by Will Durant
O ye men who think and say that I am malevolent, stubborn, or misanthropic, how greatly do ye wrong me, you who do not know the secret cause of my seeming so. From childhood my heart and mind were disposed to the gentle feeling of good will, I was even ever eager to accomplish great deeds, but reflect now that for 6 years I have been in a hopeless case, aggravated by senseless physicians,… finally compelled to face the prospect of a lasting malady… Born with an ardent and lively temperament, even susceptible to the diversions of society, I was compelled early to isolate myself, to live in loneliness, when I at times tried to forget all this, O how harshly was I repulsed by the doubly sad experience of my bad hearing, and yet it was impossible for me to say to men speak louder, shout, for I am deaf. Ah how could I possibly admit an infirmity in the one sense which should have been more perfect in me than in others … O I cannot do it, therefore forgive me when you see me draw back when I would gladly mingle with you…. What a humiliation when one stood beside me and heard a flute in the distance and I heard nothing.… Such incidents brought me to the verge of despair; but little more and I would have put an end to my life—only art it was that withheld me, ah, it seemed impossible to leave the world until I had produced all that I felt called upon to produce. … O Divine One thou lookest into my inmost soul, and thou knowest it, thou knowest that love of man and desire to do good lives therein. O men, when someday you read these words, reflect that ye did me wrong…. You my brothers Carl and——as soon as I am dead if Dr. Schmid is still alive ask him in my name to describe my malady and attach this document to the history of my illness so that so far as possible at least the world may become reconciled with me after my death. At the same time I declare you two to be the heirs of my small fortune. … It is my wish that your lives may be better and freer from care than I have had, recommend virtue to your children, it alone can give happiness, not money, I speak from experience, it was virtue that upheld me in my misery, to it next to my art I owe the fact that I did not end my life by suicide—Farewell and love each other… with joy I hasten toward death.
In the margin he wrote: “To be read and executed after my death.”23
It was not a suicide note; it was both hopeless and resolute. Beethoven proposed to accept and transcend his hardship, and bring to other ears than his own all the music that lay silent within him. Almost at once—still in Heiligenstadt in November, 1802—he composed his Second Symphony, in D, wherein there is no note of complaint or grief. Only one year after his cry from the depths he composed his Third Symphony, the Eroica, and entered with it his second and most creative period.
III. THE HEROIC YEARS: 1803–09
The learned musicologists who have been trailed in these hesitant pages divide Beethoven’s productive career into three periods: 1792–1802; 1803–16; 1817–24. In the first he worked tentatively in the simple and placid style of Mozart and Haydn. In the second period he made greater demands upon the performers in tempo, dexterity, and force; he explored contrasts of mood from tenderness to power; he gave rein to his inventiveness in variation, and to his flair for improvisation, but he subjected these to the logic of affiliation and development; he changed the sex of the sonata and the symphony from feminine sentiment and delicacy to masculine assertiveness and will. As if to signalize the change, Beethoven now replaced the minuet in the third movement with a scherzo frolicking with notes, laughing in the face of fate. Now he found in music an answer to misfortune: he could absorb himself in the creation of music that would make the death of his body a passing incident in an extended life. “When I am playing and composing, my affliction… hampers me least.”24 He could no longer hear his melodies with his physical ears, but he could hear them with his eyes, with the musician’s secret ability to transfer imagined tones into spots and lines of ink, and then hear them, soundless, from the printed pages.
Almost all the works of this period became classics, appearing through succeeding generations in orchestral repertoires. The “Kreutzer Sonata,” Opus 47, composed in 1803 for violinist George Bridgetower, was dedicated to Rodolphe Kreutzer, teacher of the violin in the Paris Conservatory of Music; Beethoven had met him in Vienna in 1798. Kreutzer judged the piece alien to his style or mood, and seems never to have played it publicly.
Beethoven ranked as the best of his symphonies the Eroica,25 composed in 1803–04. Half the world knows the story about its original dedication to Napoleon. Despite his titled friends and judicious dedications, Beethoven remained to the end of his life a resolute republican; and he applauded the seizure and reconstitution of the French government by Bonaparte in 1799–1800 as a move toward responsible rule. In 1802, however, he expressed his regret that Napoleon had signed a concordat with the Church. “Now,” he wrote, “everything is going back to the old track.”26 As to the dedication, let an eyewitness, Ferdinand Ries, tell the tale:
In this symphony Beethoven had Bonaparte in his mind, but as he was when he was First Consul. Beethoven esteemed him greatly at the time, and likened him to the greatest Roman consuls. I as well as several of his more intimate friends saw a copy of the [Eroica] score lying upon his table, with the word “Buonaparte” at the extreme top of the title page, and at the extreme bottom “Luigi van Beethoven” but not another word. … I was the first to bring him the intelligence that Bonaparte had proclaimed himself emperor, whereupon he flew into a rage, and cried out, “Is then he too nothing more than an ordinary human being? Now he will trample on all the rights of man, and indulge only his ambition. He will exalt himself above all others, become a tyrant.” Beethoven went to the table, took hold of the title page by the top, tore it in two, and threw it on the floor. The first page was rewritten and only then did the symphony receive the title “Sinfonia eroica.”27
When the symphony was published (1805) it bore the title Sinfonia eroica per festeggiare il sovvenira d’ un gran uomo—“Heroic symphony to celebrate the memory of a great man.”28
It received its first public performance April 7, 1805, in the Theater-an-der-Wien. Beethoven conducted despite his defective hearing. His style of conducting accorded with his character—excitable, demanding, “most extravagant. At a pianissimo he would crouch down so as to be hidden by the desk; and then, as the crescendo increased, would gradually rise, beating all the time, until at the fortissimo he would spring into the air, with his arms extended as if wishing to float on the clouds.”29 The symphony was criticized for “strange modulations and violent transitions,… undesirable originality,” and excessive length; the critic advised Beethoven to go back to his earlier and simpler style.30 Beethoyen winced and growled, and worked on.
Giving another hostage to fortune, he tried his hand at opera; on November 20, 1805, he conducted the premiere of Leonore. But Napoleon’s troops had occupied Vienna on November 13; the Emperor Francis and the leading nobles had fled; the citizens were in no mood for opera; the performance was a resounding failure despite the applause of the French officers in the scanty audience. Beethoven was told that his opera was too long, and clumsily arranged. He shortened and revised it, and offered it a second time on March 29, 1806; again it failed. Eight years later, when the city teemed with the Congress of Vienna, the opera, renamed Fidelio, was given a third trial, and achieved a moderate success. Beethoven’s mode of composition had become attuned to instruments with greater range and flexibility than the human voice; the singers, however anxious to break new barriers, simply could not sing some soaring passages, and at last they rebelled. The opera is occasionally staged today, borne on the wings of the composer’s fame, and with revisions that he can no longer revise.
From that difficult and unrewarding experience he passed to one masterpiece after another. In 1805 he presented Piano Concerto in G, No. 4, Opus 58, second only to the fifth in the affection of virtuosos. He celebrated the year 1806 with the Sonata in F Minor, Opus 57, later christened “Appassionata,” and added three quartets, Opus 59, dedicated to Count Andreas Razumovsky, Russian ambassador at Vienna. In Marc
h, 1807, Beethoven’s friends, probably to console him for the failure of his opera, organized a benefit concert for him; there he conducted his Symphonies No. One, Two, and Three (the Eroica), and his new Symphony No. Four in B Flat, Opus 60. We are not told how the audience bore up under this surfeit.
In 1806 Prince Miklós Nicolaus Esterházy commissioned Beethoven to compose a Mass for the name day of his wife. Beethoven went to the Esterházy château at Eisenstadt in Hungary, and presented there his Mass in C, Opus 86, on September 13, 1807. After the performance the Prince asked him, “But, my dear Beethoven, what is this that you have done again?” Beethoven interpreted the question as expressing dissatisfaction, and he left the château before his invitation had run out.
He signalized 1808 with two symphonies now known throughout the world: Symphony No. Five in C Minor, and the Sixth or Pastoral Symphony in F. They appear to have been composed concurrently through several years, in alternations of mood between the brooding of the Fifth and the gaiety of the Sixth; fitly they received their premiere together on December 22, 1808. Frequent repetitions have lessened their charm, even for old music lovers; we are no longer moved by “Fate knocking at the door,” or birds warbling in the trees; but perhaps the fading of our enchantment is due to lack of the musical education that might have equipped us to follow with appreciation and pleasure the logic of thematic contrasts and developments, the cooperation of counterpoint, the playful rivalry of different instruments, the dialogue of winds and strings, the mood of each movement, the structure and direction of the whole. Minds are differently molded—some to feelings, some to ideas; it must have been as hard for Hegel to understand Beethoven as for Beethoven—or anyone—to understand Hegel.
In 1808–09 he composed the Piano Concerto No. 5 in E Flat, Opus 73, known as the “Emperor.” Of all his works this is the most lovable, the most enduringly beautiful, the one of which we never tire; however often we have heard it, we are moved beyond words by its sparkling vivacity, its gay inventiveness, its inexhaustible fountains of feeling and delight. In this concerto a man rising triumphantly out of apparent disaster wrote an ode to joy far more convincing than the stentorian chorus of the Ninth Symphony.
Perhaps the happiness of the “Emperor Concerto” and the Pastoral Symphony reflected Beethoven’s increasing prosperity. In 1804 he had been engaged as piano teacher by Archduke Rudolf, youngest son of the Emperor Francis; so began a friendship that often helped the increasingly discreet republican. In 1808 he received a flattering offer from Jérôme Bonaparte, king of Westphalia, to come and serve as Kapellmeister in the royal choir and orchestra at Cassel. Beethoven agreed to fill the post at six hundred gold ducats per year; apparently he had still some faith in his dying ears. When word spread that he was negotiating with Cassel, his friends protested against what they called disloyalty to Vienna; he answered that he had toiled there for sixteen years without receiving a secure position. On February 26, 1809, the Archduke sent him a formal agreement by which, in return for Beethoven’s remaining in Vienna, he would be guaranteed an annual sum of 4,000 florins, of which Rudolf would pay 1,500, Prince Lobkowitz 700, and Count Kinsky 1,800; in addition Beethoven might keep whatever he earned. He accepted, and stayed. In that year 1809 Papa Haydn died, and Beethoven inherited his crown.
IV. THE LOVER
Having achieved economic stability, he returned to his lifelong quest for a wife. He was a warmly sexual man. Presumably he found a variety of outlets,31 but he had long felt the need for a permanent companionship. In Bonn, according to his friend Wegeler, he was “always loving.” In 1801 he mentioned to Wegeler “a dear sweet girl who loves me and whom I love.” This is generally supposed to have been his seventeen-year-old pupil Countess Giulia Guicciardi; however, she married Count Gallenberg. In 1805 Beethoven centered his hopes upon the widowed Countess Josephine von Deym, to whom he sent a passionate declaration:
Here I give you a solemn promise that in a short time I shall stand before you more worthy of myself and of you—Oh, if only you would attach some value to this—I mean to founding my happiness by means of your love…. Oh, beloved Josephine, it is no desire for the other sex that draws me near to you, it is just you, your whole self, with all your individual qualities—this has compelled my regard—this has bound all my feelings—all my emotional power—to you…. You make me hope that your heart will long beat for me —Mine can only—cease—to beat for you—when—it no longer beats.32
Apparently the lady turned to other prospects. Two years later Beethoven was still appealing to be admitted to her presence; she did not reply.
In March, 1807, he paid such devout attentions to Mme. Marie Bigot that her husband protested. Beethoven sent “Dear Maria, dear Bigot,” a letter of apology, declaring: “It is one of my chief principles never to be in any other relationship with the wife of another man than that of friendship.”33
On March 14, 1809, expecting to be in Freiburg, he wrote to Baron von Gleichenstein:
Now you can help me to look for a wife. Indeed, you might find some beautiful girl at F—— who would perhaps now and then grant a sigh to my harmonies. … If you do find one, please form the connection in advance. —But she must be beautiful, for it is impossible for me to love anything that is not beautiful—or else I should have to love myself.34
But this was presumably one of Beethoven’s jokes.
More serious was his affair with Therese Malfatti. She was another of his pupils, daughter of a distinguished physician. A letter to her of May 8, 1810, has some of the air of an accepted lover. On May 2 Beethoven had sent an urgent request to Wegeler, then at Coblenz, to go to Bonn and locate and send him the composer’s baptismal certificate, for “I have been said to be older than I am.” Wegeler complied. Beethoven made no acknowledgment, and in July Stephan von Breuning wrote to Wegeler: “I believe his marriage project has fallen through, and for this reason he no longer feels the lively desire to thank you for your trouble.” Till his fortieth year he insisted that he had been born in 1772. The baptismal certificate gave his birth year as 1770.
After his death three letters were found in a locked drawer which are among the most tender and fervent love letters in history. They were never sent. As they name no name, no year, and no address, they remain a mystery that has produced its own literature. The first letter, dated “July 6, in the morning,” tells of Beethoven’s hectic three-day trip from Vienna to a woman in an unstated place in Hungary. Some phrases:
My angel, my all, my very self…. Can our love endure except through sacrifices—except through not demanding everything—can you change it that you are not wholly mine, I not wholly thine. Oh, God! look out into the beauties of nature, and comfort yourself with that which must be—love demands everything…. We shall soon surely see each other…. My heart is full of many things to say to you—ah, there are moments when I feel that speech is nothing after all—cheer up—remain my true, my only treasure, my all as I am yours….
Your faithful
LUDWIG
The second and much briefer letter is dated “Evening, Monday, July 6,” and ends: “Oh God! so near so far! Is our love not truly a celestial edifice—firm as heaven’s vault.” The third letter:
Good morning, on July 7
Though still in bed my thoughts go out to you, Meine unsterbliche Geliebte [my immortal beloved], now and then joyfully, then sadly, waiting to learn whether or not fate will hear us. I can live only wholly with you, or not at all—yes I am resolved to wander so long away from you until I can fly to your arms and say that I am really at home, send my soul enwrapped in you into the land of spirits…. Oh God, why is it necessary to part from one whom one so loves and yet my life in W[ien—Vienna] is now a wretched life—your love makes me at once the happiest and the unhappiest of men—at my age I need a steady, quiet life. … Be calm, only by a calm consideration of our existence can we achieve our purpose to live together—be calm—love me—today—yesterday—what tearful longings for you—My life—m
y all—farewell —Oh, continue to love me—never misjudge the most faithful heart of your beloved L.
Ever thine, ever mine, ever for each other.35
Who was she? No one knows. The pundits are divided, chiefly between the Countess Guicciardi-Gallenberg and the Countess Therese von Brunswig; nothing short of a countess would do. Apparently the lady was married; if so, Beethoven, in wooing her, was forgetting the excellent principle he had professed to the Bigots. However, the letters were not sent; no harm was done; and music may have profited.
V. BEETHOVEN AND GOETHE: 1809–12
In 1809 Austria was again at war with France. In May French cannonballs were dropping on Vienna; court and nobility fled; Beethoven sought refuge in a cellar. The city surrendered, the victors taxed the commonalty a tenth of a year’s income, the well-to-do a third. Beethoven paid, but, from a safe distance, shook his fist at a patrolling Gaul, and cried, “If I, as a general, knew as much about strategy as I, the composer, know about counterpoint, I’d give you something to do! “36
Otherwise, the period from 1809 to 1815 shows Beethoven in relatively good spirits. In those years he often visited the home of Franz Brentano, prosperous merchant and patron of art and music, who sometimes helped Ludwig with a loan. Franz’s wife, Antonie, was at times confined to her room with illness; more than once, during such spells, Beethoven came in quietly, played the piano, then left without a word, having spoken to her in his own language. On one such occasion he was surprised, as he played, by hands placed upon his shoulders. Turning, he found a young woman (then twenty-five), pretty, her eyes glowing with pleasure over his playing—even over his singing, to his own music, Goethe’s famous lyric about Italy, “Kennst du das Land.” She was Elisabeth—”Bettina”—Brentano, sister to Franz, and to the Clemens Brentano whom we shall meet as a famous German author. She herself was later to produce a number of successful books presenting autobiography and fiction in a now inextricable mixture. She is our only authority for the story just told, and for the later episode in which, at a party in Franz’s home, she heard Beethoven discourse not only profoundly, but with an order and elegance not generally ascribed to him, though sometimes appearing in his letters. On May 28, 1810, she wrote enthusiastically about him to Goethe, whom she knew not merely through neighborly relations with his family in Frankfurt, but through a visit with him in Weimar. Some excerpts from this famous letter: