Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph

by Swafford, Jan

  Jefferson’s declaration also shows that the Enlightenment did not do away with God but rather placed Him at a remove from His creation: the Creator as cosmic watchmaker who crafted the perfect machinery of the universe and sat back to let His cosmic experiment run, like a wise parent leaving humanity free to find its own path. The goal of life is the pursuit of happiness, here and now. Religion and state are different realms.

  The Enlightenment’s determination to separate church and state was a radical departure in any society, Western or otherwise, but, as the founding fathers of the United States recognized, it was a fundamental principle of an enlightened state. An established church and enforced dogma were a guarantee of tyranny, and tyranny of any stripe was anathema to Aufklärers. “To do good wherever we can,” Beethoven would say, “to love liberty above all things, and never to deny truth though it be at the throne itself.”

  To the philosophes, God was a figure beyond the stars, watching all and knowing all, a transcendent moral influence, but one who did not deign to meddle with the perfection of His physics to make miracles. Science had opened the path to that conviction. Isaac Newton made the epochal discovery that the physical laws that rule the whole universe are the same that rule our lives on earth. For the first time in history, the heavens and the earth became part of the same immutable mechanism.21

  If the Enlightenment was Christian in its foundation and in much of its tone, no longer was any religion presumed to have a monopoly on the divine. Religions were unique to the cultures that shaped and sustained them; in their myriad voices, all religions worshiped the same transcendent and unknowable reality. For the mainstream of the Enlightenment, the most immediate revelation of divinity was in nature, and the truest scripture was found not in a book but in science.22 Let God rest out beyond the stars in His sublime perfection; it is up to us to understand ourselves and rule ourselves. “Know then thyself, presume not God to scan,” wrote Alexander Pope. “The proper study of Mankind is Man.”

  This rationalistic, antidogmatic, searching, secular humanist sense of the divine came to be called “deism.” The term helps describe the convictions of Voltaire and Rousseau, Jefferson and Franklin—and, to a degree, Beethoven. He was no churchgoer; in his maturity, he studied Eastern religion and scripture. “Only art and science,” he wrote, “can raise men to the level of gods.”23 He never claimed that God imbued him with his gifts. He believed his talent came from nature—God’s nature, to be sure. At the same time, Beethoven would be no more a conventional deist than he was a conventional anything else, and his ideas of God evolved along with his life and art. The older he got, the more he turned toward faith in a God who was present and all-seeing, who listened to prayers (though none of this was anathema to deists).

  All eras pass, and in the end, the Enlightenment’s dream of an earthly Elysium did not endure. It was overturned in Europe by forces including the limitations of science, the limitations of reason, the fear of social chaos, the resistance of religions to giving up their monopoly on truth. The Enlightenment’s shibboleth of reason toppled at last. The founding Romantic poet and philosopher Novalis condemned the “harsh, chilly light of the Enlightenment” and exalted the mythical and mystical.24 Beethoven, for his part, did not share that spirit; he never really absorbed the Romantic age. At the same time the Enlightenment birthed ideas whose reverberations would not disappear in the world, or in Beethoven’s mind and music.

  So many excesses of the Enlightenment, in all its forms great and terrible, rose from excesses of hope.

  If the methods of reason and science that were applied (and often misapplied) to all things united the whole of the Enlightenment—and among progressives everywhere there was a sense of boundless human potential about to be unleashed—there were still essential differences between the way the Enlightenment was translated and transposed in France, England, and America, and how it took form in German lands: Aufklärung.

  In most regions, philosophical and ethical ideals quickly became political. In an age that prided itself on rationality, it was natural to conclude that the institutions and extravagances of the ancient courts had little reason behind them. Enlightenment criticism of church and aristocracy, the unchallenged privilege once granted to Electors and petty princes, and the power wielded and abused by the clergy would, in France, lead to revolution, then to an avalanche of murder and an attempt to wipe away the aristocracy and the church. But, like most of Germany, Bonn never challenged the system of princes and courts. In stark contrast to the French, German Aufklärers wanted strong governments, efficient bureaucracies, strong armies, powerful and enlightened princes. The German ideal of enlightened reform was top-down, achieved by edict.

  Thus the celebration of what came to be called “benevolent despots,” most famous among them Frederick the Great in Berlin (for whom Voltaire was house philosopher) and Joseph II in Vienna. In a letter, Frederick wrote a virtual definition of enlightened despotism: “Philosophers should be the teachers of the world and the teachers of princes. They must think logically and we must act logically. They must teach the world by their powers of judgment; we must teach the world by our example.”25

  While Aufklärers often tended to the anticlerical, they were not against religion. By the time Beethoven left Bonn, he had experienced little but cultured and enlightened aristocrats and clerics, many of them his admirers and patrons. Partly for that reason, he never despised the church and nobility in their existence—or at least he held them in no special contempt compared to the rest of the world. His disgust with the Viennese aristocracy would be based on its behavior. In any case, nobles paid much of his rent.

  In a later century, the trust in bureaucracy and armies and despots benevolent or otherwise would lead Germany to catastrophe, but still a monumental achievement of the Aufklärung was the science of government. Progressive ideas created state bureaucracies in Vienna and Berlin and elsewhere that supported, at first, the liberal goals of the Aufklärung—and only later the goals of police states. It was the time of the rise of the Hofrat, the court privy councillor, and a welter of other titles. The courts’ demand for skilled administrators in turn created a new educated and ambitious middle class, hungry for power and also hungry for literature and ideas and music. This bureaucratic middle class was a primary engine of the Aufklärung in German lands.26

  In the age of reason, German literature bloomed, some of it in the spirit of Aufklärung and some opposing it—one example of the opposition being the Sturm und Drang decade of the 1770s. The next generation in Germany turned against it all. If the resonating ideas of the Enlightenment were reason, truth, nature, order, and objectivity, those of the coming Romantics would be the subjective, the instinctive, the uncanny, the sublime, and nature in its great and terrible face. As one essential Romantic writer, E. T. A. Hoffmann, put it, “Beethoven’s music sets in motion the mechanism of fear, of awe, of horror, of suffering, and wakens just that infinite longing which is the essence of Romanticism.” The Aufklärung looked to a radiant future of social and scientific perfection; the Romantics looked to the fabled, mysterious, ­unreachable past. The eighteenth century longed for freedom and happiness. The nineteenth century was caught up not in longing toward an end but in longing for the delirium and pain of longing itself.

  In 1785, in the middle of a decade with a fever of revolution in the air, Friedrich Schiller caught the spirit of the age in ecstatic verses called “An die Freude” (Ode to Joy). The poem’s essence was the Enlightenment cult of happiness as the goal of life, the conviction that the triumph of freedom and joy would bring humanity to an epoch of peace and universal brotherhood, the utopia he called Elysium:

  Joy, thou lovely god-engendered

  Daughter of Elysium.

  Drunk with fire we enter,

  Heavenly one, thy holy shrine!

  Thy magic reunites

  What fashion has broken apart.

  Beggars will be princes’ brothers

  Where thy
gentle wing abides . . .

  Be embraced, you millions!

  This kiss for the whole world!

  Brothers! over the starry canopy

  A loving Father must dwell!

  Whoever has had the great success

  To be a friend of a friend,

  He who has won a sweet wife,

  Join our jubilation! . . .

  Brothers, drink and join the song,

  All sinners shall be forgiven,

  And Hell shall be no more.

  Schiller’s poem is in the tradition of a German geselliges Lied, social song, intended literally or figuratively to be sung among comrades with glasses raised.27 The verses themselves are drunken and reeling with hope. In dozens of musical settings, An die Freude was sung in Freemason lodges all over Germany and by young revolutionaries in the streets.28 For Beethoven and for many of his era, these verses were the distillation of the revolutionary 1780s. By the end of his teens, Beethoven was determined to do his own setting of the poem. Perhaps he did, but if so, the attempt did not survive. When he took up An die Freude again, decades later, those verses still rang for him with what they meant to his youth, and to the Aufklärung.

  At the center of the Rhenish Aufklärung lay Bonn, already in the 1770s, under Elector Maximilian Friedrich, called “the most Enlightened ecclesiastical city in Germany.”29 A decade later, under new Elector Maximilian Franz, it would be still more so. Even the Rhenish clergy were devotees of Aufklärung. A liberal Catholic journal in Bonn railed at the “crude, uncouth manners and great stupidity” of the monks in conservative Cologne.30

  In the Aufklärung, encompassing what came to be called the Classical period in music, the art was called a wonderful, even exalted entertainment. It would be the Romantics, in search of the transcendent, who placed instrumental music at the summit of the arts, and Beethoven at the summit of instrumental music. If he had grown up in Cologne (or perhaps anywhere but in Bonn in the late eighteenth century), he might have been great in his art but he would have been a different and likely a lesser artist—not the demigod to bestride the nineteenth century that demanded bestriding demigods.

  In the revolutionary 1780s, these tides, personified in Beethoven’s teacher Neefe and later in his Bonn circle, whirled around the teenager, part of his daily experience and conversation. Even as he stubbornly resisted any shaping but his own, the age still molded him, leaving him with ideals and ambitions about being a composer that no one had ever had before. He never quite spelled out those ideals in words. They would be found in his music, and in the lyrics he chose to embody in music—above all, An die Freude.

  As for Bonn and places like Bonn, these little ecclesiastical states and principalities had existed for centuries with their customs and costumes and dialects, their courts sometimes progressive and cultured and sometimes moldering and repressive, their princes sometimes benign and sometimes tyrannical. It was all a world that was passing, to be swept away by revolution and change, dying piece by piece sometimes over decades, sometimes in days. In the course of the next century, Bonn and the absurd patchwork of other ancient little German principalities that Beethoven knew would drift and vanish like summer clouds.

  4

  Loved in Turn

  AROUND THE BEGINNING of 1783, the firm of Goetz in Mannheim published a work whose elegantly engraved title page declares, “Variations pour le clavecin Sur une Marche de Mr. Dresler, Composeés et dediées à Son Excellence Madame la Comtesse de Wolfmetternich nèe Baronne d’Asseourg, par un jeune Amateur Louis van Betthoven, agè de dix ans.”1 The publication had been the doing of Beethoven’s teacher Christian Neefe. He advertised it himself, in third person, in a report on Bonn music and musicians in Cramer’s Magazin der Musik:

  Louis van Betthoven, son of the tenor singer mentioned, a boy of eleven years and of most promising talent. He plays the clavier very skillfully and with power, reads at sight very well, and . . . plays chiefly The Well-Tempered Clavier of Sebastian Bach, which Herr Neefe put into his hands. Whoever knows this collection of preludes and fugues in all the keys—which might almost be called the non plus ultra of our art—will know what this means. So far as his duties permitted, Herr Neefe has also given him instruction in through-bass. He is now training him in composition and for his encouragement has had nine variations for the pianoforte . . . engraved in Mannheim. This youthful genius . . . would surely become a second Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart were he to continue as he has begun.2

  These were not idle opinions and prophecies. Neefe had come from Leipzig, where Bach’s music was still alive decades after his death, and his student’s keyboard studies were centered on The Well-Tempered Clavier, in those days more a work known to the occasional connoisseur than something active in the repertoire. Neefe understood its synoptic quality, its incomparable survey of the depth and breadth of what music can do both technically and expressively. Beethoven was perhaps the first musician outside the Bach family to grow up playing the WTC, imprinting that music in his fingers and his heart and his very sense of music. Perhaps here he began to learn what Bach called “invention,” in which the whole of a piece elaborates a single idea. Here, for the first time, this giant of the past nourished a budding giant. Teaching the boy the WTC from the age of ten or eleven may have been the single most important thing Neefe did for him.

  Now Beethoven had been called in print a genius for the first but hardly last time, and the magical connection to Mozart was invoked for the first but hardly last time. The title page of the variations declares that the composer is age ten; he was, in fact, twelve when they were published. Abetted by his father, his confusion about his age had settled in.

  The Dressler Variations are in C minor, on a funeral march by the eponymous composer. The piece is slight and conventional, reasonably impressive in imagination, harmony, and keyboard technique for a boy of Beethoven’s years. At the same time, this earliest-known Beethoven work is rich in prophecy not only in its musical substance but also in its existence in print: already Neefe and others were inspired to feats of generosity for this brilliant but oblivious student.

  Beethoven pursued the variation genre from now to the end of his life. The idea of theme and variations is to start with a short piece of music by oneself or someone else (often a well-known melody) and to transform and reimagine it in a series of vignettes. These may be based on the theme’s melody, harmony, bass line, or some combination of them. The variation form is an ideal learning exercise for a student, because it amounts to studying a fundamental element of what composition is about: taking a piece of material, an idea, and transforming it into new passages that share an underlying essence but sound different. So a student learns that an essential part of composing is a matter of contrast and diversity founded on unity and invention: fashioning many things from one thing. If Bach was a model of invention, writing variations put the idea into practice. From here on, the concept and technique of variation lay at the core of Beethoven’s art in whatever genre he took up.

  Already in the Dressler Variations, he understood that a sequence of variations should not be random or static; there needs to be a sense of growth from first variation to last. Beethoven already knew, in other words, that there needs to be an overarching plan. On this first attempt, the variations do not entirely add up and some are oversimilar, but still a pattern is evident: starting from the stolid pace of the march, he animates the music by degrees—using the old technique of division, decorating the theme with faster notes—until the concluding allegro variation, the first in C major, erupts in ebullient virtuosity.

  In that may lie a story. These variations on a funeral march in C minor (foreshadowing Beethoven’s future funeral marches and other darkly expressive works in that key) might form a memorial for the boy’s recently passed, still-lamented teacher and friend Franz Georg Rovantini. If so, the final variation conveys a triumph over sorrow and fate—another narrative to which Beethoven returned throughout his life.3

  The you
ng composer, of course, knew none of these prophecies. He knew he had made a start in the larger world of music. In the next two years, two rondos for piano saw print, along with two songs, Description of a Girl and To an Infant. From this starting point in his creative life, not yet in his teens, Beethoven was already fashioning pieces that would be played in places he would never see, by people he would never know.

  These were the years when Beethoven’s life came intensely into focus around music at a professional level, from soloing to playing in the orchestra pit. This student that Christian Neefe inherited was unpromising in every way but musically: morose, intractable, deficient in hygiene. But it was after the advent of Neefe as his teacher that the pace of Beethoven’s life, musical and otherwise, gained momentum, if not yet in any definable direction.

  As Neefe said in his published note, he was teaching the boy composition as much as keyboard. The technical part of Beethoven’s keyboard studies appears to have been concentrated on organ. Neefe was an able keyboard player, but no notable virtuoso. What he did more importantly was to introduce the boy to a wealth of musical literature, centered on German composers, that had been neglected in a court that preferred Italian music.4 (There were a number of Italians in the Kapelle, starting with Kapellmeister Andrea Luchesi.) Besides The Well-Tempered Clavier, Neefe introduced the boy to the intimately expressive keyboard works of C. P. E. Bach, to Haydn and Mozart, and to a new generation of piano-oriented composers including Sterkel and Clementi.