Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph

by Swafford, Jan

  In Bonn he had learned harmonic practice, how to build chords and chord changes and changes of key over a bass line by way of studying “thoroughbass.” This was a practical matter for an organist and pianist, because sometimes one was required to extemporize an accompaniment from a bass line, but it also imparted a good sense of managing harmony. He had learned to make new material out of a given idea by writing variations on a theme. He had absorbed conventional formal models and instrumentation.

  When he arrived in Vienna, the aspect of craft Beethoven knew to be his weakest suit was counterpoint, the art of weaving melodies together. Neefe had never really taught him counterpoint, which was regarded as an abstruse but nonetheless valuable study for a composer. Thus the period’s term for contrapuntal music: the “learned style,” with its overtone of pedantry. During his first year in Vienna, largely putting away ambitious creative work, Beethoven turned his full attention to counterpoint, turning out dozens of exercises.

  What that study amounted to, for any composer of that time and long after, was something on the face of it absurd: a systematic, minutely rule-bound course of study in the style of Renaissance choral music in general, Palestrina in particular. In other words, one of the essential paths to becoming a serious composer in the eighteenth century was to master the skills of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The particular hurdle Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven had to clear was a 1725 treatise by Viennese court Kapellmeister Johann Joseph Fux (pronounced fooks) called Gradus ad Parnassum, or Steps to Parnassus. The original had been an imaginary quasi-Socratic dialogue, in Latin, between a teacher and his student. Haydn, like Mozart with his pupils, used his own adaptation of the treatise.

  Fux laid out the path to mastery of counterpoint in a series of “species,” each exercise starting with a given melody in long notes called a cantus firmus, “fixed song.” Writing counterpoint—one or more new melodies—around a preexisting cantus was a technique going back to the Middle Ages, but Fux put the practice into a rationalized and systematic method. In first species the student composes a new melody under or on top of a cantus, one note for each note of the cantus. In second species there are two notes per note of the cantus, in third species four notes, and so on. The species proceed in increasingly elaborate stages until one is writing four-part counterpoint in a kind of abstraction of Renaissance–Palestrina style, using the old church modes as well as modern major and minor scales. Each stage of the process accumulates rules governing the relation of every note to every other note. By the point of writing in four parts, the maze of notes and rules has become head-splitting. In the original Fux, the teacher reassures the suffering student that if he can do this, everything else in music will seem easy.4

  Why did generations of students submit to this torturous study in an archaic style? For several reasons. It teaches a young composer to make notes do what the composer wants rather than follow where they lead. Fux lectures his imaginary student that to make it work, you have to think ahead, not jump on a solution before you know where you are going. Every note matters, and every note has to be seen in the context of the whole. For a composer like Beethoven, who learned harmony by means of thoroughbass—thinking from chord to chord—species counterpoint led him to understand the long-range movement of melodic lines. Which is to say that he learned a central principle: the lines create the harmony rather than submit to the harmony. (Even when composers of that era seemed to be writing simple melody and accompaniment, they were thinking contrapuntally.)

  There is another insight to be gained in doing species exercises. As you learn one rule after another, you also learn that the rules are not immutable but form a hierarchy. You give up one rule for the sake of a higher rule, and ultimately what determines that choice is your taste, ear, and sensitivity. So the later stages of species counterpoint approach the subtle relativity of decisions that is free composition. Submitting to Fux’s rules carries over into finding and following your own rules, and also into knowing when to break them.

  These are the conceptions and skills Beethoven willed himself to master—these, and the more practical matter of being fluent at the learned style when he needed it. The early Classical galant style had viewed counterpoint as old-fashioned, inexpressive, charmless, as symbolized by C. P. E. Bach’s nickname for his father: “the Old Wig.” The mature Viennese Classical style shaped by Haydn and later Mozart put counterpoint back into the picture, especially with fugal passages and movements integrated into the new formal models. Mozart’s discovery of J. S. Bach was also a discovery of the power of counterpoint; it helped lead him to his greatest music. So the richness of the Viennese Classical style had much to do with both overtly contrapuntal episodes and steady contrapuntal undercurrents.

  Steeped in Haydn and Mozart, Beethoven took as self-evident that he needed the learned style to be a true craftsman. Yet in the end his mighty efforts to master counterpoint never entirely took. It was not his kind of discipline. On the page as at the keyboard, his forte was improvisation, the lightning flash of inspiration. He would never be a natural contrapuntist, never completely fluent though he wrote a great deal of counterpoint, some of it splendid. Yet exactly because counterpoint remained a struggle, it was also an endless challenge and fascination. “Whatever is difficult,” Beethoven would write, “is good.” He never forgot Fux, never forgot Palestrina, never forgot the old church modes. Eventually all these elements, and Bach, found their places in his art.

  As for the great Haydn as a teacher, Beethoven was soon disgusted. Correcting counterpoint exercises is a tedious business; the best counterpoint tutors tend to be pedants, and Haydn was anything but. “Art is free,” he said, “and is not to be diminished by any chains of craftsmanship.”5 In Beethoven’s exercises, Haydn missed more mistakes than he caught, and Beethoven knew it. That his teacher had his own urgent projects would not have mattered to this pupil. Haydn seems to have remained patient, or maybe the word is dogged. But it is not entertaining to work with a student, however talented, who clearly considers you a sloppy teacher at the same time that he hates being told what to do.

  There was another issue Beethoven would probably not have cared about, if he knew of it. At the end of January 1793, a month after the lessons began, Haydn lost one of his most treasured friends when Marianne von Genzinger died at age forty-three. She was a married woman with whom he had carried on a platonic relationship, much of it through letters in which he poured out his feelings. Haydn had a spouse, but she was impossible and they had separated long before. (Haydn referred to her in a letter as “my wife, that infernal beast.”)6 For that matter, Haydn was juggling a long-time mistress from his Esterházy Palace days, plus a new mistress in London. But nobody could replace Mme Genzinger in his life. After she died, friends noted that Haydn became less warm, more sarcastic.7 For a number of reasons, then, Haydn would be no lasting mentor for Beethoven. Like most younger people, Beethoven called the old man “Papa,” but he had little affection to spare for father figures.

  Beethoven’s formal lessons with Haydn probably lasted only through spring 1793, but there would be contacts and consulting between them in the coming years, and now and then they appeared in concerts together. There was a curious postscript to his counterpoint studies. Some years after Beethoven died, a venerable Viennese composer and teacher named Johann Baptist Schenk stepped forward with a startling account of that period. Frustrated with Haydn’s carelessness, Schenk recalled, Beethoven had come to Schenk behind Haydn’s back to correct his counterpoint exercises first, which Schenk was happy to do. Wrote Schenk, “I pointed out to him, however, that our work together must forever remain a secret.” But a year later, Schenk continued, Haydn found out about the deception and was furious, which put a permanent crimp in relations between teacher and student.

  The trouble is, Schenk’s yarn does not add up. For one thing, Beethoven seems to have saved all his exercises, as he apparently tried to save every page he put pen to. The 245 pages that survived s
how a steady trickle of mistakes that had not been corrected by anybody. Only 42 pages show any corrections at all.8 Is it conceivable that in his old age Schenk, a distinguished composer and teacher, would cook up the story? It is more than conceivable; it was standard practice. The science of history was still taking shape in the early nineteenth century, and there was little sense of the primacy of fact. To make up things about one’s relationship with a historic figure like Beethoven was a convenient way to engrave one’s name in history. It was also a good way to settle scores. Schenk hated Haydn, declaring to a friend, “Mozart was a good soul, but Haydn was false through and through.”9

  In any case, there never was a complete break between Haydn and Beethoven. The old master was patient and generous, the young man not so stupid as to openly insult the leading composer in the world. In May 1793, Haydn took Beethoven with him to the Esterházy Palace in Eisenstadt, to acquaint his employer Prince Nikolaus with this new talent. Beethoven returned to Vienna, while Haydn stayed on in Eisenstadt, working intensively on the pieces for England.10 Haydn was frantically busy when he returned in the fall, so it is likely the regular lessons never resumed.

  Beneath the cordiality, a degree of tension simmered between the two, most of it on Beethoven’s side. They were separated by two generations. Beethoven had found a quick success in Vienna, where Haydn had for decades been brushed aside (Joseph II had declared his music “tricks and nonsense”).11 Haydn could accept the younger man’s boldness only so far, and that would rankle Beethoven. Meanwhile the older man understood perfectly well the nature of the ego he was dealing with. To a degree, it amused him. Behind Beethoven’s back, Haydn took to calling him die große Mogul, “the Great Mogul”—in the phrase of a later time, “the Big Shot.” When Beethoven largely stopped coming to call in later years, Haydn would ask visitors, “How’s it going with our Big Shot?” More seriously to a devout man, Haydn reportedly declared Beethoven an atheist.12

  If it took some years for the Viennese to realize that the heir of Haydn and Mozart had arrived as a composer, it took little time for Beethoven to establish his primacy among pianists. For the better part of his first decade in Vienna he remained, in the eyes of the public and himself, a composer-pianist as Mozart had been, as many composers were. Beethoven had given more of his teens to the keyboard than to composing. (Haydn was a competent pianist and played violin, but he was unusual among composers of the time in being, as he put it, “no magician” on any instrument.) Besides the brilliance of Beethoven’s playing in general and the unprecedented fire of his improvising, there were really no serious piano rivals in sight when he arrived in town.

  There were, of course, those who imagined themselves to be rivals. One established entertainment in the salons of music fanciers was the piano duel, in which virtuosos would present their repertoire and be handed challenges of sight-reading and improvisation. In 1782, Mozart reported to his father a duel before Joseph II with his rival Muzio Clementi: “After we had stood on ceremony long enough, the Emperor declared that Clementi ought to begin . . . He improvised and then played a sonata. The Emperor then turned to me: ‘Allons, fire away.’ I improvised and played variations. The Grand Duchess produced some sonatas by Paisiello . . . , of which I had to play the Allegros and Clementi the Andantes and Rondos. We then selected a theme from them and developed it on two pianofortes.”13

  On the street sometime around 1793, the father of pianist Carl Czerny ran into Abbé Joseph Gelinek, a leading virtuoso of the city, dressed up and headed for a piano duel at a reception. His opponent was a young foreigner. “I’ll fix him,” Gelinek assured the elder Czerny.

  The next day Czerny ran into the abbé again and asked how the duel went. Gelinek’s response was awestruck. “Yesterday was a day I’ll remember! That young fellow must be in league with the devil. I’ve never heard anybody play like that! I gave him a theme to improvise on, and I assure you I’ve never heard even Mozart improvise so admirably. Then he played some of his own compositions which are marvelous—really wonderful—and he manages difficulties and effects at the keyboard that we never even dreamed of.”

  “I say,” said Czerny the elder, “what’s his name?”

  “He’s a small, ugly, swarthy young fellow, and seems to have a willful disposition . . . His name is Beethoven.”14

  Besides improvising, Beethoven had probably played his Righini Variations, brilliant and virtuosic in the extreme, his showpiece during his first months in Vienna. It would take little time for the wealthy music fanciers of the town to try to capture him for their music rooms, and little time for Beethoven to capture the most storied and generous of Viennese connoisseurs.

  Soon after arriving in Vienna, Beethoven had found better lodging than the garret he started in, moving to a less miserable garret at 45 Alstergasse. Before long he was given a comfortable room on the first floor of the house. The owner of the building was Prince Karl Alois Johann Nepomuk Vinzenz Leonhard Lichnowsky, who kept an apartment in the building for his own use. As it happened, if there was any music-fancying prince in Vienna whom Beethoven most needed to know, it was Lichnowsky.

  From a recently ennobled Prussian family of music patrons going back generations, Karl Lichnowsky was one of the most important connoisseurs and patrons in the city, spending great swaths of his considerable fortune on his passion. His circle had long amounted to a nexus of Viennese musical life. Liberal-minded, a lover of Voltaire, a competent pianist, Lichnowsky had been a patron, student, and Masonic lodge brother of Mozart—and, like Mozart, possibly an Illuminatus.15

  Lichnowsky’s wife, Princess Maria Christiane, had once been among the “Three Graces,” sisters called the most beautiful women in Vienna.16 She had also studied with Mozart and was one of the better amateur pianists in the city. Prince Karl’s brother Moritz was another Mozart pupil and a fine pianist. Karl was an old friend of Count Waldstein, Beethoven’s patron in Bonn, and Christiane was a cousin of Waldstein. Her sister was married to Count Razumovsky, the Russian ambassador to Vienna, another patron who was to play a historic role in Beethoven’s life. Christiane’s mother, Countess Thun, had been a friend of Mozart; he wrote his father that the countess was “the most charming and most lovable lady I’ve ever met.”17

  For Beethoven, who needed to establish himself in Vienna, the interconnections of people and interests emanating from the Lichnowskys did not end there. Lichnowsky had studied in J. S. Bach’s home of Leipzig and developed a taste for the work of the elder Bach; he had a long correspondence with son C. P. E., from whom Lichnowsky obtained the elder Bach’s manuscripts in a time when little of the music was in print.18 Every Friday, Karl and Christiane gave a musicale at their palace for friends and cognoscenti, who included Haydn. Beethoven’s playing of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier was one of the things that endeared him to the Lichnowsky circle. One day an elderly guest declared that he had once heard J. S. Bach himself play, and Beethoven sounded, the visitor said, just like Bach.19

  In short, the first patrons Beethoven acquired in Vienna could hardly have been more cultured, connected, rich, and generous. His quick triumph sprouted mainly from Haydn and the Lichnowskys and their influence. Karl Lichnowsky, rather than Haydn, would be the dedicatee of opus 1. For years Beethoven kept a bust of the prince in his rooms; the princess gave him an elegant desk clock that he kept by him the rest of his life. From that point on, Beethoven moved in aristocratic circles as an admired artist and more or less an equal. There was an abiding irony in that situation. Part of his success came from three letters: the van in his name that many of the aristocracy assumed indicated that he came from a noble background.

  The Lichnowskys’ shared passion for music did not translate into a happy married life. An acquaintance noted that Christiane always looked sad.20 She had a sickly constitution; in a time without anesthetics, both her breasts had been removed in fear of cancer. The main source of her unhappiness was not her health, however, but her husband. In every respect, Karl Lichnowsky wa
s a piece of work. Swaggering and domineering, with a brassy voice, Lichnowsky womanized constantly, which endlessly tormented his wife (even though infidelity was common practice in the Viennese nobility). In her diary, the ever-catty Countess Lulu von Thürheim pitied Christiane and loathed Karl, calling him a “a cynical rake and shameless coward.”21 All the same, Christiane Lichnowsky was a formidable figure in her own right. Thürheim wrote that the countess combined “a good heart and Christian forbearance with violent prejudices.” People whom Christiane didn’t like she went out of her way to damage in the elegantly vicious world of Viennese high society.22

  In a miserable marriage, music was Christiane’s solace. Her admiration for Beethoven was boundless and forgiving. Though only five years older than her protégé, she began, to his annoyance, to mother him. Karl behaved likewise. Beethoven had a standing invitation for lunch at 4 p.m. “I would have to be home by half past three every day,” he complained to his visiting Bonn friend Wegeler, “change into something better, see that I was properly shaved, etc.—I can’t stand all that!” So he usually ate at a tavern, whether or not he could afford it. At some point the prince notified his servants that if he and Beethoven rang for them at the same time, they were to answer Beethoven first. Hearing about it, Beethoven went out that day and hired himself a servant.23

  Karl’s brother Moritz and Christiane Lichnowsky were both more able pianists than Karl; they could actually play Beethoven’s keyboard works rather than play at them. Yet Karl steadily reassured Beethoven that he did not have to write down to amateurs.24 It was up to the players to cope with what he gave them. Before long, many did, in a time when some of the best pianists were amateurs, and piano sonatas were played not in public concerts but in private gatherings or alone for the pianist’s private pleasure.