Conversations with Beethoven

by Sanford Friedman

  SANFORD FRIEDMAN (1928–2010) was born in New York City. After graduating from the Horace Mann School and the Carnegie Institute of Technology, he was stationed as a military police officer in Korea, earning a Bronze Star. He began his career as a playwright and theater producer, and was later a writing instructor at Juilliard and SAGE (Services and Advocacy for GLBT Elders). “Ocean,” a chapter from Friedman’s first novel, Totempole, was serialized in Partisan Review in 1964 and won second prize in the 1965 O. Henry Awards. Totempole (1965; available as an NYRB Classic) was followed by the novels A Haunted Woman (1968), Still Life (1975), and Rip Van Winkle (1980). At the time of his death, Friedman left behind the unpublished manuscript for Conversations with Beethoven.

  RICHARD HOWARD is the author of seventeen volumes of poetry and has published more than one hundred fifty translations from the French, including, for NYRB, Marc Fumaroli’s When the World Spoke French, Balzac’s Unknown Masterpiece, and Maupassant’s Alien Hearts. He has received a National Book Award for his translation of Les Fleurs du Mal and a Pulitzer Prize for Untitled Subjects, a collection of poetry. His most recent book of poems, inspired by his own schooling in Ohio, is A Progressive Education (2014).

  CONVERSATIONS WITH BEETHOVEN

  A Novel

  SANFORD FRIEDMAN

  Introduction by

  RICHARD HOWARD

  NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

  New York

  THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

  435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  www.nyrb.com

  Copyright © 2014 by Sanford Friedman

  Introduction copyright © 2014 by Richard Howard

  All rights reserved.

  Cover image: Pages from a conversation book belonging to Ludwig van Beethoven, dated September 9, 1825; Beethoven–Haus Bonn, collection of H. C. Bodmer

  Cover design: Katy Homans

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Friedman, Sanford, 1928–2010.

  Conversations with Beethoven / by Sanford Friedman ; introduction by Richard Howard.

  1 online resource. — (New York Review Books classics)

  Description based on print version record and CIP data provided by publisher; resource not viewed.

  ISBN 978-1-59017-788-4 — ISBN 978-1-59017-762-4 (alk. paper)

  1. Beethoven, Ludwig van, 1770–1827—Fiction. 2. Composers—Germany—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3556.R564

  813'.54—dc23 2014018738

  2014013610

  ISBN 978-1-59017-788-4

  v1.0

  For a complete list of books in the NYRB Classics series, visit www.nyrb.com or write to: Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014.

  Contents

  Biographical Notes

  Title Page

  Copyright and More Information

  Introduction

  CONVERSATIONS WITH BEETHOVEN

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Speakers

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  INTRODUCTION

  From the Sidelines

  BETWEEN graduating from Horace Mann and earning a BFA from Carnegie Tech, Sanford Friedman wrote seven full-length plays, the first of which was produced when he was nineteen at the University Playhouse on Cape Cod. The subsequent six were never produced nor even published, though I recall reading an arresting melodrama about John Brown which Friedman had written in his early twenties and set great store by to the end of his life.

  After his discharge in 1953 from the army—he served as a military policeman in Korea and was awarded a Bronze Star—Friedman and two rather spooky associates leased and renovated Carnegie Hall Playhouse and for two seasons produced plays by, among others, Samuel Beckett, Eugène Ionesco, and Brendan Behan. Revealed as a possibly profitable enterprise, the Playhouse was whisked away from these young, helplessly highbrow producers and, after a questionable stint as Carnegie Hall Cinema, eventually assumed its present, much glamorized guise of Zankel Hall, one of whose occasional highbrow vestiges was to be the Susan Sontag memorial concert.

  It was not, however, until 1965 that Friedman published his first novel, Totempole, which was a considerable success, even though—or perhaps because—it was the first American fiction whose central character was a sensitive M.P., both Jewish and homosexual. Totempole was followed in 1968 by A Haunted Woman, the romance of a withering but resourceful actress remarkably “like” Mrs. Jackson Pollock. Then, in 1975, Friedman produced a curiously disparate pair of what his (new) publisher rather cautiously called “short novels”: the cover says Still Life, but inside we must contend with Life Blood as well as Still Life—how short can that be? And then, in 1980, yet another publisher presented another (singular) Friedman novel, Rip Van Winkle, which turns out to be the recuperation of an American legend which makes that aspiring designation mean what it actually prescribes: this legend had better be read.

  Thereupon follows an extended silence of thirty years until Sanford Friedman voicelessly dies (of a heart attack inside his own front door) in the spring of 2010—but no, I am surely referring to the deliberately stridulent mutism that followed the completion, late in the ’80s, of this writer’s last (and breathlessly original) novel, remote from any earlier mannerisms and in fact suggestive of the alien designs of Thomas Mann or even W.G. Sebald. The frustrated efforts, over the next twenty years, of this now middle-aged New Yorker to find a publisher for his most ambitious and perhaps finest work were accompanied by a growing rage against the disappointing silence—timidity? repugnance? indifference?—to which it appeared to be condemned.

  But this too is a deception: if The Author proposes his withdrawal, Literature (eventually) presents his triumph. I believe, deep down, that Sanford Friedman would have been pleased, or at least satisfied, that what he thought of not as his last but rather latest book would, finally, be out in the world with its predecessors. I lived with Sanford Friedman for most of the time (nineteen years) during which his books were written; I lived against him in the years after. I had many opportunities to observe this remarkable writer and few enough to comfort him, but at least I can point out the wonderful inventiveness of the text of Conversations with Beethoven, starting with the title. As most of us know, Beethoven, in the last part of his life, had gone deaf, and the only way anyone could converse with the elderly genius was by scribbling a message, however intimate or formal, in a notebook. Many of such notebooks still survive, and of course the remarkable thing about the “conversations” thus preserved is that the “talk” of everyone except the frequently volatile composer is recorded. Beethoven would read the texts and respond aloud (except when he wished to keep his own responses private; at these times the composer himself would write them in another notebook to be shared with only the intended receiver). For the most part, however, the deaf man seems to have been so urgently committed to what he wanted to say, what he wanted done (or not done), that having nothing to go by but the texts of “others,” we must imagine, sometimes rather sketchily, what the great man’s responses may have been. Though of course Beethoven himself could and did write formal (or informal) letters to be mailed or manually delivered by his own servants. . .

  The wonder of Conversations with Beethoven, then, is that each of us must determine its import according to our reading of the words, as Friedman has imagined them, of those who within its pages dare to address the aging, irritable, and eventually hospitalized Maestro—especially his five querulous doctors, his surviving brothers, and his beloved nephew Karl (who has, to his
uncle’s horror and outrage, ventured to become an officer in the Austrian Royal Army), as well as the boy’s hated mother (she closes the “conversations” with an eight-page letter to her son describing Uncle Ludwig’s funeral), and a troop of terrorized admirers and musicians (including Franz Schubert) who are more often than not misrecognized by the dying composer, not to mention any number of greedy noblemen eager to be distinguished by the Maestro’s dedication of whatever scrap of his immortal music remains unspoken for.

  The confounding but entirely convincing procession of these voices can evidently be accounted for by Friedman’s early dramatic commitment: perhaps only someone who has written “seven full-length plays” when hardly out of adolescence could have made the voices of his final literary creation so identifiable, so musical without footnotes. Perhaps the only explanatory gloss that the reader of Conversations with Beethoven should be aware of is the entirely contradictory (and therefore dreadful) amalgam of compassion and contempt for humanity that inspired it. This double entendre might be unrecognizable unless one saw and suffered from it in early and intimate circumstances, as I had occasion to during the many years I lived with the ultimately astonishing novelist Sanford Friedman.

  —RICHARD HOWARD

  March 17, 2014

  CONVERSATIONS WITH BEETHOVEN

  To Tom Lowenstein

  It is known that conversation with Beethoven had in part to be written; he spoke, but those with whom he spoke had to write down their questions and answers. For this purpose thick booklets of normal quarto writing paper and pencils were always close at hand.

  —FERDINAND HILLER, composer

  SPEAKERS FORM OF ADDRESS

  Karl van Beethoven, Beethoven’s nephew Uncle

  Karl Holz, a young friend and musician Maestro

  Johanna van Beethoven, Karl’s mother Ludwig

  Dogl, a local doctor Maestro Beethoven

  Stephan von Breuning, Beethoven’s lifelong friend Ludwig

  Gerhard von Breuning, Stephan’s young son Prospero

  Niemetz, Karl’s best friend Mr. Beethoven

  Anton Schindler, Beethoven’s first biographer Great Maestro

  Johann Wolfmayer, businessman and patron of Beethoven Dear Friend

  Ignaz Schuppanzigh, leader of

  the Schuppanzigh Quartet Honored Guest

  Seng, an assistant doctor at General Hospital Mister

  Johann van Beethoven, Beethoven’s brother Brother

  S.H. Spiker, the Royal Librarian at Berlin Maestro Beethoven

  Michael Krenn, a young servant at Gneixendorf Master Brother

  Therese van Beethoven, Johann’s wife Brother-in-Law

  Andreas Wawruch, Beethoven’s attending physician Esteemed Patient

  Jakob Staudenheim, a prominent doctor Celebrated Patient

  Johann Baptist Bach, Beethoven’s lawyer Worthy Friend

  Giovanni Malfatti, a Viennese doctor Beethoven

  Franz Schubert, a rising young composer Revered Maestro

  Heribert Rau, a banker Venerated Composer

  1

  BADEN, JULY 29, 1826

  UNCLE,

  I keep thinking of the first time I came here. It was the summer after my father died, when you became my father, I mean my guardian, and sent me to Mr. Giannatasio’s boarding school. Thus I must have been ten years old—half my years! You took great pleasure in serving as our cicerone, showing us the thermal springs and other sights. I had never seen adults wheeled about in chairs, naturally. How I envied them that luxury (doubtless you will find in this the seeds of my prodigality), until someone told me that those in chairs were either sick or dying. The idea of a watering-place to which adults retired to die was difficult to grasp. Secretly it disgusted me. In any case it was with Mr. G. and his family that I visited you that summer, but later than this, in late August or early September, after my hernia operation. I remember because it was owing to the operation that you forbade me to climb up to Castle Rauhenstein. Somehow or other you had neglected to mention the castle until it loomed overhead. Imagine! a medieval fortress on a hilltop; if Castle Rauhenstein had been the Colossus of Rhodes, I could not have been more excited! I started running up the path, but you stopped me. I begged you to let me go on, but you refused. Tears followed; whereupon you struck me soundly, explaining to the others that during my father’s lifetime I would obey only when beaten. If you permitted me to climb up to the castle, I would surely rupture myself once more; it was, you said, for my own good. (How often thereafter did I hear those words! Was it for my own good when, two years later, you pulled me out of a chair so violently that Dr. Smetana had to be sent for?—I had indeed ruptured myself once more!) To temper my disappointment one of the others said that it really made no difference since the castle was nothing but ruins. Needless to say, ten years ago I didn’t know the meaning of “ruins.”

  From the window of this room I can see those ruins in the moonlight; after all these years they beckon still. As a boy, whenever I climbed up there to the tower, I always tried to imagine the dungeon in olden times, before it was buried under silt. Since, however, I had never seen a dungeon, my notions came entirely from illustrations of your Fidelio, the Act II mise-en-scène depicting Leonora’s rescue of Florestan. In my head I hear the music now, the words are on my lips—Leonora’s “Ah, you are saved, thank God!” It never fails to stir me, nor to bring tears. (I should confess that I have had considerable wine; however, lest you reproach me for being profligate, rest assured that it’s nothing but a local table wine.) “Ah, I am saved, thank God!” sings Florestan. The trumpet, the torches, their glorious duet! Never has there been such sublime music for the stage, unless it is the final chorus in praise of the man who finds a “true wife.”

  That same year, my first at Mr. G.’s boarding school, an odd-looking man dressed like a ragamuffin showed up one day at the playground. It turned out to be my mother! You and the High Court had forbidden her to visit me; thus she, like Leonora, appeared in disguise. Yet, unlike Leonora, her object was not to rescue me—that would come later; on that occasion she wanted only to set eyes on me and give me her assurances that she had not abandoned me. —Well and good, but did you praise her for her trouble, did you call her a true wife or mother? Hardly! You called her the Queen of the Night; you called her pestilential and a whore!—Not until much later, when I was fourteen and my mother became pregnant with Ludovica, did I even understand the meaning of such slurs. What is more, I had no idea why she christened the baby Ludovica. Later still, when I was old enough to understand, Uncle Johann told me that Ludovica’s father was the Hungarian medical student who lodged with us while my own father was still living. Well, needless to say, your brother was misinformed. Only after it became common knowledge that a well-known Finance Councilor had fathered the child, did I finally get up the nerve to ask my mother why she had named Ludovica for you. “To honor him,” was all that she said.—Forgive me, I mean no disrespect, yet I cannot help but laugh. Ludovica! Was it merely a piece of mischief or was it a clever device to encourage the gossip which was already circulating at the time, namely, that you were in love with my mother? Or, worse still, by naming it Ludovica did she mean to imply falsely that you yourself were the child’s father?—Whatever her object, it was not your destiny to find in her or, to be sure, in any other woman, a true wife. Frankly, there were times when I felt convinced that you had settled for me in lieu of such a wife, made me your helpmate, housekeeper, amanuensis, as well as the supervisor of the servants, errands, marketing, and God knows what. You even turned me into your wine taster, a kind of variation on the theme of Ganymede, so fearful were you of being poisoned. But you are not Zeus; and I, alas, am still too young to have found a wife. Indeed now I never shall. For God’s sake! come to your senses—I am the one imprisoned in that dungeon! I am Florestan.

  Not since the Congress of Vienna has a Police Chief had a network of spies like yours. There is no other term for them, your Holz and Breuning and Schindl
er, Uncle Johann and Dr. Bach; you even found a way of pressing into service the Director of my school, not to mention my landlord and his wife. Imagine my being forbidden to leave the house after dark without written permission from you—I am twenty years old! Only Talleyrand was ever kept under such strict surveillance. You have even outdone the Secret Police. Instead of your spies informing you of their suspicions, you inform them; whereupon they set about to furnish the proof—I suspect the boy is cutting classes, I suspect he is lying and stealing, I suspect him of drinking, gambling, whoring—whatever fancy comes to your mind, and off they rush to catch me in flagrante delicto! Schindler claims to have seen me at the billiard table in a tavern where, he reports, I was not only gambling with some coachmen but cheating them to boot. (How would the sycophant, whom you call Mr. Shitting behind his back, know that I was cheating unless he knows a good deal more about gambling than I do!) Holz bumps into me “quite by accident” at the billiard tables, and voilà! that is all the proof you need. I am called a good-for-nothing, a liar, a swindler, a thief! Such accusations are distressing enough when spoken; they are insupportable when shouted at the top of one’s lungs in a towering rage, as is your habit.

  Obviously this dungeon in which I find myself is not the place of solitude and silence you have pictured in Fidelio; that, alas, is your own dungeon, the dungeon of your deafness. Mine is a place of tumult, of constant violence and shouting. You do not know, nay, cannot know, naturally, the sound of your own voice; sometimes it is louder than fortissimo, louder than the loudest thunderclap! as if in revenge for your deafness you were determined to deafen me.—Apart from the dynamics, you have no idea of your countenance during such outbursts: the ferocity in your eyes, the swelling of your veins, the baring of your teeth—Indeed it is a terrible sight to behold! Yet that is only the half of it. Your rage sets off a kind of blood lust in you, albeit not for blood but tears, my tears; thus you take pleasure in toying with me cruelly, interrogating me like a Grand Inquisitor, tormenting me, torturing me, breaking me down bit by bit, until you take your satisfaction in bringing me to tears!