Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph

by Swafford, Jan

  Archduke Rudolph, the leading force in the agreement, was then twenty-one and about to become the most loyal, important, and demanding patron Beethoven ever had. As half brother of the reigning emperor Franz I, Rudolph was a prime catch. He had been reared with the usual princely curriculum of languages, court protocol, fencing, and dancing, but his passion was for music. Not satisfied with the palace music teacher, Rudolph began studying piano with Beethoven as early as 1804 (the exact date fell by the wayside), and he wanted to compose. By 1808, he had earned enough of Beethoven’s gratitude to get the dedication of the Fourth Piano Concerto, the first of many dedications to him.

  The archduke’s health had always been delicate, and he suffered from the old Habsburg affliction of epilepsy. As a result, the chubby and good-natured youth had been directed away from the usual military career of men in the royal family. (His brother Archduke Karl was commander in chief of the Austrian army.) Rudolph chose the only other real option he had, the church. He took minor orders in 1805, at age seventeen, and gained the right of succession as archbishop of Olmütz. Rudolph’s interest in music was another royal tradition, but he pursued it with unusual dedication. He could have succeeded to the archbishopric in 1811, but passed it up likely because he wanted to concentrate on his studies.2 If it was considered proper for an archduke to amuse himself playing the piano and composing, however, there was no question of his becoming a professional musician. Rudolph was born into a family of emperors; that was his profession.

  Rudolph assembled a music library that by 1814 had some 5,700 pieces by 825 composers, and it grew from there.3 Early on he opened his library to Beethoven. Most likely Rudolph had met Beethoven at musicales in which he performed at Prince Lobkowitz’s palace.4 Visiting composer J. F. Reichardt heard Rudolph and was impressed both by his handling of Mozart and by his personality: “The Archduke is so modest and unassuming in his whole demeanor, and so informal, that it is easy to be near him.”5

  So this gentle brother of an emperor was the galvanizing figure, both with money and influence, in the initiative to keep Beethoven in Vienna. By early February 1809, the annuity agreement was in the polishing stage. Beethoven wrote his friend Baron Gleichenstein, “His Lordship Archduke Rudolph again wanted to insert a few more items such as and, but, and whereas—Please make the whole statement refer exclusively to the true practice of my art in a way that will suit me.” When Rudolph’s ands and buts were in place, the formal contract was dated March 1. It begins,

  The daily demonstrations which Herr Ludwig van Beethoven gives of his extraordinary talent and genius as a musical artist and composer have aroused the desire that he may surpass the great expectations warranted by the experiences heretofore achieved.

  Since, however, it has been demonstrated that only a man as free from cares as possible can devote himself to one profession excluding all other occupations, and thus be enabled to create great and sublime works ennobling the arts, therefore the undersigned have come to a decision to place Herr Ludwig van Beethoven in the position wherein his most pressing requirements will not be of embarrassment to him, nor in any way inhibit his powerful genius.

  The undersigned were three: His Imperial Highness Archduke Rudolph, who guaranteed 1,500 florins per annum; the noble Prince Lobkowitz, who added 700; and the noble Prince Ferdinand Kinsky, who took the leading part at 1,800, all totaling 4,000 florins a year. This was not the kind of money one built palaces with, but it was some four times the salary of a middle-class civil servant. To it Beethoven could add fees from commissions, publications, and students. The stipend more or less made up, then, what he had lost in earnings for keyboard performances because of his encroaching deafness. Besides, in theory, the annuity was a reliable sinecure, while income from performing had always been dicey.

  At the same time, for some unknown reason Beethoven expected soon to be named imperial Kapellmeister. He agreed that if he were so appointed, his salary at court would be deducted from the annuity. Probably understanding that this was not likely to happen, that Beethoven could never be a courtier and a composer on call, the sponsors agreed that “should such an appointment not come about” or if he were incapacitated, the stipend would continue for life. In return, Beethoven promised nothing except that he would not move out of Austria or travel out of the country without permission from the contracting parties.6

  That Rudolph and Lobkowitz signed the contract is as expected. That the names of Razumovsky and several other important patrons are missing is surprising. Prince Lichnowsky contributed nothing, perhaps a sign of lingering tension over the fracas of 1806 that ended Lichnowsky’s own annuity to Beethoven. Curiously, the largest share in the new annuity came from Prince Ferdinand Johann Nepomuk Kinsky. The contract of 1809 is the first surviving evidence of any connection between Beethoven and that prince. Nor is the then-twenty-seven-year-old Kinsky on record as being an active patron of musicians. He was an officer in the Austrian army. Soon after signing the contract he left town to fight the French and apparently forgot all about the annuity.7

  At age thirty-eight, Beethoven had secured something few artists ever enjoy: a guarantee of a prosperous and independent life devoted to his work. It seemed almost too good to be true—and as it turned out, it was too good, too easy. After a brief period of elation, Beethoven sank into depression. His work began a long decline—less in quality than in quantity. He would never again approach the nearly superhuman level of production he had sustained since the Heiligenstadt crisis of 1802. And watching his annuity being eroded from a combination of happenstance, economics, and death, Beethoven would come to see the contract as a millstone around his neck.

  Around this time Beethoven fell into in a wrangle with Countess Erdödy, one of the contract’s first promoters. It was a fine mess of misunderstanding seasoned by Beethoven’s paranoia. Since fall 1808, he had been living in rooms in her apartment. The cause of the fight is obscure, but it had to do with a male servant on the countess’s staff who was working for Beethoven and whose income, it appears, she covertly supplemented. It may have been a matter as simple as Beethoven’s offended pride that a patron would keep a servant on the job by adding to the salary he was paying. Given the mysteries of the countess, however, he may have suspected something more sinister. On a sketch of his current project, the Fifth Piano Concerto, he wrote in fury, “Beethoven is no servant. You wanted a servant, now you have one . . . Indeed you have gotten a servant in place of the master. What a replacement!! What a magnificent exchange!!!!” From that it seems he had concluded that the countess was paying the man for more intimate services than housework.8

  Beethoven usually fled after these blowups, and so he did again. He took the first flat in Vienna he could find, which happened to be a residence on Walfischgasse that also sported a brothel. He began a torturous campaign to find a better apartment, Baron Zmeskall scouting places and getting himself tied up in Beethovenian knots.

  Before long Beethoven was persuaded that Countess Erdödy had actually been bribing the servant so the man would put up with his troublesome employer. Beethoven felt, he wrote to Zmeskall, “compelled to believe in this generosity, but I refuse to allow it to be practiced any longer.”9 Erdödy duly received one of his apologies: “I have acted wrongly, it is true—forgive me. If I offended you, it was certainly not due to deliberate wickedness on my part—Only since yesterday evening have I really understood how things are; and I am very sorry that I behaved as I did—Read your note calmly, and then judge for yourself whether I have deserved it and whether you have not paid me back sixfold for all I have done . . . Do write just one word to say that you are fond of me again. If you don’t do this I shall suffer infinite pain.”10 This had become his formula for telling people they were important to him, and for manipulating them: Do what I ask or you will cause me pain. Even though he and Erdödy were soon back on friendly footing, he did not move back into her comfortable flat, but in April he escaped the rooms over the brothel for a nicer place. Eve
n when he took comfortable and elegant lodgings, however, he had a gift for turning them into depressing hovels.

  He had hardly run out of bile. This winter he was also feuding with Carl, who remained, in practice, the most fractious of the Beethoven brothers. Ludwig wrote Johann, “If only God would give to our other worthy brother instead of his heartlessness—some feeling—he causes me an infinite amount of suffering. Indeed with my poor hearing I surely need to have someone always at hand.” Married, working as a clerk in the Department of Finance, and with a young son, Carl had largely bailed out of serving as Beethoven’s agent and lackey. The details of this friction are also obscure, but it may have stemmed from a set-to involving Stephan von Breuning, who had heard doubts about Carl’s integrity from a colleague at the Ministry of War. Stephan told Ludwig, who told Carl, who pitched a fit with the originator of the story. Among the three of them, old wounds reopened.11

  The blows kept coming. In this period Breuning, one of Beethoven’s oldest friends, lost his young and talented wife of less than a year, Julie von Vering. Beethoven had been fond of Julie, often played piano duets with her, and dedicated to her the piano version of the Violin Concerto (the violin version is dedicated to Stephan). After Julie died, Beethoven wrote his friend Baron Gleichenstein, “I find it impossible to resist my impulse to tell you of my fears about Breuning’s hysterical and feverish condition and at the same time to beg you so far as possible to attach yourself to him more closely . . . My circumstances allow me far too little time to discharge the supreme duties of friendship. So I beg you . . . to shoulder the burden of this anxiety which is really torturing me.”12 In other words, Beethoven was asking a proxy to do his consoling for him. Again, his main plea was based on the pain it caused him. Still, this amounted, in his fashion, to an act of kindness to Stephan.

  Despite all this trouble, work on the Fifth Piano Concerto went well, perhaps marking a burst of creative energy after signing the annuity contract. Even with signs of war on the horizon, music in Vienna was bustling as usual. In early March, Beethoven’s op. 69 Cello Sonata had its premiere, the cello played by Schuppanzigh’s quartet-playing colleague Nikolaus Kraft, the piano by Baroness Dorothea von Ertmann. The baroness, probably once a pupil of Beethoven’s, had become one of his favored keyboard interpreters.13 His pet name for her was “Dorothea-Cäcilia,” after the patron saint of musicians.14 In one of his reports on the Viennese musical scene, J. F. Reichardt raved about Ertmann, “A lofty noble manner and a beautiful face full of deep feeling increase my expectation still further at the first sight of the noble lady; and then as she performed a great Beethoven sonata I was surprised as almost never before. I have never seen such power and innermost tenderness combined even in the greatest virtuosi; from the tip of each finger her soul poured forth . . . Everything that is great and beautiful in art was turned into song.”15 In those days women instrumentalists were still ­effectively banned from the public stage, but they were central to private musical life, which remained the most important avenue for chamber and solo music. As has been noted before, only once in Beethoven’s lifetime was a sonata of his performed in public. And he valued a powerful champion when he heard one.

  Ertmann was not in Beethoven’s intimate circle, but there was an enormous respect and sympathy between them. At one point when she had lost a child, Beethoven invited her over, sat down at the piano, and said, “Now we will converse in music.” For more than an hour he improvised for her. “He said everything to me,” Ertmann later told Felix Mendelssohn, “and finally gave me consolation.”16 It must have been a heartrending scene, Beethoven making music for a bereaved woman who played and understood his work as well as anybody alive. He gave voice to her grief and offered her hope. Here was a microcosm of what all his music does: it captures life in its breadth of sorrow and joy, spoken to and for the whole of humanity. Beneath the paranoid, misanthropic, often unbearable surface, Beethoven was among the most generous of men.

  Shortly after he signed the annuity contract in March 1809, Beethoven sent a copy to Gleichenstein and observed gaily,

  You will see from the enclosed document, my dear, kind Gleichenstein how honorable my remaining here has now become for me—Moreover the title of Imperial Kapellmeister is to follow . . . now you can help me look for a wife. Indeed you might find some beautiful girl at F[reiburg] where you are at present, and one who would perhaps now and then grant a sigh to my harmonies . . . If you do find one, however, please form the connection in advance—But she must be beautiful, for it is impossible for me to love anything that is not beautiful—or else I should have to love myself.17

  In those days a man usually married only after settling into a profession. Beethoven was feeling relatively healthy and after the annuity relatively prosperous, so it was a natural time to think again of marriage. His flippancy quickly receded when he was faced with the reality of courtship and the discouraging prospect of what he really had to offer.

  In Vienna the more pressing concern of March 1809 was Austria’s latest declaration of war on France. Napoleon was at the zenith of his career, absolute dictator of his country and unrivaled on the battlefield. In 1806, he imposed the Continental System on his territories, the massive—and generally ineffective—blockade of Britain. He had neutralized the Russians by an arrangement with Tsar Alexander, and controlled most of the German states under the Confederation of the Rhine. His brother Louis ruled Holland; brother Jérôme, Westphalia; brother Joseph, Spain; and a stepson, most of Italy. Pope Pius VII had excommunicated Napoleon and stood as a powerful voice of resistance in Italy. To address that problem, in July 1809, French troops broke into the Vatican and kidnapped the pope. He was held in luxurious exile for five years.

  The new coalition against the French joined Austria and Great Britain, with the support of occupied but rebellious Spain. A familiar story commenced. Once again the French army marched toward Vienna, once again the imperial family and much of the aristocracy packed up and fled. Among them was Archduke Rudolph. Beethoven drafted a sonata movement as an affectionate farewell, calling it Das Lebewohl, “The Farewell.” He waited until after Rudolph returned to finish more movements.

  As the French neared Vienna, Rudolph’s brother Archduke Maximilian proposed to defend the city with sixteen thousand troops, one thousand conscripted students and artists, some militia, and other rags and tatters of forces. Reaching the walls of the city, the French demanded surrender. Maximilian declined. The French parked twenty howitzers on the heights of the Spittelberg and began shelling. Once again the Viennese sprinted for cover in vaults and cellars. Vienna had cannons on the bastions of the town, but apparently they never fired a shot. During the barrage, Beethoven retired to brother Carl’s basement, where he huddled miserably with pillows over his ears as explosions lit up the city.

  Meanwhile Napoleon ordered a bridge of boats over the Danube, and his troops entered town by way of the Prater park, outside the walls.18 After a day’s charade of resistance the white flag went up on the walls of Vienna. By May 13, Napoleon was back in his old headquarters in the emperor’s summer palace at Schönbrunn. A Count Andréossy issued a proclamation to the Viennese: “An aggression as unjust as unforeseen, and the chances of war have brought before your eyes for the third time, the Emperor NAPOLEON, King of Italy, Protector of the Confederation of the Rhine . . . I shall prove myself to be faithful to his plans . . . striving incessantly for the maintenance of order, for the repression of all unjust acts, and in a word, for all that will assure your tranquility.”19 This second French occupation was again relatively gentle, unlike in Spain where the French met fierce resistance and atrocities were ongoing on both sides. In Vienna the French were quick to impose not only restrictions but pointed new freedoms. A newspaper notice said, “All persons who have forbidden books on deposit at the former Censorship Bureau may now claim them.” Banned plays, including Schiller’s Don Carlos and Wilhelm Tell and Goethe’s Egmont, returned to the Viennese stage.20

 
There were relatively few casualties in the bombardment of Vienna. They included a perhaps delayed one. On May 12 a shell exploded outside Haydn’s house with a concussion that shook the place and scared the wits out of his servants. The old man heaved himself up and cried defiantly, “Children, don’t be frightened. Where Haydn is, nothing can happen to you!” But the shock left him prostrate. On May 26, in the new occupation, a French officer called and in a strong voice sang him an aria from The Creation. In tears, Haydn declared that he had never heard it sung so beautifully. Later that day he assembled the household and, at the piano, played for them, three times over, with all the passion he had left in him, his simple and eloquent Austrian anthem. The next day he took to bed, whispering, “Children, be comforted, I am well,” and began to drift in and out of consciousness. Haydn died peacefully on May 31, at seventy-seven.21 He had been an honorary member of the French Institute of Arts and Sciences, and many French soldiers and officers were in the funeral train. In the ceremonies at the Schottenkirche the music was the Requiem of his beloved friend Mozart.22 Now, Beethoven was the only peer of Haydn alive. And only now did he begin to speak with admiration of his teacher.

  During the occupation Beethoven was visited by a music-loving French diplomat, Baron de Trémont, who found the composer in a good mood. He reported the visit in a memoir. Before going to Vienna, he had asked Luigi Cherubini in Paris for a letter of introduction. “I will give you one to Haydn,” Cherubini said, “and that excellent man will make you welcome, but I will not write to Beethoven. I should have to reproach myself that he refused to receive someone recommended by me. He is an unlicked bear!” Beethoven’s once-inseparable Bonn friend Anton Reicha, now also in Paris, wrote a letter for Trémont but warned that Beethoven hated the French and was, moreover, “morose, ironical, misanthropic.”