Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph

by Swafford, Jan

  To translate and adapt the French libretto of Leonore, Beethoven recruited a friend he judged to be a reliable collaborator. Joseph von Sonnleithner was a lawyer and son of a lawyer who had also been a composer; this son was a diplomat and music lover interested in composers of the past. He had made a nearly three-year tour of Europe gathering rare old scores for study and publication. Besides his profession as a bureaucrat, Sonnleithner was a founding partner in a music-publishing firm with the anomalous name of Bureau des arts et d’industrie, which published a good deal of older music by J. S. Bach and others, and by 1814, forty-four works by Beethoven.26 Just as usefully, as he worked with Beethoven customizing the libretto of Leonore, Sonnleithner served for several months as artistic director of the Theater an der Wien, after that for ten years as secretary of the court theaters.27 In a country where everything in life and art was of concern to the censors, and arts involving words, with their infinite capacity for subversion, were of most special concern to the censors, a high-level bureaucrat like Sonnleithner was a good man to have on one’s side. That weighed as heavily as his skills as a librettist, which at that point were largely untested anyway.

  Sonnleithner’s short tenure as director of the Theater an der Wien resulted from a shake-up that resolved Beethoven’s sticky contract situation with his nominal employer and ex-librettist Schikaneder. In the beginning of 1804, Baron Peter Anton Braun, who managed both court theaters, bought the Theater an der Wien. Shortly after, Braun fired Schikaneder as director of the theater, whose statue as Papageno presided over the entrance. At that point Beethoven’s contract with Schikaneder for an opera was terminated, and he had to move out of the theater. That solved the friction over Vestas Feuer, but it was a setback for Leonore. Beethoven had been going at the opera full tilt, composing scenes as fast as he could get words from Sonnleithner.

  Beethoven had already had run-ins with Baron Braun over performance venues and considered him an enemy. He wrote Sonnleithner, “I know in advance that if everything depends again on the worthy Baron’s decision, the answer will be no . . . his treatment of me has been persistently unfriendly—Well, so be it—I shall never grovel—my world is the universe . . . I do not want to spend another hour in this wretched hole.”28 Soon after, he moved out of the theater and into a flat in the building where his childhood friend Stephan von Breuning lived, known as das rothe Haus (the Red House) and belonging to the Esterházy estates. Before long he moved in with Stephan. At that point the two hotheaded Rhinelanders began to work out whether they could get along as roommates.29

  By around April 1804, the score of Bonaparte was copied and ready. Prince Lobkowitz had given Beethoven a splendid 1,800 florins for exclusive access to the symphony for six months and made his house orchestra available for trial run-throughs to be heard by invited guests. Beethoven had to have been concerned about the fate of a symphony he knew tested so many boundaries. He was becoming resigned to the deterioration of his hearing and the steady drain of illness. As for Leonore, he was uncertain about its performance possibilities as he continued desultorily to work on it.

  At the same time, publishing was going well and likewise his reviews, so he had reason to be hopeful about the reception of the symphony. In nearly the whole of an issue with Beethoven’s picture on the cover, the Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung hailed the publication of the Prometheus Variations in these kinds of terms: “inexhaustible imagination, original humor, and deep, intimate, even passionate feeling are the particular features . . . from which arises the ingenious physiognomy that distinguishes nearly all of Herr v. B’s works. This earns him one of the highest places among instrumental composers of the first rank.”30 When the Second Symphony appeared the journal called it “a noteworthy, colossal work, of a depth, power, and artistic knowledge like very few . . . it demands to be played again and yet again by even the most accomplished orchestra, until the astonishing number of original and sometimes very strangely arranged ideas become closely enough connected, rounded out, and emerge like a great unity.” More and more the elements that were special, unusual, even bizarre about his music were becoming the things most admired about it, at least in progressive circles. In other words, critics were beginning to let Beethoven be Beethoven, to sense the unity that lay under the bewildering diversity of his surfaces.

  If his musical enemies were fading in strength, his body remained his greatest enemy. Around the time Beethoven moved in with Breu­ning, he became frighteningly ill. When he recovered from the worst of it, he was left with a fever that lingered for months. He began to be attacked by abscesses in his jaw and finger, and a septic foot; eventually the finger problem nearly led to an amputation.31 To be so physically beset in the middle of preparing for the symphony readings and trying to keep Leonore afloat made him more brittle than usual. And there were other projects demanding attention. In the middle of sketches for the opera he jotted down two ideas, one the beginning of a piano concerto and the other the beginning of a symphony, one idea gentle and the other dynamic but sharing a common rhythmic motif. Here he found the leading ideas for his greatest concerto and eventually his most famous symphony.

  From Nottebohm, Two Beethoven Sketchbooks

  As plans heated up for readings of the new symphony and other new pieces with Lobkowitz’s orchestra, in late May of 1804, Ferdinand Ries turned up at Beethoven’s flat with stunning news: the puppet French Senate had just declared Napoleon Bonaparte to be emperor of France. For Beethoven this was not just an interesting or shocking piece of information; it concerned him intimately. Ries had seen the copyist’s score of the new symphony lying on a table in his room, with its title page: at the top, Bonaparte; at the bottom, Luigi van Beethoven.

  Now Beethoven heard that the hero he had admired as a liberator, so much that he shaped his most ambitious work around him, had made himself an emperor. Beethoven did not stop to think about the practical questions, did not try to gloss over the import of this news. He grasped quite clearly what it meant. Napoleon was no liberator but was in it for his own power and glory. In a transport of rage, Beethoven cried to Ries, “So he too is nothing more than an ordinary man! Now he also will trample all human rights underfoot, and only pander to his own ambition. He will place himself above everyone else and become a tyrant!” He snatched up the title page of the symphony, ripped it in two, and threw it to the floor.32

  If that was said and done as Ries remembered it years later, Beethoven was correct in every respect. In his response, the news hit him in terms of ideals and history. He understood that now the revolutionary dreams of the 1780s were finished, because Napoleon had been the only man able to realize them. The Revolution is dead; long live the Revolution.

  But of course, Beethoven did not throw out the Third Symphony. When the parts were published in 1806, the title would read Sinfonia eroica, composta per festeggiare il sovvenire d’un grand’uomo: “Heroic symphony, composed to celebrate the memory of a great man.” It was a finely considered title. The great man in memory was the beau ideal Beethoven and so many others had taken Napoleon to be. That imaginary hero was dead and buried, while Napoleon himself continued to triumph on the battlefield. More than the death of a hero, now the symphony marked the death of a dream.

  But the vanished title did not erase the connection of the symphony to Napoleon in its foundation and in Beethoven’s mind. It did not even fully erase his name from the manuscript. In August 1804, offering the symphony and a pile of other new works to Breitkopf & Härtel, Beethoven noted, “[T]he title of the symphony is really Bonaparte . . . I think that it will interest the musical public.” A title page of the symphony survived, with a date of that same month in another hand. On the top of the page, the words Intitulate Bonaparte have been erased so violently that some of it has chewed right through the paper. When Beethoven was enraged at a thing or a person, he hated to see the very name or word. Yet at the bottom of the page, in pencil in Beethoven’s own hand, are the words Geschrieben auf Bonaparte, “written
on Bonaparte,” and that has not been erased. Here is a graphic representation of the ambivalence that was seen all over Europe. Napoleon himself defined it: “Everybody has loved me and hated me,” he said. “Everybody has taken me up, dropped me, and taken me up again.”33

  His enthronement, the central symbolic event of Napoleon’s career, elevated to myth the day it happened, came on December 2, 1804. Amid stupendous pomp and ceremony in the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris, in the presence and with the blessing of Pope Pius VII, Napoleon placed the Charlemagne Crown on his head as emperor of France.34 That he crowned himself was the ultimate symbol of this self-made conqueror, now a self-made emperor. With that he declared himself Charlemagne’s successor, and thereby symbolically erased the thousand-year succession of emperors of the Holy Roman Empire down to the present Emperor Franz II. Napoleon was no longer the dictator of a nominal republic; he was the founder of a new hereditary line of sovereigns, on the model of the ancien régime that the Revolution believed it had annihilated once and for all.

  Among the French government’s decrees of the next months was an Imperial Catechism, which the church was directed to teach to all children of the soi-disant republic that was in fact a dictatorship. This new catechism included these responses:

  Q. Why are we obliged to all of these duties to our Emperor?

  A. First, because God, who created empires and distributes them according to His will, in heaping on our Emperor gifts, both in peace and war, has established him as our sovereign and rendered him the minister of his power and image on earth. To honor and serve our Emperor is thus to honor and serve God himself.

  Q. What should one think of those who fail in their duty to the Emperor?

  A. According to the Apostle Saint Paul, they would be resisting the order established By God Himself, and would render themselves worthy of eternal damnation.

  Q. What is forbidden to us by the Fourth Commandment?

  A. We are forbidden to be disobedient to our superiors, to injure them, or to speak ill of them.35

  This is, of course, the definition of tyranny worldly and spiritual. Yet while Napoleon had only briefly been a Jacobin, was a dictator in every sense, and had essentially put aside the French republic, there were still progressive elements in his agenda. In spring of 1804, his regime issued the Code Napoleon, a set of civil laws that enshrined some foundations of the Revolution: personal liberty, freedom of conscience, and property rights. The ancient nobility and class privileges were abolished and the government declared to be entirely secular. The influence of the code would be immense and lasting.36 Yet beside its progressive clauses were ones reflecting Napoleon’s hatred of democracy. The code suppressed the rights of women and gave precedence to landowners and to employers at the expense of employees. Napoleon held to Enlightenment beliefs in science and reason, but he had nothing but contempt for popular will or parliamentary debate. In those respects he stood not so far from German Aufklärers, including Beethoven (also no believer in democracy, even if he admired parliaments).

  So with Beethoven and many others over the next decades, the habit of dropping and taking up Napoleon continued. In more practical terms, after a couple of years of the French fighting only the British, the rapprochement with Austria was crumbling and a new coalition against France on the horizon, so in any case it was no longer safe to premiere a symphony called Bonaparte. The renewal of war, meanwhile, scuttled Beethoven’s “irrevocable” plans for a French tour or relocation. For such reasons, the world would know the Third Symphony as Eroica. But as Beethoven wrote his publisher, it is really Bonaparte.

  Around the middle of 1804, Beethoven worked on two new piano sonatas and an orchestral work. The first sonata is on the order of what gardeners call a “sport”: a surprising deviation of type in a species. He laid out the Piano Sonata in F Major, op. 54, in two droll and inexplicable movements. The first begins with a lazily lilting tune that repeats a couple of times before pounding triplets erupt and clatter along forte for two pages, after which the lazy friend returns. Their connection is sealed in a coda that marries the two contradictory ideas. The finale takes shape as a mostly monothematic moto perpetuo that threads a virtuosic course through dazzling changes of texture and key. To later times, op. 54 would be remembered as the valley between the summits of Waldstein and op. 57, the Appassionata. Beethoven began the latter in 1804 as well, interrupting work on Leonore, which for the moment had no performance possibilities.37

  A second curious manifestation of that period was the Triple Concerto op. 56 for orchestra and a trio of violin, cello, and piano, dedicated to Prince Lobkowitz. Beethoven called it a Konzertant, relating it to the genre of symphonie concertante fashionable in France. So for him it likely amounted to another salute and calling card to the French, to prepare his journey. That in turn might explain, if anything does, the singular and sometimes backward-looking style of the music. Some of it looks back as far as the Baroque concerto grosso for multiple soloists—though a piano trio was an unusual, perhaps unprecedented, solo group.38 In effect, Beethoven here returned to a pattern of the years before the New Path, producing a stylistic experiment that had no progeny in his work. Gorgeous but peculiar, expensive and impractical to perform, the Triple Concerto would never really catch on. Beethoven himself scarcely promoted it, though he was quick to sell it—the 1807 publication came out, as far as history knows, before the piece was premiered.

  Despite distractions including lingering illness in the middle of 1804, Beethoven’s ideas still ran strong. But life was ganging up on him. He had to have been on edge, and that goes partway to explaining a nasty row between him and Stephan von Breuning in early July. Tensions had been brewing between the roommates for a while; what touched it off was practically nothing. Beethoven learned that the caretaker of the building had not gotten proper notice that he had vacated the other flat to move in with Stephan, so Beethoven was still liable for the rent. Over dinner the visiting Carl van Beethoven, provoking as usual, blamed the oversight on Breuning. Ludwig tried to defuse the situation by jokingly blaming it on Ries, but Breuning boiled over, jumped up, and shouted that he would send for the caretaker on the spot. Beethoven was having none of that. He also shot up, sending his chair flying, and bolted the house. Soon he bolted all the way to Baden.39

  A hail of recriminations followed. Breuning wrote a conciliatory note, but Beethoven was having none of that either. He wrote Ries, “As Breuning by his behavior has not scrupled to present to you and the caretaker my character from an aspect in which I appear to be a wretched, pitiable, and petty-minded fellow, I am asking you . . . to give my answer verbally to B . . . I have nothing more to say to Breu­ning—His thoughts and actions—prove that there should never have been a friendly relationship between us and will certainly never be again.” A few days later he wrote to Ries again:

  My sudden rage was merely an explosion resulting from several previous unpleasant incidents with him. I have the gift of being able to conceal and control my sensitivity about very many things. But if I happen to be irritated at a time when I am more liable to fly into a temper than usual, then I erupt more violently than anyone else. Breuning certainly has excellent qualities . . . yet his greatest and most serious faults are those which he fancies he detects in other people. He is inclined to be petty, a trait which since my childhood I have despised . . . And now our friendship is at an end! I have found only two friends in the world with whom, I may say I have never had a misunderstanding. But what fine men! One is dead, the other is still alive.40

  The two friends he meant were the long-departed Amenda and the late Lorenz von Breuning, Stephan’s brother. (He forgot to number Stephan’s brother-in-law Franz Wegeler among the friends he had never seriously fought with.) In any case, a couple of months later Beethoven and Stephan met by chance on the street and fell into each other’s arms. Beethoven sent him an ivory miniature of himself and a rhapsodic letter of reconciliation:

  Behind this painting my dear go
od St, let us conceal forever what passed between us for a time—I know that I have wounded your heart; but the emotion within me, which you must certainly have detected, has punished me sufficiently for doing so. It was not malice which was surging in me against you, no, because in that case I would no longer have been worthy of your friendship. It was passion, both in your heart and in mine.—But distrust of you began to stir in me—People interfered between us—people who are far from being worthy of you or of me [probably Carl van Beethoven was the “people”] . . . You know, of course, that I always meant to give [the enclosed portrait] to someone. To whom could I give it indeed with a warmer heart than to you, faithful, good and noble Steffen—Forgive me if I hurt you. I myself suffered just as much. When I no longer saw you beside me, for such a long time, only then did I realize fully how dear you were to my heart, how dear you always will be.41

  The old friendship returned to its course, for a time. Stephan remained a close and critical student of his friend. In November, Stephan wrote Wegeler,