The Holy Roman Empire was having a hard winter of its own. In the ongoing War of the Second Coalition, Austria suffered another mauling from the French at the Bavarian village of Hohenlinden. The hospitals of Vienna filled up with wounded soldiers—gratifying to musicians at least, because benefit concerts would be needed.43 The Battle of Hohenlinden forced the Habsburgs to make peace, which meant the end of the latest coalition against France. In the Treaty of Lunéville, signed in February 1801, Austria conceded all its territories in Italy except for Venice. The thousand-year-old Holy Roman Empire was not just shrinking; it was dying.
In the middle of January 1801, Haydn conducted his Creation at a benefit for wounded soldiers in the Grosser Redoutensaal of the Hofburg. In another benefit at the end of the month, Beethoven felt well enough to play his Horn Sonata, now in print as op. 17, with Giovanni Punto. Haydn conducted two of his symphonies on that program.
Beethoven had other matters on his mind. In January he wrote another long letter to publisher Franz Anton Hoffmeister in Leipzig, laying on his respect, pleasure, gratitude, humility, etc. If he was in demand, he still felt the need to court publishers vigorously. As a practical item, he offers to make a piano arrangement of the Septet. He names his prices for the pieces accepted: 20 ducats (around 100 florins) for the Septet arrangement; the same for the C Major Symphony (a shockingly low price); the B-flat Piano Concerto for a bargain 50 florins. He also asks 100 florins for the big B-flat Piano Sonata, reassuring Hoffmeister, “This sonata is a terrific piece, most beloved and worthy brother.” He goes on to give quite lucid reasons for the prices, in effect telling the publisher his business: “I find that a septet or a symphony does not sell as well as a sonata. That is the reason why I do this, although a symphony should undoubtedly be worth more . . . I am valuing the concerto at only [45 florins] because, as I have already told you, I do not consider it to be one of my best concertos . . . I have tried to make the prices as moderate for you as possible.”
At the end he emits an inked sigh for having to make these mundane arrangements: “Well, that tiresome business has now been settled. I call it tiresome because I should like such matters to be differently ordered in this world. There ought to be in the world a market for art, where the artist would only have to bring his works and take as much money as he needed. But, as it is, an artist has to be to a certain extent a business man as well.” The market idea is neither irrational nor insincere. Beethoven was thinking of similar organizations proposed during the French Revolution.44 It was not, however, an idea a publisher would conceivably be receptive to.
Beethoven includes an aside showing that the recent middling-to-bad reviews in the Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung were still eating at his mind: “As for the Leipzig r[eviewers], just let them talk; by means of their chatter they will certainly never make anyone immortal, nor will they ever take immortality from anyone upon whom Apollo has bestowed it.”45 As the bestower of immortality he cites not the Christian God but Apollo. Since he does not believe God makes miracles or meddles in one’s born gifts, he resorts to a metaphor.
At the end of his letter to Hoffmeister, Beethoven adds, “For some time I have not been well; and so it is a little difficult for me even to write down notes and, still less, letters of the alphabet.” Perhaps, but he had taken on a commission to write the music for a ballet called Die Geschöpfe des Prometheus (The Creatures of Prometheus). For this apparently merely commercial job, he dropped every other project and jumped in.
The Prometheus ballet and its story were the creation of dancer, choreographer, composer, and impresario Salvatore Viganò, the recently appointed ballet master of the Vienna court. Viganò was one of the premiere dancers and choreographers in Europe, in those days at least as famous as Beethoven.46 Viganò’s approach to ballet was reformist and controversial. He was given to storytelling with pantomime and tableaux, as it would be with Die Geschöpfe des Prometheus. He had the usual problems of reformers. As one of his admirers described it, “There was something disconcerting in suddenly seeing dramatic action, depth of feeling, and pure plastic beauty of movement in a particular form of spectacle in which one was hitherto accustomed to seeing nothing but leaps and contortions, constrained positions, and contrived and complicated dances.”47
On the face of it, Viganò’s plot for this new ballet was chimerical. The figure of Prometheus, in Greek myth the demigod punished by Zeus for bringing fire to humanity, was not exactly the same character as the hero of the ballet. Viganò took a newly invented Prometheus myth from an eighteenth-century French novel and adapted it to his Enlightenment taste. As the playbill explained, Viganò’s new Prometheus was “a sublime spirit, who came upon the men of his time in a state of ignorance, who refined them through science and art, and imparted to them morals.”
Prometheus carves stone statues of a man and a woman and magically brings them to life, only to discover that his creatures are alive but not yet human. They have no spirit, no soul. In order to teach them feelings, wisdom, and moral awareness, Prometheus takes them to Apollo on Parnassus. The god commands his subjects to humanize the creatures by bringing them to understand music, drama, and dance, each represented by its respective deity. At the end, Apollo commands “that Bacchus [performed by Viganò himself] make known the heroic dance that he invented.”48
The idea of humanity being illuminated by art and science is a high-Aufklärung theme that struck deep resonances in Beethoven. He would later write, from the same kind of conviction, “Only art and science can raise men to the Godhead.” That the arts were necessary to become fully human was an idea that reached back to the core of his Bildung in Bonn, where, for one example, the goal in founding the National Theater had been to create “an ethical school for the German people.” But there was a more specific body of thought relating to ethics, morality, and art that Viganò may have drawn from: the recent philosophical writings of Friedrich Schiller.
Schiller had been one of the artists and thinkers who hailed the French Revolution. He had virtually prophesied it in his most famous poem, “An die Freude.” He had been declared an honorary citizen of France. But the coming of the Reign of Terror horrified Schiller. After the execution of Louis XVI he wrote, “I haven’t been able to look at the papers for the last fortnight, I feel so sickened by these abominable butchers . . . The [revolutionary] attempt of the French people . . . has plunged not only that unhappy people itself, but a considerable part of Europe and a whole century, back into barbarism and slavery.”49 Schiller remained true to the Enlightenment principles of the Revolution, but he recoiled from endorsing, as some did, what became of the Revolution in France. And despite all the rage against tyranny in his early plays—The Robbers, Fiesco, Don Carlos—Schiller retained a characteristically German-Aufklärung faith in enlightened princes who had the power to impose reform from above.50
In the 1790s, after devoting years to studying Kant’s philosophy, Schiller issued what amounted to his answer to the Terror and the failure of the Revolution to establish a rational society: On the Aesthetic Education of Man. The essence of that book, which had a wide and lasting influence, is that the ideal society cannot rise from revolution but only from education in aesthetics—in other words, from an appreciation of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful, and their embodiment in Art. “Art is a daughter of freedom,” Schiller wrote; and, “It is only through Beauty that man makes his way to Freedom”; and, “The way to the head must be opened through the heart.”51 Earlier he had been fervent about the Aufklärung Glückseligskeitphilosophie, the philosophy of happiness as the goal of life. The ideal society, in which brotherhood and freedom make happiness possible, Schiller called Elysium. This was the essence of “An die Freude”: “Joy, thou god-engendered daughter of Elysium.” That poem, rising from the revolutionary (and Masonic and Illuminist) spirit of the 1780s, was part of his path to the Aesthetic Education.
Whether Viganò read this work of Schiller’s or whether he and Beethoven absorbed the
ir ideas from the zeitgeist, these kinds of ideals were the foundation of Die Geschöpfe des Prometheus: learning of beauty and art makes a human being free, moral, and ethical, thereby able to mold lives and societies that are harmonious and happy. The story of the Prometheus ballet would be a representation of that ideal in sound and movement.
The depth and breadth of these ideas, however, are not particularly audible in the tone of Beethoven’s music, which on the whole is in conventional ballet style. Like most composers of his time, he was schooled in the traditions of genres: how a symphony is distinct from a quartet, how the tone of an overture to an opera is distinct from the first movement of a symphony. To study composers as models for his works was also to study how they handled genres. He had spent the last decade exploring and mastering one medium and genre after another. Now he tried his hand at ballet music, which required a certain elegance and lightness of touch, and he conformed to that expectation as best he could.
After his latest siege of illness, complaining of exhaustion, Beethoven got to work. In the first two months of 1801, he wrote an hour’s worth of orchestral music—overture, introduction, and sixteen numbers. The job appealed to him beyond the commission fee and his attraction to the story and ideas. It was a way of making himself better known to the Viennese court and getting practice in theatrical music. He was not a beginner in writing for dance; there had been the Ritterballet in Bonn and ballroom dances for Vienna. In style, this music for the theater would be entirely distinct from his work for the concert hall and his other theatrical music. The Prometheus Overture, elevated and Mozartian in tone, begins dramatically, with dissonant chords punctuating silence. From there, he kept the ballet music graceful, tuneful, light and pleasing even in its sterner moments (though as it turned out, not light enough for reviewers). Given the speed at which he had to produce the score, there was little time for rumination in any case.
Still, what mainly galvanized Beethoven were the humanistic implications of the ballet, in particular its finale. After much dancing by the gods of the various arts, in which the new creatures join in, to the horror of his children Prometheus is killed by a wrathful Melpomene, Muse of tragedy. But luckily Thalia, Muse of comedy, is on hand to cheer everybody up and bring the demigod back to life.52 And so, “amid festive dances the story ends.” The particular festive dance that Beethoven and Viganò chose for a finale was one of the most popular dances of the time: the anglaise or englische.
Beginning as an English country dance, the englische had spread across Europe. There were regional variations, but it was always done as a contra dance: a line of women and a line of men changing partners during its course. By 1800, the Viennese form of the dance was accompanied by a suite of short tunes in changing meters: say, a touch of minuet in three-beat, a two-beat segment, and so on. It ended with a waltzlike segment.53
Dances usually have symbolic dimensions that are part of their image and popularity. The englische contra dance had uniquely progressive implications. The constant change of partners as one danced down the line produced a literal mingling of classes; a nobleman might end up hand in hand with a merchant’s daughter. This was not a small thing. It was something new in public social life, even radically new. In the englische each participant was, for the duration of the music at least, an equal citoyen of the dance, and for that reason the englische acquired a frisson of democracy. In turn, for some thinkers that situation made the englische into a symbol of an ideal society. One of those caught up by that symbol was Schiller, who wrote in a letter,
I can think of no more fitting image for the ideal of social conduct than an English dance, composed of many complicated figures and perfectly executed. A spectator . . . sees innumerable movements intersecting in the most chaotic fashion . . . yet never colliding . . . it is all so skillfully, and yet so artlessly integrated into a form, that each seems only to be following his own inclination, yet without ever getting in the way of anybody else. It is the most perfectly appropriate symbol of the assertion of one’s own freedom and regard for the freedom of others.54
So, the “festive dances” that end the Prometheus ballet are more than a formal conclusion. Choosing an englische for the finale made the end and goal of the story a symbol something like Schiller’s image of “one’s own freedom and regard for the freedom of others.” The music for this finale begins innocuously enough, with a lilting two-beat tune, distinctively an englische. A simple bass line anchors the simplest possible harmonies. Yet over the next two years that little tune and its bass line would come to obsess Beethoven, for their simplicity that held enormous musical potential and for the harmonious society this dance represented to him, to Schiller, and to many others.
Here burgeoned a train of thought that took Beethoven and music itself to a new place. By means of this ballet, he began to understand how he could join his art to the social, ethical, moral, and spiritual ideals of the age. That train of thought took him beyond youthful brilliance and craftsmanship to his full maturity.
In this period, Beethoven revised his 1794 setting of Matthisson’s “Opferlied” (Song of Sacrifice). Its Schilleresque last lines became a touchstone with him: “Give me, as a young man and as an old man . . . O Zeus, the Beautiful together with the Good.” In autograph albums, he would quote that indispensable joining of the sensuous and ethical: the Beautiful together with the Good.55
15
The New Path
AT ITS PREMIERE, Die Geschöpfe des Prometheus had a middling reception, the reaction to the dance more middling than to the music. One J. C. Rosenbaum reported to his diary, “The ballet did not please at all, the music a little . . . At the end the ballet was more hissed than applauded.”1 Most ballet aficionados wanted their leaps and positions rather than Salvatore Viganò’s high-minded pantomime. The Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung reviewer summarized: “As much dignity and artistic design as it had . . . it nevertheless was not liked in general . . . The music also did not entirely live up to expectations, even though it possesses more than ordinary merit . . . However, that he wrote too learnedly for a ballet, and with too little regard for the dance, is certainly not subject to doubt.”2 All the same, there would be a respectable fourteen performances of Prometheus in 1801, more the next year.
After the premiere Beethoven ran into Joseph Haydn on the street. The old man greeted him with, “Now, yesterday I heard your ballet and it pleased me very much.”
Beethoven attempted to be gracious: “Oh, my dear Papa, you’re very kind, but it’s a long way from being a Creation!”
Confused about what that meant, Haydn replied, “That is true, it is not yet a Creation, and I very much doubt whether it will ever succeed in being.” And they took their leave, both of them baffled and annoyed.3
If Haydn’s reply to Beethoven’s attempted compliment meant anything, it was not the absurd statement that Prometheus could never turn into a Creation but that its composer would never rise to a Creation. Haydn kept up with what Beethoven was putting out, and he could not have liked much of what he heard.
Haydn had his own frustrations as of 1801. He had been seriously ill in the winter of 1800–1801 and was worn down by his labors on another giant oratorio from a text by Baron von Swieten, The Seasons. He was disgusted with himself for taking on the project and for giving in to Swieten’s pressure to put into the piece literalistic depictions of flora and fauna, not omitting croaking frogs. The public would eat up the representations of nature in the oratorio, but Haydn dismissed some of those passages as “Frenchified trash.” Though after its premiere, in May 1801, The Seasons would find nearly as much popularity as The Creation, Haydn was nearly exhausted as a composer. “The Seasons,” he said, “has finished me off.”4 He would not complete the set of string quartets commissioned like Beethoven’s op. 18 by Prince Lobkowitz, with which he surely had intended to show his one-time pupil a thing or two. He had a visiting card made that said, quoting one of his song texts, “Gone forever is my strength, old and wea
k am I.”5 Senility was overtaking one of history’s supreme musical minds.
As Haydn sank, Beethoven rose. After the short but intense labor on the ballet, he got back to practical business. Time he had once spent practicing piano was now going into the unending nuisance of publishers and publications. In a letter to Hoffmeister in Leipzig regarding ongoing projects, he apologized for not writing sooner to “my dear brother”: “I was ill, and in addition, I had a great deal to do . . . Perhaps the only touch of genius which I possess is that my things are not always in very good order . . . I have composed a ballet; but the ballet-master has not done his part very successfully.”
Another element holding up his dealings with Hoffmeister was that he had begun what became an extended courtship of Breitkopf & Härtel. The firm, founded in 1719, was the leading music-publishing house in Europe. Beethoven wanted its celebrated imprint on his works. If he thought the firm paid better than lesser publishers, however, he was to learn otherwise.
There was another matter between him and Breitkopf & Härtel. He wanted to strike back at the humiliating reviews of his music in its journal, the Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung. Beethoven was becoming a hot name in print, and he knew it. So he was ready to issue a little warning to a house that wanted his music. With great precision of purpose, he wrote to Gottfried Christophe Härtel, head of the company. The pans of his op. 12 Violin Sonatas and other pieces had galled him, and he was already anticipating future nasty notices:
Please be so kind just to inform me what types of composition you would like to have from me, namely, symphonies, quartets, sonatas and so forth, so that I may be guided by your wishes . . . I merely point out that Hoffmeister is publishing one of my first concertos, which, of course, is not one of my best compositions. Mollo is also publishing a concerto which was written later . . . Let this serve merely as a hint to your Musikalische Zeitung about reviewing these works . . . Advise your reviewers to be more circumspect and intelligent, particularly in regard to the productions of younger composers. For many a one, who perhaps might go far, may take fright. As for myself, far be it from me to think that I have achieved a perfection which suffers no adverse criticism. But your reviewer’s outcry against me was at first very mortifying. Yet when I began to compare myself with other composers, I could hardly bring myself to pay any attention to it but remained quite calm and said to myself: “They don’t know anything about music.” And indeed what made it easier for me to keep calm was that I noticed how certain people were being praised to the skies who in Vienna had very little standing among the best local composers . . . However, pax vobiscum—Peace between you and me.6
Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph Page 32