A cello sonata and two piano trios, each a distinct personality. All these chamber pieces form an illustration of something Beethoven said more than once: he based all his pieces on a story or an image and wrote the music to fit it. Recall the Romeo and Juliet backstory in his first string quartet. But in all but a few cases, Beethoven as a matter of policy did not tell the world what his model stories were. They were his own business, another part of his workshop that he did not want the world snooping in. He wanted his listeners to write their own stories, their own poems, to his work. Which is to say that he was too wise in his art to compromise one of the important things about music, perhaps the most important of all: its mystery.
Summer 1808 found Beethoven on Kirchengasse in Heiligenstadt, his main project to finish the Sixth Symphony. (He did not hold his crisis of 1802 against the rural spa town.) He seems to have finished the Fifth Symphony early that year, after nearly four years of off-and-on work on it. His room looked out to the street. The inner rooms, around a garden, were rented to the Grillparzer family, whose son Franz was a budding poet. He had encountered Beethoven before, at the home of his uncle, Beethoven’s librettist Joseph Sonnleithner. Grillparzer recalled that in this summer his mother took to standing in the courtyard listening to Beethoven play as he composed. When he caught her at it, he did not play another note aloud all summer.24 This female enthusiast became another victim of Beethoven’s iron unforgivingness.
Just as he always had pieces in progress, he also generally had schemes going. He returned to his dogged campaign to sell pieces to Breitkopf & Härtel. “The tutor of the young Count Schönfeld,” he wrote Gottfried Härtel in June, “. . . assures me that you would again like to have some of my works—Although, since our relations have been broken off so frequently, I am almost convinced this resumption . . . will again lead to nothing.” He offers them the two new symphonies, the cello sonata, the Mass in C. Other publishers would be happy to take them, he says, but “I would prefer your firm to all others.” On one point he is particularly insistent: “You must take the Mass or else I can’t give you the other works—for I pay attention not only to what is profitable but also to what brings honor and glory.”25 The particular honor and glory he may have had in mind was putting his mass up against Haydn’s—a delusional idea, if he hoped to challenge their popularity.
At that point Härtel was not remotely interested in the mass. He would take a great deal of convincing. In another letter Beethoven offered it to him for nothing and said he would pay to have it copied. Härtel did not budge. (He finally published it, grudgingly, in 1812.) Soon Beethoven gave up on the mass. Breitkopf & Härtel received the Fifth and Sixth Symphonies, the op. 69 Cello Sonata, and the two Piano Trios op. 70—every one of them among the greatest examples of their genre. The price Beethoven asked was 600 florins; he got a little over 400, three months’ living at best.26 Later when he received the proofs of the Cello Sonata from Härtel, he discovered they were unbelievably infested with mistakes. In a letter he meticulously corrected them. The corrections were ignored.
That summer he wrote Collin hoping for another opera libretto, only “I should like this time a libretto without dancing and recitatives.” He may have been sketching on Collin’s Macbeth, but that never got far, though the ideas perhaps served for the Ghost Trio. He had gently put off the playwright’s Bradamante because it had magical elements, which appealed to him even less than dancing and recitatives. “I cannot deny that on the whole I am prejudiced against this sort of thing,” he wrote, “because it has a soporific effect on feeling and reason.” (True, Mozart’s Zauberflöte, the definition of a magical opera, was his favorite. But he had no intention of competing with Mozart in that kind of story, still less in his trademark sex comedies.) “In any case,” he sighed, “I think that we shall probably have to wait a bit; for that is what those worshipful and high and mighty theatrical directors have decreed—I have so little reason to expect anything favorable from them that the thought that I shall certainly have to leave Vienna and become a wanderer haunts me persistently.”27
Back in Vienna he moved into the Krügerstrasse apartment of another patron, the Hungarian countess Anna Marie Erdödy. Lichnowsky had an apartment in the same building, but the resentments of their 1806 quarrel lingered and they saw little of each other. There seems to have been nothing romantic between Beethoven and the countess—they would have been more circumspect if there had been. But they were on easy terms and stayed that way, except for the usual quarrel that arose sooner or later with anyone in Beethoven’s proximity. Erdödy gave him a patient and sympathetic ear; he called her his Beichtvater, his father confessor. He gave her the dedication of the op. 70 Trios, finished at her house. In many ways, the countess’s story was similar to Beethoven’s other aristocratic patrons, only more so: she was a fine amateur pianist and a grand eccentric, having been relieved by separation of an unhappy marriage to a Hungarian count, and with three children to rear.
Like Josephine Deym, this countess was a celebrated beauty. Unlike Josephine, she was comfortably rich, and more or less an invalid. A chronic condition swelled her feet and kept her often in bed. Much of her activity involved limping painfully from one piano to another, often to play Beethoven in musical soirees at her house. She was reported to be, in spite of everything, cheerful and high-spirited. Police reports of the time, however, describe her as “depraved.” That may have meant something as simple as her being denounced by a spy for criticizing the government. Or Erdödy may have taken opium, a common painkiller in those days.28
Around October Beethoven suddenly received an offer to become Kapellmeister for the soi-disant king of Westphalia in Cassel, which lay in northwestern Germany. This king was none other than Jérôme Bonaparte, youngest brother of the French conqueror, who had established his family in similar positions all over the map. Jérôme had led a rambling youth. Sent off to sea by Napoleon in 1800, he stopped for two years in the United States and, to the consternation of his family, married the daughter of a Baltimore millionaire. (He was expected to marry into the European nobility.) Napoleon had the marriage annulled and banned the woman from any of his territories. Jérôme protested, to no avail; his American wife bore his son in London and never saw him again.
Effective service in the Prussian campaign of 1806 got Jérôme back in Napoleon’s good graces. He was installed in Westphalia and supplied by his brother with a more appropriate mate, Princess Catherine of Württemberg, a cousin of Tsar Alexander I. “The wellbeing of your people is important to me,” Napoleon wrote him in a cautionary letter, “not only for the influence that it will have on your glory and mine, but also for the prospect of Europe as a whole.” (Note the order of values.) “It is essential that your people enjoy a liberty, an equality, a wellbeing unknown to the people of Germany.” Jérôme remained something of a loose cannon. Even for a ruler of the time, he was excessively fond of military pomp and finery, of parties and mistresses. His subjects dubbed him König Lustig, “King Merry.” But his imposition of Napoleonic reforms, including the Civil Code and a parliament, made him popular, for a time, with his people.
Jérôme’s offer to Beethoven was not a sign of his musical sophistication. It was designed to bring luster to a puppet court. He already had the services of the finest painters in Napoleonic France to glorify himself and his queen, and he had extravagant architectural plans for his capital. As the offer to Beethoven stated, the only duties of the court Kapellmeister were to conduct a few concerts and play occasionally for the king. Beethoven would have unlimited access to the court orchestra and freedom to travel and pursue his own projects. The proffered salary was a handsome 600 gold ducats, around 2,700 florins, plus 1,000 more for travel expenses.29 Perhaps Beethoven knew and approved that the court’s religious commissar, one Wuerschmidt, was a proud Freemason and former Illuminatus.30 Such things on an official’s resume were unthinkable in Vienna.
Now Beethoven had an escape route from Vienna, if he chose to ta
ke it. At the beginning of November he wrote Count Oppersdorff, commissioner of the Fourth and Fifth Symphonies, “I have been offered an appointment as Kapellmeister to the King of Westphalia and it may well be that I shall accept this offer.” With that he left the door open to a better offer. It is entirely possible that he kept Jérôme Bonaparte on the line as a bargaining chip. Did he really believe he could be happy as a servant in a gaudy French puppet court? Did he consider the job a way of reaching Napoleon himself?
In March he had written Oppersdorff a jovial letter about “your symphony”: “The last movement of the symphony has three trombones and a piccolo—and, although, it is true, there are not three kettledrums, yet this combination of instruments will make a more pleasing noise than six kettledrums.”31 Then he began putting off Oppersdorff concerning the disposal and dedication of the symphonies the count had commissioned. He wrote in the November letter, “You will probably have formed an unfavorable impression of me. But necessity drove me to hand over to someone else the symphony which I composed for you [the Fifth], and another one as well [the Sixth]—Rest assured, however, that you will soon receive the symphony which is specially intended for you [the Fourth].”32 Oppersdorff naturally expected dedications for the Fourth and Fifth in return for commissioning them. In the end both Fifth and Sixth ended up dedicated to older and more generous patrons, Princes Lobkowitz and Razumovsky, and the Fourth to Oppersdorff. He may have formed the unfavorable impression Beethoven was concerned about, because there is no indication of further business or communication between them.33
By early November Beethoven had agreed to conduct an orchestral concert of his works—including the popular Coriolan but none of the new pieces—for a benefit at the Theater an der Wien. There commenced the hectic slate of arrangements and complaints and threats that accompanied all his public endeavors. During the month he wrote promoter and friend Count Moritz Dietrichstein:
I could not get the concerto. And even if I had got it, it would have been no good. For at the Theater . . . I have had the experience of hearing performers play from rough copies. You cannot ask me to expose my compositions to the uncertainty of a performance which is likely to fail. I will come to the meeting on Monday, although indeed I know that my presence is quite unnecessary, because people never pay any attention to what I say . . .
[A few days later:] If I have to experience a repetition of what happened at the rehearsal on Saturday, nobody will ever persuade me to have anything more to do in the slightest way with this unfortunate concert.34
But he did conduct at the unfortunate charity concert, and the upshot of it was that the “Worshipful Direction” of the Theater an der Wien finally, after he had spent two years begging them, allowed him a concert on December 22—just over a month from the charity concert. Both programs were a testament to the speed at which orchestral programs could be pulled together in those days.
To add to the frenzy, as he had done in his earlier Vienna benefits Beethoven decided to compose a new work to make a grand finale for the concert. The previous hasty productions had been the First Symphony and Christus am Ölberge. Why he needed a splashy finish for a program that already was to include the premieres of the Fifth and Sixth Symphonies and Fourth Piano Concerto is hard to conceive. But as always, his resolve once made was implacable. He began to cobble together a fantasia for solo piano, orchestra, and chorus using an old tune from the sketchbooks, and found a poet to whip up a text about the splendors of music. The opening of the piece would be a piano solo he would improvise on the spot.
His letters in this month of frantic labors are some of the cheeriest he had written in years. As part of his attempt to secure soprano Anna Milder, his first Leonore, he wrote his old Florestan, Joseph August Röckel, “Be sure to make a very good arrangement with Milder . . . tomorrow I will come myself to kiss the hem of her garment.” He was still promising Collin to compose the playwright’s libretto Bradamante: “Great and Enraged Poet!!!!! Give up Reichardt—and use my notes for your poetry. I promise that . . . immediately after my concert which, to counterbalance its purpose of putting some money into my pocket, is robbing me of a good deal of my time, I will go to you, and then we will start work on the opera at once.” He deplored the magical elements in Bradamante and had no real intention of setting it. But he liked Collin and probably considered him the best available prospect to produce a workable libretto.
Beethoven knew that Collin, frustrated with being put off, had shown the libretto to visiting composer Johann Friedrich Reichardt, who was anxious to set it (and eventually did, with no success). Reichardt, then fifty-six and well known, had just arrived in Vienna eager to take in its musical atmosphere and perhaps to make himself part of it. One of his first endeavors was to seek out Beethoven at Countess Erdödy’s. (As his letter shows, they had met before at some point.) Reichardt was a sharp observer of people and events, and his letters, which he soon got in print, paint a vivid portrait of Beethoven and Vienna in the months Reichardt visited there:
I have also sought out and visited the good Beethoven. People pay so little attention to him here that no one could tell me where he lives, and it entailed quite a lot of trouble on my part to locate him. [The difficulty was more likely due to Beethoven’s constant relocations.] Finally I found him in a large, desolate and lonely apartment. At first he looked as dark as his own lodgings, but soon became more cheerful and even seemed as pleased to see me again as I was heartily glad to see him. He also told me a lot of things which were important for me to know, all in a very frank and agreeable manner. His is a powerful nature, like a Cyclops in appearance but at the same time very intimate, hearty, and good. He lives and spends a good deal of time with a Hungarian Countess Erdödy who lives in the front part of the large house. But he has become quite estranged from Prince Lichnowsky who lives in the upper part of the same house.35
Among the things Beethoven told Reichardt about was the offer from Cassel. This was a considerable shock to the visitor, because as far as Reichardt knew he currently occupied that position himself.36 Though he had not been happy in Cassel and may have had no intention of going back, he did not appreciate being replaced without notice. Reichardt advised Beethoven in the strongest terms not to take the job.
In early December Reichardt attended a house concert:
The whole pleasant impression was once more destroyed by Beethoven’s overwhelming, gigantic overture to Collin’s Coriolan. My brain and my heart almost burst from the hammer blows and shrillness within the narrow rooms, especially as everyone tried . . . to increase the noise in view of the fact that the composer was present. It gave me great pleasure to see dear Beethoven being much fêted, particularly because he has the unfortunate, hypochondriac whim that everyone here persecutes and despises him. His highly obstinate character may well scare off many of the kind-hearted and gay Viennese . . . It really upsets me very deeply when I see this basically good and remarkable man looking gloomy and suffering. Although I am convinced, on the other hand, that his best and most original works can only be produced when he is in a stubborn and deeply morose state of mind.37
A couple of weeks later, on December 22, 1808, Reichardt was sitting in Prince Lobkowitz’s box when, at 6:30 p.m., in the unheated Theater an der Wien, Beethoven gave the downbeat for the premiere of the Sixth Symphony, commencing one of the most remarkable and outlandish concerts in the history of music. Reichardt and Lobkowitz were among the shivering survivors still in their seats when the concert ended at 10:30.
22
Darkness to Light
NEAR THE END of 1808, the Weiner Zeitung ran an advertisement for a “musical Akademie” whose scope and ambition were extraordinary to the point of absurd:
On Thursday, December 22, Ludwig van Beethoven will have the honor to give a musical Akademie in the R. I. Priv. Theater-an-der-Wien. All the pieces are of his composition, entirely new, and not yet heard in public . . . First Part: 1, A Symphony, entitled: “A Recollection of Countr
y Life,” in F major (No. 5). 2, Aria. 3, Hymn with Latin text, composed in the church style with chorus and solos. 4, Pianoforte Concerto, played by himself.
Second part. Grand Symphony in C minor (no. 6). 2, Hymn, with Latin text composed in the church style with chorus and solos. 3, Fantasia for Pianoforte alone. 4, Fantasia for the Pianoforte which ends with the gradual entrance of the entire orchestra and the introduction of choruses as a finale.1
Beethoven placed the notice himself. The program was only the third he had mounted for his benefit since he arrived in Vienna, and it had been five years since the most recent concert. For the last two of those years, his creativity had burned at white heat while the Viennese bureaucracy kept him waiting for a venue. The result was an overstuffed program, compounded by his decision to present solo and choral pieces to contrast the orchestral ones, and his determination to whip up the stem-winding Choral Fantasy to end the evening.
His claim that all the pieces were “entirely new” is, of course, not entirely true. Four were premieres and three not. The numbering of the symphonies is the reverse of the order in which he finally published them. The two movements of the Mass in C are called “hymns,” because music from the Latin liturgy was not allowed in secular concerts; the texts had to be translated into German. In all that planning Beethoven paid no attention to the time and the season. The concert amounted to some four hours of what was doomed to be underrehearsed music in an unheated hall in the dark of winter.
Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph Page 56