Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph

by Swafford, Jan

  For Beethoven G major tended to be a gentle and pastoral key, and gentleness pervades this sonata. It begins with a little violin fillip of indefinite meter and tonality like a birdcall, introducing a movement of heart-filling warmth and charm conjuring the outdoors: reverie, birds, summer breezes. Nature was still Beethoven’s cathedral; here is a fresh angle on a pastoral style. Nearly the entire first movement is marked piano or pianissimo. Figures evoking birdcalls and breezes will be abiding sources of material, as will the opening trill. Another idea that arrives later in the exposition is a poignant intrusion of notes borrowed from the minor, especially the flat sixth degree—and most especially E-flat, the flat six of G major, which will play a role in the sonata both as a note (sometimes disguised as D-sharp) and as a key.

  Formal outlines are on the whole simple and regular; the second movement Adagio espressivo is a straightforward ABA, the main theme one of his long-breathed lyrics, the middle section a blissful trance. The movement segues directly into a rough and ironic scherzo with jolting, offbeat accents; its trio has the lilt of a folk dance, say a German Ländler.

  Another kind of folkish simplicity is the basis of the finale, Poco allegretto. (He had sketched the theme earlier, perhaps for the A Major Cello Sonata.)57 Its theme suggests a little dance tune from a comic opera. The movement is continuous, the sections contrasting but flowing together, so it is not all that obvious that we are hearing a theme and six variations with a couple of interludes, one being a stretch of chromatic fugue whose apparently out-of-nowhere subject is actually a stretching out of the movement’s opening theme. The coda gives us a bracing gust of wind, a warm reminiscence of the theme, and a jolly burst of final chords. All this is to say that the effect of the finale is less its nominal form, a theme and variations, than a stream of consciousness. That quality too will mark much of the late music: the old forms still functioning but sunk beneath the surface, a few seminal motifs flowering into a proliferation of melody, everything with an effect of transcendent, rhapsodic freedom.

  This exquisite sonata shows that while life had assaulted Beethoven and he had faltered, his courage, his discipline, and his devotion to his craft had not deserted him completely. Here is the inner world of an aging, unhappy, chronically ailing composer who had increasing difficulty hearing anything but what sang in his head, but who remembered the sounds of nature and the feelings of exaltation and of love human and divine that he found there. These are things only an artist older and wiser, who has done much and suffered much, can fully understand and truly speak of.

  Still, living back in the Pasqualati house overlooking the bastion in Vienna, his production slowed alarmingly. After the Violin Sonata in G Major, in the first half of 1813 he finished nothing else but some folk-song settings and a piece for a play at the Burgtheater.58 With few if any friends left to unburden himself to, no shoulders to weep on, in 1812 he began to keep a Tagebuch, a diary. Its first entries reveal the rawest anguish he had expressed since the Heiligenstadt Testament. This was a private testament, addressed only to himself and to God:

  Submission, deepest submission to your fate . . . O hard struggle! . . . You must not be a human being, not for yourself, but only for others; for you there is no longer any happiness except within yourself, in your art. O God! give me strength to conquer myself, nothing at all must fetter me to life. In this manner with [A.] everything goes to ruin.59

  [Two entries later:] O terrible circumstances, which do not suppress my longing for domesticity, but [prevent] its realization. O God, God, look down upon the unhappy B., do not let it continue like this any longer.

  The Heiligenstadt Testament had been written when he was younger, healthier, in the middle of his fame as a virtuoso, his work running strong and in demand, his wounds fresh, and there were fewer old scars. Then his response to suffering had been defiance, not resignation, not submission. By the time of the Tagebuch submission was the only path left for him. He did not believe in miracles, in God coming down from the stars to answer his prayers, but he had no one but God to pray to for an end to his suffering. As he had done in that earlier cry from the cross, he threw himself on his art as the only meaning left in his life. But in that earlier cry, when he feared never to feel joy again, he had not given up on love and family. Now he was letting go of those dreams too.

  Every woman he had truly loved—including Julie Guicciardi, the singer Magdalena Willmann, Josephine Deym, Therese Malfatti, his Immortal Beloved—had rejected him or had been lost because of forces outside his control. Now he gave up on women, gave up hopes for love and romance and family. As he wrote in the Tagebuch, to give up on love is close to giving up on life. Once again his art was all he had left. But now, for the first time, his art was drifting.

  Here was another turning point in his life, as the Heiligenstadt Testament had been, as the declaration of a new musical path had been before that. Beethoven had acted on those declarations with all the fierce power of his will. But his will was waning now; there is no decisiveness in his declaration of submission and withdrawal, only anguish. For the moment he did not have the energy and confidence to lift himself up. He was about to be very busy, in a time when the demand for his work heated up suddenly. But in spirit he was still on the way down.

  Yet Beethoven, capricious in all things, was capricious even in his despair. Among those first anguished entries in the Tagebuch is a technical note: “The precise coinciding of several musical voices generally hinders the progression from one to the other.” (He appears to mean that contrapuntal voices need to be rhythmically distinct.) And there would be few further cries from the soul like the ones that begin the diary. Nor did the Tagebuch become a record of daily events. The bulk of it is a collection of quotations Beethoven liked, from a great variety of literary sources, sprinkled with practical musical and household items, excerpts from potential opera librettos, and so on. “How should Eleison be pronounced in Greek?” runs one note. “E-le-i-son is correct.” (That toward another try at a mass.) Authors quoted or referred to include Schiller (the most frequent), the philosophers Herder and Kant, the fantasist Gozzi, the Spanish dramatist Calderón, Pliny, Plutarch, Homer. He wrote down only a few entries about music and no quoted reviews of his work, good or bad. There is not a single entry about current events, which were in world-changing convulsions during the time of the Tagebuch.

  The bulk of the entries are inspirational in one way or another. “Portraits of Handel, Bach, Gluck, Mozart, and Haydn in my room. They can promote my capacity for endurance.” (In fact he had no pictures of those composers on his wall.) There were exhortations to stick to his last, to subdue his longings and transcend his pain and deafness: “Everything that is called life should be sacrificed to the sublime, and be a sanctuary of art. Let me live, even if by artificial means, if only they can be found!” He quoted a contemporary comment on artists: “‘Unfortunately, mediocre talents are condemned to imitate the faults of the great masters without appreciating their beauties: from thence comes the harm that Michelangelo does to painting, Shakespeare to drama and, in our day, Beethoven to music.’”

  The most unexpected collection of quotations shows that by the mid-1810s, Beethoven was reading Eastern religious texts and books about those religions, most having to do with Hinduism. His underlying concern was to broaden his conception of God. From a commentary on the Rig-Veda:

  Free from all passion and desire, that is the Mighty One. He alone. No one is greater than He. (Brahm.) His spirit, is enwrapped in Himself. He, the Mighty One, is present in every part of space. O God . . . You are the true, eternally blessed, unchangeable light of all times and spaces . . . You alone are the true (Bhagavan—the) blessed one, the essence of all laws, the image of all wisdom of the whole present world—You sustain all things.

  [Another entry, a paraphrase he had adapted to his own life and work:] All things flowed clear and pure from God. If afterwards I became darkened through passion for evil, I returned, after manifold repentance a
nd purification, to the elevated and pure source, to the Godhead.—And, to your art.

  [From the Bhagavad Gita:] Blessed is (the man) who, having subdued all his passions, performeth with his active faculties all the functions of life, unconcerned about the outcome. Let the motive be in the deed, and not in the outcome. Be not one whose motive for action is the hope of reward.60

  [Regarding Indian music:] Indian scales and notes: sa, ri, ga, ma, na, da, ni, scha.

  The final quotation in the Tagebuch, added years after it began, also concerns God. It is from Beethoven’s favorite book of homilies and natural history, Christoph Christian Sturm’s Reflections on the Works of God and His Providence Throughout All Nature: “Therefore, calmly will I submit myself to all inconstancy and will place all my trust in Thy unchangeable goodness, O God! My soul shall rejoice in Thee, immutable Being. Be my rock, my light, my trust forever!”

  In Schiller’s essay “The Mission of Moses,” Beethoven read inscriptions said to be found on Egyptian monuments:

  I AM THAT WHICH IS,

  I AM ALL, WHAT IS, WHAT WAS, WHAT WILL BE;

  NO MORTAL MAN HAS EVER LIFTED MY VEIL.

  HE IS ONLY AND SOLELY OF HIMSELF,

  AND TO THIS ONLY ONE ALL THINGS OWE THEIR EXISTENCE.

  These evocations from ancient Egypt did not go into the Tagebuch. Beethoven copied them out on a sheet of paper and put them under glass on his writing table so they would be before his eyes as he worked. Those sublime sentiments would play their part in his late music too.

  An undogmatic and unbigoted interest in non-Western religions was another part of the Aufklärung ethos Beethoven imbibed in Bonn. For deists, all religions worship the same things with different languages and images and traditions. Beethoven instinctively responded to poetic religious texts (after all, in large part religions are created and sustained by poetry). From these texts he wanted imagery, inspiration, broadening, not dogma. His most ambitious works from the Eroica onward had been involved with the world, the hero, the ideal society, joy, beauty, sorrow, personal struggle and triumph, and, so far, a frustrated search for a sacred style in music. Now in his anguish he turned his thoughts upward and beyond, reaching for a sense of the divine larger than any scripture or church. And he turned to God directly: neither the Tagebuch nor any of his letters or works to this time had any significant reference to Christ beyond his hasty oratorio Christus am Ölberge.

  In his art Beethoven was reaching beyond the sorrows of lovers and friends, the rough jokes, the clashes of armies and exaltation of heroes that had inspired his work. Now for Beethoven, Sturm’s book melding science and religion joined with a sense of primeval mystery. Beethoven was pulling away from the earth, to a higher angle of view. At the same time he was singing more within than ever, starting with the locked inwardness of the deaf man who can hear only the songs in his own head. No less was Beethoven headed for the childlike, the naive, the utterly simple, all these qualities more than ever. He had not given up his drive, seen from his earliest music, to do and to express and to feel more in every direction. It was these kinds of conceptions and images that helped create the music he was to write in his last years: humanity standing under the infinite canopy of the stars, no less human and concrete than before, with no heroes to exalt us but only ourselves, reaching toward one another and, in that, toward Elysium and toward God, to make a world whose order reflects the sublime order of the universe.

  At the same time, the quotidian hounded Beethoven more than ever. As 1813 began, the element of the Tagebuch that prevailed in his external life was the despair of the first pages. Signs of desperation and loneliness were all over him. Occasionally in notes to his old bachelor friend and helper Baron Zmeskall, a new and peculiar term began to turn up, a shared code. In February, Beethoven wrote, “Be zealous in defending the Fortresses of the Empire, which, as you know, lost their virginity a long time ago and have already received several assaults—”; “Enjoy life, but not voluptuously—Proprietor, Governor, Pasha of various rotten fortresses!!!!”; “Keep away from rotten fortresses, for an attack from them is more deadly than one from well-preserved ones.”61

  The codes here are transparent enough. Beethoven is talking about prostitutes, solicitations, the threat of venereal disease. (A later conversation book cites the title of a French treatise on venereal diseases.)62 Most bachelors in those days put off marriage until they were settled into a career, and patronized whores as a matter of course. It was estimated that in a population of around two hundred thousand Viennese in 1812, roughly 10 percent were full- or part-time prostitutes.63 Once, violinist Ignaz Schuppanzigh took Beethoven to a brothel and had to avoid Beethoven’s wrath for weeks. Still, it is likely Beethoven was acquainted with the institution before 1813. In these depressed years he began frequenting brothels more often, usually with old bachelor Zmeskall, his faithful helper in that as in much else.

  His loneliness could not have been alleviated by these fleeting and tainted pleasures. All of it offended his spirit, his idealization of women and love, his puritanical instincts. The contrition shows up in the Tagebuch: “Sensual gratification without a spiritual union is and remains bestial, afterwards one has no trace of noble feeling but rather remorse.”64 Again: “From today on never go into that house—without shame at craving something from such a person.”65 At the same time, there is a commonsense acknowledgment of the inevitability of desire: “The frailties of nature are given by nature herself and sovereign Reason shall seek to guide and diminish them through her strength.” From a Hindu text concerning the sacred image of the phallus, Beethoven copied, “To someone who was offended by the idea of the lingam, the Brahman uttered, ‘Did not the same God who has created the eye also create the other human members?’”

  If it were only a matter of everyday sins and regrets, all this might have been a passing symptom of lost love. But in addition Beethoven seemed visibly to be falling apart. Friends found him looking shockingly dirty and run-down. At the end of 1812, composer Louis Spohr met Beethoven at a restaurant, and they got together occasionally after. Beethoven knew of Spohr’s work and was kindly toward him. Once, when Beethoven did not show up for several days, Spohr went to see him. Beethoven explained that his boots were in tatters and “as I have only one pair I am under house-arrest.” His manners in those days, Spohr recalled, were “rough and even repulsive.”66

  Patrons in restaurants shied away from him. In Baden, piano maker Nannette Streicher and her husband found Beethoven in “the most deplorable condition . . . He had neither a decent coat nor a whole shirt, and I must forbear to describe his condition as it really was.”67 This suggests that he was resorting to the bottle more than usual. The ­Streichers helped him as best they could.68 It was as if Beethoven were sinking to where his father had been at nearly the same age. If he had not been one before, maybe in these years he became a functional ­alcoholic—impaired but still able to work, not out of control. At least, in contrast to his father’s case, there are no stories of Beethoven being found rolling in the gutter. The Streichers’ report, though, implies something in that direction.69

  In his youth, Beethoven had known beyond doubt that he had great powers inside him. As the years brought their blows, whatever his anguish he sustained a conviction that he was equal to anything fate threw at him. After his youthful brashness left him, his essential confidence did not—though he had faltered in the aftermath of Josephine’s withdrawal, in 1807. Now he was not so sure he was up to the blows. He wrote to Archduke Rudolph that “unfortunate incidents occurring one after the other have really driven me into a state bordering on mental confusion.”70 Eventually he hit bottom, then began to rise.

  From now on, his mind and body, his inner creative tides and his external existence, which had always run on separate yet parallel tracks, were going to diverge more and more. It is as if the more anguish fate heaped on him, the more his rage and desperation and paranoia mounted, the brighter and purer his creative spirit burned. But
not yet. That resolution would take the better part of a decade to gather. In 1813 and for some time after, the main thing he thought about was money.

  Sunk more in grief than in art in those years, Beethoven never wrote of what was going on in the world, but he could not have been unaware of it, and in the end he profited from the results. In June 1812, Napoleon invaded Russia with a Grande Armée of nearly 700,000 men, the largest force in European history. Now the French were pursuing a dangerous two-front war; French forces were also fighting the British and Portuguese in Spain.

  In Russia, nearly half Napoleon’s troops were Poles and Germans from conquered territories. (One of his aims was to prevent Tsar Alexander I from invading Poland.) As the Russian army retreated before him, the world expected another conquest. At Borodino, on the road to Moscow, the Russians made a stand but retreated after bloody fighting. Napoleon’s army swept into Moscow, only to find no troops defending it. Before long, a fire of mysterious origin burned much of the Russian capital to the ground. Tsar Alexander sat tight, refusing all peace overtures.