Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph

by Swafford, Jan

  In the theater, neither of the first written overtures worked. They overwhelmed the light, almost buffa tone of the opera’s opening, and by anticipating the climax and its trumpet call, they weakened that climax. A new approach Beethoven drafted for the abortive performance in Prague in 1808 he shelved unheard.

  After the premiere of the revised opera, more people showed up for the next two performances. The applause burgeoned, the press reviews turned warmer. After so much labor and frustration, a success appeared to be brewing. Then everything went up in smoke. Waiting outside the office of court theater manager Baron von Braun, tenor Röckel heard shouting break out behind the door. Beethoven had gotten an unprecedented deal giving him a direct percentage of the gate, and he refused to believe the figures he was getting for his share of the receipts. Braun had aroused Beethoven’s perennial conviction that everybody was swindling him.

  Patiently Braun explained that while the expensive seats had been full, the galleries were not. Stalking up and down the room, Beethoven cried, “I don’t write for the multitude—I write for the connoisseurs!” The baron replied with something he should have known better than to say to Beethoven: “But the connoisseurs alone do not fill our theater. We need the multitude to bring in money, and since in your music you have refused to make any concession to it, you yourself are to blame . . . If we had given Mozart the same percentage of the receipts of his operas [that we gave you], he would have been rich.”

  That was the last straw. “I want my score!” Beethoven bellowed, his face crimson. “My score at once!” The baron rang for a servant and had him fetch the music. When he returned, the baron tried to calm the raging composer: “I’m sorry, but I believe on calmer reflection—.” Beethoven snatched the score from the servant’s hand and fled, running past Röckel outside without seeing him. Röckel went in to find Braun distraught. “Beethoven was excited and overhasty,” Braun said. “You have some influence with him. Try everything—promise him anything in my name, so that we can save his work for our stage!” Röckel hurried out to try to persuade Beethoven, but he would not discuss the matter. The score went into the drawer and stayed there.57

  Thus out of pride and paranoia, Beethoven himself sank his opera for what turned out to be the better part of a decade. There was talk of a performance at Prince Lobkowitz’s palace, but apparently nothing came of it; likewise the 1808 Prague performance.

  If the collapse of Leonore was his own doing, he was still terribly depressed about it. “Probably nothing,” Stephan von Breuning wrote Wegeler in Bonn, “has caused Beethoven so much grief as this work, whose value will be fully appreciated only in the future.”58 During this period Beethoven copied out some lines from a book that gave him inspiration for years, Rev. Christian Sturm’s reflections on the tangible presence of God in nature: “Thou has tried all means to draw me to Thee. Now it hath pleased Thee to let me feel the heavy hand of Thy wrath, and to humiliate my proud heart by manifold chastisements. Sickness and misfortune has Thou sent to bring me to a contemplation of my digressions. But one thing only do I ask, O God, cease not to labor for my improvement. Only let me, in whatsoever manner pleases Thee, turn to Thee and be fruitful of good works.”59 By whatever agency, that prayer was answered in 1806, a year when Beethoven was chronically ill, crushed over the collapse of his opera, disappointed in love, and fruitful beyond belief in good works.

  That spring, brother Carl van Beethoven married Johanna Reis, daughter of a prosperous upholsterer. Ludwig considered her a contemptible tramp. Carl’s position with the Office of Revenue kept him busy, and he was near the end of his service as his brother’s agent. Their son Karl was born just over three months after the ceremony.60

  The day after Carl’s ill-omened marriage, Beethoven started the first of three string quartets that had been commissioned by Count Andreas Kyrillovich Razumovsky, the Russian ambassador to Vienna. Apparently Beethoven had been planning new quartets for some time.61 Part of the commission agreement seems to have been that each quartet would include a Russian folk tune. He secured a collection of national songs and combed it for material. When in the previous decade he had accepted the commission from Prince Lobkowitz for the six quartets that became op. 18, he had been a young composer feeling his way into territory owned mainly by Haydn, then still in his prime as a composer. Now Beethoven had come fully into his own and Haydn’s creative career was closed. He began these quartets feeling free and fearless.

  This patron, Count Razumovsky, was known to Vienna as one of the most extravagant princes in a city full of the breed. He came from a musical family. His father and his father’s brother had started as singers in the Russian court and were ennobled in fond gratitude for their services, mainly of an intimate nature, to the future empresses Elizabeth Petrovna and Catherine the Great.62 Like Lichnowsky and Lobkowitz, Razumovsky was another aristocrat mad for music who played an instrument well. As a violinist he had been tutored in Haydn’s quartets by Haydn himself, and he often sat in at second violin in house performances. In 1800, he asked Beethoven for lessons in quartet writing and was sent to Aloys Förster, Beethoven’s mentor in the medium.63

  Like Lichnowsky, Razumovsky was a prince of the decadent variety in his private life. An acquaintance described him as “enemy of the revolution, but good friend of the fair sex.” He pursued women as avidly as music, among his conquests in the high nobility being the queen of Naples. Meanwhile he married into the highest Viennese nobility: Elizabeth, Countess Thun, sister of Prince Karl Lichnowsky. As an ambassador, it appears that he paid more attention to his own affairs, in every sense, than to affairs of state, but his position was secure under his patron, Tsar Alexander.64

  Whatever Razumovsky’s appeal to women, it did not seem to lie on his surface. While his manners were impeccable, he was said to have the pinched and malevolent face of a Russian police ­interrogator.65 Wrote one acquaintance, Baroness du Montet, “He radiates pride in all things; pride in his birth, his rank, and his honor, . . . in his bearing, in his speech.”66 The Razumovsky Palace, finished in 1808, sat imperiously on a hill in the suburb of Landstrasse, built in a mixture of Empire and Renaissance styles, flaunting its roof garden, library, art gallery, and hall of sculptures by Canova. Given his interest in music and his connection to the Lichnowskys, Razumovsky naturally had made Beethoven’s acquaintance early on. They seemed to have gotten along with less friction than Beethoven did with Lichnowsky and other patrons.67

  The quartets for Razumovsky went quickly. In August 1806, Beethoven notified publisher Gottfried Härtel that brother Carl was coming to visit (at which Härtel would have groaned) and wrote, “You may discuss with him the question of new violin quartets, one of which I have already finished; and indeed I am thinking of devoting myself almost entirely to this type of composition.”68 Neither of those statements was necessarily true. Beethoven was given to telling publishers he had works in hand that were not finished, sometimes not even begun. That he was thinking of devoting himself to string quartets may have been equally exaggerated, or may have been a symptom of the joy and sense of discovery he was finding in working on Razumovsky’s commission. The Muse kept passionately by his side in those days.

  At the end of his letter to Härtel, he unleashed another of his broadsides about bad reviews in the Breitkopf & Härtel house journal: “I hear that in the musikalische Zeitung someone has railed violently against the [Third] symphony, which I sent you last year and which you returned to me. I have not read the article. If you fancy that you can injure me by publishing articles of that kind, you are very much mistaken. On the contrary, by so doing you merely bring your journal into disrepute.” The Third was published that year under the title Eroica. In fact the AMZ reviewers had been inevitably baffled but scrupulously fair. Beethoven’s return fire concerning reviews was generally excessive. And he probably had read the reviews.

  Around the end of August he and Prince Lichnowsky, still his most powerful patron, still supplying him with a stipend
of 600 florins a year, went together for a stay at the Lichnowsky castle in Grätz, Silesia (later part of the Czech Republic). This working vacation proved fateful in several directions. Beethoven brought with him ideas in various states of completion for a symphony (eventually the Fifth) and a fourth piano concerto; in Grätz, he wrote most of a violin concerto in addition to working on the quartets for Razumovsky. At the castle he could spend his time as he wished. A servant, asked later about his impressions of the famous visitor, said Herr Beethoven struck him as not in his right mind. He would dash around the castle and grounds for hours on end, bareheaded in the cold and rain; other times, he would shut himself up in his room for whole days, not seeing anyone.69 What the servant was seeing amounted to an extended creative raptus. Beethoven was writing work after work, most of them remarkable, at a clip that would strain anyone’s sanity.

  Not long after Beethoven arrived, Lichnowsky took him out to meet his friend Count Franz Joachim Wenzel Oppersdorff, who had a castle near Ober-Glogow stocked with one of the last private orchestras maintained by the aristocracy of those days. His musicians doubled as household officials. Oppersdorff and Beethoven hit it off from the beginning, especially after the house orchestra played the Second Symphony.70 It seems likely that Beethoven headed back to Grätz with a commission for two symphonies. Putting the other projects aside, he scraped together some ideas and plunged into a symphony in B-flat.

  In a letter of September 3, he offered the new symphony, three Razumovsky quartets, Leonore, and Christus am Ölberge to Breitkopf & Härtel “immediately.” Despite all the frustrations, he was still doggedly courting the most prestigious publishing house in Europe. Probably only the last two pieces were finished by then, but he apparently did write the symphony in a matter of weeks. By the end of the year the Fourth Symphony, Fourth Piano Concerto, Razumovsky Quartets, and Violin Concerto would all be more or less finished, all of them largely completed in the preceding six months. There were also minor works from 1806, including the Thirty-Two Variations for Piano, WoO 80, which he dashed off and forgot about. Later he happened to overhear the daughter of the piano maker Streicher playing the variations and asked her who wrote them. Told he was the culprit, he exclaimed, “Such nonsense by me? Oh, Beethoven, what an ass you were!”

  Then in late October, in the middle of this rush of work, once again he managed one of his self-inflicted disasters. Beethoven and Lichnowsky, both of them egotists of a major order, had a fractious history. The year before, Beethoven had written Josephine Deym, “In spite of many rough passages which we are encountering on the path of this friendship . . . I feel how dear he is to me.”71 What touched off this scuffle was the visit of some French officers, who were at their leisure after their army’s thrashing of the Austrians and Russians at Austerlitz. Lichnowsky arranged a musicale for the visitors, to show off his prize protégé. He may have known Beethoven had recently hobnobbed with French officers, playing through a Gluck opera, so there was no reason to expect a storm.

  What happened survived only in rumors and echoes. Beethoven refused to play, declaring that he was no servant and would not be ordered to perform for enemies of his country. Lichnowsky admired and understood Beethoven perhaps as well as anyone, but he was also a prince, imperious in nature, used to being obeyed. He did not enjoy being humiliated in front of foreign dignitaries, least of all by a commoner who had enjoyed his generosity for years. He demanded that Beethoven play, was refused, demanded again. In one story Beethoven locked himself in his room and Lichnowsky kicked the door in. In another version Beethoven was swinging a chair over his head and had to be restrained from braining the prince by Count Oppersdorff. There may have been a threat of jail, by way of a joke Beethoven did not appreciate. There may have been worse threats from Lichnowsky. Later in a letter, Beethoven referred to “people who like to belabor their friends with flails.”72

  It appears that, in the wake of the ruckus, Beethoven gathered up his manuscripts, bolted the Lichnowsky castle, and walked some five miles to a nearby village. From there he found a cart and made the 140-mile, three-day journey back to Vienna. During a rainstorm on the trip, some of his music, including the manuscript of the Appassionata, got wet in his trunk, damaged but not destroyed. Two legends of the aftermath may or may not be true: one, that when Beethoven got home he smashed on the floor a plaster bust of Lichnowsky he had been given; two, that he wrote a note to Lichnowsky saying, “Prince! What you are, you are by circumstance and by birth. What I am, I am through myself. Of princes there have been and will be thousands. Of Beethovens there is only one.” Whether or not he actually wrote those words, it was surely what he believed, and he had every reason to.

  But moral and financial issues are two quite different things. Whatever satisfaction Beethoven found in his rages and revenges, he soon realized that this paroxysm had cost him Lichnowsky’s stipend of 600 florins a year. Having sunk his opera in a fit of paranoid rage, now Beethoven had tossed out a quarter or more of his income. (For a landed aristocrat like Lichnowsky, the stipend was pocket change.) He and the prince eventually reconciled to some degree, but they were never really close again, and the stipend was gone for good.73 Beethoven, for his part, learned the relevant lesson. He never made that kind of mistake again with a patron. This was his last major indulgence in self-damaging fury.

  Yet after the fight he arrived back in Vienna in high spirits. Sometimes fits of wrath seemed to leave him refreshed. He was laughing when he showed the still-wet Appassionata manuscript to Paul Bigot, Count Razumovsky’s librarian. Bigot’s wife Marie, a fine pianist, insisted on playing over the sonata on the spot. Beethoven was delighted with her sight-reading of the water-stained manuscript in his scratchy hand (though his fair copies could be legible enough). After the sonata reached print, he submitted to Marie’s plea and made her a gift of the manuscript. The Bigots, especially Marie, were becoming highly appreciated friends.

  At the beginning of November, a new offer arrived from Scottish publisher George Thomson. In 1803, he had asked Beethoven for six sonatas based on Scottish themes, but Beethoven’s price had been too steep. A later request for chamber pieces had also gone nowhere. Thomson was a promoter and publisher of Scottish and other regional folk music. Now he offered Beethoven some piecework: arranging folk songs for a modest fee each, but with the promise of a steady supply of material. Earlier Thomson had commissioned Lord Byron, Sir Walter Scott, and Robert Burns to supply words for existing melodies. Some of the results were historic, the Burns lyrics including those to Auld lang syne. For arrangements, Thomson had hired German composers including Pleyel and Haydn.

  Now that Haydn was no longer able to manage even piecework, Thomson turned to the newest famous German composer. The arrangements he wanted from Beethoven varied between ones for solo voice and piano to more elaborate ones for multiple voices, sometimes including obbligato parts for other instruments. Thomson insisted the arrangements had to be playable by amateurs.74 It was never entirely clear why Beethoven agreed to take on commercial items like this that took up time and paid skimpily. The loss of Lichnowsky’s stipend may have had something to do with it. In any case, whatever the constraints, Beethoven agreed, writing Thomson, in French, “I will take care to make the compositions easy and pleasing as far as I can and as far as is consistent with that elevation and originality of style, which, as you yourself say, favorably characterize my works and from which I shall never stoop. I cannot bring myself to write for the flute, as this instrument is too limited and imperfect.” It would be another four years before he sent Thomson the first consignment, of fifty-three melodies. They constitute the beginning of one of the most extensive, also nearly negligible, bodies of work in his career.

  The first public manifestation of what Beethoven had accomplished in this almost-inconceivable year came when the Violin Concerto was premiered by Franz Clement in a benefit concert for himself on December 23, 1806. Along with the Fourth Symphony, most of the concerto had been written at a gallo
p in the autumn, the finale finished, it was said, two days before the premiere. Clement may have sight-read the finale in the concert. The former child prodigy was at the peak of his fame, not a traveling virtuoso but a much-admired concertmaster and soloist in Vienna. When Clement was a prodigy of fourteen, in 1794, Beethoven had written in an album, “Go forth on the way in which you hitherto have travelled so beautifully, so magnificently. Nature and art vie with each other in making you a great artist.”75 In the next decade he and Beethoven had come to an easy and mutually admiring professional relationship, and the concerto was written for him. Beethoven’s affection for Clement was shown in one of his wry annotations on the manuscript, with a trademark pun: Concerto par Clemenza pour Clement, “Concerto for Clemency from Clement.”

  In his most recent violin sonatas, Beethoven had been inspired by the modern French school, which had created a revolution in playing based in part on the relatively new Tourte, or “Viotti,” bow. Its inward arc, rather than the Baroque outward-arced bow, made possible a stronger tone and a wider range of effects. The French style was familiar to Beethoven through the playing of Rodolphe Kreutzer and George Bridgetower, and through the well-known concertos of Giovanni Battista Viotti, like Cherubini an Italian-born composer who found his fame in Paris. Viotti’s concerto style, which came to be known as simply “the French violin concerto,” involved bravura effects, forceful attacks, and a greater repertoire of slurs, all enabled by the new bow. These concertos also expected a more robust tone from the soloist. All this in turn helped associate French concertos in the audience’s mind with the atmosphere of the Revolution. Along with the development of the modern bow, pre-1800 violins, even the most precious Stradivaris and Guarneris, were being taken apart and fitted with longer fingerboards, a higher bridge, and a thicker sound post inside. In addition to the new bow, these adaptations gave the violin more power and brilliance, even though the strings remained the traditional gut.