Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph

by Swafford, Jan

  The 1780s marked the decade when the pianoforte—still in the middle of its evolution, still marked by significant differences among regional schools and individual makers—finally triumphed over the harpsichord. With its hammers striking strings rather than the strings being plucked, as with the harpsichord, the piano could create a far wider range of volume and touch than older keyboard instruments. In turn, this changed the kind of keyboard music being written. New kinds of figuration, written articulations, pedal effects, and dramatic contrasts of volume began to appear in keyboard music, which in turn urged composers toward more intense kinds of expression.

  By his mid-teens, Beethoven was thoroughly a piano player and composer. Neefe held out, preferring the more intimate clavichord, though eventually he embraced the newer instrument. So at the piano Beethoven may have been mainly his own teacher; or perhaps he and his teacher together worked out how to play this instrument, as distinct from the harpsichord and clavichord. Beethoven developed his playing in the same way he developed his composing: by experimenting and by studying other accomplished musicians. Throughout his life, in all things musical he modeled what he did on what he perceived to be the best of its kind, then took the models in his own direction.

  When Ludwig’s first teacher, Giles van den Eeden, finally died in June 1782, after fifty-nine years as court organist, Neefe took over the position. He found his ascension surprising, because he was Protestant and the court Catholic. The day after he assumed the job, Neefe followed Elector Max Friedrich to Münster and left Beethoven as his substitute.5 At age eleven, the boy was capable of filling in at the most important organ position in town. Soon he was regularly substituting for Neefe at the organ in the chapel, at the clavier in the court orchestra, and in rehearsals at the theater, where Neefe remained music director.

  Earlier, Chief Minister Belderbusch had decreed that the small theater of the Electoral Residence was to be a national theater, like the one Joseph II established in Vienna. The larger agenda of the theater was didactic, high-minded, high-Aufklärung: it would endeavor “to raise German theatrical art to an ethical school for the German people.”6 To head it, Belderbusch brought in the Grossmann-Hellmuth Company, its leading member the actor, director, playwright, and friend of the Beethoven family G. F. W. Grossmann. The idea was not only to present a wide variety of theatrical art but also to emphasize German playwrights and composers.

  The theater’s ambitions expanded. Grossmann’s production of Schiller’s Fiesko in 1783 may have been its premiere; he mounted Schiller’s Räuber and Kabale und Liebe; Shakespeare’s Macbeth, King Lear, and Hamlet; works by Molière, Voltaire, Beaumarchais, the Italians Goldoni and Gozzi; and his own plays. He produced The Abduction from the Seraglio, the greatest success of Mozart’s life, soon after its premiere in Vienna, and that season mounted nineteen other operas and operettas and melodramas. Beethoven would have seen most or all of these productions. Soon he was a rehearsal pianist at the theater and, after that, a member of the orchestra.

  As Beethoven entered his early teens, there were other influences as important to him as his teacher Neefe and the town’s newly rich offerings of opera and theater. Other people began to reach him. For all his roughness, the fractiousness he inherited from his family, his tendency to drift off in his own thoughts, he was attracting the ears and the admiration of the town’s most sophisticated connoisseurs. These were aristocrats, civil servants, clerics, and educators who could discern talent when they saw it and who had the vision to see uncommon qualities of spirit beneath a raw exterior. Now Beethoven found friends and champions. From his teens on, these champions tended to be exceptional people—though none more exceptional than himself, as Beethoven knew, perhaps, too well.

  The first of his lifelong friends was medical student Franz Wegeler. They met when Ludwig was twelve (as Wegeler remembered it) or thirteen. Wegeler was five years older. One of the first things the older boy noticed about Beethoven was that he talked enthusiastically about his grandfather and his mother, hardly at all about his father. He was always after his mother to tell him stories of his grandfather, old Ludwig. His teacher Neefe, the boy told Wegeler with some bitterness, had been harsh in criticizing his first compositions.7 Here also appears a lasting pattern: Beethoven was generally to be fondest of friends, family, and benefactors who were distant or, like his grandfather, dead. With those he saw intimately and regularly, sooner or later there would usually be trouble.

  But Beethoven and Wegeler got along from the start and never ceased to. It was Wegeler who recommended his younger friend to a wealthy local family named Breuning as a piano teacher. Daughter of the Elector’s personal physician, Helene von Breuning was the widow of Hofrat Emanuel Joseph von Breuning, who had died from trying to save court records in the conflagration at the Electoral Residence. From that point, Helene reared their four children with the help of her brother-in-law Canon Lorenz, one of the liberal, enlightened clergy of Bonn.8 Beethoven was engaged to teach piano to daughter Eleonore, called Lorchen, a year younger than him, and to Lorenz, called Lenz, youngest of three brothers.

  The Breuning house was a stately three-story mansion on Münsterplatz, facing the cathedral. Helene was admired for her fine aristocratic features, her wisdom and patience with children, her intellectual curiosity and broad culture. When Beethoven came into the Breuning family circle, he joined a stream of court officials, artists, and intellectuals who frequented the house. Its tone of Rhenish joie de vivre was enlivened by the racket of four boisterous children playing games and music upstairs. Second son Stephan von Breuning was to be one of Beethoven’s lifelong friends, despite quarrels and long estrangements. Stephan studied with Kapelle violinist Franz Anton Ries and sat in occasionally with the court orchestra. Oldest son Christoph, like the rest of the family, was a passionate reader and wrote poetry.

  What probably began as a simple matter, the hiring of a talented local boy to teach keyboard to children under the eyes of their benevolent and formidable mother, developed over the next years into an irreplaceable part of Beethoven’s Bildung, that German word meaning not only schooling but also growth in experience, maturity, understanding. Beethoven came into the orbit of a family that gave him something like the nurturing home he never really had and provided him with books and ideas that stayed with him.

  In 1783, once again with Neefe pulling strings, Beethoven, at twelve, published three clavier sonatas dedicated to Elector Max Friedrich. Remembered as the Electoral Sonatas, they are a leap beyond the slight Dressler Variations of a year before. Under Neefe’s tutelage, the boy was learning composition at a tremendous pace. He was also going furiously at the technical aspects of writing not for clavier in general, like most keyboard publications of the time, but specifically for the pianoforte. The Dresslers have no volume markings and few articulation marks; they are harpsichord pieces. The Electoral Sonatas bristle with pianistic effects.

  Each sonata has its own personality. The opening movement of no. 1, in E-flat major, has an atmosphere stately, aristocratic, fashionably galant, and a little pompous; its tone may have been a tribute to the Elector. No. 2, in F minor, starts with a slow and fraught introduction, then launches into an intense (or would-be) Allegro assai. It is followed by an Andante strikingly poignant for a boy of twelve, and a perfunctory Presto finale. No. 3, in D major, the strongest of the set, suggests Haydn at his most vivacious. Its jolly outer movements frame the most striking formal idea of the sonatas, a minuet followed by six variations. Most prophetic is the unfolding of the F Minor Sonata: it begins with a somber introduction that leads to a driving Allegro theme, and features an unusual repeat of the slow introduction and another return of that introduction before the recapitulation. All this is to say that Beethoven’s first minor-key sonata is the embryo of his future op. 13, the Pathétique Sonata, which treats its introduction the same way.

  The Electoral Sonatas reveal that, by age twelve, Beethoven knew correct harmonic practice, modulation, and the traditio
nal formal models of sonata movements—a more sophisticated matter than the genre of theme and variations. He could write sparkling and idiomatic virtuoso passages. He knew about the emotions and characters one weaves into music and wielded these expressive and traditional topics effectively: the gestures and mood of the galant, the tone of the elevated and aristocratic, the gay, the poignant, the comic, and so on through the emotions as represented in music. He had the beginnings of his sense of the character of particular keys: E-flat major, aristocratic and expansive and noble; F minor, dark and furioso; D major, bright and ebullient. Maybe most surprising of all, in these early sonatas Beethoven is already in the habit of connecting his themes by means of small motives, such as the rising and falling thirds heard throughout the E-flat Sonata and the rising tonic triad outline that begins each movement. Consciously or instinctively, Beethoven already grasped not only that a multimovement work needs a unity of mood but also that it can be based on a unified collection of ideas, just as a set of variations are all based on one theme.

  At the same time, the Electoral Sonatas reveal the elements of his craft that Beethoven had not mastered as he entered his teens. If his themes are attractive, they are also conventional, some of them shapeless and static. It is hard to tell whether his departures from standard forms are imaginative or naive; he has not learned the inner logic of form, how to make the material inflect a shape and sit convincingly within it.

  Most strikingly, in his determination to write pure piano music using the full range of the instrument’s volume and touch, the twelve-year-old goes over the top with fussy, awkward, sometimes impossible dynamics and articulations. Some markings have to be ignored: say, the intricate articulations on fast sixteenth notes, the wild up-and-down dynamics.9 Especially in the first two sonatas, ideas tend to be presented and then dropped. Only in the D Major does he begin to grapple with the sophisticated discipline of sustaining an idea: if the furioso first theme of the F Minor Sonata did not soon collapse into bland octave passages, it might have approached the intensity of its descendent the Pathétique.

  The dedication to Elector Max Friedrich that prefaces the printed score of the sonatas is significant in itself:

  Gracious One!

  Since my fourth year, music has been the first of my youthful pursuits. Having become acquainted early on with this dear muse that called forth pure harmonies in my soul, I grew to love it, and, as it often appeared to me, it grew to love me in turn. Now I have reached my eleventh year; and ever since, in hours of blissful solitude, my muse has often whispered to me: “Try to write down the harmonies of your soul!” Eleven years—I thought—and how would the author’s role suit me? And what would men of our art say to it? I was almost shy. Yet, it was the will of my muse—I obeyed and wrote.

  And may I now, Gracious One! dare to put my first youthful works at the foot of Your throne? And may I hope that You will grant them the encouraging approval of Your gentle fatherly eye?10

  These words may have been written by Beethoven, but the style and the moony idealism are Christian Neefe’s. Beethoven would never write words quite like these again. By adulthood, the fastidious schoolboy lettering disappeared from his handwriting, and his language became concrete and to the point. The harmonies of his soul would speak in his art, rarely in his words.

  In 1783 there was a small fourth brother in the Beethoven household: Franz Georg van Beethoven, named in honor of the late violinist Franz Georg Rovantini. In March the toddler died at age two. There was a consequence of the earlier death. Rovantini’s sister Maria Magdalena, a cousin of Maria van Beethoven, came from Rotterdam to visit her brother’s grave. While she was at it, she wanted to take in the sights around Bonn and the Rhineland. She was accompanied by a wealthy widow and her daughter, for whom Maria Magdalena worked as governess. The well-to-do trio from Rotterdam stayed with the Beethovens for a month, and made later visits.11

  In turn, Maria’s cousin and her employer invited the Beethovens to Rotterdam and arranged for aristocratic performance venues for Ludwig, including the royal court at the Hague. Johann was not able to get released from his court duties in Bonn, so, toward the end of 1783, Maria van Beethoven and Ludwig set off north down the Rhine to Holland. The weather was so cold that on the boat, Maria held Ludwig’s feet in her lap to keep them from freezing. It turned out to be one of the longest journeys of his life. At the concert, before an audience of nobles in the Hague, he found great success playing a concerto in E-flat of his own.12 Beginning with a flavor of hunting call–cum–march (the march an abiding topic in his future concerto first movements), it is a lively and eclectic piece that showed off his virtuosity.

  Playing a solo work on the same program was the Mannheim-born composer, violinist, and violist Carl Stamitz, then living in the Hague. Known for his symphonies concertantes and concertos, he likely became the first internationally famous composer the young Beethoven met. For his concerto performance, Ludwig was paid the unusually high fee of 63 florins, nearly 50 florins more than the distinguished Stamitz. (Perhaps because his mother was there, on the court’s payment record Beethoven was listed at his correct age of twelve.)13

  Apparently Ludwig and his mother stayed with Maria’s cousin for a while, the boy concertizing in grand houses, before returning to Bonn.14 In Holland, he had found favor with both his composing and his playing, met a celebrated composer, and saw a great European city for the first time. There is no indication what he thought of any of it, but probably he was not impressed. If he had ever felt daunted to be performing before, say, a roomful of aristocrats and a famous composer in the splendid music room of a palace, he appeared no longer daunted and never would be. He simply saw it as his job and his due. All Beethoven is recorded to have said about his Rotterdam journey is this: “The Dutch are skinflints, they love money too much, I’ll never visit Holland again.” His fee for playing his concerto, 63 florins, would have meant several months’ living to a member of the Bonn Kapelle. He never did visit Holland again.

  January 1784 brought the first herald of a new era in Bonn. For twenty years chief minister and power-behind-the-throne Count Caspar Anton von Belderbusch, moving force behind the founding of the National Theater and of the Academy, which he was preparing to turn into a university, and music-loving patron of the Beethoven family, died from an overdose of emetic. Bonners had seen him as a corrupt minister mainly concerned with feathering his nest. Hearing the news of his death, the city danced in the streets.15

  Around that time, Beethoven received a review of his first published compositions. This first notice of his career was a bad one: the Musikalischer Almanach dismissed the Dressler Variations and Electoral Sonatas, saying they “perhaps could be respected as the first attempts of a beginner in music, like an exercise by a third- or fourth-form student in our schools.” Beethoven may have hoped to get the E-flat Major Piano Concerto published; if so, he dropped the idea.16

  Besides being Neefe’s assistant organist, the boy had taken over for his teacher as rehearsal pianist in the theater. In February, Neefe petitioned Elector Max Friedrich to make the boy’s organ position official and salaried. Relaying Neefe’s petition, lord high steward and Musikintendant Sigismond gave the Elector a summary of where Beethoven and his family stood at that point:

  The supplicant’s father served Your Electoral Grace and Your Grace’s predecessors for 29 years, and his grandfather for 46 years [sic—it was 40 years] . . . the supplicant has been sufficiently tested in the past and has been found capable of playing the court organ, which he has often done in the absence of the organist Neefe, as well as at rehearsals of plays and at various other functions, and will do so in such cases in the future; . . . Your electoral Grace has most graciously provided for his care and contingent subsistence (which his father is absolutely no longer able to do) . . . the supplicant well deserves to have graciously bestowed upon him the position of assistant at the court organ, in addition to a small increase of remuneration.17

  The p
etition got nowhere for the moment, swallowed by events at court. Meanwhile, it reveals that Johann van Beethoven was becoming useless as a provider, on the way to being a charity case. Belderbusch, the family’s champion at court, was dead. If anyone was going to support the Beethovens now, it had to be oldest son Ludwig. His father had been making 450 florins a year, to which he added with private lessons, to which Ludwig added with proceeds from his performances, gifts for dedications, and the like—a trickle that helped keep the family going but was at the same time unpredictable. By then Maria van Beethoven was weary and perhaps ill, Johann sinking deeper into the bottle. The Electoral Court, for its part, had lost its leader Belderbusch and had further troubles of its own.

  For Elector Max Friedrich, 1784 was another unfortunate year, though it would be his last bad one. His regime had already seen a grueling famine and a fire that all but destroyed the Electoral Residence, and he and Belderbusch were, in some degree, blamed for both. Now, after the death of Belderbusch, who had run the government, the court being rudderless under an Elector unused to governing, nature with a certain touch of biblical poetry followed fire and famine with flood.

  On February 27, a thaw and heavy rain broke up the ice covering the Rhine, which that winter had been thick enough to support the market and its trade. When the river ice broke, a wave of ice and water engulfed the town. At the Fischer house, the baker’s family hauled their valuables and furniture from the ground-floor bakery to the attic. As the water climbed to four feet on the next floor, Maria van Beethoven was heard to say, “What flood? . . . In Ehrenbreitstein we had lots of floods, so this one doesn’t impress me.” When the water reached the bottom of their third-floor stairs, Maria was impressed. The Beethovens also dragged their belongings to the attic, where they and the Fischers conferred and decided to get out. They exited the house on a ladder, parents carrying children; ran along boards placed in the courtyard; and ended up in a house on higher ground in Stockenstrasse to wait out the disaster. It was the worst flood Bonn had seen since 1374. City walls on the river were damaged and more than a hundred houses destroyed, but the Fischer’s Zum Walfisch survived.18