Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph

by Swafford, Jan

  Beethoven did not pull back from society, not yet, or from performing. In October 1798, he made another tour, to Prague, where he gave two public concerts featuring the first two piano concertos and improvisations, and some private performances. One of those who came to hear was the Czech virtuoso and composer Wenzel Johann Tomaschek. After the first experience of this newcomer, Tomaschek was not just impressed, he was devastated: “Beethoven’s magnificent playing and particularly the daring flights in his improvisation stirred me strangely to the depths of my soul; indeed I found myself so profoundly bowed down that I did not touch my pianoforte for several days.”

  Tomaschek dragged himself to a second concert that afflicted him equally. Then after a concert at the home of a “Count C.,” he drew some consolation after hearing Beethoven improvise and play pieces including the “graceful Rondo from the A major sonata,” op. 2, no. 2. In his response, Tomaschek, younger than Beethoven but with an older sensibility, showed the distinction between an eighteenth-century musical consciousness and a progressive one: “This time I listened to Beethoven’s artistic work with more composure. I admired his powerful and brilliant playing, but his frequent daring deviations from one motive to another, whereby the organic connection, the gradual development of ideas was broken up, did not escape me. Evils of this nature frequently weaken his greatest compositions . . . The singular and original seemed to be his chief aim.”32 Here were charges that would turn up in criticism regularly in the coming years: Beethoven was capricious, he provoked for the sake of provocation, in his work he leaped from idea to idea with no sense of unity or organic unfolding.

  By the end of October 1798, he was back in Vienna, playing one of his concertos in a program. Despite the threat to his hearing, he was still an active virtuoso, still practicing intensely, still growing as a performer. But he had taken his next-to-last concert tour.

  Later he said that his hearing bothered him most in company, least when he composed. Sunk in his raptus, he could shut off the chaos in his ears and hear only what he was improvising on the piano or in his head, sketching on the page. The year 1799 turned out unhappy but richly productive. In the early months he filled his second sketchbook with ideas and drafts toward a string quartet in F major, eventually no. 1 of the set commissioned by Prince Lobkowitz. Through page after page, he drafted variations on an obsessive figure, laying out a nearly monorhythmic kind of first movement that he would often return to in the future. His composing process alternated stretches of improvising at the keyboard with the scratch of a quill pen racing across the page at the table he kept beside the piano. Once or twice a day, in all weathers, he set off on a brisk walk around the city walls, his head ringing with music as he hustled unseeing past palaces and bastions and strolling Viennese. So his creative rhythm was set. Day after day, year after year: improvise, sketch at the table, go out and walk. Walking was as much a part of the process as the rest of it.

  Haydn was once asked whether he ever composed with a story in mind. He said he thought he had once, something about a man’s confrontation with God, but he couldn’t remember which piece. Beethoven told an admirer that there were always stories or images behind his music. Unusually in one case, he admitted the inspiration when somebody guessed it. He played over the slow movement of the F Major String Quartet for Amenda. His friend said it sounded like the parting of two lovers. It’s based on the ending of Romeo and Juliet, Beethoven said. Sketches for the last part of the movement show a close attention to the story: with a dramatic fortissimo “he enters the tomb”; a sweeping figure is noted as “despair”; at “he kills himself,” the music sinks to empty single notes; descending figures represent “the last sighs.”33 But in the final version of the movement, Beethoven took out all those pictorial gestures in the sketches. What remains is a mood, a sense of encroaching threat: the rushing figure he called “despair” became a whirlwind that appears in the middle of the movement and rises to the end like doom.

  Except for a few pieces whose character or scene he would label—Pathétique, Pastoral, Das Lebewohl—he rarely again spoke to anyone about his images and stories, and few hints show up in his sketches. Even on the page he kept his cards close. Sometimes the stories were a starting point, something to get the notes flowing, like the old days in Bonn when he improvised musical portraits of his friends. Stories, characters, images helped him shape a piece and find evocative ideas, helped keep the narrative and feeling focused. But that was a matter of the workshop, and Beethoven rarely talked about his workshop. And while he was obsessed with technique, he did not appreciate anybody else talking about it: technical analysis was mere “counting syllables,” he would say, as if describing the meter of a poem could explain what the poem is about.

  His craftsmanship was nobody’s business but his own. He wanted his listeners to create their own stories, their own poetry, their own fantasias from his poems in tone. Eventually he came to call himself not a Komponist but a Tondichter, a tone poet. In his scale of values, poets were more important than musicians, superior beings all around. In later years, if there was any man alive whom Beethoven placed on a higher plane than himself, it was the poet and writer Goethe.

  Beethoven spent most of thirty pages of the new sketchbook on the F Major Quartet, as usual largely working through one movement before going to the next. At the end of the main work on the F Major, he continued on to quartets in G and A major, a septet that was eventually op. 20, and some piano variations, among a miscellany of pieces large and small, finished and unfinished.34 His anxiety about his hearing apparently did not slow him so much as a step.

  From now on, the stages in Beethoven’s career would be tracked by critics in print. There had long been music critics and critical journals; an ambitious new one appeared at the end of 1798: the Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung (General Musical Magazine), produced by the Leipzig music-publishing firm Breitkopf & Härtel. Though it was in effect a house journal, Breitkopf gave it considerable editorial latitude and named an able first editor, Johann Friedrich Rochlitz. He had studied music in Leipzig, then turned to theology and Kantian aesthetics.35 Rochlitz would make the AMZ into the most important musical journal of its time, its format large and double-columned like a newspaper, its stable of writers keeping music lovers apprised of the publications and the doings of famous musicians.

  Naturally the journal kept readers apprised of the most dynamic of the younger pianist-composers, Beethoven. By this point he had a serious keyboard rival in Vienna. One of the first extended AMZ pieces involving Beethoven, in May 1799, describes a duel with Joseph Wölffl. Originally from Salzburg, Wölffl had studied violin in childhood with Leopold Mozart; later he was a friend and perhaps piano and composition student of Wolfgang. Wölffl was yet another eccentric virtuoso and looked the part: gaunt and tall, his clothes flapping around him. Wenzel Tomaschek described Wölffl’s fingers as “monstrously long,” giving him a huge reach on the keyboard. He had the peculiar habit of sometimes playing melodies, even quite fast ones, with one finger.36

  It was an age when for many listeners the polish and virtuosity of pianists were at least as important as the music they played. Competing virtuosos were treated like rival athletes. The piano enthusiasts of Vienna split into Beethoven and Wölffl camps. Between the two men, however, the rivalry stayed friendly. Beethoven tended to be more generous to competitors (except overrated ones) than Mozart had been. After all, in his generation he knew he still had no real peer as a composer. Wölffl for his part dedicated his op. 6 Piano Sonatas to Beethoven.

  Inevitably when they were in Vienna together, there would be a duel. It took place before a packed audience at the home of wealthy businessman and one-time Mozart patron Baron Raimund Wetzlar. Beethoven’s patron Prince Lichnowsky sat in the front row; host Baron Wetzlar was a devotee of Wölffl. The two contenders played their own music, improvised alone, and, seated at two pianos, tossed ideas for improvisation back and forth in mounting waves of virtuosity.37 The favored, Mozarti
an style of playing in those days was Wölffl’s: lucid, concise, subtle. A favored term of approval was a “pearly” sound, each note delicate and distinct. Beethoven, in comparison, was less precious, more fiery, technically dazzling with his blinding scales and double and triple trills. In his youth he had spent a great deal of time teaching himself to play the piano as distinct from the harpsichord and clavichord. He had a rare gift for a singing legato at the piano, achieved partly by his prophetic technique: he held his fingers bent and close to the keys, his body still, his fingers sometimes hardly seeming to move. During loud passages, though, he might break hammers and strings on the delicate, harpsichord-like pianos of the time.

  Most reviews of his playing pointed out these things in one way or another. After the duel, a summary of the opinions of local cognoscenti was included in an Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung article of May 1799 called “The Most Famous Female and Male Keyboard Players in Vienna.” After commending a couple of women virtuosos, the anonymous writer compares the styles of the two leading “gentlemen”:

  Beethoven and Wölffl cause the most sensation. Opinions about preferences for one over the other are divided. Nevertheless, it seems as if the majority is inclined toward [Wölffl] . . . Beethoven’s playing is extremely brilliant but less delicate, and it occasionally crosses over into the obscure. He demonstrates his greatest advantage in improvisation. And here it is really extraordinary with what ease and yet steadiness in the succession of ideas B. does not just vary the figurations of any given theme on the spot . . . but really performs it. Since the death of Mozart . . . I have never found this kind of pleasure anywhere to the degree provided by Beethoven. Here, Wölffl is inferior to him. However, Wölffl has . . . fundamental musical learning and true dignity in composition, plays passages that seem impossible to execute with astonishing ease, precision, and clarity . . . Wölffl gains a special advantage because of his unassuming, pleasant bearing over Beethoven’s somewhat haughty manners.38

  Another and more Romantic account came, years later, from conductor and composer Ignaz von Seyfried. He witnessed this duel or another one like it between Beethoven and Wölffl and recalled his impressions of these “athletes” and “gladiators.” He declared it was “difficult, perhaps impossible, to award the palm of victory to either one.” In his lavishly metaphorical description, there is, as in the AMZ account, an implication that Beethoven was a composer and player for the few rather than the many:

  In his improvisations even then Beethoven did not deny his tendency toward the mysterious and gloomy. When once he began to revel in the infinite world of tones, he was transported above all earthly things;—his spirit had burst all restricting bonds, shaken off the yokes of servitude, and soared triumphantly into the luminous spaces of the higher aether. Now his playing tore along like a wildly foaming cataract, and the conjurer constrained his instrument to an utterance so forceful that the stoutest structure was scarcely able to withstand it; and anon he sank down, exhausted, exhaling gentle plaints, dissolving in melancholy. Again the spirit would soar aloft, triumphing over transitory terrestrial sufferings, turn its glance upwards in reverent sounds and find rest and comfort on the innocent bosom of holy nature. But who shall sound the depths of the sea? It was the mystical Sanskrit language whose hieroglyphs can be read only by the initiated. Wölffl, on the contrary, trained in the school of Mozart, was always equable; never superficial but always clear and thus more accessible to the multitude.39

  In these responses, one finds an important element of the critical debate that marked Beethoven’s public career. The ideal of the later eighteenth century, the age of reason, placed a supreme value on transparency, coherence, and restraint: the art that hides art, the “organic,” the elegance and irony that mask emotion while subtly revealing it. It was a time when the tragic voice in music (heard mainly in opera and religious works) felt detectably forced and stylized. Mozart’s greatest operas were comedies, which suited the temper of the time and the temper of its music.40 Originality was valued, but only in good measure. In search of the “natural,” “pleasing,” and “accessible,” the later eighteenth century dismissed the creations of the previous era as “baroque,” a word actually meaning a misshapen pearl, made into a term for art overdecorated and overcomplex (in musical terms, too densely contrapuntal). As a pejorative, the term baroque was allied to “bizarre,” meaning deliberately provocative, irrational, unnatural. (The modern, nonpejorative use of the word Baroque as the name of a period in the arts came much later.)

  Another characteristic complaint visited on Beethoven was that his sonatas were “fantastic.” Fantasia was the time’s term for a genre in a quasi-improvisatory style outside the usual formal models, free in meter, tempo, form, and character, “in which,” wrote a theorist of the time, “the composer arranges the images of his imagination without an evident plan, or with a certain level of freedom, and thus sometimes in connected, at other times in quite loosely ordered phrases.”41 Mozart had written famous fantasias.

  To compose fantasias was acceptable to the aesthetic sensibility of the time; to call them sonatas was not. Beethoven founded everything he did on models from the past, but many musicians and critics did not understand or approve of the ways he pushed tradition. In fact, he was pushing his models in directions innate to them: he used contrast, but sharper contrasts; a variety of keys, but a broader variety; developments and codas, but longer and more varied ones; transitions, but sometimes longer transitions than usual and sometimes none; and so on through every dimension of music. Those who could not hear the connections to the past accused Beethoven of making his sonatas too much like fantasias: loose, incoherent, beyond all decorum.

  Charles Burney, in General History of Music of 1776 had defined the attitude of the high Enlightenment: music was “an innocent luxury, unnecessary, indeed, to our existence, but a great improvement and gratification to the sense of hearing.” A few years later Mozart wrote to his father, “Passions, violent or not, must never be expressed to the point of disgust, and music must never offend the ear . . . but must always be pleasing.” Mozart epitomized the Enlightenment’s musical aesthetic in the letter describing some of his new works: “These concertos are a happy medium between what is too easy and too difficult; they are very brilliant, pleasing to the ear, and natural, without being vapid. There are passages here and there from which connoisseurs alone can derive satisfaction; but these passages are written in such a way that the less learned cannot fail to be pleased, without knowing why.”42

  When Ignaz von Seyfried wrote about Beethoven’s music using terms such as “mysterious,” “gloomy,” “Sanskrit,” “hieroglyphs,” “the initiated,” he drew a line between Beethoven and the eighteenth-century taste for subtlety, restraint, irony, broad appeal, the happy medium. In order to make his way, Beethoven had to change that aesthetic. That task would not be entirely his job, however. As of 1798, there was a new spirit in the air that was to foster an audience for whom words like “mysterious,” “hieroglyphs,” “fantastic,” even “bizarre” would be terms of praise. This was the movement that named itself Romantic, which came to embrace Beethoven as its essential musical voice. Even though the Romantic sensibility was abroad in the land by the end of the eighteenth century, it had not yet made its way to music. When Beethoven’s music and that sensibility connected, his ascent toward the status of demigod began. The contest between Beethoven and Wölffl in a crowded eighteenth-century Viennese music room was, in a real sense, a duel between the past and the future of music.

  In June 1799, a hapless critic of the Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung with little to no experience of Beethoven was assigned to review the op. 12 Violin Sonatas. Contemplating these pieces so mild, so beholden to Mozart (and to a later age so barely Beethovenian), this befuddled listener could only splutter:

  After having arduously worked his way through these quite peculiar sonatas, overladen with strange difficulties, he must admit that . . . he felt like a man who had t
hought he was going to promenade with an ingenious friend through an inviting forest, was detained every moment by hostile entanglements, and finally emerged, weary, exhausted, and without enjoyment. It is undeniable that Herr van Beethoven goes his own way. But what a bizarre, laborious way! Studied, studied, and perpetually studied, and no nature, no song. Indeed . . . there is only a mass of learning here, without good method. There is obstinacy for which we feel little interest, a striving for rare modulations . . . a piling on of difficulty upon difficulty, so that one loses all patience and enjoyment.43

  He relents enough to suggest that “this work shouldn’t be thrown away because of these complaints. It has its value . . . particularly as a study for experienced keyboard players. There are always many who love excessive difficulties in invention and composition, that which one could call perverse.” He ends these backhanded compliments by hoping the composer will “follow the path of nature,” when he will “certainly provide us with quite a few good things for an instrument over which he seems to have extraordinary control.”

  Beethoven generally read everything he could find written about himself. He would have read that review with blood boiling. Soon he would find a way to twist Breitkopf & Härtel’s arm to assign him more sympathetic reviewers. Within a few years, he had the satisfaction of seeing op. 12 go through several reprintings by Artaria in Vienna, and further editions in Paris and London.44 Meanwhile he issued works designed to show critics and the public that, when he wanted, he could write as pleasingly as you like.