Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph

by Swafford, Jan

  In Vienna, a reaction to reform and revolution was gaining strength. Yet the reality was that if most progressive Germans approved the Revolution at first, they were still largely not radicals, not Jacobins, not haters of princes and nobles. In German lands, there would be no active revolt against their own ancient regimes and marginal agitation in that direction, though some of that agitation would be heard, ringingly, in Bonn. Most German Aufklärers still wanted not an end to princes but better ones: benevolent despots, like Joseph II in Vienna.

  The revolutionary enthusiasm of many German artists and thinkers ended with the fall of the guillotine on Louis XVI and his Austrian queen, Marie Antoinette. The Jacobin-inspired Terror that ensued galvanized reactionaries. From that point in the courts of Vienna and elsewhere commenced a relentless campaign to crush anything smacking not only of Jacobinism but also of Josephinism or republicanism.

  Beethoven’s circle was among those electrified by the advent of the French Revolution, but between his duties in the viola section of the court orchestra, his piano performing and practice, the increasing helplessness of his father, and the overseeing of his brothers, he had little leisure to ponder France and the future of Europe.

  It was past time for Johann van Beethoven to retire. His voice had been shot for years, and he had fallen into a sad and public soddenness. When Johann was a child he had watched the bottle master his mother. Now his sons watched him lose the same battle, if indeed Johann put up a fight at all. There were the usual scenes, the ordinary tears. The children appeared at the tavern at night to pull at his coattails: “Papächen, Papächen, come home.” There were nights when Johann collapsed on the street and Ludwig wept and pleaded with the police not to arrest him, then had to drag his reeking and ranting father back to the house.

  Around November 1789, Ludwig petitioned the Elector to retire his father and pay him Johann’s salary so he as oldest son could feed and clothe his family and pay off his father’s debts.29 When the decree came back it had a provision to send Johann away, as once his mother had been sent away to oblivion:

  Because His Serene Electoral Highness has graciously granted the request submitted by the supplicant and has henceforth entirely dispensed with the further services of his father, who is to withdraw to a country village in the electorate of Cologne, it is most indulgently commanded that in the future he be paid, in accordance with his wish, only 100 Reichsthalers of the annual salary that he has received until now . . . that the other 100 Thalers be paid to his supplicating son in addition to the salary that he already enjoys, as well as three measures of grain annually, for the upbringing of his brothers.30

  With this decree, the humiliation of Johann van Beethoven was nearly complete. His son of eighteen was now the recognized breadwinner and head of the family; by the decree, it would be Ludwig handing Johann half of his pension. They both knew what most of that would be spent on. It seems to have been understood, though, that the order to exile Johann from Bonn was for the moment a threat, something to hold over him if he were not cooperative with the court and his son.

  Before Ludwig could present the decree to the court official and receive his pay, Johann pleaded to let him collect the salary so he would not have to endure the shame. Johann pledged to hand over to his son the ordained half of every salary payment. Ludwig agreed and, perhaps to the surprise of both, Johann lived up to that promise. Now, with half his father’s pay added to his salary as organist, Ludwig was making the equivalent of 300 florins a year, a living slim but workable for the upkeep of himself and his brothers. He added to it with earnings from lessons and performances. And his father did not have to beg him for wine money.

  If Beethoven did not issue many ambitious pieces in the several years before 1790, he still sketched ideas on paper and improvised constantly. Then as later, improvisation was not only his main road to fame but his prime creative engine. He was building a fund of ideas and techniques on which a career would be founded. Since his occasional Trio for Piano and Winds of 1786, he had apparently finished little: perhaps two preludes (later op. 39) and a piano concerto in B-flat major eventually, much worked over, to become Concerto No. 2. He was still Neefe’s assistant as court organist and one of the four violists in the orchestra, performing a steady diet of orchestral works and operas. By that year the number of vocal and instrumental musicians employed by the court Kapelle had expanded to forty-nine.31

  What revived the teenage Beethoven as a composer was urgent news that arrived in Bonn on February 24, 1790: four days earlier, Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II, older brother and inspiration of Elector Maximilian Franz, had died in Vienna. One of the most progressive leaders of the age, the model of an enlightened despot, Joseph died exhausted and embittered, despairing of the reforms that had become a movement bearing his name: Josephinism.

  His mother, Empress Maria Theresa, had undertaken modest reforms and among her sixteen children gave birth to a quartet of future crowned heads: Joseph, Marie Antoinette, Maximilian Franz, and Joseph’s successor, Leopold. When Joseph came into sole possession of the throne after his mother’s death in 1780, he issued a blizzard of decrees, finally totaling six thousand in his ten-year reign. Most were issued in the name of reason and progress; many earned him more enemies than admirers. He expanded the University of Vienna and established the German National Theater in the palace’s Burgtheater (both endeavors were echoed in Bonn). He issued the Code of Civil Law. He liberated the serfs, decreed Jewish emancipation, and, with the Edict of Toleration, allowed free practice of religion. He mounted initiatives to improve public health, abolished the death penalty and torture (the regime of his mother, Maria Theresa, had published an illustrated manual of torture techniques for officials).32 Whereas his mother had tried to stamp out Masonry, Joseph had Freemasons as advisers. He was vitally interested in the arts, including music, and if he had not appreciated and championed Mozart as much as he might have, he had still allowed and perhaps even encouraged the court production of Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro, based on a notorious Beaumarchais play that, under the cloak of a sex comedy, amounts to an indictment of aristocratic tyranny.

  Joseph’s campaign to bridle the church was more draconian. A Catholic like all Holy Roman emperors before him, he was still virtually anticlerical and antipapist. A personal visit and plea from Pope Pius VI did not prevent Joseph from dissolving more than seven hundred contemplative monasteries that he deemed were not doing useful work for society. The immense fortune generated by the sale of monastery lands was largely devoted to education. What priests remained were placed under the tight control of the government, creating something close to a state church.33

  On the other side of the equation, Joseph’s foreign policy ended disastrously when he joined an ill-fated alliance with Russia in a war against Turkey. His meddling with the church turned many citizens against him, including former serfs he had liberated. As Joseph returned from the battlefield to die in Vienna, deserted by friends and family, there were uprisings of nobles and peasants around his lands.

  By the time of his death, more of his subjects hated Joseph than loved him, and the reaction against Josephinism was in full fury in Austria. Besides his habit of stepping on toes in every direction, both high and low, it had been noted that most of his endeavors in one way or another enhanced the power of the throne. He had abolished many religious holidays, which had the effect of reducing everyone’s leisure. His expansion and refinement of the Austrian bureaucracy turned out to serve the interests of repression better than it served progress. Even his personal austerities—his order that no one should bow to him on his walks, his old coat with patches on the elbows—only annoyed the Viennese, who loved imperial ceremony and finery, and called him stingy.34 In the misery of his last months, Joseph declared as his epitaph, “Here lies a prince who had the best of intentions and whose plans were all doomed to failure.”

  But in Bonn, Josephinism had taken root because Joseph’s brother Max Franz was Elector and beca
use there was little resistance to progressive initiatives: few people outside Bonn cared much what happened in that city, though the relations between liberal Bonn and conservative Cologne remained poisonous. In Bonn, at least, Joseph was mourned as a hero, the incomparable champion of Aufklärung in his time.

  When Joseph died the Lesegesellschaft planned an elaborate memorial program. The spearhead of the memorial was Eulogius Schneider, one-time Franciscan monk at odds with his church, lecturer on Greek literature at the university, and one of its fire-breathing radicals. Among the minority of Germans who were true Jacobins, Schneider was the first to translate La Marseillaise into German. He not only endorsed but served the French Revolution through its self-devouring course, until it devoured him.35

  As Schneider began working on his ode to Joseph II, to be declaimed at the memorial, he proposed that the ceremony should include a funeral cantata written by one of the leading musicians in Bonn. Schneider put forward a cantata text by a protégé of his, Severin Anton Averdonk. This young theology student was younger brother of the late contralto Johanna Helene Averdonk, the student of Johann van Beethoven who had made her debut alongside seven-year-old Ludwig in their Cologne recital of 1778.36 To compose the cantata Schneider probably had in mind Christian Neefe or Joseph Reicha, leader of the court orchestra. Besides the usual musical challenges, there was hardly more than two weeks to write the piece so it could be copied and rehearsed for the March 19 festivities. In the event, perhaps because of the urging of Neefe or Count Waldstein or both, Beethoven was assigned the task. He went to work furiously, setting Averdonk’s impassioned verses.

  Then two days before the ceremony, the Lesegesellschaft drily announced, “The recommended cantata cannot be performed for various reasons.” The reasons seem to have been mainly twofold: the piece was not finished, and in any case the music the teenager was writing was too hard to pull together in the available time. Beethoven probably finished it that summer.37

  There is no record that Beethoven was upset that his Cantata on the Death of Emperor Joseph II was not performed. He may have hoped it would have a chance later. And he may have sensed its immaturity; he never published or performed the cantata himself, and it was lost for many years. All the same, in terms of his career, he would scarcely write anything more important.

  The text of the cantata is overwrought as can be, and a high-Aufklärung manifestation: a funeral cantata written by a theology student that does not mention God until the third number, and then only in passing; only toward the end does it give lip service to paradise and immortality. In this cantata death is nothing but tragic, and Joseph’s main immortality is his legacy on earth, not his bliss in heaven. It begins portentously, with all nature theatrically in mourning:

  Dead! Dead! Dead!

  Dead, it is groaned through the desolate night,

  and the echoing rocks cry it back!

  And you waves of the sea howl it in your deeps:

  Joseph the Great is dead!38

  And so on. Beethoven’s setting also pulls out all the stops, revealing that at age nineteen he had a number of stops to pull. If he pulled too many, that is a sign of his youth, but already the expression is powerful, the handling of the orchestra effective and expressive, the voice unmistakably his own. As a sign of that dynamism, he mined ideas from this cantata again and again in later years.39

  The opening pages, scored for an orchestra of strings and doubled winds, are momentous in sound and import: an ominous low C answered by whispered high chords, a halting and sobbing flute solo, an atmosphere new to music in its very sound and texture.40 The high wind chords become the chorus’s cry of “Dead! Dead!” This opening movement has a tragic depth hardly heard since the high Baroque. That tone would be heard again in Mozart’s Requiem the next year, and after that not again perhaps until the Largo e mesto movement of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata op. 10, no. 3.41 One of Beethoven’s most significant contributions to the music of his time was to rediscover a true tragic style that had bordered on foreign to the elegant, ironic, restrained temper of Haydn and Mozart and their time. That tragic style reawakened with the opening of the Joseph Cantata.

  The overall approach in the choruses and the arias is operatic, from a youth who had heard a good deal of Mozart and Gluck from the orchestra pit. In the opening chorus we find another prophecy of future dark-toned Beethoven works in C minor. At the same time, in the course of incessant chromatic restlessness and piercing suspensions, he lands on the uncommon deep-flat keys he favored: B-flat minor, and the E-flat minor he had used in the first Piano Quartet. In other words, prophesied in the opening of the Joseph Cantata are both a Beethoven C-minor mood and a more shadowed E-flat-minor mood, slower in tempo, whose pathos recalls Bach’s E-flat Minor Prelude in The Well-Tempered Clavier.42

  The first movement reaches a depth of sorrow stunning for a teenager, if beyond what its maudlin text deserves. The same applies to the following recitative, “Die Ungeheur” (The Monster), its furioso accompaniment outracing the fingers of many string players of the time. The monster in question is a familiar Aufklärung bête noire:

  A monster, its name Fanaticism,

  Rose from the depths of hell,

  Stretched itself between earth and sun

  And it became night!

  Joseph’s assault on the power, privileges, and, by implication, dogmas of the church—the monster of fanaticism—is the single specific thing he is hailed for in the cantata text. In the next aria with chorus, Joseph brings sunlight to humanity via D major, though the music maintains its restless and rambling chromaticism. (This seems to be the main device the teenage Beethoven knew to express sorrow.)

  The cantata’s steady diet of modulations is over the top, some of the word setting awkward, all of it overscored. If the opening chorus is equal to the occasion, it overmatches the text; the rest of the cantata shows a manifest straining and stretching for effect, with little sense of the appropriate length to fit the material, the text, the sentiment. Still, there is a mature sense of rhythm; the teenage Beethoven knew how to keep a long movement in motion with expressively apt accompaniments. The soaring lyric melody of the soprano aria, “Then men rose to the light,” he would remember in Fidelio, in which men again rise to the light.

  With the crowning of Joseph’s brother Leopold II as Holy Roman emperor, in October 1790, Beethoven was supplied with another cantata text for the occasion. The second imperial cantata shared the same fate as the first; it was too hard for the court orchestra to play. In the Cantata on the Accession of Emperor Leopold II, Beethoven reveals even more clearly that he is a youth of remarkable technique but with a shaky sense of form and proportion. He sets to music what he wants the text to be rather than what it is, with its flights of angels and “smile of humanity floating” on Leopold’s lips. In the soprano aria “Flow, tears of Joy!” he prolongs the first syllable of Segen, “blessings,” for a page and a half of virtuosic melisma, to unintentionally comic effect. Before that the soprano has to hold her joyful tears through nearly five pages of introduction to her aria. Beethoven has not yet grasped the importance of proportion.

  In their texts both cantatas were forlorn gestures to a dying age. The time of benevolent despots in German lands died with Joseph. Leopold II, his brother and heir to the throne, recoiled at the bloody revenge the French Revolution was taking on the aristocracy. He started the process of dismantling Josephinism once and for all.

  The Imperial Cantatas of 1790 reveal Beethoven as a splendid young talent flexing his creative muscles, showing off a precocious knowledge of harmony, the orchestra, and operatic-style expressiveness. They also show the nearest approach yet to his mature voice. At the same time, they show that he had a good deal to learn about doing more with less—one of the main lessons he was to learn in the next decade. Besides the Joseph Cantata’s prophecies of his later music, there is at least one in the Leopold. At the beginning of the finale the chorus proclaims, “Stürzet nieder, Millionen,” “f
all to your knees, you millions.” That line echoes, surely deliberately, a familiar line from Schiller’s “An die Freude,” a leading motif not just of Beethoven’s youth but of his entire life.

  8

  Stem and Book

  AS OF DECEMBER 16, 1790, Beethoven was twenty years old, a young talent much remarked on, and naturally there were young women in the picture. His piano student Lorchen von Breuning sent him a birthday card containing a little poem wishing him long life and “forbearance and patience,” the latter applying for some reason to her. The printed poem uses the familiar du form of address, her signature the formal Sie. Beethoven may have been in love with Lorchen at this or some point, but probably not helplessly so.

  There was another girl who had moved him, Madame Baroness de Westerholt, his piano student and daughter of an official of the electoral stables with a musical family. A few years before, Beethoven had written for the family the Trio for Piano, Flute, and Bassoon. This year he sent the baroness a card with a printed French verse ending, “For you, my very dear friend! / My heart will never change, / And will cherish you forever.”1 Years later Bernhard Romberg remembered this infatuation as a “Werther love,” which is to say desperate and frustrated, like that of Goethe’s doomed hero.2 If so, Beethoven did not seem to suffer for long, and in any case, like most of his loves to come, the baroness was above his station. While his collection of friends and objects of affection was growing, he still loved solitude as much as he did a woman, still fell into his raptus when he became oblivious to everything except what was singing in his head.