Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph

by Swafford, Jan

  A rising peroration that would live in legend shows Beethoven had not lost hope or courage, at least not on the day of this letter: “If only I can be partially liberated from my affliction, then—I will come to you as a complete and mature man . . . You will find me as happy as I am fated to be on this earth, not unhappy—no, that I could not bear—I will seize Fate by the throat; it shall certainly not bend and crush me completely—Oh, it would be so lovely to live a thousand lives.”

  The letter goes on to a different kind of confession. In this period he still taught students, and to a degree he had returned to socializing:

  You would find it hard to believe what an empty, sad life I have had for the last two years. My poor hearing haunted me everywhere like a ghost; and I avoided—all human society. I seemed to be a misanthrope and yet I am far from being one. This change has been brought about by a dear charming girl who loves me and whom I love. After two years I am again enjoying a few blissful moments; and for the first time I feel that—marriage might bring me happiness. Unfortunately she is not of my class—and at the moment—I certainly could not marry—I must still bustle about a good deal.16

  The dear charming girl was most likely his new piano student, the seventeen-year-old countess Giulietta Guicciardi, called Julie. Staying in Vienna in the 1790s, Wegeler had found his old friend, then the new keyboard lion in town, getting a lot of attention from women. No details of those encounters would survive, in itself a sign that Beethoven did not take these flirtations or affairs seriously. He could fall in love as precipitously as tripping over a cobblestone, but this is the first time his letters show any evidence of it. Julie was the daughter of Countess Susanna Guicciardi, sister-in-law to Countess Anna Brunsvik, who was mother of Josephine and Therese. Beethoven fell for at least two of those musical young cousins, Julie and Josephine, and possibly with all three of them.

  Julie Guicciardi was remembered as delightful to look at, modestly bright and talented, well aware of her charms. Early in 1801, there was a catty letter from Josephine Brunsvik to her sister: “Julie Guicciardi is creating a furore here. They refer to her only as the beautiful Guicciardi, and you know that she understands how to capitalize on it.”17 Julie was surely flattered to have the attention of Beethoven, among others, and he would not have been subtle about it. But whatever his fantasies might have been, there was no realistic chance of marriage. A woman of the nobility who married a commoner lost the privileges of her class; her children could not inherit her title. Few noblewomen were prepared to give up so much, least of all to marry a freelance composer of uncertain income, however celebrated, who was meanwhile homely, hot-tempered, utterly self-involved, and afflicted with chronic diarrhea. The other matter, his growing deafness, he would have kept hidden from Julie.

  If Beethoven was strict with his women students, he was surely milder than with the young males. One of those boys ran home crying from a lesson after Beethoven whipped his fingers with a steel knitting needle.18 (That was Johann van Beethoven’s teaching style.) In later years Julie Guicciardi remembered that he insisted on a light touch and drilled her on interpretation to the last detail: “He himself was often violent, throwing the music around and tearing it up.” He would not take any payment except linen, if she promised she had sewn it herself. She found he did not particularly like to play his published pieces and preferred to improvise. (For him improvising was the creative future, old pieces were the past; they were merchandise.) He was, she recalled, “very ugly, but noble, sensitive, and cultured. Most of the time he was shabbily dressed.”19 They had proper lessons, perhaps flirted, she gave him an ivory medallion with her picture, he fell into transports. An old tradition says that eventually he proposed, and not Julie but one of her parents squelched it.20 In any case, her parents married her off to Count Wenzel Robert Gallenberg, a minor composer, in what turned out to be another loveless aristocratic union. Beethoven kept the medallion of Julie Guicciardi in his collection of talismans for the rest of his life.

  Standing between Beethoven and the women he yearned for were his health, his high-mindedness, their social position, his eccentricity. Just how outlandish he could be sometimes is seen in a letter he wrote to Julie’s mother, Countess Susanna, who had sent him a present as thanks for the free lessons to her daughter. Perhaps in his cups, he dashed off a long, semicoherent, partly ironic complaint. The gist of it seems to be that to pay him for what he considered a gift was to treat him as a common music teacher in it for the money:

  It seemed to me that you wanted to humble my pride by wanting to show me that you wished . . . to put me in your debt than to have the appearance of being in mine. What, after all, did I do to deserve anything like this? None of the time I ever spent at your house was for gain . . . The talent of your daughter and your social ease make me glad to be in your house; why drag in any other whys? No . . . I can’t ever completely forgive you for now robbing me entirely of the pleasure of ever giving at least the appearance of seeming an unselfish person. But I shall plan my revenge; this shall consist of my thinking of nothing else than of how to put you so much in my debt . . . that it won’t even occur to you to reflect how it would even be possible to dispose of me again in this way.21

  Here on display is one of the essential factors of Beethoven’s life: for well and ill, his response to every challenge was outsized. The greater the challenge, the more aggressive his response. He fought with most of his friends. He often improvised best when he was angry at the audience. He fell in love with unavailable women. His outsized reactions made him a chronically difficult man to get on with. That same drive to overreaction also, more than once, saved his art and saved his life.

  His fancied courtship with Julie Guicciardi lingered on into 1802, perhaps until the announcement of her engagement the next year. Whatever feelings of passion and loss he experienced did not slow the tide of ideas washing over him. A nagging dissatisfaction had been growing in his mind for some time, the realization that he had not entirely freed his work of the eighteenth century, had not put any lasting stamp on the music of his time. For whatever reasons, he looked over what he had done and saw it was not good enough. He was still young. He did not realize yet that it would never be good enough.

  Sometime in 1801 or 1802, he arrived at another of those reckonings when he willed a change in his life and his art. In his usual laconic fashion he announced to his violinist disciple Wenzel Krumpholz, “I’m not satisfied with what I’ve composed up to now. From now on I intend to embark on a new path.”22

  This declaration came not just from dissatisfaction, and it was not that Beethoven had forsworn one path for another. The reality was that, to that point, there had been no path. He had been trying one thing and another, one voice and another. Now he intended to put that wandering behind him, because he had begun to understand who he was as man and artist, which is to say, now he saw a path lying before him. It would be in the direction of the voice he wielded in the C Minor Piano Trio of op. 1, in the D Major Piano Sonata of op. 10, and in the Pathétique. (Always, though, he would wield more than one voice.) Before long, the New Path would lead him to an overarching and defining metaphor, the figure of the hero.

  In other words, Beethoven was ready to become what he had imagined becoming, a figure in the world and in history, and he had begun to see how that could be done on the page. He told Amenda that despite illness and deafness he felt equal to anything. The sureness of purpose he had always possessed amid the contrapuntal uncertainties of life and art was still with him, only now the direction was visible. The works of 1801–2 stand as the first avatars of the New Path.

  Those pieces came in the most natural medium for him, in the piano sonatas of opp. 26–28, all from 1801. In that year when he wrote his anguished and defiant letters to Wegeler and Amenda, he was extraordinarily full of creative juice. These first hints of a maturity that would be named for a heroic voice, however, were characterized less by aggressiveness than by a beauty sometimes verging on
the uncanny. At the same time, in the piano sonatas of 1801, he mounted singular experiments with the genre and its forms.

  In the Grand Sonata in A-flat Major, op. 26, Beethoven fully possessed the voice history would know him by, and at age thirty he was writing music that would place him once and for all in the history of his art. Everything about this sonata seems to be more than anything in the works before: more personal; more innovative in the approach to form (there are no movements in sonata form); more varied in the expressive scope, with fresh kinds of unity. Not least, starting from the gentle beginning, the A-flat Major finds heights of individuality and sheer beauty of expression beyond anything he had reached before. That key at the farthest usable limits of the unequal keyboard tunings of the time, dismissed by theorists as expressing mainly horror, inspired Beethoven to feelings of tenderness, nobility, resignation.

  As here, he scaled those heights often with simple means employed with incomparable subtlety. The opening Andante con variazioni of op. 26 is unforgettable in its serene songfulness. (He would have recalled another piano sonata with a beautiful first-movement set of variations: Mozart’s A Major, K. 331. But his main model for variations was always Haydn.) The ensuing variations are mostly subdued and inward but with a gathering momentum and great variety of color and texture. The first movement also sets up one of the generating conceptions of op. 26: no overt motivic connections, no steady dramatic unfolding, but rather the idea of variation itself as a unifying element. The opening theme sets the pattern by itself infolding a variation:

  He placed the scherzo second—a genial and flowing one, its main theme involving continuous variation of its opening measures.

  Alongside the sketch for the first-movement theme, Beethoven had written, “[V]aried at once—then Minuetto or some other character piece like for example a March in A♭ minor and then this,” followed by a sketch, soon rejected, for the last movement. (He returned to an earlier idea for the finale, which had been the first notation for the sonata in that sketchbook.)23 Typically, before he got to work on the music for a movement, he could not work properly until he knew its key. To decide on the tonality for a piece was, for him, to decide on its expressive quality. That “character piece” in A-flat minor turned out to be the Marcia funèbre sulla morte d’un eroe.

  By a character piece he meant something that had an overt topic (military, funereal, pastoral, or the like) from which it did not depart. To write a funeral march was nothing surprising in wartime, with Vienna full of wounded and dying soldiers. At the beginning of 1801, Beethoven had played in a charity concert for the wounded. Specifying “on the death of a hero” was another matter: in the era of the Napoleonic Wars, when funerals were everywhere, Beethoven was beginning to think about heroes and heroism. And funeral marches were a familiar and popular genre in the French revolutionary style.

  The main theme of the op. 26 Funeral March is not a melody so much as a variation on its dotted rhythm, in dark A-flat minor, its middle section a stretch of musical pictorialism evoking drumrolls and, perhaps, musket shots.24 Beethoven was to write two more funeral marches in his life, each of them also for soldiers: heroes. The purposeful miscellany of movements in op. 26 comes to rest on a lithe and brilliant rondo made largely from continual variations of its opening figure. The effect is of pulling back from the somber funeral march into something animated but impersonal, like a cleansing rain.

  Beethoven hardly took a breath between the remarkable sonatas of that year. Published next would be the two of op. 27, both of them titled Sonata quasi una fantasia. By that he implied that they were in the style of a relatively free-form improvisation.25 Variation and improvisation remained at the core of his creativity, now highlighted in pieces that helped give birth to the New Path. Instead of the usual Allegro, both sonatas open with slow movements, each enigmatic in its way; there are no sonata-form movements in either; in both sonatas the movements run together and the finale is the most intense (the first of his works decisively to take that end-directed shape). Beethoven may have been thinking of the critics who wrote that all his sonatas were wild and formless, like fantasias. Now he intended to demonstrate how a fantasia was done.

  Op. 27, no. 1, in E-flat major, ended up the lesser-known of the two, but like all his sonatas it has a singular personality, from stately to haunted to ebullient. Its opening Andante is something of a blank sheet, offering little in the way of melody or passion but a great deal of pregnant material: an opening short–short–long rhythm that will resonate throughout, a falling third and rising fourth that will do likewise. In the middle of this ABA movement, a dashing figure runs amok in glittering roulades. Again a scherzo is placed second, this one in C minor, strange unto ghostly with its falling chromatic whispers punctuated by pouncing fortes. An Adagio con espressione lies somewhere between a solemn and aria-like slow movement—with the first sustained melodies in the piece—and a long introduction to the finale. He finishes with a buoyant Allegro vivace rondo with fugal tendencies. Startlingly, the slow movement intrudes again near the end, before a laughing Presto coda that recalls both the rondo theme and the start of the first movement. Thus he ties the knot in drawing the whole together. The point was that, for Beethoven, if a fantasia on paper was not a standard form but a style, an atmosphere, a quasi-improvisation, it still had to be unified.

  On publication, the first movement of the Sonata quasi una fantasia of op. 27, no. 2, eventually misnamed the Moonlight, ascended quickly to feverish popularity, on its way to becoming one of the most famous pieces ever written. Its mythical status was well established in Beethoven’s lifetime. The reason is the rapt and dolorous atmosphere unlike anything heard before—and no less the ease with which the opening movement lies under the fingers and within the affections of amateur pianists.

  The key is C-sharp minor. C. F. D. Schubart, a poet and aesthetician whose work Beethoven consulted (though hardly followed slavishly), called this rare and solemn tonality suitable for “[p]enitential lamentation, intimate conversation with God . . . signs of disappointed friendship and love.”26 Any or all of these descriptions are appropriate to the uncanny poetry of this work. Nearly everyone who knows music would come to know that first movement, impossible to forget from the first hearing, its endlessly murmuring triplets and hazy colors tinged with mysterious yearning and sorrow. The sonata is dedicated to Julie Guicciardi, and if it is Beethoven’s farewell to her, it is a heartbreaking one—but it ends in fury and defiance. Beethoven here gave to music a piercing emotional rhetoric never imagined before.27 He directs the whole first movement to be played with the sustain pedal down, so the harmonies overlap, one fading into the next, the resonances in the instrument building up as each chord is dwelled on.28

  By way of relief comes a relaxed scherzo with elegant and winsome themes. Then the most shocking movement of that year’s pieces: the finale is marked Presto agitato, which conveys its implacable ferocity. The whispering arpeggios of the first movement have become a torrent of arpeggios that rise to whiplash offbeat chords. As in the previous sonata, the finale is the focus and payoff of the whole. The mystery and incipient tragedy of the first movement have boiled into fury, expressed in a virtuosity that is the antithesis of the first movement’s simplicity.

  Now, having that year written three sonatas each of which takes a radically distinct direction and embodies a formal experiment, with op. 28, in D major, Beethoven added another whose regular form belied another complete departure. There would be no better demonstration of his unremitting search for variety and contrast than the comparison of this halcyon work to the tumults and innovations of the previous sonatas. The title Pastoral was a later publisher’s invention, but at least this time it fits the music, which largely unfolds in sunny serenity. At the beginning, over a long tonic drone a falling melody spins out lazily, repeats, is answered by a companion melody that rises and also repeats, giving notice that this sonata will take its time about things and not depart too far from its basis on th
e simple tonic triad. After a misty and babbling second theme (actually starting in C-sharp major), the Durchführung, the “working out” of themes, falls into a mounting agitation that seems to be suddenly soothed when the da capo, the recapitulation, arrives like a rediscovery of bliss.

  There is no real slow movement in the Pastoral Sonata but rather a bustling one that combines textures: legato and singing in the right hand, staccato and bouncing in the left. Maybe because of that tricky mingling of touches, Beethoven especially liked to play this second movement.29 The middle is cheery, but toward the end clouds seem to gather into troubled and ambiguous last measures. A drily witty scherzo shoos the clouds away. The rondo finale’s theme recalls the first movement’s start, its drones now loping along in a droll, donkey-cart gait, with flowing and yodeling lines above. The intervening sections seem to be trying to get excited about something, but they are tamed by the calming return of the A theme and its donkey cart. Finally the suppressed excitement bursts out in a ebullient, virtuosic coda.

  Beethoven’s concern with unifying the whole of his pieces does not always show clearly in his sketches. Often what is most fundamental in a piece is what a composer does not need to write down, because it is innate in the conception. But in this case, after jotting an idea for the second movement, Beethoven immediately added a few bars of sketch for a finale, both sketches turning around a galvanizing idea, the fifth D to A in melody and accompaniment.30 The theme in both sketches begins with a descent from A to D.