Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph

by Swafford, Jan

In February the hastily assembled music for Kotzebue’s King Stephan and The Ruins of Athens premiered with the plays in Pest. In comparison to its fellow quick productions such as Christus am ­Ölberge and Prometheus, this theater music seems closer to being truly Beethovenian, like the Egmont music. At the same time it was not so far from hackwork, written to please, in keeping with the Hungarian chauvinism of the plays. This theater music presaged a coming period of occasional pieces Beethoven turned out for the money.

  In the end, of his more commercial items this music would stand as some of the more appealing, or anyway less notorious. The Ruins of Athens Overture is in his rich, fully developed theatrical style. Of the incidental pieces, the choral music is duly and conventionally inspiring, likewise a bass aria begotten by Mozart’s Zarastro in Die Zauberflöte. There is an over-the-top male chorus that sounds rather like Mozart’s Turks in The Abduction from the Seraglio singing from the fierce passions of opium. All this music for the “mustachios” of Hungary has a degree of exotic coloration; the evocative sonorities of the overture would have their impact, along with Coriolan and Egmont, on Romantic overtures and program music for many years to come. Best of all for Beethoven, this music went over nicely with audiences. From the Septet op. 20 onward, his most commercial pieces often turned out to be his most popular.

  February 1812 also saw the Vienna premiere of the Fifth Piano Concerto, later dubbed Emperor, with Carl Czerny soloing. This concerto from 1809, which Beethoven wrote probably knowing he would never play because of his deafness, was not premiered until November 1811, in a Leipzig concert he did not attend. Like its predecessor, the Emperor is dedicated to Archduke Rudolph. The majestic quality that earned its name would be credited to the influence of its dedicatee, brother of the emperor. But there were many Beethoven dedications to Rudolph, and their characters range widely.

  A more likely reason for the tone of the Fifth Concerto is simply that he had written nothing like it, and he wanted maximum contrast from his output in a given genre. As usual with Beethoven, the Emperor lays out its essential character and ideas in the first moments. It is in E-flat major, most often a heroic key for him, and so it is here. (It is his last heroic-style work in E-flat major.) We hear a fortissimo chord from the orchestra that summons bravura torrents of notes from the piano. The radical step is less the idea of beginning with the soloist (as he had already done in the Fourth Concerto) than the cadenza-like quality, which will mark much of the solo part (the reason he omits the usual concluding cadenzas). A second towering chord from the orchestra is answered by more heroic peals from the piano, this time sinking to some quiet espressivo phrases that foreshadow the second movement.

  Only then does the orchestra set out on the leading theme, in a sweeping and imperious military style. By now it’s clear that this piece is heroic in tone, symphonic in scope, and the hero is the soloist. The opening theme dominates the movement. The appearance of a softly lilting second theme in exotic E-flat minor presages a work marked by unusual key shifts, their effect ranging from startling to mysterious. At the end of the orchestral exposition the soloist returns on a rising chromatic dash that leads to a two-fisted proclamation of his own version of the orchestra’s theme. It dissolves into flashing garlands of notes, continuing the endless cadenza in the solo part that persists through the course of an enormous movement.

  After an opening more consistently militant in style than in any other Beethoven concerto, the second movement unfolds in a serenely spiritual atmosphere, beginning with an eloquent theme in muted strings that Czerny said was based on pilgrims’ hymns. It echoes the quiet espressivo phrases of the first movement’s opening. In turn, the spirituality of the second movement is punctuated with touches of the soloist’s first-movement bravura.

  Picking up directly from the end of the slow movement, the rondo finale begins with a lusty, offbeat theme in the piano. Call its tone playfully heroic. As in the first movement, the opening theme dominates. Toward the end, a thrumming martial timpani seems to herald the approach of the final cadenza. But once again there is no cadenza because the soloist has been showing off in a quasi-improvisatory fashion all along. The piece finishes with offbeat exclamations that land on the beat only at the last moment. So ends not the final work in Beethoven’s heroic style but one of the last in which he seems to take the heroic mode at face value. He never completed another concerto.

  Johann Friedrich Rochlitz, editor of the Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung (so often maligned by Beethoven to its owner Härtel), called it “doubtless one of the most original, most inventive, most effective, but also most difficult of all existing concertos,” and reported the audience at the Leipzig premiere to be “in transports of delight” at the end. The Viennese received it without enthusiasm.78

  The two premieres, the slighter theater work receiving the most acclaim, ushered in an eventful, in some ways too eventful, year for Beethoven. His fame was secure, his earlier “revolutionary” works had settled into the repertoire, publishers were contending for his work (though not Breitkopf & Härtel anymore). In 1812, he completed the Seventh and Eighth Symphonies.

  It could have been no surprise that in that year sculptor Franz Klein turned up at his door wanting to make a plaster life mask of the famous man. Partly because of the new quasi-science of phrenology—the theory that face and head reveal character, genius, what have you—molding the faces of the great had become fashionable. Goethe, George Washington, Keats, and many others submitted to the procedure. More practically, Klein and other artists wanted an objective record of a subject’s “real” face on which to model paintings and sculptures. Klein’s enthusiasm for taking casts of his subjects was reflected in his Viennese nickname of “Head Chopper.” The impetus for this particular life mask came from piano maker Johann Andreas Streicher; he had commissioned Klein to make a bust of Beethoven to add to the distinguished company of busts in his private concert hall.

  So one day Beethoven found himself lying face-up at an angle, his face and hair soaked in soapy water and oil, protective material covering his eyes, straws stuck up his nose to breathe through, while the Head Chopper slathered a thick mass of reeking wet gypsum over his face. As the procedure went on and on with excruciating slowness, Beethoven became increasingly fearful that he was going to suffocate. Suddenly in a spasm of anger and fear he jerked off the almost-set cast, threw it to the floor, and ran from the room.

  The mask shattered into pieces. Klein was able to glue them together and so reconstructed the “true” face of the composer, down to his scars from smallpox or whatever it was. From there Klein made his soon-famous bust that, with the mask itself, became the model for most portraits of Beethoven from then on. The mask and those ensuing portraits show a small man with a formidable scowl turning down his protruding lips, his chin and brow fiercely clenched, his hair standing nearly on end. That was the image the Romantic world and later ages came to know Beethoven by. It was the face they wanted to see in their geniuses: fierce, bold, defiant, suffering, stormy up to the slant of his hair. So tormented did it look that for the rest of the century, many people assumed it was Beethoven’s death mask.

  With Klein’s life mask and bust, the visual corollary of the Beethoven myth entered the zeitgeist. But no earlier portraits had that look, and neither did later ones done from life by artists who were observing what was actually in front of them, the man rather than the myth. Beethoven did not look like that bust most of the time. Except in his rages, his face was usually impassive, the major animation being in the eyes. The Klein mask and the bust he made from it are not a “real” portrait of a genius. They are the face of a man scowling because he is angry and uncomfortable and frightened.79

  Beethoven was perennially annoyed by the peripherals of fame, such as the tribe of artists wanting him to sit still so they could capture his face and his soul—though he sometimes liked the results. But there were more serious things concerning him in 1812. He was still locked in the grip of his ailment
s, but working on the Seventh and Eighth Symphonies. “I have been constantly unwell and extremely busy,” he wrote his new friend Varena in Graz, offering him the first of the new symphonies for a charity concert.80

  At the end of July he left Vienna for his second Teplitz sojourn in hope of a cure. Waiting to greet him there were Prince Lichnowsky; Bettina von Arnim, formerly Brentano, with her new husband Achim, and her brother Clemens; Karl August Varnhagen; Goethe; and a mysterious woman with whom Beethoven was desperately in love.

  25

  My Angel, My Self

  ONLY TO YOUTH can love seem easy. With the years come losses that taint the yearning and the passion. From his twenties into his thirties Beethoven had been a lionized virtuoso, steadily but capriciously in love, and women showed up at his door. Then came Josephine Deym, beautiful and musical, whom he could not get off his mind. Her rejection devastated him but did not damp the fire of his work. In 1812, his desires were a different matter than his pursuit of Josephine five years before. It is as if after the creative climax at the end of 1808, when he put two new symphonies and the Fourth Piano Concerto before the public, he looked up from his labors and realized how miserably alone he had been. He courted Therese Malfatti, a girl of seventeen, and for his trouble gained only humiliation. But he did not give up, not yet. He had not forgotten Josephine. He had met Bettina Brentano and met or renewed his acquaintance with Antonie Brentano, and both women captivated him.

  There was new urgency in his search now. This kind of desperation for love and companionship is a symptom of age, in Beethoven’s case of passing forty alone and in bad health. And now a woman had appeared who had not drawn away from him, who for the first time in his life seemed prepared to return his love. But there was something awry between them.

  He had to have been in a frantic state as he headed for the Teplitz resort at the end of June. He stopped in Prague and met with his dilatory patron Prince Kinsky, who gave him an advance of 600 florins on the next installment of the stipend.1 On July 3, Beethoven failed to turn up for a planned evening with his earlier Teplitz acquaintance Karl Varnhagen. “I was sorry, dear V,” he wrote later, “not to be able to spend my last evening at Prague with you . . . But a circumstance which I could not foresee prevented me.”2 He had received urgent news. Things were coming to a head.

  Two days later, his coach struggling into Bohemia in miserably cold and rainy weather, Beethoven arrived in Teplitz.3 The meeting of Goethe and Beethoven that Bettina had stage-managed was about to happen. But at that point Beethoven was thinking of another meeting, with a woman whom he believed to be nearby in Karlsbad. The next day he began to write her a letter in a mingling of love, hope, and despair, his words spilling onto the page like music with the surge of his passion. It is his only surviving letter to a woman that steadily uses the intimate du, “thou,” a sign of intimacy between friends or lovers:

  July 6

  In the morning—

  My angel, my all, my self.—only a few words today, in fact with pencil (with yours)—only tomorrow is my lodging positively fixed, what a worthless waste of time on such things—why this deep grief, when necessity speaks—Can our love exist but by sacrifices, by not demanding everything, can you change it, that you not completely mine, I am not completely yours—Oh God look upon beautiful nature and calm your soul over what must be—love demands everything and completely with good reason, so it is for me with you, for you with me—only you forget so easily, that I must live for myself and for you, were we wholly united, you would feel this painfulness just as little as I do—

  my trip was frightful, I arrived here only at 4 o’clock yesterday morning, because they lacked horses . . . at the next to the last station they warned me about traveling at night, made me afraid of a forest, but this only provoked me—but I was wrong, the coach had to break down on the terrible route . . . still I had some pleasure again, as always whenever I fortunately survive something—

  now quickly to interior from exterior, we will probably see each other soon, even today I cannot convey to you the observations I made during these last few days about my life—were our hearts always closely united, I would of course not have to . . . my heart is full of much to tell you—Oh—there are still moments when I find that speech is nothing at all—

  cheer up—remain my faithful only treasure, my all, as I for you the rest of the gods must send, what must and should be for us—your faithful ludwig

  Monday evening on July 6—

  You are suffering you my dearest creature—just now I notice that letters must be posted very early in the morning Mondays—Thursdays—the only days on which mail goes from here to K[arlsbad]—you are suffering—Oh, wherever I am, you are with me, I talk to myself and to you—arrange that I can live with you, what a life!!!! like this!!!! without you—Persecuted by the kindness of people here and there, which I think—I want to deserve just as little as I deserve it—Homage of man to man—it pains me—

  and when I regard myself in the framework of the universe, what am I and what is he—whom one calls the Greatest—and yet—herein is again the divine spark of man—I weep when I think that you will probably not receive the first news of me until Saturday—as much as you love me—I love you even more deeply but—never hide yourself from me—

  good night—since I am taking the baths I must go to sleep—Oh god—so near! So far! Is not our love a true heavenly edifice—but also firm, like the firmament—

  good morning July 7

  —while still in bed my thoughts rush toward you my Immortal Beloved now and then happy, then again sad, awaiting fate, if it will grant us a favorable hearing—I can only live either wholly with you or not at all

  yes I have resolved to wander about in the distance, until I can fly into your arms, and can call myself entirely at home with you, can send my soul embraced by you into the realm of spirits—yes unfortunately it must be—you will compose yourself all the more, since you know my faithfulness to you, never can another own my heart, never—never—O God why have to separate oneself, what one loves so and yet my life in V[ienna] as it is now is a miserable life—

  at my age now I need some uniformity and consistency of life—can this exist in our relationship?—Angel, right now I hear that the mail goes every day—and I must therefore close, so that you will receive the L[etter] immediately—be calm, only through quiet contemplation of our existence can we reach our goal to live together—be patient—love me—today—yesterday—What longing with tears for you—you—you—my love—my all—farewell—o continue to love me—never misjudge the most faithful heart of your beloved

  L.

  forever yours

  forever mine

  forever us4

  This letter, written over the course of two days, is the only surviving part of an ongoing dialogue between Beethoven and his lover that had been carried on in letters and in person for some unknown length of time. Its contradictions echo his jumble of feelings. He was writing with her pencil, so they had been together not long before. The feelings revealed in his words are an excruciating mixture of yearning and uncertainty, of hope trying to overcome despair. Their dialogue had reached a point where, at either Teplitz or Karlsbad, they needed to reach a resolution.

  The reason for his pain is adumbrated between the lines: “[C]an you change it, that you [are] not completely mine, I am not completely yours.” He had fallen into his old pattern: his lover was married or betrothed or otherwise unavailable. The difference this time was that she reciprocated his love. Since it was some sort of forbidden relationship, the secrecy between them was so tight that no other letter between the two survives that clearly identifies her. For the rest of his life Beethoven kept these pages with him, hidden alongside the Heiligenstadt Testament and portraits of women he had loved, one of his collection of secret talismans. The letter may never have been mailed, or she may have returned it. He could keep it because it did not have her name on it. Deliberately, nothing was to be lef
t for history to find her out. The future would know her only as Unsterbliche Geliebte, “Immortal Beloved.”5

  “[L]ove demands everything and completely with good reason, so it is for me with you, for you with me . . . I must live for myself and for you.” They are united in love but not in life. How they are united cannot be gleaned from his words. Are they physically lovers or lovers in spirit, living in the hope of somehow being fully united? A plea for resignation, from himself and from her. He says fate must decide the issue, and for Beethoven fate was always a hostile power. And yet, he reminds her, in each of us there is a spark of the divine that cannot reach but can imagine God. “Is not our love a true heavenly edifice[?]” The love of man and woman, Mozart taught in Die Zauberflöte and Schiller in “An die Freude,” is the earthly counterpart of divine love.

  “I can only live either wholly with you or not at all.” No more of this neither-nor; it must be one or the other. “[A]t my age now I need some uniformity and consistency of life—can this exist in our relationship?” He was forty-two, in his day much closer to the end than to the beginning. The letter speaks of his love in rapturous and anguished phrases, dogged by a sense of impossibility. At his age he can’t live and love merely on hope. “[O]nly through quiet contemplation of our existence can we reach our goal to live together.” Only in finding a way out of their dilemma. Now they must meet and decide whether there really can be a way, whether she is to be his Immortal Beloved forever or never.