Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph

by Swafford, Jan

  Here, dear Streicher, are the letters . . . But I do ask you to ensure that the instruments do not wear out so quickly—You have seen your instrument which I have here and you must admit that it is very worn out . . . You know that my sole object is to promote the production of good instruments. That is all. Otherwise I am absolutely impartial. Here you must not be annoyed at hearing the truth from your most devoted servant and friend

  Beethoven

  He was trying to get from Streicher a piano that pleased him, but the reality was that no instrument pleased him for long. The Érard from Paris, sent him as a gift, which had helped inspire the Waldstein and Appassionata, was now finished for him: “My motto,” he wrote Streicher, “is either to play on a good instrument or not at all—As for my French piano, which is certainly quite useless now, I still have misgivings about selling it, for it is really a souvenir such as no one here has so far honored me with.” He adds that he was suffering from a new complaint, an infection or abscess: “On account of my foot I cannot yet walk so far.”33

  Still more letters were directed to publisher Gottfried Härtel, who had finally agreed to take the Mass in C, though not to pay for it. (Incredibly, in October Beethoven jotted down, “The mass could perhaps be dedicated to Napoleon.”)34 There were steady misunderstandings and wrangles over the mass. “For God’s sake publish the mass just as you have it,” he wrote Härtel, “without waiting for the organ part . . . The general character of the Kyrie . . . is heartfelt resignation, deep sincerity of religious feeling . . . Gentleness is the fundamental characteristic . . . cheerfulness pervades this mass. The Catholic goes to church on Sunday in his best clothes and in a joyful and festive mood.”35 (Here is another of the few times he revealed an underlying conception of a piece.) After one particularly egregious train of engraving errors that he had meticulously corrected, he wrote Härtel with exasperation and remarkable restraint:

  Mistakes—mistakes—you yourself are a unique mistake—Well I shall have to send my copyist to Leipzig or go there myself, unless I am prepared to let my work—appear as nothing but a mass of mistakes—Apparently the tribunal of music at Leipzig can’t produce one single efficient proofreader; and to make matters worse, you send out the works before you receive the corrected proofs . . . Please note that a whole bar is missing from the pianoforte arrangement of the overture to Egmont . . . All the same I do esteem you very highly. As you know, it is the custom with human beings to esteem one another for not having made even greater mistakes—36

  All his courting of Härtel over the years, all his patience and determination were finally negated by an overcautious publisher afraid that Beethoven would lose him money. After taking on a few works, including the Harp Quartet and the Emperor Concerto, the Egmont music, op. 84, was the last new Beethoven work Breitkopf & Härtel published.37 In 1815, Beethoven finally settled a row of pieces on the Viennese publisher Sigmund Anton Steiner, whose house became his principal outlet for years.38 But he doggedly kept pitching ideas to ­Härtel.

  The endless drain of proofreading and contending with publishers was hardly Beethoven’s only distraction. When Archduke Rudolph was in town he expected several lessons a week in piano and composition, and they dragged on for hours. In this period began a major motif of Beethoven’s letter writing for years to come: notes begging off a lesson with Rudolph because of ill health. In early 1811, he wrote, “For over a fortnight now I have again been afflicted with a headache.” A few days later: “I am better and in a few days I shall again have the honor of waiting on you and of making up for lost time—I am always desperately worried if I cannot be zealous in your service and if I cannot be with Your Imperial Highness as often as I should like. It is most certainly true to say that this privation causes me very great suffering.”39 The latter sentiment is most certainly not true; clearly, to Rudolph he exaggerated his physical travails to escape lessons. But in his notes he took pains not to cause offense. He was no longer the brash young lion treating his aristocratic admirers imperiously. He had come to understand the importance of hanging on to this loyal and royal friend. With Rudolph there would be no break like the violent argument that ended the earlier stipend from his once-leading patron, Prince Lichnowsky.

  But why did Rudolph, an accomplished musician and one of the most admiring, talented, and generous noblemen Beethoven ever knew, make such demands? As a composer himself, he understood that Beethoven needed all the time he could get for his work. Furthermore, though Rudolph was a fine pianist and worked hard at his music, to have professional ambitions in the field would have been unthinkably beneath his station.

  There is no evident reason for Rudolph’s demands other than that he was high aristocracy and when all was said and done, Beethoven for him was still a kind of servant—a well-paid one at that. (Beyond his contribution to Beethoven’s yearly stipend, Rudolph likely paid separately for the lessons.) Commoners enjoying one’s patronage were expected to be at one’s beck and call. As mild, good-natured, unpretentious, and relatively enlightened as Rudolph was, his demands had the authority of centuries, of eons. Beethoven served, groveled, made excuses, kept his feelings to himself. Much of the year, at least, Rudolph was out of town.

  Beethoven’s private feelings, however, were hardly groveling. At the end of 1811, a visitor reported him declaring, “From the Emperor to the shoeshine boy, all the Viennese are worthless.” His contempt for the Viennese was undimmed after nearly twenty years in the city. The visitor went on to say that Beethoven “has only one [student], who gives him very much trouble and whom he would gladly be rid of, if he could.” Asked by the visitor who that might be, Beethoven was not shy in saying: “The Archduke Rudolph.”40 But for the rest of his life, he and Rudolph stayed true to each other, in their fashions.

  Keeping the pot boiling on another front, in summer 1810 Beethoven sent off fifty-three British Isles folk-song arrangements to publisher George Thomson in Edinburgh. So among publishers, patrons, hackwork, illness, and romantic tumult, his days were consumed.

  The lasting testaments to Rudolph’s favor were the string of major works dedicated to him. Beethoven announced a new one in a letter of March 1811. After noting the headache that had afflicted him for weeks, he wrote Rudolph, “I began to work rather hard; and one of the fruits of this diligence is a new pianoforte trio.” In light of its stately opening theme and its dedication to Rudolph, the Piano Trio in E-flat Major, op. 97, came to be known as the Archduke. It is an indicative product of these years: brilliant, attractive, and safe (except for the Serioso ­Quartet).

  Still, the Archduke is hardly a simple bow to a patron; it is a huge—some forty-five minutes—four-movement work of surprising contrasts. The mellifluous and expansive opening evaporates momentarily when the strings enter on a poignant note. That habit of withdrawing inward is central to the overall tone of the trio. It is seen throughout the gentle development section of the first movement, the opposite of the familiar dramatic Beethovenian development. It flows without fanfare into a varied recapitulation of the main theme. The scherzo is placed second in line, rather than the usual third, and involves one of Beethoven’s jokes for connoisseurs: the theme starts with a bald B-flat-major scale, rhythmized. The mood is one of delight, and that persists through the middle trio section, which expands the joke: after the scherzo theme made from a major scale, the trio theme outlines a slithering chromatic scale. That idea alternates with buoyant bursts of waltz.41

  For the slow movement he made a warm and gorgeous set of variations, its theme one of the long-lined, singing chorale melodies that were to become a signature of his late style. Here the inward moments of the earlier movements flower. If this is not quite so ethereal as his later andantes, it still has some of his future style’s expansiveness and also the experiments in texture, where the appearance of the pages starts to become complex unto spiky—but no less singing in sound. The movement ends with a varied and affecting return of its opening, as if recalled in memory.

  B
y now it had become normal for Beethoven not only to interweave the keys and thematic material of a work throughout its course but also to join movements, especially the last two. So the Andante flows into a sparkling, dancing finale with dynamic dotted figures, the rondo theme uniting the scale motifs of earlier movements with the melodic shape of the work’s opening measures. The mood is cinched at the end, when the 2/4 theme is remade into a dashing, scherzolike 6/8, and the movement races to a scintillating conclusion. It would not be a stretch to imagine the Archduke as taking shape in Beethoven’s mind as an idealized portrait of the archduke himself, or a portrait of their relationship—from the sunny side of the picture.

  With his two major instrumental pieces of 1810–11, the Serioso Quartet and the Archduke Trio, a desert and an oasis as starkly contrasting as any adjacent works of his life, Beethoven returned again to an old pattern of his: an aggressive and challenging piece followed by a more approachable one. Always he had an acute sense of the effect of his music on his listeners. In the brusque, enigmatic, prophetic Serioso, he pushed technical and expressive norms, and the sympathy of his listeners, close to their breaking points. In the Archduke he returned to the relatively normative and genial with all the mastery at his command.

  Josephine Deym remained on his mind into 1811. In January, he wrote to Therese Brunsvik, Josephine’s sister: “I do request you . . . to send me again that little sketch which I have been unfortunate enough to lose. An eagle was gazing at the sun, that was the subject. I can never forget it. But you must not assume that in this connection I am thinking of myself, although such a thought has already been imputed to me. Why, many people surely like to witness an act of heroism without being in the very least like heroes.”42 Beethoven liked to keep inspirational items on his desk and piano, that image of aspiration being one of them. Therese copied Beethoven’s letter and sent it to Josephine, who was living in Vienna, newly and disastrously married to Baron Christophe von Stackelberg. But though Beethoven might still have been carrying a torch for Josephine, there is no record or much likelihood of contact between her and Beethoven at this point—she was not yet separated from Stackelberg. Eventually, the baron absconded with her children and left her alone and desperate.43

  A month after writing to Therese, Beethoven sent Bettina Brentano a rambling and affectionate letter:

  Dear, Dear Bettine!

  I have already received two letters from you, and see from your letter to “die Tonie” [Antonie Brentano] that you still think of me, and far too favorably at that. I carried with me your first letter all summer long, and it has often made me very happy . . . although if I haven’t written you often, and although you don’t see anything of me at all, in thought I write to you a thousand times. Even though you haven’t written to me about it, I can imagine how you have to put up in Berlin with those “worldly” good-for-nothings—much chatter about art but no action!!!! . . .

  You are getting married, dear Bettine, or maybe it has already happened, yet I haven’t even been able to see you beforehand; nevertheless may all blessings that marriage offers stream down upon you and your husband . . .

  What can I say about myself? “Pity my fate!” I exclaim with poor Johanna [referring to a character in a Goethe poem]. If I am granted a few more years of life, I shall thank the all-embracing almighty for it, whether those years be ones of contentment or pain.

  If you write to Goethe about me, try to use words that will convey to him my most profound respect and admiration for him. I am just about to write to him myself about Egmont which I have set to music, quite literally out of love for his poetry, which makes me very happy; but who can thank enough a great poet, the most precious jewel that a nation can possess?

  And now I must close, dear good B. I did not get back home until 4 this morning from a drunken party that made me laugh heartily, and for which I am now tempted to cry nearly as much. Uproarious jollity often drives me back into myself. Many thanks to Clemens for his kind interest; as for the Cantata [Clemens had sent him a libretto] the topic is not important enough for us here; it’s otherwise in Berlin—as for affection, the sister has such a large part of it that not much is left over for the brother . . .

  And now goodbye, dear, dear B., I kiss you on the forehead, and thus press on it as with my seal all my thoughts for you. Write soon, soon and often to your friend

  Beethoven44

  In the letter his feelings for Bettina are obvious, but there is none of the breathless rapture that used to mark his letters to Josephine Deym. He seems not particularly anguished at the news that she is marrying Achim von Arnim. (Arnim was a prominent poet and a friend of her brother Clemens. She had worked with them on their later legendary collection of German folk poetry, Des Knaben Wunderhorn.) He wants Bettina to recommend him again to Goethe, and he invites her to make up words for him that will please the poet. So he knows Bettina’s propensity for invention but trusts her to invent for him, because his own words will not do. There is love in his letter, but it is not disappointed love, not the anguish of love lost. It concludes with a rueful story about a hangover and a polite rejection to relay to her brother. The most essential point of the letter, in fact, may be to prod Bettina to continue her campaign to bring him and Goethe together.

  Yet his tone of warm but restrained affection is inflected by two striking details. Near the end, after the words “I kiss you,” Beethoven has stricken out “with pain.” Then in the last sentence, he uses the intimate du for “you.” Earlier, through all the raptures of the letters to Josephine Deym, Beethoven had always used Sie, the formal “you.” These details may be clues to his feelings for Bettina—or not. He may have stricken out “with pain” because it seemed to him improper for a now-married woman. In any case, the phrase is hardly a cry from the soul, and it could be ironic: one may write such words gallantly to tell a woman she is desirable without putting too fine a point on it. As for the du to Bettina and the Sie to Josephine, that may be a sign of overflowing affection to Bettina.45 Or it could be only a reflection of the reality that Bettina was a commoner and Josephine an aristocrat, for whom a commoner could never properly use the intimate pronoun unless the two were virtually betrothed.

  Finally, after months of the two men turning their thoughts warily toward one another from a distance, Beethoven wrote a gushing letter to Goethe in April. He used the proper form of address for Goethe’s position as an official of the Weimar Court.

  Your Excellency! The pressing opportunity afforded me by a friend of mine and a great admirer of yours (as I am also), who is leaving Vienna very soon, allows me only a moment in which to thank you for the long time I have known you (for that I have done since my childhood)—That is so little for so much—Bettina Brentano has assured me that you would receive me kindly, or, I should say, as a friend. But how could I think of such a welcome, seeing that I can approach you only with the greatest reverence and with an inexpressibly profound feeling of admiration for your glorious creations!—You will shortly receive from Leipzig through Breitkopf and Härtel my music for Egmont, that glorious Egmont on which I have again reflected through you, and which I have felt and reproduced in music as intensely as I felt when I read it—I should very much like to have your opinion on my music for Egmont. Even your censure will be useful to me and my art and will be welcomed as gladly as the greatest praise.—

  Your Excellency’s profound admirer

  Ludwig van Beethoven46

  The letter was hand-delivered to Goethe in Weimar by Franz Oliva, a bank clerk and amateur pianist who was becoming Beethoven’s new unpaid secretary and go-between—now that brother Caspar was married, working in the Austrian bureaucracy, and rearing a child.47 Goethe’s encouraging reply to Beethoven came in June:

  With great pleasure, my most highly esteemed sir, I have received your kind letter, sent through Herr von Oliva. I am deeply thankful for the sentiments expressed therein, and can assure you that I sincerely return them, for I have never heard one of your work
s . . . without wishing that I could once admire you yourself sitting at the piano, and delight in your extraordinary talent. The good Bettina Brentano surely deserves the interest that you have shown in her. She speaks of you with rapture and the liveliest affection, and counts the hours that she spent with you among the happiest of her life.48

  He looks forward to hearing the Egmont music, says he will use it in the court theater, hopes Beethoven will visit Weimar.

  Beethoven’s Egmont Overture and incidental music had been intended for a Vienna production of Goethe’s play in May 1810. As it often transpired, he did not finish the music in time for the opening, even though the assignment from the imperial court theater had come the previous autumn and he had started it then. Here is an example of the difficulty he was having in those days getting serious pieces rolling, a situation his services to Archduke Rudolph did not help. He finished the Egmont music in June; it was premiered at the fourth performance of the play. He dispatched it to Breitkopf & Härtel for publication.49

  This theater project had interested him for at least two reasons. The music published by the leading house in Europe would be his calling card to Goethe and he hoped the beginning of a friendship. From this connection, besides the satisfaction of being close to the great man, Beethoven hoped for an opera libretto—say, one drawn from the first part of Goethe’s Faust, published in 1808, which was on Beethoven’s mind as a possibility.50 At the same time, Egmont was another story of the kind that always galvanized him: heroism, sacrifice, the shining idea of liberty. All the same, he had initially told the court theater he preferred to write music for a production of Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell, the same sort of liberation story but with more action. He got assigned Egmont instead.51