Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph

by Swafford, Jan

  Partly by chance, then, between the play and the songs this was a Goethe period for Beethoven. He hoped to parlay them into a friendship at least and a collaboration at best. This all transpired in the heart of what would eventually be named the Goethezeit, the age of Goethe in German culture. And like Beethoven, Goethe—poet, playwright, scientist, courtier, government minister, far-reaching polymath—joined an eighteenth-century sensibility to an art that not only pointed to the future but helped shape that future. In essence there were three German giants around the turn of the nineteenth century who served both as completions of the Aufklärung and prophets and instigators of Romanticism: Kant in philosophy, Goethe in letters, Beethoven in music. Romantics were in the process of making all of them into myths. Kant was recently dead, the other two still in the middle of their lives.

  The Egmont music was one of Beethoven’s major efforts in a time of slim pickings for him. Goethe’s plot is based on a historical incident close to the heart of the Dutch people. It is set in the sixteenth century, when the Netherlands was ruled by Catholic Spain. The Spanish emperor Charles V had abolished the constitutional rights of the Dutch and used the Inquisition to suppress Protestants. The Flemish general Egmont, a national hero after his victories over the French, journeys to Madrid to plead with the court for tolerance. Speaking the truth to tyrants earns him a death sentence as a traitor. In the play his beloved Clärchen, failing in her attempts to rouse Egmont’s countrymen to save him, kills herself in despair. Those two deaths begin a brutal Spanish suppression in Holland. But for Goethe this story does not end in defeat. On the eve of his execution Egmont dreams of an embodiment of Freedom with Clärchen’s face, who places a laurel of victory on his head. Egmont goes to the scaffold exalted. For the end of the drama, after Egmont’s execution, Goethe calls for a “symphony of victory.”

  With his concrete sense of things, Beethoven wrote on a sketch, “The main point is that the Netherlanders will eventually triumph over the Spaniards.”52 He also noted, “[P]erhaps the death could be represented by a rest.”53 He may or may not have remembered that he had done the same at the end of Coriolan. Here the martyrdom of the hero is not just a tragic end but also a new beginning, a prophecy of liberation.

  The Egmont Overture and incidental music show how far Beethoven had come in finding his own theatrical voice since Christus, Prometheus, Coriolan, even Fidelio—or maybe how inspired he was by the first genuinely significant play he had worked with. Here in his theater music he frees himself of both Mozart and Cherubini. The orchestral sound is grand, rich, and colorful, distinct both from his symphonic orchestral voice and from his previous theater music. As in all his overtures, the one for Egmont amounts to a symphonic poem that follows the story.

  As it needed to be, this is another outpouring of Beethoven’s heroic style—one of the last. A stark orchestral unison begins the overture; then comes a darkly lumbering gesture in low strings, evoking the burden of oppression. The key is F minor, for Beethoven a tragic, death-tinted tonality. The introduction gathers to an Allegro that itself gathers steadily, like the impetus of revolt.54 The stern second theme returns to the baneful opening idea sped up. As in Coriolan, the two themes of sonata form are used to represent contending forces in the story.

  The music has an enormous forward thrust, always pointing ahead. After a short development, the recapitulation starts in the proper F minor then wanders in key, searching. It arrives back at F minor for the last hammer blows of tyranny and the short rest that stands for Egmont’s death—short because it is not the end of the drama. The end is the “Victory Symphony,” the prophecy of freedom the overture has been searching for. Here is another heroic piece of Beethoven’s that ends with overflowing joy, as in the final moments of the Eroica, the Fifth Symphony, the Leonore overtures, and the opera itself. This is his most elemental joyful ending of all; through much of its pealing course, the “Victory Symphony” hardly moves off a triumphant ­F-major chord.55

  The rest of the incidental music for Egmont, nearly half an hour of it, has the same rich and fresh sound as the overture. There are two songs for Clärchen, one a military march and the other a testament to love, neither of which owes anything overt to Mozart. The rest of the incidental music is entr’actes, the touching “Death of Clärchen,” a melodrama, and the “Victory Symphony” heard again. There are passages like nothing else in Beethoven, such as the long, exquisite oboe solos of the third entr’acte. The several marches, by contrast, seem at once practiced (Beethoven wrote quite a few marches) and routine.

  How Goethe responded to the Egmont music is not recorded. Among his many contradictory qualities, Goethe was a restlessly searching personality in his art and at the same time conservative in his politics, opinions, and tastes—except when he was not conservative, as in writing plainly of love and lust. His unpublished erotic poetry would have shocked Beethoven beyond words, but Clärchen and Egmont are chaste and heroic—Beethoven’s kind of lovers.

  Antonie Adamberger, who played Clärchen in this performance, recalled working with Beethoven on the music. With this actress noted for her beauty as much as her talent, he was in his most charming mode. “Can you sing?” he asked when she was brought to him.

  “No!” she said.

  Beethoven laughed. “No? But I’m supposed to compose the songs in Egmont for you!” She told him she had tried singing for a while but gave it up because it made her hoarse. “That’ll be a fine how’d-you-do,” Beethoven said jovially in Viennese dialect. He rummaged through the music on the piano and found something for her to sing as he accompanied. Pleased at what he heard, with a kind look he stroked her forehead and said, “Very well, now I know.” Three days later he returned with the songs she had inspired and taught them to her. Finally he decreed, “There, that’s right. So, so that’s the way, sing it thus, don’t let anybody persuade you to do it differently, and see that you don’t put any ornaments in it.”56

  There were always these sorts of pleasant interludes, especially with singers and actresses. Otherwise it was a miserable period for Beethoven. An added misery, equal to any other for him, came to a head in February 1811. The Austrian inflation that had been speeding toward a gallop through the first decade of the century, spurred by war and by Napoleon’s punitive demand for reparations, reached a climactic crash. The government declared bankruptcy and reduced the value of paper currency to a fifth of its former value. By that year the cost of living had gone up some 1,000 percent since 1795; in 1817, inflation would reach nearly 4,000 percent. The devaluation caused little stir among the aristocracy, most of whose wealth was in land. Government officials were given a raise to offset the devaluation. But many on a fixed income, including pensioners, and effectively including Beethoven with his yearly stipend, were devastated. A wave of bankruptcies and suicides broke out in the Austrian upper-middle class.57

  As of the end of 1810, all three of Beethoven’s contributing patrons—Archduke Rudolph and Princes Lobkowitz and Kinsky—had kept up on their contributions, even the dilatory Kinsky. That winter Rudolph was quick to increase his part of the stipend from 1,500 to 6,000 florins a year, to compensate for the devaluation. Kinsky eventually followed suit. But inflation was not Beethoven’s only problem. Lobkowitz was on the verge of bankruptcy, mainly because of the acres of money he had spent on his musical passions. His livelihood on the line, Beethoven took none of this lying down; he went to the men or their representatives in person, and he went to the courts. But meanwhile, there was no money from Lobkowitz for three years, and payments from the Kinsky estate lapsed for two years.58

  By the middle of 1811, Beethoven felt driven to distraction with his endless round of illness and frustration in love, and now anxieties over money. On doctor’s orders he retreated to the spa at Teplitz, where Dr. Malfatti ordered him to suspend work and see to his recovery. That was the sort of medical direction the chronically ill Beethoven chronically ignored. In August, as he boarded the carriage for Teplitz, he receive
d a parcel with a commission to write incidental music for two commemorative plays by August von Kotzebue, King Stephan and The Ruins of Athens, scheduled for the opening of a theater in Pest. The deadline was tight, but Beethoven was not about to pass up a commission. “Although my doctor has forbidden me to work,” he wrote Gottfried Härtel concerning the Hungarian offer, “I sat down to do something for those mustachios, who are genuinely fond of me.”59

  Mounting one of his old-style marathons on the order of Christus am Ölberge and the Choral Fantasy, in his first three weeks in Teplitz he scribbled some thirty-five minutes of orchestral, choral, and solo music for the plays and put them in the mail on time—only to be notified that the opening had been postponed until the following year. At the same time he courted writer Kotzebue for an opera libretto: “Whether it be romantic, quite serious, heroic, comic or sentimental, in short, whatever you like . . . I must admit that I should like best of all some grand subject taken from history and especially from the dark ages, for instance, from the time of Attila or the like.”60 (Beethoven either did not know or did not care that Kotzebue’s politics were notoriously reactionary, or that he was a fierce and vocal opponent of Goethe.)

  Long-standing medical doctrine had it that one’s health could be restored by taking the cure at a beautiful place in the country, preferably where springs gushed forth from the earth. Teplitz, near the Karlsbad spa and some thirty miles from Prague, was one of the celebrated hot springs in Europe. It offered tranquillity in the forms of a classical park, forests, and lakes. Also in Teplitz, brilliant company was reliably to be found. Goethe frequented the spa, likewise various aristocracy and royalty. Among the latter visitors this summer was Prince Kinsky, from whom Beethoven managed to extract the stipend money that had been in arrears.

  One of those who made Beethoven’s acquaintance on this visit to Teplitz was diplomat, writer (later biographer of Goethe), and wounded veteran of the Austrian army Karl August Varnhagen von Ense. His impressions of Beethoven on this meeting, written to the poet Ludwig Uhland, stand as another high-Romantic paean to a demigod:

  I made the acquaintance of Beethoven and found this reputedly savage and unsociable man to be the most magnificent artist with a heart of gold, a glorious spirit and a friendly disposition. What he has refused to princes he granted to us at first sight: he played on the fortepiano. I soon was on intimate terms with him and his noble character, the uninterrupted flow of a godlike spirit which I always seemed to feel with an almost reverential awe when in his very silent presence . . . I spent the time entirely with him and his friend Oliva. The latter is one of the best of men . . . [Beethoven] is incredibly industrious and prolific. On his walks he seeks out distant places along the lonely paths between the mountains and through the forest, finding peace in the contemplation of the great features of nature . . . If I could only tell you how beautiful, how moving, devout, and serious, as if he had been kissed by a God, this man appeared as he played for us on the forte­piano some heavenly variations, pure creations granted by God to which the artist must give voice and, much as he would have wished, could not fix down on paper! At his request, my dear friend, I gave him all your poems.

  Varnhagen got the full Beethoven treatment of puns, aphorisms, reminiscences, far-ranging observations, and complaints including diatribes against the French, plus admiration for the writer’s fiancée, Rahel Levin, and a recollection of his 1806 fight with Lichnowsky: on one “fearful occasion a Prince [attempted] by physical force to make him play to his guests.”61 (Rahel, Varnhagen’s “goddess of his heart’s most dear delight,” was a Jewish writer who kept a brilliant salon.62 She and Varnhagen married in 1814, after she converted to Christianity.) Inevitably Beethoven turned their conversations toward an opera libretto.63 In turn, Varnhagen introduced Beethoven to the philosopher and Kant disciple J. G. Fichte and to C. A. Tiedge, a poet and another Kantian, author of the lyric “An die Hoffnung” that Beethoven had set while courting Josephine. All members of this company were united in Francophobia. Beethoven took powerfully to Tiedge, and the two were quickly on a du intimacy. “Every day,” Beethoven wrote the poet after he left Teplitz, “I berate myself for not having made your acquaintance at Teplitz sooner . . . Let us embrace like men who have cause to love and honor one another.”64 Inevitably, Beethoven saw Tiedge as not just a friend but also another potential librettist.

  In fact, there is no record of any personal contact between Beethoven and Tiedge after this summer, and nothing else seemed to endure from the trip. No opera libretto appeared; in this period Beethoven said no to some dozen librettos submitted to him.65 Meanwhile he and his new helpmate Oliva had a violent quarrel, which Varnhagen reported left the younger man “deeply depressed.” They were soon reconciled and talked about going to England together—of which nothing came.66

  The next meeting between Beethoven and Varnhagen was a couple of years later, in Vienna. On that occasion the writer found his demigod surly, unsociable, hostile toward the aristocracy, even uncouth, and declined to take him to see Rahel. Varnhagen would not have known that by that point Beethoven had suffered another failure in love, the worst yet.67

  If Beethoven was ailing in 1811, however, his letters show a surprising lightness of spirit. His puckish imagination and rampant irony were running high. In a letter to Zmeskall, after a smeared line he finishes, “We make you a present of a few inkblots.”68 He wrote publisher Härtel another compendious letter, making excuses for Christus but trying to sell it anyway, and complained as usual about “those wretched r,” meaning “reviewers”—he refused to write the word—who praised “the most contemptible bunglers.” He ends with this sardonic melody: “You can’t go on re-re-re-re-re-vi-vi-ew-ew-ew-ew-ing-ing to all eternity, that you can’t do.”69 In the same letter he takes back the intended dedication of the Mass in C to Bettina Brentano, since “the lady is now married.” It came out dedicated to Prince Kinsky, who had finally paid up his part of the stipend enhanced to account for inflation.

  In one respect the Teplitz spa had its intended effect; for the moment, Beethoven felt healthier than he had in some time. He wrote Zmeskall in late October, “My feet are better, and the maker of the feet [presumably God] has promised the maker of the head [himself] a sound foot in eight days at latest.”70 The maker of the foot did not oblige.

  On leaving Teplitz Beethoven visited Prince Lichnowsky at his estate in Graz, scene of their break five years earlier that had never completely healed. The once-lusty and -domineering Lichnowsky was failing, it was rumored from venereal disease. He had less than three years to live.71 In nearby Troppeau Beethoven directed a performance of the Mass in C, of which he remained fond even if the world did not embrace it. After the mass he improvised on organ for a half hour—one of his last public performances. At the end of the year he wrote several versions of the lyric “An die Geliebte” (To the Beloved), perhaps with Antonie Brentano in mind: one version had an optional guitar part; she played the instrument.72 It was the next spring when he gave the manuscript of one version to Antonie at her request. In it the poet imagines kissing a tear from his beloved’s cheek, exclaiming, “[N]ow your sorrows are also mine!” To what extent this song, short in time but long in passion, was a testament of love for Antonie or only of empathy with that woman of constant sorrows is another of the mysteries of these days.

  Back in Vienna he started his singing parties again, hoping for inspiration toward vocal works, and began sketching ideas for three new symphonies. On one page he jotted, “Freude schöner Götter Funken Tochter aus Elysium. Detached fragments, like princes are beggars, etc., not the whole . . . Detached fragments from Schiller Freude brought together in a whole.” Nearby in the sketchbook is a try at a melody for An die Freude and a note about a “Sinfonia in D moll.”73 So as of the turn of 1812 he was sketching what within the year became the Seventh and Eighth Symphonies, and what more than a decade later became the Ninth Symphony in D minor, which treats An die Freude just as he describes. These th
ree symphonies amounted to the most ambitious slate of work he had planned in years.

  But the work would never be unimpeded. The hopeful upturn in his health at Teplitz did not last. In November, he begged off a lesson with Archduke Rudolph, saying, “I was suddenly struck down by such a fever that I completely lost consciousness; an injured foot may have partly caused this feeling of faintness.”74 By now the foot infection, or whatever it was, had been torturing him for nearly a year.

  Yet his creative energy was running relatively high, and also his kindness. This winter he began an extended correspondence with lawyer Joseph von Varena, whom he had met in Teplitz. Varena asked Beethoven for works to be done at charity concerts he was giving in Graz. Beethoven responded with great generosity and kept it up for years, donating to charities in Graz a stream of scores in print and manuscript.75 “From my earliest childhood,” he wrote Varena, “my zeal to serve our poor suffering humanity in any way whatsoever by means of my art has made no compromise with any lower motive . . . the only reward I have asked for was the feeling of inward happiness which always attends such actions.”76 The Graz charity concert of December 1811 included the Choral Fantasy; a seventeen-year-old pianist named Marie Koschak, whom Beethoven had recommended, scored a triumph with the solo part.77