Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph

by Swafford, Jan

  Eight days after the ban on Leonore was lifted, the French army reached Vienna. It had taken Ulm and Salzburg at the end of October, and the city was left essentially undefended. At the approach of the French, the court and the aristocracy packed up and left, “sending everything away,” wrote a diarist, “even bedwarmers and shoe-trees. It looks as if they have no intention of ever coming back.” The emperor provided a hundred horses in the Josephsplatz to pull carriages loaded with the possessions of the wealthy; eventually he added a fleet on the Danube for the same purpose, and guaranteed they would be protected.

  On November 13, fifteen thousand French troops marched into the city in ranks with banners flying and bands playing. The Viennese turned out to watch as if it were a holiday parade. They found the grenadiers grand with their high caps and breastplates, but it was noticed that the common soldiers were shabby, and many of them marched with strips of confiscated lard, hams, and chunks of meat dangling from their belts.36 On the fifteenth, Napoleon issued the usual proclamation from the emperor’s palace at Schönbrunn, where he had taken up residence. His troops generally behaved well, but they were allowed to appropriate every bit of food they could find and every horse in town.

  Hundreds of officers were billeted inside the city walls and thousands of ordinary soldiers in the suburbs, all in commandeered private homes. The markets emptied and the banks closed. Most of the population stayed home. The rattle of coaches and throngs of pedestrians disappeared and a strange calm reigned, the streets populated mostly by French soldiers.37 Baron Braun announced to the performers and employees of the court theaters that, by imperial order, the theaters were to remain open unless there was a bombardment, in which case everyone was permitted to run for their lives.38

  Under those conditions, rehearsals for Leonore resumed in an atmosphere far worse than the usual pre-premiere anxiety. At one point Beethoven was fuming about a missing third bassoon and Prince Lobkowitz made a joke about it. Passing the prince’s palace on his way home, Beethoven was heard to shout, “Lobkowitzian ass!”39 A week after the occupation began, the opera premiered at the Theater an der Wien. The title role was handled by twenty-year-old Anna Milder, for whom Beethoven had written the part. She was talented, also young and inexperienced.40 Over Beethoven’s protest the title was given as Fidelio, to avoid confusion with the Paer version.

  The circumstances of launching a serious and ambitious opera low in action and high in ideals could hardly have been worse. For three nights, it played to almost empty houses made up mainly of French officers, a few Beethoven friends including Lichnowsky, and a smattering of tourists and brave souls willing to leave their homes. “Except for whores,” wrote one theatergoer, “one sees very few women at the theaters.”41

  The audience watched the story advance on its slow course with its spotty cast: an overture that begins gloomily, evoking Florestan singing in his chains; the opening scene with Leonore disguised as a young man named Fidelio, working in the prison where her husband is starving in the dungeon. There are the awkward touches of comedy as she fends off the attentions of the jailer’s daughter Marzelline, who is in love with this youth; the prisoners’ moment in the sun, singing of sunlight and freedom; Pizarro’s vow that this will be his prisoner’s last day. Fading in his chains, Florestan remembers his love and the springtime of his life. Leonore finds her way to the dungeon, helping the jailer dig her husband’s grave. Gun in hand, she cries to an incredulous Pizarro, “First kill his wife!” The minister’s trumpet calls, the villain is exposed, the lovers freed, and Leonore hailed in music of resplendent celebration: Retterin! Savior!42 At the second performance Stephan von Breuning distributed to the minuscule audience a poem he had written hailing the work, overoptimistically: “Our hearts were stirred, elated, pierced in turn / By Leonore’s courage, love, and tears; / Now jubilant echoes vie to praise her faith / And dread anxiety gives way to bliss.”43

  There was the potential for a great and moving opera in this story, and Beethoven’s music was equal to it. But this was his first attempt at the stage, and even if it had been an ideal performance, the opera was not ready to sail. A Viennese reported to his diary, “In the evening I went to W. Th. to hear Louis Beth.’s opera . . . The Opera has pretty, ingenious, difficult music and a tedious libretto of little interest. It had no success and the theater was empty.” Reported a visiting British doctor, “The story and plan of the piece are a miserable mixture of low manners and romantic situations; the airs, duets and choruses equal to any praise . . . Beethoven presided at the pianoforte and directed the performance himself. He is a small dark young-looking man, wears spectacles . . . Few people present, though the house would have been crowded in every part but for the present state of public affairs.”44

  The reviews followed suit, everybody noting that the music was in some degree splendid, the story slow and clichéd. “Both melody and characterization,” said the Freymüthige, “failed to achieve that happy, striking, irresistible expression of passion that grips us so irresistibly in Mozart’s and Cherubini’s works. The music has several pretty spots, but it is still far from being a perfect work or even a successful one.”45 The Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung was more blunt: “Until now, Beethoven had so often paid homage to the new and strange at the expense of the beautiful; one would thus expect above all to find distinctiveness, newness, and genuine, original creative flair . . . and it is precisely these qualities that one encounters in it least.”46 The visiting Cherubini took in the opera and declared the overture so chromatic that he had no idea what key it was in, and that Beethoven had little conception of writing for the voice.47

  Immediately Beethoven’s friends began a campaign to persuade him to rework it. Singer and stage manager Friedrich Meyer invited the new house tenor, Joseph August Röckel, to a meeting in the music room of Lichnowsky’s palace, where a circle of friends and admirers were assembling to demand revisions. Everybody but Beethoven agreed that the slow and ponderous first act had to be shortened, mainly by cutting three numbers. Meyer advised Röckel that there was going to be a storm. He was right. The occasion, in December 1805, went on from seven in the evening until two in the morning in an atmosphere of rage, hysteria, and implacable determination from Beethoven’s friends.

  Röckel recalled that those present, mostly of Beethoven’s inner circle, included Prince and Princess Lichnowsky, brother Caspar van Beethoven, Stephan von Breuning, poet and playwright Heinrich von Collin (whose play Coriolan had stirred Beethoven), actor Joseph Lange (Mozart’s brother-in-law), Friedrich Meyer (another Mozart brother-in-law), playwright G. F. Treitschke (who later worked on the final version of the opera), and theater concertmaster Franz Clement. Under the many-candled chandeliers of the Lichnowsky music room, surrounded by silken draperies and old-master paintings in golden frames, they began going through the opera number by number. Princess Lichnowsky played piano from Beethoven’s enormous manuscript score while violinist Clement, famous for his recall, provided a distillation of the string parts from memory. Meyer and Röckel covered the singing parts, male and female. They played and sang through the first two of the three acts, making suggestions as they went, all of which Beethoven rejected. Before long the company discovered that while most of them had experienced his fury, they had never seen anything like the apoplectic heights he attained when they brought up the issue of cutting three numbers. He attempted to seize the score and run off with it but was prevented by the princess, who placed her hands over the music and refused to give it up. They continued on to the third act, Röckel sight-reading the part of Florestan (his effort earned him the part in the next production).

  It was well past midnight when they finished the reading. “And the revisions, the cuts?” Princess Lichnowsky asked Beethoven. “Do not insist on them!” he declared. “Not a single note must be missing!” This called for desperate measures. The frail princess hurled herself at his feet, crying, “Beethoven! No—your greatest work, you yourself shall not cease to exist
in this way! God who has implanted those tones of purest beauty in your soul forbids it, your mother’s spirit, which at this moment pleads and warns you with my voice, forbids it! Beethoven, it must be! Give in! Do it in memory of your mother! Do it for me, who am only your best friend!”

  Stunned, Beethoven stood still for a moment, turned his eyes upward, and burst into sobs. “I will—yes, all!” he gasped. “I will do all, for you—for your—for my mother’s sake!” Gently he pulled the princess to her feet.

  By then it was nearly two in the morning, everyone completely exhausted. Not another word was spoken about the opera. Doors were flung open, revealing the dining room spread with a sumptuous dinner. As they sat down Beethoven was suddenly in the best of moods. Gaily he asked Röckel what the tenor had just devoured from his plate. Röckel said he had no idea, he had been so ravenous. “He eats like a wolf,” Beethoven roared, “without knowing what! Ha!”48

  From that point Beethoven took the revisions in his own hands. Behind librettist Sonnleithner’s back, he had Stephan von Breuning work over the libretto. He wrote disingenuously to Sonnleithner, “I particularly request you to give me a short written statement permitting me to have the libretto with its present alterations printed again under your name . . . Three acts have been reduced to only two. In order to achieve this and to make the opera move more swiftly I have shortened everything as much as possible.” In regard to the libretto changes, he wrote, “I have made them myself.”49 That was essentially a lie, perhaps to protect Sonnleithner’s feelings. The matter of adjusting the timing and the dramatic arc of a play or opera is a craft that has to be learned by a combination of experience and trial and error. By the end Beethoven had surgically excised more than five hundred bars, reduced the first two acts to one, and cut jailer Rocco’s comic (and not very amusing) aria “Hat man nicht auch Gold.”50

  All this was carried on in the middle of the continuing French occupation. During it Beethoven entertained some visiting French officers by playing through the entire Gluck opera Iphigénie en Tauride from the orchestral score while the Frenchmen provided the arias and choruses. Czerny, who was present, recalled that the soldiers sang “not at all badly.”51

  The occupation was relatively peaceful, with the occasional pleasant moments like that one, but outside the gates of the city there was nothing but disaster for Austria. On December 2, 1805, in the greatest victory of his career, Napoleon’s 68,000 troops crushed the Austro-Russian army of 90,000 at Austerlitz, near Brno in Moravia. He lured Russian tsar Alexander I into a trap, cut the allied army in two, and by midday the French, with minimal losses, had killed or wounded 15,000 enemy and captured 11,000, totaling nearly a third of the allied forces. In spite of the October Battle of Trafalgar, in which Admiral Nelson wiped out most of a Franco-Spanish fleet and ensured Britain’s command of the sea, the Third Coalition could not survive Austerlitz. The tsar took his army back to Russia. “We are babies,” he said, “in the hands of a giant.” Austria was forced to sign the humiliating Treaty of Pressburg, ceding cities and vast territories to France and Bavaria and recognizing Napoleon as king of Italy. Napoleon also required Austria to pay 40,000 gold francs in indemnity. That contributed to a rising financial crisis in Austria that came to a head years later.

  The next July, in 1806, Napoleon joined sixteen German states into the Confederation of the Rhine, with himself as “protector,” for the first time reducing the number of small principalities. Nearly two dozen states eventually joined. The new entities soaked up smaller states around them. All members of the confederation were obliged to supply Napoleon with troops, as was Austria. These developments inflamed Prussia, which joined Britain and Russia in a new coalition. That ended quickly with French victories in the battles of Jena and Friedland in October 1806. (On hearing about Jena from friend Wenzel Krumpholz, Beethoven quipped, “It’s a pity I don’t understand the art of war as well as I do the art of music. I would conquer him!”) At the end of the year, Napoleon imposed on his subject territories the Continental System, which amounted to a gigantic embargo on trade with Britain. It was ineffective and did harm to everyone involved, including France, but it lasted until 1814.

  Acting on the inevitable, in August 1806, Franz II declared the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire. He retitled himself Franz I, first emperor of Austria. So came the final collapse of the union that traced its ancestry back a thousand years to Charlemagne. This was the summit of Napoleon’s career, when a born nobody, a “little corporal” of genius, unbounded ambition, and remarkable luck, wiped away a millennium of history. He was a tyrant with the blood of millions on his account by the time he was done, but there had never been anyone like him. For all the disgust and betrayal felt by Beethoven and myriad others, they knew the simple fact that Napoleon existed made him an irrevocable part of history.

  With the premiere of the reworked version of the opera set for March 1806, new Florestan Joseph Röckel was summoned to Beethoven’s flat to pick up some revisions. He was confronted by an elderly servant. In the next room he heard splashing as the great man washed himself to the accompaniment of mighty groans. Finally persuading the servant he was supposed to be there, Röckel entered and beheld the fabled Beethoven household chaos: a chair held some pages of the Eroica, pages of the opera were scattered like leaves over furniture and floor for the ink to dry, and in the middle of assorted piles of music, Beethoven stood before his washstand naked or nearly so, groaning as he poured cascades over himself, the water running through the floorboards to the apartments below. Röckel was struck by Beethoven’s powerful build; he looked indestructible. That day he was in a kindly mood. As he dressed, he went on about how he had copied out the new version of Röckel’s part himself from the illegible draft.52 He gave Röckel the music and sent him on his way.

  Just before the premiere of the revival, Prince Lobkowitz sponsored a performance of the Paer version of Leonore in his palace.53 It is not recorded why he did that; maybe it was to show connoisseurs how much better Beethoven’s setting was. The three airings of the revised Leonore at the end of March and into April were a quite different matter from the original production. The French were gone, the nobility returned from their hiding places. The streets filled up again with Viennese desperate for entertainment and distraction. “The people are indifferent upon every topic but mere idle objects of amusement,” wrote an English visitor, “and the new ballet or play, the dress of the bourgeois, the parade of their emperor’s return, etc., is more eagerly talked about than the miserable treaty of peace, the loss of an army, or the overthrow of an empire. The subject is ‘traurig’ [sad], they say, and in this world we ought to amuse ourselves.”54

  The first performance was fairly well attended. Stephan von Breuning distributed a new poem of praise. The orchestra, however, had gotten their parts at the last minute and stumbled through the music. Not the least sympathetic, Beethoven wrote stage manager Meyer to have house conductor Ignaz von Seyfried handle the next performance, because “I want to see and hear it myself today at a distance. At all events my patience will not then be so severely tried as it would be if I were near the orchestra and had to listen to the murder of my music! . . . All desire to compose anything more ceases completely if I have to hear my work performed like that!”55 He was equally furious that his preferred title of Leonore—a title focused on the real heroine rather than the disguised one—had once more been rejected, and the production was again billed as Fidelio.56

  He had written a new overture for this production, roughly the same length as the first, and likewise in C major, but more focused and forceful. (Later, in a confused chronology, the original came to be called Leonore No. 2, the second No. 3, and one for an abortive 1808 Prague performance No. 1.) The first two overtures give a kind of self-contained musical summary less of the action of the opera than of its emotional unfolding, from suffering to salvation to celebration. In other words, rather than the expected operatic curtain raiser, the Leonore overtures amoun
t to what a later time would call a “program piece” or a “symphonic poem,” a work painting pictures and tracing a narrative.

  In these first of his mature overtures, Beethoven indulged his love of musical storytelling. Connoisseurs of the time, himself included, deplored descriptive instrumental music as in bad taste. Yet Beethoven wrote many such pieces anyway—for example, most of his overtures. Like the earlier overture, No. 3 begins memorably, with a descent into the darkness and despair of the dungeon, wandering through inchoate harmonies until suddenly we are in A-flat major, Florestan’s key, and we hear a moment of his aria “In des Lebens Frühlingstagen” (In the Springtime of Life). Here is the essence of the opera, its ethos, its utterly Beethovenian idea: a hero dying in a tyrant’s dungeon, singing in his chains of a better life. After the extended Adagio of the introduction, a surging and hopeful Allegro begins. In contrast to Leonore No. 2, No. 3, like his later overtures, is laid out in a clear and direct sonata outline. The orchestral sound is brilliant and muscular, Cherubini-esque, in contrast to Mozart’s darting, quicksilver textures. Here is the theatrical version of Beethoven’s heroic style, which is the French revolutionary style: grand, spacious, forceful, direct, popularistic. The minister’s trumpet is the turning point of the overture, as of the opera; then there is a coda of overflowing jubilation.