by Will Durant
CHAPTER XXVIII
Beethoven
1770–1827
I. YOUTH IN BONN: 1770–92
HE was born on December 16, 1770. Bonn was the seat of the prince-archbishop elector of Cologne, one of those Rhineland principalities which, before Napoleon “secularized” them, were ruled by Catholic archbishops engagingly secular and inclined to support well-behaved artists. A considerable part of Bonn’s 9,560 population was dependent upon the electoral establishment. Beethoven’s grandfather was a bass singer in the Elector’s choir; his father, Johann van Beethoven, was a tenor there. The family, of Dutch stock, had come from a village near Louvain. The Dutch van indicated place of origin, and did not, like the German von or the French de, indicate titled and propertied nobility. Grandfather and father were inclined to excessive drinking, and something of this passed down to the composer.
In the year 1767 Johann van Beethoven married the young widow Maria Magdalena Keverich Laym, daughter of a cook in Ehrensbreitstein. She developed into a mother much beloved by her famous son for her soft heart and easy ways. She gave her husband seven children, four of whom died in infancy. The survivors were the brothers Ludwig, Caspar Karl (1774–1815), and Nikolaus Johann (1776–1848).
The father’s salary of three hundred florins as “Electoral Court tenorist” was apparently his sole income. The family lived in a poor quarter of Bonn, and the young Beethoven’s surroundings and associations were not of a kind to make him a gentleman; he remained a roughhewn rebel to the end. Hoping to improve the family income by developing a son into a child prodigy, Beethoven’s father induced or compelled the four-year-old boy to practice at the clavier or on the violin many hours in the day, occasionally at night. Apparently the boy had no spontaneous urge to music,1 and (according to divers witnesses) he had to be urged on by a severe discipline that sometimes brought him to tears. The torture succeeded, and the boy came to love the art that had cost him so many painful hours. At the age of eight, with another pupil, he was displayed in a public concert, March 26, 1778, with financial results unrecorded. In any case the father was encouraged to engage teachers who could lead Ludwig into the higher subleties of music.
Aside from this he received little formal education. We hear of his attending a school where he learned enough Latin to salt some of his letters with humorous Latin inventions. He picked up enough French (which was the Esperanto of the time) to write it intelligibly. He never learned to spell correctly in any language, and seldom bothered to punctuate. But he read some good books, ranging from Scott’s novels to Persian poetry, and copied into his notebooks morsels of wisdom from his reading. His only sport was in his fingers. He loved to improvise, and in that game only Abt Vogler could match him.
In 1784 Maria Theresa’s youngest son, Maximilian Francis, was appointed elector of Cologne, and took up his residence in Bonn. He was a kindly man, enthusiastic about food and music; he became “the fattest man in Europe,”2 but also he brought together an orchestra of thirty-one pieces. Beethoven, aged fourteen, played the viola in that ensemble, and was also listed as “deputy court organist,” with a salary of 150 gulden (750?) per year.3 A report to the Elector in 1785 described him as “of good capability, … of good, quiet behavior, and poor.”4
Despite some evidence of sexual ventures,*the good behavior and growing competence of the youth led to his receiving from the Elector (1787) permission and funds for a trip to Vienna for instruction in musical composition. Soon after his arrival he was received by Mozart, who heard him play, and praised him with disappointing moderation, apparently thinking that the piece had been long rehearsed. Suspecting this suspicion, Beethoven asked Mozart to give him, on the piano, a theme for variations. Mozart was astonished at the youth’s fertility of invention and sureness of touch, and said to his friends, “Keep your eyes on him; someday he will give the world something to talk about”;6 but this story has too familiar an air. Mozart appears to have given the boy some lessons, but the death of Mozart’s father, Leopold (May 28, 1787), and news that Beethoven’s mother was dying, cut this relationship short. Ludwig hurried back to Bonn, and was at his mother’s bedside when she died (July 17).
The father, whose tenor voice had long since decayed, wrote to the Elector, describing his extreme poverty, and appealing for help. No answer is recorded, but another singer in the choir came to the rescue. In 1788 Ludwig himself added to the family income by giving piano lessons to Eleonore von Breuning and her brother Lorenz. Their widowed, wealthy, cultured mother received the young teacher into full equality with her children, and the friendships so formed helped in some measure to smooth the sharp corners of Beethoven’s character.
Helpful, too, was the kindness of Count Ferdinand von Waldstein (1762–1823), himself a good musician, and a close friend of the Elector. Learning of Beethoven’s poverty, he sent him occasional gifts of money, pretending that they were from the Elector. Beethoven later dedicated to him the piano sonata (Opus 53 in C Major) that bears his name.
Ludwig needed help more than ever now, for his despondent father had surrendered to alcohol, and had been with difficulty rescued from arrest as a public nuisance. In 1789 Beethoven, not yet nineteen, took upon himself the responsibility for his younger brothers, and became legal head of the family. A decree of the Elector (November 20) ordered that the services of Johann van Beethoven should be dispensed with, and that half of his annual salary of two hundred reichsthalers should be paid him, and the other half to his eldest son. Beethoven continued to earn a small sum as chief pianist and second organist in the Elector’s orchestra.
In 1790, flush with a triumph in London, Franz Joseph Haydn stopped at Bonn on his way home to Vienna. Beethoven presented to him a cantata that he had recently composed; Haydn praised it. Probably some word of this reached the Elector’s ear; he listened favorably to suggestions that he allow the youth to go to Vienna for study with Haydn, and to continue for some months to receive his salary as a musician on the Elector’s staff. Probably Count von Waldstein had won this boon for his young friend. He wrote in Ludwig’s album a farewell note: “Dear Beethoven, you are traveling to Vienna in fulfillment of your long-cherished wish. The genius of Mozart [who had died on December 5, 1791] is still weeping and bewailing the death of her favorite…. Labor assiduously and receive Mozart’s spirit from the hands of Haydn. Your true friend Waldstein.”
Beethoven left Bonn, father, family, and friends on or about November 1, 1792. Soon afterward French Revolutionary troops occupied Bonn, and the Elector fled to Mainz. Beethoven never saw Bonn again.
II. PROGRESS AND TRAGEDY: 1792–1802
Arrived in Vienna, he found the city alive with musicians competing for patrons, audiences, and publishers, looking askance at every newcomer, and finding no disarming beauty in the youth from Bonn. He was short, stocky, dark-complexioned (Anton Esterházy called him “the Moor”), pockmarked, front upper teeth overlapping the lower, nose broad and flat, eyes deepset and challenging, and head “like a bullet,” wearing a wig and a van. He was not designed for popularity, with either the public or his competitors, but he was rarely without a rescuing friend.
Soon came news that his father had died (December 18, 1792). Some difficulty having developed about Beethoven’s share in his father’s small annuity, he petitioned the Elector for its continuance; the Elector responded by doubling it, and adding: “He is further to receive three measures of grain… for the education of his brothers” (Karl and Johann, who had moved to Vienna).7 Beethoven, grateful, made some good resolutions. In a friend’s album, May 22, 1793, he wrote, using the words of Schiller’s Don Carlos: “I am not wicked—Hot blood is my fault—my crime is that I am young….
Even though wildly surging emotions may betray my heart, yet my heart is good.” He resolved “to do good wherever possible, to love liberty above all else, never to deny the truth, even before the throne.”8
He kept his expenditures to a stoic minimum: for December, 1792, fourteen florins (35?) for
rent; six florins for rent of a piano; “eating, each time 12 kreuzer” (six cents); “meals with wine, 6½ florins” (16.25??). Another memorandum lists “Haidn” at various times as costing two groschen (a few cents); apparently Haydn was asking little for his lessons. For a while the student accepted correction humbly. But as the lessons continued, Haydn found it impossible to accept Beethoven’s reported deviations from orthodox rules of composition. Toward the end of 1793 Beethoven quit his aging master, and went three times a week to study counterpoint with a man more famous as teacher than as composer, Johann Georg Albrechtsberger. Concurrently, three times a week, he studied violin with Ignaz Schuppanzigh. In 1795, having taken all that he felt need of from Albrechtsberger, he applied to Antonio Salieri, then director of the Vienna Opera, for instruction in composition for the voice. Salieri charged nothing to poor pupils; Beethoven presented himself as such, and was accepted. All four of these teachers found him a difficult disciple, bursting with ideas of his own, and resenting the formalism of the musical theory offered him. We can imagine the shudders generated in “Papa Haydn” (who lived till 1809) by the irregularities and sonorities of Beethoven’s compositions.
Despite—perhaps because of—his deviations from traveled roads, Beethoven’s performances won him, by 1794, a reputation as the most interesting pianist in Vienna. The pianoforte had won its battle with the harpsichord; Johann Christian Bach in 1768 had begun performing solos on it in England; Mozart adopted it, Haydn followed suit in 1780, Muzio Clementi was composing concertos definitely designed for the piano and its new flexibility between piano and forte, between staccato and sostenuto. Beethoven made full use of the piano’s powers and his own, especially in his improvisations, where no printed notation hampered his style. Ferdinand Ries, pupil of both Haydn and Beethoven, later declared: “No artist that I ever heard came at all near the height which Beethoven attained in this branch of playing. The wealth of ideas which forced themselves on him, the caprices to which he surrendered himself, the variety of treatment, the difficulties, were inexhaustible.”9
It was as a pianist that the patrons of music first appreciated him. At an evening concert in the home of Baron van Swieten, after the program had been completed, the host (biographer Schindler relates) “detained Beethoven and persuaded him to add a few fugues of Bach as an evening blessing.”10 Prince Karl Lichnowsky—the leading amateur musician in Vienna—so liked Beethoven that he regularly engaged him for his Friday musicales, and for a time entertained him as a house guest; Beethoven, however, could not adjust himself to the Prince’s meal hours, and preferred a nearby hotel. The most enthusiastic of the composer’s titled patrons was Prince Lobkowitz, an excellent violinist, who spent nearly all his income on music and musicians; for years he helped Beethoven, despite quarrels, and he took in good spirit Beethoven’s insistence on being treated as a social equal. The ladies of these helpful nobles enjoyed his proud independence, took lessons and scoldings from him, and allowed the poor bachelor to make love to them, in letters.11 They and their lords accepted his dedications, and rewarded him moderately.
So far his fame was only as a pianist, and, as such, it reached Prague and Berlin, to which he made visits as a virtuoso in 1796. But meanwhile he composed. On October 21, 1795, he published, as his Opus I, Three Grand Trios, about which Johann Cramer, after playing them, announced, “This is the man who is to console us for the loss of Mozart.”12 Stimulated by such praise, Beethoven wrote in his notebook: “Courage! Despite all bodily weaknesses my spirit shall rule…. This year must determine the complete man. Nothing must remain undone.”13
In 1797 Napoleon, unseen, first came into Beethoven’s life. The young general, having driven the Austrians from Lombardy, had led his army over the Alps, and was nearing Vienna. The surprised capital extemporized defense as well as it could with guns and hymns; now Haydn wrote Austria’s national anthem-“Gott erhalte Franz den Kaiser, unsern guten Kaiser Franz”; and Beethoven produced music for another war song—”Ein grosses deutsches Volk sind wir.” These spirited compositions were later to be worth many regiments, but they did not move Napoleon, who exacted a humiliating peace.
A year later General Bernadotte came to Vienna as the new French ambassador, and shocked the citizens by raising from his balcony the French Revolutionary tricolor flag. Beethoven, who had frankly expressed republican ideas, openly declared his admiration of Bonaparte, and was often seen at the ambassador’s receptions.14 Apparently it was Bernadotte who suggested to Beethoven the idea of a composition honoring Napoleon.15
Seeking to tap nearer services, Ludwig in 1799 dedicated his Opus 13, “Grande Sonate Pathétique,” to Prince Lichnowsky, in gratitude for favors received or hoped for. The Prince responded (1800) by putting six hundred gulden at Beethoven’s disposal “until I obtain a suitable appointment.”16 This sonata began simply, as if in humble filiation from Mozart; then it proceeded to a difficult intricacy that would later seem simple beside the almost aggressive complexity and power of the Hammerklavier Sonatas or the “Appassionata.” Still easy on eyes and hands were the First Symphony (1800) and the “Moonlight Sonata” in C sharp minor (1801). Beethoven did not give the latter piece its famous name, but called it “Sonata quasi Fantasia.” Apparently he had no intention of making it a love song. It is true that he dedicated it to the Countess Giulia Guicciardi, who was among the untouchable goddesses of his reveries, but it had been written for another occasion, quite unrelated to this divinity.17
To the year 1802 belongs one of the strangest and most appealing documents in the history of music. This secret “Heiligenstadt Testament”—which was not seen by others till found in Beethoven’s papers after his death—is intelligible only through a frank confrontation of his character. There had been many pleasant qualities in it in his youth—a buoyancy of spirit, a fund of humor, a devotion to study, a readiness to help; and many of his Bonn friends—his teacher Christian Gottlob Neefe, his pupil Eleonore von Breuning, his patron Count von Waldstein—remained devoted to him despite his growing bitterness against life. In Vienna, however, he alienated one friend after another until he was left almost alone. When they heard that he was dying they came back, and did what they could to ease his pains.
His early environment scarred him lastingly; he could never forget, and never forgive, the toilsome, anxious poverty, or the humiliation of seeing his father surrender to failure and drink. He himself, as the years saddened him, yielded more and more to the amnesia of wine.18 In Vienna his stature (five feet five inches) invited wit, and his face was no fortune; his hair thick, disheveled, bristling; his heavy beard spreading up to his sunken eyes, and sometimes allowed to grow to half an inch before shaving.19 “Oh God!” he cried in 1819, “what a plague it is to one when he has so fatal a face as mine!”20
These physical disadvantages were probably a spur to achievement, but, after the first few years in Vienna, they discouraged care of his dress, his body, his rooms, or his manners. “I am an untidy fellow,” he wrote (April 22, 1801); “perhaps the only touch of genius which I possess is that my things are not always in very good order.” He earned enough to keep servants, but he soon quarreled with them, and seldom kept them long. He was brusque with the lowly; with the highborn he was sometimes obsequious, often proud, even arrogant. He was merciless in assessing his rivals, and was rewarded by their almost unanimous dislike. He was severe with his pupils, but taught some of them without charge.21
He was a misanthrope, judging every man basically base, but fondly forgiving his troublesome nephew Karl, and loving every pretty pupil. He gave to nature the unquestioning affection that he could not offer to mankind. He frequently fell into melancholy moods, but almost as frequently had spells of raucous jollity, with or without wine. He had an often inconsiderate sense of humor (e.g., Letters 14, 22, 25, 3022), punned at every opportunity, and invented sometimes offensive nicknames for his friends. He could laugh more readily than he could smile.
He tried, through worried years, to co
nceal from the world the affliction that embittered his life. In a letter of June 29, 1801, he revealed it to a friend of his youth, Franz Wegeler:
For the last three years my hearing has become weaker and weaker. The trouble is supposed to have been caused by the condition of my abdomen, which… was wretched even before I left Bonn, but has become worse in Vienna, where I have been constantly afflicted with diarrhea, and have been suffering in consequence from an extraordinary disability…. Such was my condition until the autumn of last year, and sometimes I gave way to despair.
I must confess that I lead a wretched life. For almost two years I have ceased to attend any social functions, just because I find it impossible to say to people: I am deaf. If I had any other profession I might be able to cope with my infirmity; but in my profession it is a terrible calamity. Heaven alone knows what is to become of me. Already I have cursed my Creator and my existence … I beg you not to say anything about my condition to anyone, not even to Lorchen [Eleonore von Breuning].
Apparently in hopes of profiting from its sulfur baths, Beethoven spent part of 1802 in Heiligenstadt, a small village near Göttingen. Wandering in nearby woods, he saw, at a short distance, a shepherd playing a pipe. As he heard no sound, he realized that now only the louder sounds of an orchestra would reach him. He had already begun to conduct as well as to perform and compose; and the implications of this peasant’s unheard pipe threw him into despair. He went to his room and composed, on October 6, 1802, what is known as the “Heiligenstadt Testament,” a spiritual will and apologia pro vita sua. Though he captioned it “For my brothers Carl and——Beethoven,” he carefully concealed the document from all eyes but his own. It is here transcribed in its essential lines: