Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph

by Swafford, Jan

  Dear, beloved and only J! Again even a few lines, only a few lines from you—have given me great pleasure—How often have I wrestled with myself, beloved J, in order not to commit a breach of the prohibition which I have imposed upon myself [not to see her]—But it is all in vain. A thousand voices are constantly whispering to me that you are my only friend, my only beloved—I am no longer able to obey the rule which I imposed upon myself. Oh, dear J, let us wander unconstrainedly along that path where we have often been so happy—Tomorrow or the day after I shall see you . . . Until now my health has continued to be very poor, but it is slowly improving . . . I returned from Eisenstadt a few days ago. I had hardly been back in Vienna for a day when I called on you twice—but I was not so fortunate—as to see you—That hurt me deeply—and I assumed that your feelings had perhaps undergone some change—But I still hope . . . Do not forget—do not condemn / your ever faithfully devoted / Bthvn / I am just coming into town today—and I could almost deliver this letter myself—if I did not suspect that I might for the third time fail to see you.59

  His letter of the next month reveals that Josephine had ordered her servants not to let him in the house. Whatever it took, however she admired him as an artist, she was not going to be tormented by the fury of his love anymore. He learned, if he had not before, that the intimate feelings of women were a quite different matter from the enthusiasm of admirers. It is notable that he never questioned Josephine’s right to make her own decisions and run her own life, even if one of those decisions was to turn him away. There is a wan resignation in his last two surviving letters to her:

  Since I must almost fear that you no longer allow yourself to be found by me—and since I do not care to put up with the refusals of your servant any longer—well then, I cannot come to you any more—unless you let me know what you think about this—Is it really a fact—that you do not want to see me any more—if so—do be frank—I certainly deserve that . . . When I kept away from you, I thought I must do so, because I had an idea that you desired it—although when doing so I suffered a good deal—yet I controlled my feelings—but it occurred to me again later on that—I was mistaken in you . . . Do let me know, dear J—what you think. Nothing shall bind you—In the circumstances I can and certainly dare not say anything more to you.

  And shortly after, still more sadly:

  Please deliver this sonata to your brother, my dear Josephine [the Appassionata, dedicated to Franz Brunsvik]—I thank you for wishing still to appear as if I were not altogether banished from your memory . . . You want me to tell you how I am. A more difficult question could not be put to me—and I prefer to leave it unanswered, rather than—to answer it too truthfully.60

  With that, at least for the foreseeable future, he put Josephine aside, his hopeless dream of marriage one more thing to endure with everything else he had to endure. It was not just that he had fallen helplessly in love with a woman; it was that, perhaps for the first time, he needed a woman, not just a nice wife at his side and some nice children. He felt desperately that he needed love to save him, because he was not so sure he could save himself. But the love he needed did not transpire, and he was left with only himself. Despite all he had been through, he was just beginning to discover how much courage and resilience he was going to require.

  How did he endure the end of this dream? From around this time there would be rumors of a suicide attempt. One story had it that Beethoven went to Countess Erdödy’s estate in Jedlersee and suddenly disappeared. It was assumed he had gone back to Vienna, but after three days a servant found him huddling in the distant parts of the palace garden, apparently trying to starve himself to death.61

  Josephine for her part went on to a second and unmitigatedly disastrous marriage with Baron Christoph von Stackelberg—the marriage having been precipitated by her pregnancy.62 The handsome baron combined qualities of the domineering, the incompetent, and the sinister, with a gift for sowing misery and disaster around him. It was one more aristocratic marriage of the worst kind, with money at the center of it—he had none, and he wanted hers. They became estranged; he appropriated Josephine’s inheritance, having gone through his own; he virtually kidnapped their children and left her to die alone. “What Josephine suffered and endured after her marriage to Stackelberg,” Therese wrote, “—entire books could be written about it.”63 Beethoven remained in touch with Therese and through her received occasional, never good, reports about Josephine. There is no record of whether he and Josephine ever met or corresponded again—though that does not mean it could not have happened.

  His physical headaches, at least, were receding. He was working on Count Oppersdorff’s commission for a fifth symphony, a work he would not give a name but which concerned something in the direction of fate and triumph. When that symphony was done, without stopping for breath he would take up some ideas from the sketchbooks and finish a sixth symphony, that work concerned with peace, contentment, and God.

  21

  Schemes

  AROUND THE END of 1807, Beethoven wrote an elaborate petition to the directors of the Theater an der Wien. His old patron Prince Lobkowitz, now one of the directors of the theater, had encouraged him to try it. His letter to “The Worshipful R. I. Theater Direction” begins,

  The undersigned flatters himself that during his sojourn in Vienna he has won some favor and approval not only from the high nobility but from the general public as well, and that he has secured an honorable acceptance of his works at home and abroad. Nevertheless, he has been obliged to struggle with difficulties of all kinds and has not yet been able to establish himself here in a position which would enable him to fulfill his desire to live wholly for art, to develop his talent to a still higher degree of perfection, which must be the goal of every true artist . . .

  Inasmuch as the undersigned has always striven less for a livelihood than for the interests of art, the ennoblement of taste and the uplifting of his genius towards higher ideals and perfection, it necessarily happened that he often was compelled to sacrifice profit and advantage to the Muse.1

  Here is a sign of a new vision: to live wholly for his art, to secure a steady position and income and to be relieved of the wretched uncertainties of freelancing. In the petition he lays out his proposals and blows his own horn with proper restraint. He applies to himself the word genius, not in the Romantic sense but in the Classical, eighteenth-century sense: a spirit that animates a person’s character, gifts, capacities; not so much what one is but a quality one possesses to a greater or lesser degree.2 So Beethoven uses the term in the sense he grew up with, in the sense Haydn and Mozart used it.

  Further in the letter, Beethoven notes—or rather threatens—that he is on the verge of being driven from Vienna, a city “more estimable and desirable to him than any other.” If other declarations in the petition are earnest enough, that one is balderdash. He still had no love for Vienna and the Viennese and never would. He was entirely open to offers from elsewhere.

  He proceeds to make two concrete and yet, given the direction of his career and the nature of his genius, unlikely suggestions. If the Worshipful Direction will grant him “the means of a comfortable livelihood favorable to the exercise of his talents . . . He promises and contracts to compose every year at least one grand opera . . . [for] a fixed remuneration of 2400 florins per annum and the gross receipts of the third performance of each such opera.” Second, he proposes to supply, gratis, any small operettas, divertissements, choruses, or other occasional pieces desired by the Direction. The idea of his producing “at least” an opera a year plus potboilers to order was one of his regular overestimations of what he could produce—well beyond the stupendous quantity and quality of what he actually was producing in those years. He was slow to pull an opera together and highly choosy about librettos. But his proposal to the theater shows that he believed it was worth devoting most of his time to. In Vienna as in much of Europe, composing opera remained the most direct route to fortune for a compose
r.

  At the end he adds, with a nod to the likely outcome, “Whether or not the Worshipful Direction confirms and accepts this offer, the undersigned adds the request that he be granted a day for a concert in one of the theater buildings.” In the end, even though the directors included his old patron Prince Lobkowitz, they approved neither the residency nor the concert. They knew Beethoven’s history with opera; it had not been pleasant or profitable. Three of the directors were Esterházys, one of them Prince Nikolaus, who had been “angry and mortified” over the mass he commissioned from Beethoven.3 Of course, if Beethoven was the loser in this situation, music may have been the winner. His principal gift was for instrumental music; writing for voices was a perennial struggle for him. If the management of the Theater an der Wien had accepted his proposal and he had actually devoted himself to opera more or less full-time, the future history of opera might have been less enriched than the future history of instrumental music would have been impoverished.

  In any case, Beethoven’s hopes for a benefit had fallen through again. Each failure outraged him more. “I have already become accustomed to the basest and vilest treatment in Vienna,” he wrote playwright friend Heinrich Collin. “I have altogether five written statements about a [concert] day which has never been allotted to me . . . and indeed I have discussed this point with a lawyer—And why should I not do so? . . . Away with all consideration or respect for those vandals of art—.”4

  Beethoven had every reason to be furious over his treatment by the theater management and the rest of the bureaucracy. All the same, those vandals were doing their best for art in other respects. Toward the end of 1807, a group of aristocrats including Lobkowitz founded a subscription series that came to be called the Liebhaber Concerte, Concerts for Enthusiasts. They mounted twenty programs between November 1807 and the next March, giving each one a generous allotment (for those days) of two rehearsals. There was an orchestra of around fifty-five, largely made up of experienced amateurs; the audience was mostly of the nobility. For the final evening of the series they planned a gala performance of Haydn’s Creation. “Every concert,” the directors declared, “must be distinguished by the performance of significant and decidedly splendid music, because the institute has the intention to uphold the dignity of such art and to attain an ever higher perfection.”5

  Half the twenty concerts had Beethoven works, and some of them, including the Eroica, were performed twice.6 For a moment it appeared that Vienna was finally catching up to London and Paris, where public concerts were a normal part of musical life. But like Schuppanzigh’s public quartet series, this one soon collapsed. Vienna remained Europe’s capital of music and also remained conservative, hidebound, existing under the burden of an omnipresent bureaucracy at the service of a reactionary court. A rich and sophisticated private musical life continued to outstrip public life, and Beethoven’s symphonies, ascending in performances and popularity elsewhere, were only occasionally put before the public.7 In fact, during this period symphonies were generally out of fashion in Vienna. Only a few by all composers together were heard in the city. Between 1808 and 1811, not a single Mozart symphony was performed. At the same time, Haydn’s massive oratorio The Creation had thirty-one performances in Vienna during the decade after its 1798 premiere.8

  Despite all Beethoven’s complaining, his patrons continued to favor him above any other composer. In 1808, Prince Razumovsky established a standing string quartet in his palace. At the head, naturally, was Ignaz Schuppanzigh. Often as not the prince sat at second violin. Conductor Ignaz Seyfried wrote of that period, “Beethoven was, as it were, cock of the walk in the princely establishment; everything that he composed was rehearsed hot from the griddle and performed to the nicety of a hair . . . just as he wanted it and not otherwise, with affectionate interest, obedience and devotion such as could spring only from such ardent admirers of his lofty genius, and with a penetration into the most secret intentions of the composer.”9 In that same period, Beethoven was more fed up with the city than ever and scheming to get out of it—or to stay and secure a steady income.

  His health treated him even less kindly than the Viennese. After the slim year of 1807, his production shot up again despite continuing illness and the climax of a series of infections; he came close to having a finger amputated. “My colic is better,” he wrote Collin. “But my poor finger had to undergo a drastic nail operation. When I wrote to you yesterday it looked very angry. Today it is quite limp with pain.”10

  In March 1808 came the gala Liebhaber performance of Haydn’s Creation, celebrating the composer’s seventy-sixth birthday. The concert was an extraordinary honor for an artist who had spent much of his active career neglected by the Viennese while his music spread around the world. Everyone who knew the master understood that any performance could be his last. Three years before, a visitor reported in a letter, “We found him very weak . . . He told us that he was only 74 years old [in fact he was 73] and looks as if he were eighty . . . We found him holding a rosary in his hands, and I believe he passes almost the whole day in prayer.”11 Every day the nearly toothless invalid sat down at the keyboard and devoutly played over his Austrian anthem. It was the only thing musical he could still manage.

  Haydn had to get permission from his doctor to attend the concert, and the doctor accompanied him. His nominal employer Prince Nikolaus Esterházy sent his personal carriage to bring his Kapellmeister to the door of the packed university hall. Four men carried him in lifted high on an armchair. To a flourish of trumpets and drums and cries of “Long live Haydn!,” he was set down next to Princess Esterházy. Noticing he was shivering, the princess wrapped her shawl around him. Other aristocratic ladies followed suit, until Haydn was swathed in elegant robes. As he waited for the oratorio to begin he was handed poems in his honor.

  Antonio Salieri conducted. The orchestra whispered its evocation of Chaos. Finally came the moment everybody waited for: Haydn’s great coup, the explosion of C major on the words “And there was light.” Here was a central metaphor of the age, a joining of freedom, Aufklärung, and the divine. (In Fidelio, Beethoven had composed that same image with his chorus of prisoners emerging into the sun.) Ecstatic applause broke out in the hall. Unbearably moved, Haydn raised trembling hands heavenward toward the source of all creation.12 At intermission his doctor declared the old man could take no more excitement. As the bearers prepared to lift him, Beethoven pushed through the crowd, kissed his teacher’s forehead and hands, knelt at his feet. It was a time to put aside the resentments, the disappointments, the gnawing rivalry Beethoven felt for his teacher. If there were ever a moment the torch was passed from the old master to the Great Mogul, here it was.

  Despite the ongoing deterioration of his hearing, Beethoven still stood before the public. In a charity concert of April 1808, he conducted—rather than soloed in—the Third Piano Concerto, the Coriolan Overture, and the Fourth Symphony. The next month saw what appears to have been the public premiere of the four-year-old Triple Concerto, which had already been published (in parts, not score) the previous year.13 The Fourth Symphony and Coriolan had been privately premiered in March 1807, at the Lobkowitz Palace.14

  The three works in this charity concert form a rich pattern of relationships to the future and the past in Beethoven’s music. The Third Concerto sits on the divide between the old way and the New Path. The others lay out his future.

  In the summer and fall of 1806, he had written the Fourth Symphony in B-flat Major, op. 60, virtually in one breath, hard on the heels of finishing the revised version of Leonore. For the Fourth Symphony he put aside work on the Fifth. As with the Second, an operatic quality hovers over the Fourth. (The first sketches appear in the middle of ones for Leonore.)15 If it is less mercurial and buffa than the Second, it is no less vivacious. Meanwhile its opening melodic gambit traces the same motif as the opening of the Fifth Symphony, in a dramatically different atmosphere. Both symphonies begin with two falling thirds joined by a rising st
ep, but where the Fifth is driving and dynamic out of the gate, in the Fourth that motif begins a darkly misterioso introduction.16 Call it a nocturnal scene as prelude to a romantic-comic opera.

  The Fourth conjures a series of atmospheres, from nocturnal to romantic to rambunctious. Two elements of its opening will abide: one is the falling third from B-flat to an out-of-key G-flat. Both notes turn up in various situations and guises, memorably as F-sharp and A-sharp toward the end of the development, bringing the music to distant B major. The other element is falling thirds joined by a step, the motif of the first bars. That motif is going to be sped up and otherwise played with rhythmically, used as a seed to grow new themes.

  The darkness of the introduction sinks into silence. Then in a flash the music takes a turn to gaiety with a series of driving up-rips, as if a door were thrown open to a brightly lit ballroom. And from the opening up-rips, echoing ones Mozart used in the Jupiter Symphony and elsewhere, to the bouncing comic gait of the first allegro, the rhythmic quality is Mozartian—operatically Mozartian.17 Like the Violin Concerto, written equally fast just after this symphony, the thematic material is generally simple and without contrapuntal elaboration. There was not much time for complexities. Like the Violin Concerto’s opening on a timpani pulse, as in the Third Piano Concerto’s thematic timpani figure, in the Fourth the timpani sometimes steps into the foreground as a kind of protagonist, transcending its old association with military and festive music. At the end of the development, as a joke for connoisseurs, the music ends up in B major, but the fixed-tuning timpani insists that the A-sharp is really B-flat and so prepares the recapitulation.