The atmosphere and the pianism of op. 81 are as individual as in any of his sonatas. It begins with a solemn three-note horn call. So we can’t miss the point, Beethoven writes over these notes Le-be-wohl. After a poignant and searching adagio introduction a pealing Allegro breaks out, everything pervaded with the Lebewohl motif.39 We can interpret the movement, if we like, as the bustling preparations for a journey. The sadness of departure arrives with the coda, which ends with fading farewells echoing into the distance, the harmonies overlapping in a singular way, like horn calls echoing across a valley.
Next comes “Absence,” with its trancelike atmosphere, sorrow and hope locked in an unresolved cycle that can be broken only by “The Return,” which serves as finale. It starts with a jubilant shout of greeting that takes up and embroiders the Lebewohl motif, then sinks to a calm joy expressed in brilliant and inventive piano sonorities. Echoing the end of the first movement, the coda has a wonderful warmth, with echoes of the farewell motif resolved into the settled happiness of reunion.
History would mostly remember op. 81a with a French title, Les adieux, because Breitkopf & Härtel first published it that way. Beethoven was put out about the change. To Härtel he made an insightful linguistic point, noting that the German farewell is more intimate and significant than the French: “I have just received the ‘Lebewohl’ and so forth. I see that after all you have published other c[opies] with a French title. Why, pray? For ‘Lebewohl’ means something quite different from ‘Les Adieux.’ The first is said in a warm-hearted manner to one person, the other to a whole assembly, to entire towns.”40 Here was another small battle with a publisher in which Beethoven was entirely in the right, and which he lost.
After this effusion of solo piano music in 1809–10, he put away sonatas for another five years.
Another product of 1809, a year Beethoven said in June was producing only “a fragment here and there,” was the warm and ingratiating String Quartet in E-flat Major, op. 74, eventually dubbed the Harp for its striking pizzicatos. For some reason Beethoven had gotten stuck on E-flat major. Between 1809 and early 1811, he wrote four major works in that key: the Emperor Concerto, Harp Quartet, Lebewohl Sonata, and Archduke Trio. Only the Lebewohl carried Beethoven’s own title, and none of the pieces are in a “heroic” E-flat major.
The Harp begins with a gentle, flowing introduction, harmonically and metrically wandering but untroubled, that keeps turning up a foreign D-flat in the middle of what purports to be E-flat major. Here is a “sore” note, the same pitch as in the Eroica Symphony, also important to the Serioso Quartet, that will again have its resonances. But in keeping with the untroubled mood of this quartet, it is not a particularly sore note. A forthright Allegro breaks out with an eighteenth-century atmosphere, until the transition to the second theme injects some pizzicatos rare for the time in being in the foreground of the music rather than an accompaniment.41 As with the first two piano sonatas of the year, the exposition and whole first movement are compact and without formal or, for that matter, emotional ambiguities.
Beethoven made the opening movement gracious, elegant, beautiful, but not in the vein of the Beautiful as an aesthetic study. Here beauty is as unassuming as everything else in the music. It is that quality which makes the Harp fresh in Beethoven’s work in general and his quartets in particular, especially compared to the aggressively radical Razumovskys. All the same, he remains determined to give every piece not only distinctive material but also a distinctive sonority. The pizzicatos are a way to do that simply and directly, and they were unusual enough to give a name to the quartet. After a cheery and only modestly eventful development and fairly literal recapitulation (though the pizzicatos are extended), there comes a surprise in the form of an enormous coda that starts with frenetic and exciting cross-string fiddling from the first violin while the main theme surges beneath; then comes a section of accelerating pizzicatos. In other words, as usual with Beethoven, the pizzicatos are not just a color or a passing fancy but a motif to be developed and paid off.
In his music he was searching, so he would not have known yet that one of the places he was headed toward was a poignant and broad songfulness like the Adagio ma non troppo second movement. Its key is A-flat and the key of its second section D-flat, both echoes of the D-flat in the introduction to the first movement. The main point of the second movement is to present its long, lovely melody and two ornamented versions of it, spaced by two equally lyrical and barely contrasting sections. The contrast comes with the scherzo, marked Presto, one of his most boisterous C-minor excursions, more delicious than demonic. Its exhilarating rhythmic thrust comes from a nimble alternation of three-beat (2+2+2) and two-beat (3+3) within the bar. The scherzo section alternates with a manically contrapuntal C-major trio, marked più presto quasi prestissimo, that comes back twice.42
The movement finishes with a preparatory chord that instead of ending the scherzo ushers in the finale. The fact that this is a work more conciliatory than provocative finds its denouement in Beethoven’s only variation finale in a quartet. Its theme is a bouncy little Allegretto of unpretentious charm. His variations do not play Haydn’s game of inflating a modest tune into something grand but rather ornament the theme in six simple and graceful variations. The end becomes suddenly playful, then ebullient, and finally fortissimo, only to pull back to a quiet and once again modest departure.
All this is to say that the Harp Quartet is another work, like the piano sonatas that preceded it, that is no lapel grabber, that for all its freshness smacks of nothing “revolutionary.” This and the other pieces of 1809–10 were intended not to make strides but to bide time. Moreover, in the procession of his quartets, Beethoven may have wanted to give the public and musicians a rest after the strenuous workout of the Razumovskys.
The absence of great strides, meanwhile, is a symptom of what may have been coming over him in this period, when he had a nominally guaranteed income and was expected to repay it by surpassing himself. For the first time in some nine years, after a series of extraordinary effusions, Beethoven no longer knew as clearly as he once had what direction he was headed in. His situation may have been worse than that. He may have begun to wonder not only where he was headed but why he was headed anywhere at all. Still, the subtle and unassuming Harp would not be his only musical response to his situation. His next quartet boils with fury.
In letters of April 1810, Beethoven made three, for him startling, requests. He asked Zmeskall for the loan of a looking glass, because his was broken. He sent Baron Gleichenstein 300 florins for shirts and neckcloths, to be picked out by the baron. “Not only do I understand nothing whatever about such matters” of fashion, he wrote, “but also such matters are very distasteful to me.”43 Around the same time, he wrote Wegeler in Bonn asking for a copy of his baptismal certificate. Here were signs and portents that, once again, Beethoven was courting.
And once again, the object of his affections was young, attractive, musical, and above his station. She was Therese Malfatti, seventeen, one of two strikingly beautiful daughters of a wealthy and cultured family. Gleichenstein had introduced Beethoven to Jakob Friedrich Malfatti von Rohrenbach zu Dezza and his family in February. Jakob was cousin to Beethoven’s new physician, Johann Malfatti, who had taken over this difficult patient after the death of Beethoven’s longtime doctor Johann Schmidt. Even though Beethoven was more than twenty years older than Therese and chronically ill, in visits to the family he was quick to fall for this lively and talented girl. He hoped his art and fame, in lieu of looks and charm, might bring her to him.
This time, however, his courtship would not be the near-crazed whirlwind of passion he inflicted on Josephine Deym. He used Gleichenstein as a go-between and proceeded cautiously. He sent Therese music, writing to the baron, “Here is the s[onata] which I promised Therese.—As I cannot see her today, do give it to her—My best regards to them all. I am so happy when I am with them. I feel somewhat that the wounds which wicked people have inf
licted on my soul could be cured by the Malfattis. Thank you, kind G, for introducing me to that house—Here are another 50 gulden for the neckcloths. Let me know if you need more.”44
He became a regular visitor to the Malfatti house, sporting his new neckcloths and shirts, his hair combed carefully in his new mirror. They could not have been long in realizing what was going on. In May he wrote to Therese, who was in Mödling on her family’s estate. He enclosed a piece he wrote especially for her. His tone is tender and avuncular:
In this letter, beloved Therese, you are receiving what I promised you. And indeed, if the most powerful obstacles had not prevented me, you would be receiving still more, if only to show you that I always do more for my friends than I promise . . . No doubt I should be counting too much on you or valuing my worth too highly if I were to apply to you the saying [from Goethe’s Egmont], “People are united not only when they are together; even the distant one, the absent one too is present with us.” Who would apply such a saying to our volatile T who treats so lightheartedly all the affairs of life?—In connection with your pursuits be sure not to forget the pianoforte or, in general, music as a whole. You have such a splendid gift for music, why don’t you cultivate it seriously? You who have so much feeling for all that is beautiful and good, why will you not direct it to discerning in such a glorious art what is fine and perfect, a quality which in its turn ever radiates beauty upon us?—I am leading a very lonely and quiet life. Although here and there certain lights would like to awaken me, yet since you all left Vienna, I feel within me a void which cannot be filled and which even my art, which is usually so faithful to me, has not yet been able to make me forget.45
He had picked out a piano for her. He recommends to her Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister and Schlegel’s translations of Shakespeare. He asks her to “forget my mad behavior.” He asks whether he might visit her, if only for a half hour: “You see that I want to bore you for as short a time as possible.” The piece he had written for her is a wistful and yearning A-minor tune he called simply Für Elise, that presumably being her pet name.46 Beethoven would have been astounded and probably outraged to know that eventually this little courtship item became one of the most famous things he ever wrote.
Maybe Therese did, as he had put it, grant a sigh to his harmonies. But the courtship was soon suppressed. The Malfattis were not high nobility, but they were too high for Beethoven to marry into without consequences, and exquisite young Therese was hardly likely to feel an attraction for this middle-aged, unhandsome, deaf, ill, and eccentric suitor, no matter how famous. In any case her parents would never give consent. Beethoven had planned to go to the Malfattis and propose to Therese, but he didn’t have the courage to face her eyes looking at him.47 Instead he asked Baron Gleichenstein to sound out the family (actually, the baron was courting Therese’s younger sister Anna, whom he eventually married). Gleichenstein’s report does not survive, but Beethoven’s anguished reply to him does:
Your news has again plunged me from the heights of the most sublime ecstasy down into the depths—And why did you add the remark that you would let me know when there would be music again? Am I then nothing more than a music-maker for yourself or the others? . . . Well, so be it. For you, poor B[eethoven], no happiness can come from outside, you must create everything for yourself in your own heart; and only in the world of ideals can you find friends—I beseech you to set my mind at rest by letting me know whether I was to blame yesterday. Or if you cannot do that, tell me the truth. I am as glad to hear it as I am to speak it.48
He had been somehow egregious around the Malfattis, or perhaps all he had done was to declare himself to Therese or her parents. Their response was apparently to forbid him from visiting the house except as a performer.49 He was plunged to the depths, lovesick, also physically sick with violent attacks of vomiting. As always, he stumbled on. He finished a commissioned overture and vocal solos for Goethe’s Egmont, whose Vienna production was recently unbanned thanks to the French occupation, but his music came too late for the opening. He went on to a trilogy of songs on Goethe lyrics: Wonne der Wehmut, Sehnsucht, and Mit einem gemalten Band.
In the fall Stephan von Breuning wrote Wegeler in Bonn not to worry that Beethoven didn’t thank him for finding the birth certificate: “I believe his marriage project has fallen through.”50 Beethoven wrote Gleichenstein ruefully, “You are either sailing on a calm and peaceful sea or are already in a safe haven [the engagement to Anna Malfatti],—You do not feel the anguish of a friend who is struggling against a tempest . . . My pride is humbled.”51 In the letter asking for his birth certificate he had written Wegeler, “Who can escape the onslaughts of tempest raging around him? Yet I should be happy, perhaps one of the happiest of mortals, if that fiend had not settled in my ears—If I had not read somewhat that a man should not voluntarily quit this life so long as he can still perform a good deed, I would have left this earth long ago—and what is more, by my own hand—Oh, this life is indeed beautiful, but for me it is poisoned forever.” In the letter to Wegeler he notes that “I lived for a while without knowing how old I was.” But in fact he was still wrong about his age.52
Ultimately Beethoven could live with bad health and without love, but all the new tempests were heaped on top of the humiliating fiend in his ears. Thoughts of suicide were again eating at his mind. It was inevitable that he would be depressed about this new collapse of his romantic dreams. There is no record of friends helping him through this convulsion of despair. “Only in the world of ideals,” he wrote Gleichenstein wretchedly, “can you find friends.” The next years show that in music he was searching for some new path and not finding it, though his production ran strong for a while, if not nearly as voluminous as it had been. In the wake of one more romantic failure he desperately needed new reasons to live—which is to say, new reasons to make music.
The sketchbooks of the years after 1808 suggest that now Beethoven was having more and more trouble getting pieces off the ground.53 Yet as of 1810, his star was high and rising. “Every day,” he wrote Zmeskall with a mingling of pride and bitterness and a strange humility, “there are fresh inquiries from foreigners, new acquaintances, new circumstances connected with my art . . . Sometimes I feel that I shall soon go mad in consequence of my unmerited fame, fortune is seeking me out and for that very reason I almost dread some fresh calamity.”54 The last calamity, presumably, was Therese, though his health was also bedeviling him: fevers, headaches, a crippling foot problem, on top of his chronic vomiting and diarrhea and the demon in his ears.
It was that year when his music finally found a reviewer equal to it. Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann was a critic, composer, painter, and in his later years creator of fantastical tales that made him one of the most celebrated German authors. Hoffmann wrote operas and after he died had an opera written about him, Tales of Hoffmann. He had changed his name to include Mozart’s middle one. In all capacities he was a defining voice of the Romantic spirit. His two Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung articles of July 1810 on Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony live in history as the first important exposition of the Romantic sense of music. Which is to say that they were the first major steps in turning Beethoven the man and musician into Beethoven the demigod and myth. Here the Fifth Symphony itself ascended to the realm of archetype. Here appears the Romantic conception of instrumental music in particular as the supreme art, not in spite of its indefinable nature but because of it.
Part of the myth-making drive of the Romantics was to make myths of themselves. The Romantic era was the first cultural-aesthetic period in history to name itself. Many of Hoffmann’s critical writings are concerned with the question of what is, and who is, Romantic. In his review of the Fifth all these elements of Hoffmann’s personality and ideas, including his distinctive jumble of the factual and the fabulous, are extravagantly on display. He was yet to write the literary fantasies that established his fame, but these articles were among the most influential writings of his life.
The reviewer has before him one of the most important works of that master whom no one will now deny belongs among the first rank of instrumental composers. He is permeated by the topic that he is to discuss, and no one may take it amiss if, stepping beyond the boundaries of the customary critique, he strives to put into words what this composition made him feel deep within his soul.
When music is being discussed as a self-sufficient art, this should always be understood to refer only to instrumental music, which, disdaining all help, all admixture of any other art, purely expresses the peculiar essence of this art . . . [Instrumental music] is the most Romantic of all the arts—one almost wishes to say the only one that is purely Romantic. Orpheus’s lyre opened the gates of the underworld. Music reveals an unknown kingdom to mankind: a world that has nothing in common with the outward, material world that surrounds it, and in which we leave behind all predetermined, conceptual feelings in order to give ourselves up to the inexpressible . . .
Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph Page 62