Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph

by Swafford, Jan

  He explains at length that there was nothing in the invitation for a ride other than friendship and the beautiful day—probably true enough. And after all, he had included her sister in the invitation. There is the inevitable turning back to how the situation has affected him, to illness, to protests of his goodness:

  Never, never will you find me dishonorable. Since my childhood I have learned to love virtue—and everything beautiful and good—Indeed you have hurt me very deeply—but your action will only serve to strengthen our friendship more and more—I am really not very well today and it is difficult for me to see you. Since the performance of the [Razumovsky] quartets yesterday my sensitiveness and my imagination have been constantly reminding me that I have made you suffer. I went last night to the ballroom in order to amuse myself . . . and the whole time I was reminded that “the Bigots are so good and are suffering perhaps through your fault” . . . Write me a few lines.38

  Beethoven and the Bigots smoothed it over. He would be careful about displays of affection to Marie. But he had coached her in his music, she had become one of his chosen interpreters, and for him that was a matter equally important as a rich patron and far more important than flirting. The previous year’s near break with Lichnowsky soon after his own explosion of rage sank Fidelio may have, in fact, scared him. He did not want to lose the Bigots as friends, or Marie as an ally. In 1809, the Bigots moved to Paris, where Marie became an important champion. One of her later students was Felix Mendelssohn, and she inculcated that budding talent in the doctrine of Beethoven.

  As antidotes to the passing storm with the Bigots, to a mysterious string of headaches that went on for months, to the collapse of hopes for yet another concert, all on top of his declining hearing and chronic digestive afflictions, other developments that spring were more to the good. Nikolaus, the fourth Esterházy prince to employ Joseph Haydn (now incapacitated but still nominally court Kapellmeister), commissioned a mass from Beethoven to honor the name day of the princess. Haydn had already provided six celebrated masses for that occasion. Beethoven remained vitally interested in sacred music, a field he had yet to conquer, partly because he had yet to find his own path into it. At the same time, he wanted to find an alternative to Haydn’s approach and to the generally operatic Viennese mass—which is to say, something other than the style of his own Christus am Ölberge. What came of this commission would be one of the real experiments of his life.

  In performances of his music in Vienna, Beethoven often presided on the podium and at the keyboard. March 1807 saw two all-Beethoven concerts for an invited audience in Prince Lobkowitz’s music room. The programs included the first four symphonies, the Fourth Piano Concerto (which had to wait another year for its public premiere), arias from Leonore, and the overture Coriolan. By then the first two symphonies were well established and popular, the Eroica riding a wave of acclaim. The Fourth Symphony, overture, and concerto were new to Vienna. In its review of the concerts, the Journal des Luxus und der Moden declared, “Richness of idea, bold originality and fullness of power, which are the particular merits of Beethoven’s music, were very much in evidence to everyone at these concerts; yet many found fault with lack of a noble simplicity and the all too fruitful accumulation of ideas which . . . were not always adequately worked out and blended, thereby creating the effect more often of rough diamonds.”39

  The inexorable necessity and misery of publication at least tended to be more profitable in these years. For Beethoven the central business development of 1807 was centered in the appearance of Muzio Clementi, celebrated piano virtuoso, also piano maker, pedagogue, and publisher. As a pioneering composer for the piano, he had been a formative influence on the young Beethoven, because Clementi was among the best available models for how to write idiomatically for the instrument. Now retired from performing, Clementi lived in England and prowled the Continent looking for music to publish and customers for his pianos. He made several visits to Vienna.

  Naturally he was eager to court Beethoven, and Beethoven eager to find a British publisher. Yet an absurd contretemps had developed when Clementi came to town in 1804. Beethoven told brother Carl that he wanted to call on Clementi. Carl insisted that that was beneath his dignity; it must be the publisher who called first. Beethoven agreed. Then gossip started going around that he was snubbing the older man, and Clementi got wind of it, which offended his own sense of pride and propriety. The result was that, despite their pressing mutual interests, the two men never spoke, even on occasions when they were eating at the same long table in the Swan restaurant.40

  When Clementi returned to Vienna in 1807, all that was forgotten, as he reported to his partner in London. The letter, written in English, shows Clementi’s puckish spirit:

  I have at last made a complete conquest of that haughty beauty Beethoven, who first began at public places to grin and coquet with me, which of course I took care not to discourage; then slid into familiar chat, until meeting him by chance one day in the street.

  “Where do you lodge?” says he, “I have not seen you this long while!”—upon which I gave him my address.

  Two days after, I find on my table his card, brought by himself, from the maid’s description of his lovely form. This will do, thought I.

  Three days after that, he calls again and finds me at home. Conceive, then the mutual ecstasy of such a meeting! I took pretty good care to improve it to our house’s advantage . . . In short, I agreed with him to take in manuscript three quartets [the Razumovskys], a symphony [the Fourth], an overture [Coriolan], a concerto for the violin which is beautiful and which, at my request, he will adapt for the pianoforte . . . , and a concerto for the pianoforte [the Fourth], for all of which we are to pay him one hundred pounds sterling. The property, however, is only for the British Dominions . . . The Symphony and the overture are wonderfully fine, so that I think I have made a very good bargain. What do you think? I have likewise engaged him to compose two sonatas and a Fantasia for the pianoforte.41

  Beethoven cobbled together the promised piano arrangement of the Violin Concerto, at the same time revising the hastily written solo-violin part. Despite an elaborate new first-movement cadenza, the solo part of the piano version is remarkably sketchy. Beethoven packed off the Fourth Piano Concerto, the Fourth Symphony, and Coriolan to Clementi as a first installment, but the package got waylaid by the ongoing war and never arrived.42 Eventually Clementi put out the first British editions of the Razumovsky Quartets and the Violin and Fourth Piano Concertos; during 1810–11, he issued ten Beethoven works. Clementi’s commission for piano sonatas became opp. 78–79.43 His conquest of the haughty beauty had been gratifying on both sides.

  At the same time, Clementi’s understanding that his edition was going to be only for Britain reflects Beethoven’s pursuit of the kind of multiterritory publishing deals Haydn had arranged (and for which Beethoven had once criticized Haydn). In April Beethoven wrote his publisher friend Simrock in Bonn, “I intend to sell the following six new works to a firm of publishers in France, to one in England, and to one in Vienna simultaneously.” He offered the French rights for all the pieces to Simrock (who finally published only the quartets)—Bonn now being, thanks to Napoleon, part of France. With this method one could be paid for the same piece two or more times. It was all aboveboard but tricky to manage. To forestall piracy, all the editions needed to come out virtually on the same day, but in practice they rarely did. In any case, Beethoven was exhilarated by the prospects when he wrote Count Franz Brunsvik, Josephine’s brother, in Buda. He seems to have picked up some of Clementi’s hilarity:

  I am to get 200 pounds sterling—and, what is more, I shall be able to sell the same works in Germany and France . . . so that by this means I may hope even in my early years to achieve the dignity of a true artist—So, dear B, I need the quartets. I have already asked your sister [Josephine] about this . . . If you can arrange for the Hungarians to invite me to give a few concerts, please do so—you can have me for 200
gold ducats . . .

  Whenever we . . . drink your wine, we souse you, i.e. we drink your health—All good wishes. Hurry—hurry—hurry and send me the quartets . . . Schuppanzigh has got married—to somebody very like him [in girth], I am told—what will their family be like???? Kiss your sister Therese and tell her that I fear that I shall have to become a great man without a monument of hers contributing to my greatness—send me tomorrow, send me immediately the quartets—quar-tets-t-e-t-s.44

  The quartets were the Razumovskys; he had lent the manuscripts to Franz. His reference to Therese von Brunsvik probably refers to her hobby of painting portraits. She never did his.

  The current object of his attentions in Vienna was Fidelio librettist Joseph Sonnleithner’s publishing house, Bureau des arts et d’industrie. By this point his volunteer agent was no longer brother Carl, and brother Johann made some attempts in that direction that only provoked hostility between them. Now his go-between was Ignaz von Gleichenstein, to whom Beethoven wrote that summer, “You may tell my brother [Johann] that I shall certainly never write to him again—Of course I knew the reason for his behavior. It is this: because he has lent me money and has formerly spent a little for me he is (I know my brothers) probably worried because I cannot yet repay the sum; and the other one [Carl], moved by a spirit of revenge against me, is probably egging him on too.”45

  Gleichenstein, soon to be made a baron, was another music-loving amateur, a friend of Haydn’s, a cellist, and a colleague of Stephan von Breuning at the War Ministry. He and Beethoven had known each other for some time; by this summer they used the intimate du address. Gleichenstein had been witness for the signing of the contract between Beethoven and Clementi. As an agent he proved a great deal more expedient than Beethoven’s brothers.

  As for Johann van Beethoven, he badly needed the money he had lent Ludwig and was cannily making his demand for payment when he knew his brother was doing well. Johann was about to buy an apothecary shop in Linz, at a bargain but still beyond his means. Gleichenstein secured the payment from the Bureau des arts et d’industrie, for the same six pieces sold to Clementi, and used the money to pay off the debt to Johann—who the following year took possession of the apothecary shop so desperate for cash that he sold the iron gratings off the windows.46 Johann’s business, however, thanks to the French army, was about to bring him a comfortable fortune.

  Beethoven spent the first part of summer 1807 in Baden, working and taking the waters for the headaches that had bedeviled him for months, then went to Heiligenstadt.47 When he informed Prince Nikolaus Esterházy that the commissioned mass was nearly done, he explained that the headaches “prevented me at first from working at all and even now [have] allowed me to do very little work.” As evidence he enclosed a letter from Dr. Schmidt. His physician had given up treatment with leeches and prescribed spurge-laurel bark to be applied to his arms. One remedy was as useless as the other.48

  It was actually a productive if physically miserable summer, with at least one comic interlude. Beethoven got into the habit of stopping during his walks to admire a comely young farmer’s daughter as she worked in the fields. They never spoke, and Fräulein Liese was not pleased to be ogled by this unhandsome stranger. When her father was arrested for a drunken brawl, Beethoven showed up to remonstrate with the village council and for his vociferousness nearly got himself thrown in jail.49

  Despite the ongoing headaches, he worked with something like his usual discipline, indoors and out, on long walks in the hills and fields. He heard from Count Oppersdorff, who declared himself pleased with the Fourth Symphony he had commissioned and was ready to pay 500 florins for a fifth. Beethoven finished the Esterházy mass, picked up some symphonic sketches from several years back, and plunged in.

  As autumn arrived, he had to break off composing and travel to the Esterházy Palace at Eisenstadt for the premiere of the Mass in C on September 13, celebrating the name day of the princess. He found the attitude of the singers and musicians presaging a fiasco; at the dress rehearsal four of the five altos in the choir did not show up.50 Meanwhile Beethoven discovered that he was not, as he was accustomed to, getting a room to himself in the palace but was relegated to sharing a dank apartment in town with the court secretary of music.

  Who knows what sort of mass Prince Nikolaus and his court expected from Beethoven. Based on precedent, they might have anticipated one of three things: the full operatic, bravura treatment, as in Christus am Ölberge, by then a fairly popular piece; an operatic/symphonic mass on the Haydn model; or perhaps something excitingly bold, Beethovenian. That summer he had humbly written Nikolaus, “I shall hand you the Mass with considerable apprehension, since you, most excellent prince, are accustomed to have the inimitable masterpieces of the great Haydn performed for you—.”51 In terms of formal outline, there were no rules or standards in mass settings, only precedents, and on the whole Beethoven followed Haydn’s models in layout.52 In the end, though, he was looking for something quite new, but this time new in the direction of subtlety and simplicity.

  With due anticipation, the audience for the premiere assembled in the glittering music room of the Esterházy Palace, scene of any number of Haydn triumphs. Beethoven gave the downbeat for the mass, bringing in the basses on their unaccompanied and almost inaudible Kyrie. As the underrehearsed, apathetic performance unfolded, the prince and princess, the court, and the cognoscenti alike would have been befuddled. What they heard was a mass compact, chaste, sometimes ingenuous unto childlike, with echoes of the past from Haydn back to the Renaissance yet largely unlike any other sacred music they had ever heard.

  Beethoven was still searching for a fresh and direct sacred style, far from Christus. On a sketch of the Agnus Dei he wrote, “Utmost simplicity, please, please, please.”53 As he worked he copied out for study passages from Haydn’s Creation Mass. If in some respects he followed his old master’s model, the music hardly sounded like it.54 The court expected brilliant perorations, high drama, suffering, exaltation, all the moods of the text in high-Beethovenian style. What it got was a work gentle, devotional, ceremonial. Often the choir sings in block harmonies, the orchestra is subdued, the music full of exquisite small moments and subtleties that require a loving and nuanced performance—exactly what the premiere was not.

  For a composer, a fiasco is a uniquely traumatic experience, emotionally and physically, even worse when one is on the podium. It plays out excruciatingly slowly as the piece goes on and on and the fidgets and whispers grow in the audience. A bad performance amplifies the misery. Beethoven would have finished the performance in high dudgeon. Nikolaus, meanwhile, was not the liberal and tolerant sort of nobleman Beethoven was used to but an old-fashioned prince who considered composers to be servants. To be served badly by a mere musician sullied his court and his princely dignity.

  After the performance, the cognoscenti and musicians gathered to talk over the music and to give the usual ceremonial congratulations to the composer. When Beethoven appeared, Nikolaus turned to him and barked, “But, my dear Beethoven, what is this you have done?” Presumably he went on to more pointed complaints. Nearby stood court Kapellmeister Johann Nepomuk Hummel, Mozart’s most famous pupil and a more or less friendly rival of Beethoven. Beethoven saw Hummel chuckle at the prince’s response—for all Beethoven knew, chuckled with schadenfreude.55 Based on precedent, what ensued would have been an unpleasant scene and a precipitous flight on Beethoven’s part, as had taken place the year before at the Lichnowsky Palace and at the Theater an der Wien. Legend would have it that he left the palace immediately in a huff. In fact, there was no unpleasant scene. He lingered at the palace for several days, hoping for a performance of a concerto, parts for which had been specially copied for the occasion.

  Nothing came of the concerto and little from the mass, and there would be no more commissions from the house of Esterházy. Another attempt to find his voice as a sacred vocal composer had come to little. Beethoven spent years trying to sell the mass
to one publisher after another, finally giving it to Breitkopf & Härtel for free. Prince Nikolaus wrote a friend, “Beethoven’s mass is unbearably ridiculous and detestable, and I am not convinced that it can ever be performed properly. I am angry and mortified.” But this time Beethoven had held his tongue and burned no bridges. In 1808, Nikolaus sent him 100 florins to help out with a performance of parts of the mass in Vienna.56

  Beethoven added to the pile one more unhappy experiment with sacred music and bided his time. The Mass in C stood, in the end, as something of a disengaged work, like Christus, however contrary in style. Both came from a man who since childhood had rarely been found inside a church. For Beethoven, God was a constant presence, but religious dogma, the liturgy, the kind of incantations chanted over him at his baptism had long since lost their magic. He was, all the same, fond of the piece. “I do not like to say anything about my Mass or myself,” he wrote Breitkopf & Härtel, “but I believe I have treated the text as it has seldom been treated.”57 Certainly he had. It is a unique and beautiful work—only not a particularly exciting one.

  In the midst of this creative frustration, Beethoven returned to a still-simmering romantic frustration, in the form of Countess Josephine Deym. Around the time of the mass performance she wrote him a friendly if guarded note apologizing for some unintended slight and adding, “For a long time I had indeed wished to have news of your health, and I would have inquired about it long ago if modesty had not held me back. Now tell me how you are, what you are doing . . . The deep interest that I take in all that concerns you, and shall take as long as I live, makes me desire to have news about these things. Or does my friend Beethoven, surely I may call you thus, believe that I have changed?”58 They had been in Baden at the same time in July but apparently did not meet. She surely hoped that he had calmed down, was ready to be friend rather than suitor. His response of September 20, from Heiligenstadt, showed otherwise. His passion flared up, along with his breathless dashes on the page: