows in the midst of a generation yet unborn, then remember this hour, and think, We were there, when they buried him, and when he died, we wept.

  So Grillparzer performed his solemn task, adding his words and images to the growing myth. In the speech he never mentioned God. For him and his century, it was Art that was divine. His peroration “remember this hour, and think, We were there” echoes Shakespeare’s Henry V before battle at Agincourt. The Zeitung critic had ended by comparing Shakespeare and Beethoven. That pairing had been made going back years, both in admiration and in censure. Beethoven’s ironic penultimate words, “Applaud, friends, the comedy is over,” were from classical Roman comedy but also essentially Shakespearean. They echo Prospero as he speaks to the audience at the end of the end for Shakespeare, The Tempest: “Release me from my bands with the help of your good hands.” Beethoven had told Goethe that the main thing a rough artist like him wanted was applause, not tears.

  Beethoven and Shakespeare: who better to compare? No composer before Beethoven would have fit that comparison. There was the breadth of human understanding and expression that sensitive listeners of his time came to understand in Beethoven, even when it scared them. These two creators shared a power of utterance, a wisdom and wit, a prodigal invention and reinvention, an incomparable depth and breadth of creative journey, and a joining of tragedy and comedy, the old and the new, strangeness and rightness. The sense of timelessness that comes from an eternal human essence shining through the garb of period and idiom and language itself. The transcendence of self in art. We hardly know who Shakespeare was. So much of what we know about Beethoven, we best forget when we come to his art. The limits and the pettiness of humanity held up against the illusion of the limitless in art were never more pointed as with him. He understood people little and liked them less, yet he lived and worked and exhausted himself to exalt humanity.

  Over the centuries, Beethoven and Shakespeare were both elevated to classics, to virtual clichés, but both of them are too wild and strong to be bound in those chains. In the end they both went out with comedy, knowing that comedy is as deep as anything, that art is at the same time vaporous play and transcendent metaphor. “Faust,” Goethe said of his ultimate work, “is a very serious joke.” These artists conjure worlds, and all of us can find a place in those worlds.

  In looking back through the course of Beethoven’s life as a man, what may be most astonishing about him is that he survived the burden of being Beethoven. So much weighed on him: so much music roiled inside, so much rage, so much delusion, so much anguish physical and mental. No wonder his time called him superhuman. But the truer and sadder reality is that Beethoven lived to the ultimate capacities of being human, and he encompassed that in his art. As one of the defining figures of a revolutionary age, he witnessed and spoke for all of us a new vision of what it means to be human.

  Appendix

  Beethoven’s Musical Forms

  Neither in Beethoven’s day nor before did composers commonly set out on a piece without having in mind some traditional model of how its keys and melodic themes were going to be laid out. In modern parlance these models are all tidily labeled, the names including sonata form, sonata-rondo form, concerto-sonata form, theme and variations, ABA form, minuet-scherzo form, fugue and its derivations, canon, and so on. Some of these labels were known to Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven (such as “fugue”), some were not (such as “sonata form”).

  That musical models were elaborately described by later-eighteenth-century theorists was due in part to the influence of the age of reason, which was given to rationalizations and classifications. By the later part of the century, understanding and mastering the various formal models was part of the job of every composer, and being able to understand and recognize them part of the skill of musical cognoscenti. For the purposes of this book, it will be useful to examine the main forms Beethoven composed with refer-ence to.

  SONATA FORM

  This is the layout used for most first movements of multimovement instrumental works, sometimes for finales, now and then for slow movements, and for freestanding pieces such as overtures. What composers of Beethoven’s day probably had in mind was an outline something like this:

  The Roman numerals refer to keys. I is the home key of the movement, called the tonic. V is the key of the
fifth degree of that scale, called the dominant. For example, if the first theme and home key of a movement are in C major, the second-theme section will be in G major or in any case a new key. That first part of the movement is usually repeated.

  In the middle section, the indication X should be read as “a collection of keys at will,” in the course of what amounts to an as-if improvisation on the melodic themes of the first part. Eventually the tonic returns, and all the material of the movement is resolved into it. The modern terms for these sections are, for the first section, exposition, with its two theme sections; for the X section, development; and for the return of the opening key and material, the recapitulation, with its two theme sections now in the tonic key.

  So the basic sections of a sonata-form movement are exposition, development, and recapitulation. The movement may be preceded by an introduction, usually slower than the rest of the piece. There may be an ending section, called the coda. Beethoven had his own terms for these sections: “first part” for the exposition, Durchführung (“working out”) for the development, and da capo for the recapitulation. His term for the whole development and recapitulation section was “second part.” When Beethoven created a movement in sonata form, he composed with reference to that outline.