The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination

by DANIEL J. BOORSTIN

  Nothing could have done more to give Beethoven a heroic stature than his deafness. As Beethoven himself explained, his infirmity forced him to isolate himself. We have bizarre documentary evidence of this isolation in his “conversation books.” Surprisingly, Beethoven’s deafness would provide us with the most intimate conversational record we have of anyone before the days of the tape recorder. Of no other artist’s everyday “talk” do we have so copious, detailed, and random a report. To communicate with people he met—relatives, friends, publishers, visitors—as Beethoven became deaf he increasingly relied on the bound memorandum pads on which he invited a person to write questions or remarks. If a conversation book was not at hand he might use a slate, a loose sheet of paper, or rely on gestures.

  At his death some four hundred of these books were inherited by his heir, Stephan von Bruening, who gave them to Anton Schindler, Beethoven’s devoted servant, secretary, pupil, and companion for the last ten years of his life. Schindler used them for his copious adulatory biography, finally published in 1860. Having drawn on them for his own purposes, in 1846 Schindler sold them to the Royal Prussian Library in Berlin, recalling that Beethoven had wished them to be available to everybody. What he delivered to the library was not 400 conversation books but only 126. When the librarian asked for the missing 264, Schindler explained that he had destroyed some because they contained nothing significant, and others because they were politically embarrassing with “licentious assaults against persons in highest places.” It is more likely that Schindler destroyed them to conceal damaging facts about his idol’s private life or uncomplimentary remarks about himself. For obvious reasons, this strangely intimate record covering mostly the last nine years of Beethoven’s life is emphatically one-sided. Beethoven remained a vivacious talker and loved to have his say. In these conversation books we read mainly the words of his interlocutors or their answers to his questions. When he wrote in the books it was to put down a reminder, or when he feared being overheard or addressed another deaf person, or to record his frequent sense of outrage. But through them we can follow everyday conversations, the fees offered for composing, his concert arrangements, complaints of the price or quality of food or lodging, his reading tastes, the state of his opinions or his digestion, comments from his wayward nephew, menus from his housekeeper, and endless other trivia.

  Visitors were appalled by Beethoven’s personal disarray and slovenly household. He had hardly moved into one apartment before he vacated for another. His biographer, Thayer, could identify more than sixty residential addresses for him after 1800. When Carl Maria von Weber visited him in 1822 he noted music, money, and articles of clothing lying on the floor, wash piled on a dirty unmade bed, thick dust on the grand piano, and a chipped coffee set on the table. Rossini, whose Barber of Seville Beethoven much admired, was invited for a visit in 1822, as he reported to Wagner. “Oh! The visit was short. That is easily understood because one side of the conversation had to be carried on in writing. I expressed to him all my admiration for his genius, all my gratitude for having given me the opportunity to express it. He answered with a deep sigh and the single word: ‘Oh! un infelice.’ ” The neglect of his person, John Russell noted about 1820, gave him “a somewhat wild appearance. His features are strong and prominent; his eye is full of rude energy; his hair, which neither comb nor scissors seem to have visited for years, overshadows his broad brow in a quantity and confusion to which only the snakes round a Gorgon’s head offer a parallel.”

  At the height of his fame in Vienna after 1802, he managed to support himself without an official position. His bargains with music publishers were more favorable than those of Haydn or Mozart. Noble patrons supported him with honoraria and fees for dedications. Vienna had not treated him badly, but he was ingenious at finding causes for quarrel. After the benefit concert in 1808 where the Fifth and Sixth symphonies and his Fourth Piano Concerto were first played, he imagined a conspiracy led by Salieri, Mozart’s archenemy. Outraged at the “intrigues and cabals and meannesses of all kinds,” he threatened to leave Vienna. He would accept the invitation of Napoleon’s brother, Jerome Bonaparte, installed as king of Westphalia, to be his music master. With this as a bargaining chip, he drew up a remarkable document, to be signed by three of his rich Vienna patrons—Archduke Rudolph, Prince Lobkowitz, and Prince Kinsky. It stated the conditions on which Beethoven would remain to enrich the musical life of Vienna and Austria, his “second fatherland.” Since a composer had to be left free “for the invention of works of magnitude,” Beethoven would be given financial security now and for his old age. With an annual stipend from them of not less than four thousand florins “considering the present high cost of living,” he would still be free to make tours “to add to his fame and to acquire additional income.” They noted his desire to be named imperial musical director, and his salary would be adjusted if he received the appointment. He would conduct one charity concert every year or at least contribute a new composition for it. The three Viennese noble guarantors generously added that should Beethoven be prevented from musical work by sickness or old age, his stipend should still go on. On his side Beethoven agreed to continue to make Vienna or some other city in the Austrian monarchy his residence. This agreement, dated March 1, 1809, remained in force his whole life. But Beethoven had not put financial worries behind him.

  Even these benefactions of his admirers became the seeds of dispute, for when Austria declared war in April 1809, the value of its currency sank to half. Then, in 1814, at the very time when Beethoven, lionized in Vienna by the visiting royalty of Europe, was prospering more than ever, he insisted that his stipend be adjusted upward for inflation. He won lawsuits against the heirs of Prince Kinsky and against Prince Lobkowitz, yet somehow preserved friendly relations with their families. But he would need more than their stipends. For he acquired new responsibilities at the death of his brother Karl. Hating his brother’s widow, he fought a long legal battle for control over his weak and unhappy nephew. The young man attempted suicide, and was finally packed off to the army. When the city of Vienna gave Beethoven its freedom, he became tax-exempt, but his pension was reduced by the death of one of the benefactors, and his financial troubles still multiplied.

  Beethoven never managed an affable continuing relationship with his intellectual or artistic equals. Goethe was eager to meet him, and Beethoven, who much admired his poetry, declared, “If there is any one who can make him understand music, I am the man!” Their much anticipated meeting was a disappointment, as Goethe wrote:

  I made the acquaintance of Beethoven in Teplitz. His talent amazed me; unfortunately he is an utterly untamed personality, who is not altogether in the wrong in holding the world to be detestable but surely does not make it any the more enjoyable either for himself or others by his attitude. He is easily excused, on the other hand, and much to be pitied, as his hearing is leaving him, which perhaps mars the musical part of his nature less than the social. He is of a laconic nature and will become doubly so because of this lack.

  And Goethe was especially irritated by his arrogance.

  Beethoven’s erratic judgment of people led him to be fascinated by the charming charlatan Johann Nepomuk Mälzel (1772–1838), who was famous for his “mechanical” Chess Player against which Napoleon played in Vienna in 1809, but which really had a man inside. He did invent the metronome, which made it possible to express musical tempo as a given number of beats to the minute. He also designed the ear trumpets used by Beethoven as hearing aids, and a “panharmonicon,” which mechanically imitated instruments of the orchestra. It was for the panharmonicon that Beethoven composed his notorious “Wellington’s Victory, or the Battle of Victoria” (the “Battle Symphony”), celebrating Wellington’s victory over the French in 1813. Then Beethoven, again at Mälzel’s urging, adapted it for orchestra. Ironically, its performance was a sensational success in Vienna in December 1813 along with the less celebrated first performance of the Seventh Symphony. Later perf
ormances of the two works continued to be applauded, and were profitable to Beethoven. Although the program had been advertised as a performance of “Mälzel’s Mechanical Trumpeter with orchestral accompaniment,” and “Wellington’s Victory” had been conceived by Mälzel, Beethoven gave him none of the credit, nor any of the profits from its repeated success.

  In his last Vienna years Beethoven never mellowed. He seemed driven to dubious business arrangements for some of his noblest works. The Missa Solemnis (Mass in D), which he wrote for the installation of his friend Archduke Rudolf as archbishop of Olmütz (completed in 1823, three years late), had been promised to six different publishers, and finally sold to still another.

  In 1822 he had received a fee from the Philharmonic Symphony Society of London for composing the Ninth Symphony, which they hoped to be the first to hear. By the time the score for the Ninth Symphony was written out in February 1824 Beethoven felt peevishly at odds with the musical taste of Vienna. He thought music lovers had been seduced from serious German music by Rossini’s trivial melodies and fluffy Italian opera. Fearing his symphony would not be well received in Vienna, he asked admirers in Berlin whether his new Mass in D and his Ninth Symphony might be given their performance there. When word of this leaked out in Vienna, thirty leading citizens and music patrons of Vienna addressed an open letter to him urging that he offer the premiere performance in Vienna. The grandiloquent memorial reminded him of his proper loyalties:

  … for though Beethoven’s name and creations belong to all contemporaneous humanity and every country which opens a susceptible bosom to art, it is Austria which is best entitled to claim him as her own.… We know that a new flower glows in the garland of your glorious, still unequalled symphonies.… Do not longer disappoint the general expectations!.… Need we tell you with what regret your retirement from public life has filled us? Need we assure you that at a time when all glances were hopefully turned towards you, all perceived with sorrow that the one man whom all of us are compelled to acknowledge as foremost among living men in his domain, looked on in silence as foreign art took possession of German soil, the seat of honor of a German muse, while German works gave pleasure only by echoing the favorite tunes of foreigners and, where the most excellent had lived and labored, a second childhood of taste threatens to follow the Golden Age of Art?

  When this letter was published and gossips accused Beethoven of having instigated the letter, he was outraged. “Now that The Thing has taken this turn,” he exploded in a conversation book, “I can no longer find joy in it.” Still, flattered by the letter, Beethoven settled on Vienna for the premiere. The conversation books record his concern about every detail. The London Philharmonic Society, which had paid for what it thought would be a performance, would have to be satisfied by a manuscript.

  At the first performance of the Ninth Symphony in Vienna on May 7, 1824, Beethoven, who had his back to the audience, did not notice the thundering applause until a friend tugged his sleeve and made him turn around to see it. The police had refused to allow Beethoven to charge what he thought an appropriate price of admission, and censors objected that anyway “church music” was not supposed to be played in a theater. Despite the tumultuous reception, Beethoven was dissatisfied and dismayed at the performance, and “collapsed” when he saw the accounts, which netted him only 420 florins. At the festive dinner afterward in an elegant restaurant, Beethoven accused Schindler of swindling him, and drove his guests away. Home in a rage, he went to bed with his clothes on. A second performance two weeks later was played to a half-full house, and at a loss.

  Credited with many innovations, Beethoven became the prophet of the Romantic movement in Western music, and was so described by E.T.A. Hoffmann (1776–1822), the pioneer of German Romantic literature. “Beethoven’s music,” he wrote, “sets in motion the lever of fear, of awe, of horror, of suffering, and awakens just that infinite longing which is the essence of romanticism.” With that longing, Beethoven, the hero-composer, created classical music for an audience far outside the concert hall. His concerns were as public as those of a statesman. The orchestra, the new instrument of instruments, had the power to transcend the world of words and so could liberate instrumental music from dependence on vocal style.

  It was in “Beethoven’s instrumental music” that Hoffmann heard the “infinite longing.” Instrumental music itself was “the most romantic of the arts—one might say, the only purely romantic art—for its sole subject is the infinite.” The prolific German Romantic writer Ludwig Tieck (1773–1853) observed in 1820 that vocal music had been “only a qualified art,” but instrumental music was “independent and free.” “It prescribes its own laws, it improvises playfully and without set purpose, and yet attains and fulfills the highest; it simply follows its own dark impulse and in its dallying expresses what is deepest and most wonderful.”

  Beethoven would be adopted as the hero, the Holy Spirit of new worlds of instrumental music. Hector Berlioz (1803–1869), who saw Beethoven as his master, explained why, in the famous garden and cemetery scenes in his dramatic symphony Romeo and Juliet (1847), the lovers’ dialogues are not sung but are given to the orchestra.

  … it is because the very sublimity of this love made its depiction so dangerous for the composer that he had to give his imagination a latitude that the positive sense of the sung words would not have allowed him, and he had to resort to instrumental language—a language more rich, more varied, less limited, and by its very unliteralness incomparably more powerful in such circumstances.

  Wagner, too, would agree in 1850 that instrumental music offered “the sounds, syllables, words, and phrases of a language which could express the unheard, the unsaid, the unuttered.” Again justifying the fears of early Christian philosophers, the very wordlessness of instrumental music made it a vehicle for the wildest extravagances of German antirational philosophers. For Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860), in his World as Will and Idea (1818), some of which he said had been dictated to him by the Holy Ghost, music became the main force against reason—“not an image of the appearance, or rather of the adequate objectification of the Will, but a direct image of the Will itself … the Thing-in-Itself of every phenomenon.” Beethoven had created new forms of this transcendent experience. “If there had not been a Beethoven,” Wagner insisted, “I could never have composed as I have.”

  Beethoven’s great achievement was his invigoration of instrumental music and his discovery of new possibilities in the orchestra. But his “Choral Symphony” was a manifesto of new powers of musical creation still to come. While a choral symphony was not unprecedented, there was no such major work before his. He had originally planned an instrumental finale (on a theme he later used in a quartet), but instead seized the opportunity to unite the music of words and the music of instruments. So, too, he affirmed the new public role of music. The words he chose spoke to the great issues of his time, making explicit his concern for freedom and brotherhood. He chose the words of Schiller’s “Ode to Joy” (Freude) published in 1785, which had originally been an “Ode to Freedom” (Freiheit) but was altered for political reasons. This use of voices by the great master of instrumental music is still debated by critics, to some of whom the words of the “Ode to Joy” seem an anticlimax, a confinement of the “infinite longing” of which Beethoven’s instrumental music was prophetic, and for which instruments set the composer free. Beethoven’s return to the music of words and his bold marriage of words and instruments foreshadowed grand new forms marrying voice and orchestra to create new nations.

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  The Music of Risorgimento

  THE story of the arts in the West had been a chronicle of separations. Vocal music had been a servant of the Church, with a message of faith and worship. Instrumental music developed structures of its own, of which the sonata and the symphony were the most fertile. The ancient Greek theater had united dance, music, and words into drama. But drama in Renaissance England, the art of Shakespeare, was an art of
words. A modern art of opera would remarry music with drama and create something new from the union of voice and orchestra. Outside the Church, with its long-standing suspicion of the theater, opera would be a secular art. And it called for grand secular purposes which were slow in coming.

  The first opera in the modern sense does not appear until about 1600, and the word enters English by mid-century as a shortened form of the Italian opera in musica (“work of music”). “In Italy,” an English dictionary explained in 1656, “it signified a Tragedy, Tragi-Comedy, Comedy or Pastoral, which (being the studied work of a Poet) is not acted after the vulgar manner, but performed by Voyces in that way, which the Italians term Recitative, being likewise adorned with Scenes by Perspective, and extraordinary advantages by Musick.”

  Not only the word but the art of opera came from Italy, embroidering themes of classical mythology. The first opera of which the music has survived was performed in 1600 at the wedding of Henry IV of France and Marie de’ Medici at the Pitti Palace in Florence. The opera, Euridice, from an Italian poem by Ottavio Rinuccini, set to music by Jacopo Peri and Giulio Caccini, recounted the classical myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. Orpheus was allowed to rescue his beloved Eurydice from Hell on condition that he did not look back to her before he had taken her to the upper world. But Orpheus did look back and challenged poets to find ways to prevent the tragic result.