Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph

by Swafford, Jan

  On March 3, while ice and water still stood in the streets, Elector Maximilian Friedrich died. As usual on the death of an Elector, the theater company and musicians and other artists were dismissed with a month’s pay. National Theater director Grossmann left Bonn never to return, and most of his actors were dispersed. Christian Neefe lost his position as theater music director and had nothing to do but play organ in the chapel.19

  Once coadjutor, now Elector, Maximilian Franz arrived in Bonn late at night on April 27, 1784, without fanfare but, he declared, “with the most lively feelings of joy.” He was like an ambitious young scientist taking over a splendid laboratory. His assumption of the throne marked the full flowering of Bonn’s golden age. That apotheosis would not be found in the palaces and monuments of electoral glory but in art, poetry, philosophy, music, and the ideals behind them: in Aufklärung.

  5

  Golden Age

  FOR COURT ACTORS and musicians, the death of an Elector was a time of sorrow, however they felt about the glorious deceased. They were all dismissed, to be rehired or not at the pleasure of the next regime. In June 1784, a court official wrote for new Elector Maximilian Franz a “Respectful Pro-memoria Regarding the Electoral Court Musique.” Its summary of the members of the Kapelle included these items:

  8. Johann Beethoven has a definitely decaying voice; he has been long in service, is very poor, of respectable conduct and married.

  13. Christian Neefe, the organist, according to my unprejudiced judgment, could be relieved of this post since he is not particularly accomplished on the organ, is moreover, a foreigner of no particular merriten and of the Calvinist religion.

  14. Ludwig van Beethoven, a son of Beethoven sub no. 8, receives no stipend but, in the absence of Kapellmeister Luchesy [sic], has taken over the organ. He has good ability, is still young and his conduct is quiet and upright.1

  The next month, a depressed Christian Neefe wrote a letter to his old friend and employer Grossmann, who had left town with the regime change and closing of the National Theater. Knowing cabals in the court were against him, Neefe was desperate to find a job away from Bonn: “Your letter, my dearest Grossmann, has contributed much, much to reassure me . . . Take the warmest thanks of this friend trusting you for work. I will never forget this noble prompting of your heart.” Neefe tells Grossmann that his friends have advised him to be patient and hopeful, and have found him piano students. To Neefe, at age thirty-six, that feels like he is going back to the drudgery of age sixteen, teaching keyboard to children. He adds about his situation: “Betthoven [sic] will be the happiest, but I doubt very much that he’ll draw much actual benefit from it.”2 Beethoven, at age thirteen, had just been officially appointed Neefe’s second at the court organ, his new salary of 150 florins taken out of his teacher’s stipend. Between that reduction and the ending of his theater position, Neefe had lost most of his income and was close to losing it all.3

  Does Neefe’s curt observation that Beethoven will be pleased at his demotion show a break between them? Not necessarily; only that Neefe knew that the officials were trying to replace him as organist with his more tractable and less expensive student. Beethoven had no hand in that, nor did his father—Neefe was a friend of the Beethoven family and a frequent visitor in the house. But surely Beethoven had some idea of what was going on, that he was caught unpleasantly between his teacher’s future and his own need to earn a salary. He was in the process of becoming the main support of his family. There the situation sat for months, uncomfortable for everyone concerned.

  Beethoven had better reasons to be happy. With no duties in the theater and court music at low ebb for the moment, he had lots of time to practice piano, and for the first time in his life he was earning a regular paycheck. Meanwhile, through Neefe’s interests outside music, Beethoven was going to acquire more ideas and ideals that would endure in his life.

  For Neefe, there would be no theatrical work forthcoming from Grossmann. He had to struggle on in Bonn. In the meantime, he worked on a collection of ethical and aesthetic writings. Neefe had long been an enthusiast, a Schwärmer, for Aufklärung. That had led him to the Freemasons, the international secret society founded early in the century. Besides numbers of the aristocracy, civil service, and clergy, its membership included progressive leaders and thinkers around the West: George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and thirteen of the signers of the U.S. Constitution were Freemasons; likewise Goethe, Lessing, Gluck, and Frederick the Great of Prussia. Friedrich Schiller was not a member but was close to Masonic circles. Haydn and Mozart became lodge members in Vienna.

  One of the outcomes of Mozart’s membership was his Masonic opera Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute), whose final chorus proclaims, “Strength, Beauty, and Wisdom have attained the crown of victory!” Strength, Beauty, and Wisdom were the symbolic pillars upholding Masonic lodges.4 The trials of Mozart’s lovers Pamina and Tamino echo Masonic initiation rituals. One day, Die Zauberflöte would be Beethoven’s favorite opera, because of its humanistic ideals as much as its music.

  Dramatist G. E. Lessing summarized the Masonic agenda: “By the exercise of Brotherly Love we are taught to regard the whole human species as one family, the high and the low, the rich and the poor, created by one Almighty Being and sent into the world for the aid, support and protection of each other. On these principles Masonry unites men of every country, sect and opinion, and by its dictates conciliates true friendship among those who might otherwise have remained at a distance.”5 When Haydn was initiated, in 1785, a lodge brother congratulated him for his Masonic conception of instrumental music: “If each instrument does not consider the rights and properties of other instruments in relation to its own rights, if it does not diminish its own importance considerably, so as not to detract from the expression of its companions, the aim, which is beauty, will not be achieved.”6

  Freemasonry was the first international organization whose agenda was not economic, governmental, or religious. Its social networking and its association with Enlightenment ideals—equality, morality, tolerance, the brotherhood of humanity—brought in thousands of members. By the end of the eighteenth century, in Germany alone there were upwards of three hundred lodges peopled by more than fifteen thousand brothers, including most of the progressive leaders and thinkers of the time.7 The incessantly proclaimed essence was the conception of brotherhood. The very word brother took on an enlightened, Masonic overtone (as someday the word citizen would take on a revolutionary overtone). But, if lodges were democratic in spirit, they were elite in practice: the membership was middle and upper class, with few tradesmen and fewer women.

  “Mankind in East and West” ran a line in a popular lodge song.8 That the lodges were an international humanistic institution independent of church and state was a prime reason churches and states loathed them. Catholics, especially Jesuits, declared the Masons antireligious and atheistic. Yet plenty of religious men, including practicing Jews and Catholics (Mozart and Haydn among the latter), were Freemasons in good standing. “We regard all men as our brothers,” said a speaker in 1742. “The doctrines of the law of nature, the prime uniter of human society, do not permit us to enquire as to the religious beliefs of those we choose to be our brothers.”

  Masonic rites and activities had a peculiar dichotomy: on one side, a murky mysticism, with esoteric rituals and talk of Solomon’s Temple and the Knights Templar, of Isis and Osiris and Brahma; on the other side, practical and educational endeavors. Lodge brothers were steeped in Enlightenment convictions flowing from the scientific revolution: the Science of Man and the Science of Morality, but also practical science and common sense. In more worldly respects, Masonic lodges amounted to a circle of people who socialized and helped one another, in career terms no less than high-minded ones. And in the end, despite propaganda to the contrary, no unified Masonic program of action aspired to bring about an enlightened world by revolution. The transformation the Masons preached was personal and social.9


  Christian Neefe joined a lodge and wrote Masonic songs, but he wanted to go further toward reform and revolution not only within himself but in the whole of society. That brought him to one of the near-mythical sideshows of the Aufklärung: the Bavarian Order of Illuminati. The order was a secret society like the Freemasons and shared many of their ideals, but the younger organization aimed for something bigger and more radical. Its members intended to save the world and had a plan to do it. The order was proclaimed in 1776 by Adam Weishaupt, a professor at the University of Ingolstadt. As Weishaupt laid it out, the order was a mélange of ancient mystery cults, Jesuit-style organization, and quasi-Masonic ritual.10 As of 1783, the height of its strength and influence, there were perhaps twenty-five hundred members, most of them from the same elite classes and professions that filled the much larger membership of the Freemasons.11

  The secrecy of the Illuminati was deeper than that of the Masons, their grades more rigorous, their mysteries more arcane, their agenda more radical. Their style is shown in a model for questions and answers for those aspiring to the grade of Illuminatus Major:

  Where have you come from? / From the world of the first chosen.

  Whither do you want to go? / To the innermost sanctum.

  What do you seek there? / He who is, who was, and who shall always be.

  What inspires you? / The light, which lives in me and is now ablaze in me.12

  As a result of their arcana and their secrecy, the Illuminati acquired an aura of the uncanny or the insidious, or both. Secrecy at all levels was obsessive, starting with code names for everybody and everything: Weishaupt was “Spartacus,” the secret group of directors the “Areopagus.” For a few years, the order spread modestly but steadily. Like the Freemasons, the Illuminati did not preach violent revolution. They were concerned, first, with the development and enlightenment of individual members: moral reform one person at a time. That, however, was only the first step. Eventually the order intended to form an elite cadre that would infiltrate bureaucracies everywhere, becoming a covert but pervasive influence on governments, leading ultimately to the unification and perfection of all human societies. Wrote Adam Weishaupt, “Princes and nations shall disappear from the face of the earth peacefully, mankind shall become one family, and the world shall become a haven of reasonable people. Morality shall achieve this transformation, alone and imperceptibly.”13 While its agenda was progressive and humanistic, the order was elitist by definition: the transformation of society was to be carried out by the secret male group of the illuminated.14

  In practice, the Illuminati amounted to a sort of activist left wing of the Freemasons. A certain number of Freemasons were drawn to the order; illustrious Illuminati included possibly Goethe and, by some reports, Mozart.15 Friedrich Schiller was suspicious of the secrecy and moralistic flummery of the Illuminati. All the same, in Dresden Schiller was close to the Illuminatus Christian Gottfried Körner, and the order’s intoxicating dream of the brotherhood of humanity creating an Elysium on earth appears to have inflected “An die Freude.”16

  Education was a prime concern of the order. Every member was expected to recruit promising youths between fifteen and twenty years of age and inculcate them in Illuminist ideals.17 Neefe was relentlessly devoted to duty, so for a while he would have groomed Beethoven for the order, though the boy was too young to join a lodge. The goals of the Aufklärung and Illuminati were imparted with homilies and maxims, like Neefe’s own published homilies. Some of the maxims advised a youth to keep his distance from women romantically, to view them with the purest ideals but not expect them to be intellectual equals. Neefe wrote in an article, “They don’t think much, the female souls . . . To think is virile.”18 These attitudes pointed Beethoven toward the prudish and idealistic, as opposed to realistic, attitude toward women that he showed throughout his life.

  In 1781, an Illuminati lodge formed in Bonn, called the Minervalkirche Stagira, the Minerval Church of Stagira (named for the birthplace of Sophocles). Neefe was a founding member, along with his actor friend Grossmann.19 Members from the court Kapelle were horn player Nikolaus Simrock and Beethoven’s violin teacher and court concertmaster, Franz Anton Ries, along with a collection of progressive civil servants and artists including J. F. Abshoven, publisher of the town Intelligenzblatt, and Bonifaz Oberthür, later the first rector of the University of Bonn. So the lodge was woven into the artistic and intellectual leadership of the town. The Minerval Church met at the house of widow Anna Maria Koch in the market square, where she kept a wine bar and rented rooms.20 Widow Koch eventually added a bookstore; under the name of Zehrgarten, her establishment became the nexus of Aufklärers in Bonn. All these currents swirled around the young Beethoven as they swirled around the whole town.

  Neefe received his order name, “Glaucus,” from the Greek word for “brightly shining.” At meetings, members heard lectures on books, philosophy, science.21 Neefe had to write an autobiographical piece subjecting his own character and ideals to a rigorous examination. There was a list of one hundred questions he must answer. They began, “What do you wish to be the purpose of the Order?” Neefe replied: “Thorough and particular connection of men with God, Nature, and themselves. Especially: The implementation of the Rights of Man.”

  The hyperbolic style of the Illuminati and the order’s ultra-Aufklärung agenda seemed a perfect fit for Neefe the Schwärmer, who believed that true artists were likewise a cadre of the elect. Brother Glaucus had a precipitous rise in the order. In only four weeks, he attained an advanced grade. Two years later, in 1783, he became prefect of the Stagira lodge.22 He was involved in creating and writing for the lodge’s weekly journal, Contributions to the Spread of Useful Knowledge, which carried articles on everything from Eastern religions to husbandry. “Morality,” declared the journal, “is the science of the happiness of every single individual . . . Politics, however, has the happiness of a whole nation, even . . . of all nations as its object; it is accordingly the science of citizenship.”23 For Illuminati, as for all Aufklärers, science was the great shibboleth.

  The year 1785 turned out to be critical for Neefe in a number of directions. In February, after a trial of his playing before new Elector Max Franz, he was restored to his full salary as court organist, Beethoven remaining his assistant.24 Max Franz was agreeable to Neefe’s idea that religious services at court should be based more on German choral music, accompanied by smaller instrumental forces, a change from the former Italian orientation of court music.25

  That year Neefe also published his collection of prose sketches, modestly called Dilettanterien, which open a window into his personality, his ideals, his teaching. Widely read around Germany, the book was made up mostly of homely reflections with Masonic and Illuminist overtones, such as his response to seeing a broken bottle on the street: “Think of so many other frustrated designs and collapsed hopes of men, of friendships ruined, riches lost, courtiers fallen, empires vanished, or on the becoming and passing of nature, or on the vanity of all things . . . And then turn your gaze upwards!”

  In the Dilettanterien, Neefe also addresses matters technical and aesthetic relating to his profession, including his article “Characteristics of Instrumental Music”:

  Sulzer, one of our greatest philosophers, and probably the greatest aesthetic thinker of our time, complains about the carelessness of the endeavor to make instrumental music more important . . . There is more to [composing] than the art of putting one note after another according to the rules of thorough bass and singing . . . which any village schoolmaster can easily learn. A fiery imagination, a deep penetration into the sanctuary of harmony that is only granted to a few initiates, fervent inner feeling, insight into the nature and capacities of the various instruments, an understanding of the whole substance of music, an ability to develop that substance according to forms and models, a meticulous acquaintance with the various characters [of men], with the physical and moral aspects of mankind, with the passions . . . [are required]
if music is to be no empty cling-clang, no sounding brass or tinkling cymbal . . . One observes the nuances of feelings, or the point where one passion changes into another . . . The mob of listeners the composer doesn’t need to worry about; they never know what they want, and never truly understand anything . . . Woe to the composer who heeds such men! He will deny his talent . . . and must compose minuets, polonaises, and Turkish marches. And then—good night Talent, Genius, and Art! The great composer doesn’t get drawn into the mob. He goes calmly and unimpeded on his way to musical eloquence. It is enough for him that here and there unnoticed in some corner a better educated listener can be found who understands his language.26

  Neefe preached this idealistic Schwärmerei about art and the initiated few to his pupil Beethoven, along with the broader Aufklärung ideals of reason, freedom, duty to humankind, the pursuit of happiness. Neefe also preached a relentless sense of duty to one’s talent: what gifts you possess are owed to humanity. And, as an Illuminatus, he proclaimed the imperative of morality and how it must shape one’s life and work: to be a good artist, you must first be a good man.