Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph

by Swafford, Jan

  Austrian foreign minister Clemens Metternich had bitterly opposed the tsar’s Elba plan, declaring that Napoleon would be back leading an army within two years.42 As it transpired, Metternich understood the man better than anyone else. Marie Louise’s letters to Napoleon he quietly intercepted and filed away.43 With his usual attention to detail, Metternich picked out a new lover as solace for Marie Louise, from among the military nobility.

  On April 11, Beethoven played piano in the premiere of the Archduke Trio. Composer Louis Spohr, who had been spending time with Beethoven, recalled it as “not a treat, for, in the first place, the piano was badly out of tune, which Beethoven minded little, since he did not hear it . . . Beethoven’s continual melancholy was no longer a riddle to me.”44 Young pianist and composer Ignaz Moscheles, commissioned to do the piano and voice arrangement of Fidelio, found the playing “neither clean nor precise, yet I could still notice many traces of a once great virtuosity.”45 On the same day came the first hearing of a singspiel, Die gute Nachricht (The Good News), celebrating the fall of Paris. The music was the product of several composers; Beethoven contributed the final chorus, “Germania,” another patriotic potboiler. The text was by playwright George Friedrich Treitschke, still working with Beethoven on the revision of Fidelio.

  Early one morning Moscheles arrived to consult about his arrangement of the opera. Beethoven was still in bed but jumped up enthusiastically. To go over the music he stepped to the window overlooking the bastion. Soon he noticed that street urchins outside were raising a ruckus. “Those damned boys,” he growled, “what do they want?” Mo­scheles smilingly pointed downward, reminding Beethoven that he was naked. “Yes, yes, you’re right,” Beethoven said, and put on a dressing gown. Later, when the arrangement was done, Beethoven found Mo­scheles had written on the last page, “Finished with the help of God.” When the young man got the music back, he found Beethoven had scrawled under that: “O Man, help yourself.” Beethoven did not believe that God directed one’s writing hand.

  In the middle of March, rehearsals began on the new version of Fidelio, still without its new overture and generally in flux. He had never struggled with a work as much as with this overhaul. To change something in one place meant he had to change things elsewhere. As he wrote his collaborator Treitschke, “I could compose something new far more quickly than patch up the old with something new, as I am now doing. For my custom even when I am composing instrumental music is always to keep the whole in view . . . I have to think out the entire work again . . . I assure you, dear T, that this opera will win for me a martyr’s crown.”46 There is one of the most trenchant things Beethoven ever said about his creative process: Always keep the whole in view. It is one of his laconic asides that speaks volumes. For him a work, from an opera to a symphony to a folk-song arrangement, was an organism of balanced parts, every part related to every other—and that to a degree even in the traditionally loose construction of operas.

  Shortly before the Fidelio premiere he wrote Treitschke in continuing frustration, “This whole opera business is the most tiresome affair in the world . . . and—there is hardly a number in it which my present dissatisfaction would not have to patch up here and there.”47 His focus was still largely on the music rather than the dramatic pace and shape, but with Treitschke’s expert help in the theatrical dimension he was determined to speed up the first act, which had always languished. The pacing would never entirely be fixed, but it ended up far tighter than in the first version.

  A week before the premiere of the new Fidelio, Prince Lichnowsky died of a lingering illness, perhaps venereal. He had been Beethoven’s first patron in Vienna and one of his most generous. After their quarrel of 1806, they had never been close again, but Lichnowsky maintained a kind of pathetic loyalty. It was reported that in his last years they had an agreement that the prince could stop in now and then and silently watch Beethoven at work. If the servant did not let him in, he would leave quietly without being admitted to the inner sanctum.48

  The premiere of the not quite finished revision of Fidelio came on May 23 at the Kärntnertor Theater, where librettist Treitschke worked as a producer and dramatist. Standing in for the unfinished new overture was the old Ruins of Athens Overture. It went well, Beethoven conducting. Once again Kapellmeister Michael Umlauf sat behind him, ready to step in if there was trouble, because Beethoven could hear very little. The audience applauded stormily and called Beethoven before the curtain again and again.49 A Viennese theatrical journal raved, “We were amazed at Beethoven in his entire greatness, and what was more, we were amazed at the master . . . who, before the Battle of Vittoria, had belonged to his antagonists. At last, the great genius has for once prevailed and is able to rejoice in his works . . . The music of this opera is a deeply thought-out, purely felt portrait of the most creative imagination, the most undiluted originality, the most divine ascent of the earthly into the incomprehensibly heavenly.”50 Among other things, this review reveals that there was still plenty of lingering anti-Beethoven sentiment in Vienna. To repeat: even paranoids have enemies.

  The great disappointment of his career had finally paid him back for his trials. Fidelio went on to a long run and the applause only grew, both in the theater and in the press. In June a “K. B.” wrote in the Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung, “In the works of great poets there is an irony that gently hovers over the entire piece . . . Beethoven’s compositions have not been considered enough from this point of view. But precisely from just this vantage many things that appear to be harsh and strange in him are recognized as exquisite and necessary. This pure, poetic irony, gentle, but often also piercing and terrible, hovers over many of his most splendid productions. Indeed, frequently a deep repressed rage speaks to us from his music, but let us not forget that it is a pure, holy rage.” The process of mythologizing Beethoven is on extravagant display here. The elements of his music that had once been decried as “bizarre,” critics now described with “harsh and strange,” “rage,” and “terrible” as terms of praise. E. T. A. Hoffmann had pioneered in these critical directions. The critic also mentions irony in connection with Beethoven. Presumably he meant the distinctively Romantic sense of irony in art as self-reflection, an author turning around in midcourse to view his creation from the outside, creating paradoxes, mirrors, doppelgängers, puncturing the illusion of reality by recognizing the work as artifice. How the critic saw that kind of irony in Beethoven’s work so far is hard to discern; it would, if anything, be more relevant to the late works, which sometimes seem to be music about music. In any case, all these critical responses point to a generation finding its way to Beethoven by defining him in its own terms, as distinct from his terms (a process every artist is subject to). The Romantic portrait of Beethoven was falling into place.

  Having posted a notice in the paper after the successful concert of the previous December, Beethoven put in another one after the success of Fidelio. He was on a winning streak in Vienna, and he wanted to enhance it with some public crowing.

  A WORD TO HIS ADMIRERS

  How often in your chagrin, that his depth was not sufficiently appreciated, have you said that van Beethoven composes only for posterity! You have, no doubt, been convinced of your error since if not before the general enthusiasm aroused by his immortal opera “Fidelio”; and also that the present finds kindred souls and sympathetic hearts for that which is great and beautiful without withholding its just privileges from the future.51

  In July, Fidelio had a grand benefit concert before what the Wiener Zeitung reported as a full house—this after a long run—and earned “extraordinary applause . . . the enthusiasm for the composer, who has now become a favorite of the public, manifested itself in calls before the curtain after every act.” He was still tinkering with the opera, restoring the “Gold” aria and writing a new aria for Anna Milder, his Leonore, having cut the first one after the performance. The new overture was in place. Czerny noticed that in these days Beethoven seemed to rise ou
t of his funk of the last months and began to pay more attention to his appearance.52

  In autumn 1814, he wrote to lawyer Johann Nepomuk Kanka, who was managing his lawsuits related to his yearly stipend:

  You yourself know that a man’s spirit, the active creative spirit, must not be tied down to the wretched necessities of life. And this business robs me of many other things conducive to a happy existence . . . I shall not say anything to you about our monarchs and so forth or about our monarchies and so forth, for the papers report everything to you—I much prefer the empire of the mind, and I regard it as the highest of all spiritual and worldly monarchies . . . To whatever height I feel uplifted when in happy moments I find myself raised to my artistic atmosphere, yet the spirits of this earth pull me down again . . . Thanks to my charming disciples and colleagues I have drunk to the full a cup of bitter sorrow and have already won the crown of martyrdom in art.53

  In fact, what finally settled the stipend affair in Beethoven’s favor was not the lawsuits that claimed so much of his time but the intervention of Archduke Rudolph. As Beethoven said, he lived in the empire of the mind, where he was of the highest nobility. But he was paying much attention to the kingdom of the world these days. His perennial bitterness remained. A month after his triumph at the Congress of Vienna with Fidelio, he wrote to lawyer Kanka, ranting about “the dishonest affair of the Kinsky family . . . If the affair turns out unfavorably by reason of the behavior of the K family, then I shall have this story published in all the newspapers . . . to the disgrace of the family.”54 The rift between the empire of the mind and his quotidian rage was widening steadily.

  Beethoven’s letter to Kanka mentioning “monarchies and so forth” shows that he had been reading the newspapers. Monarchs and monarchies were on everyone’s mind these days. In the wake of Napoleon’s fall, the crowned heads of Europe with their thousands of ministers, secretaries, courtiers, spies, minions, mistresses and lovers headed toward Vienna for a titanic convocation to decide how to put Europe back together. After twenty-five years of more war than peace, and enormous social changes, no one expected that the clock could be completely rolled back. There was, for example, no interest in reviving the Holy Roman Empire. But Austria wanted its old possessions returned and in the end got most of them. The deliberations and the festivities rolled into motion toward the end of September. The convocation was expected to last a few weeks. It lasted nine months.

  The Austrian state bankrolled what was soon dubbed the Congress of Vienna. Over its course the state spent some 30 million florins to support and entertain the delegations.55 The actual work was done largely by ministers, leaving the emperors and empresses and other distinguished hordes with little to do but enjoy themselves, in every fashion the human imagination could conceive and an ocean of money realize. The chronically overcrowded city of two hundred thousand was invaded by some one hundred thousand additional, mostly rich foreigners who had to be housed. But Vienna loved a show, and there was always somewhere for residents to double up and rent out their rooms or houses or palaces.

  Musicians, actors, painters, caterers, landlords, blacksmiths, police, and prostitutes embraced the onslaught. The least chambermaid could go on the government payroll for ransacking the trash of the nobles and ministers for whom she cleaned house. Many hundreds had to be assembled to read every piece of trash with words on it and every piece of mail posted by anybody of interest. The police read and resealed some fifteen thousand letters a day.56 (The investigative structures and techniques developed in Vienna were left in place after the congress, the spying now concentrating on citizens.) Each morning, Emperor Franz I received a distillation of the most suspicious and delicious bits of information gleaned from his army of spies: who was drinking, who was abstemious, who was talking to whom and sleeping with whom, and when and where and how much. One report noted that a Herr Mayer was doing nicely selling remedies for venereal disease to the distinguished visitors.57 After the congress, the chief of police died of exhaustion.58

  Altogether, representatives and hangers-on of about two hundred states were in attendance. Yet in fact there was hardly any congress at all—at least not of the political variety. The principals in the discussions were at first only four men, representing the leading powers: Foreign Minister Clemens Metternich of Austria, recently entitled prince by the emperor; Viscount Castlereagh of England (highly reserved but no pushover, later replaced by the duke of Wellington); King Frederick William III of Prussia; and Tsar Alexander I. Around these four men swarmed legions of schemers and petitioners and ministers and informants. Fractures formed right away. Metternich and Castlereagh were united in an obsession with order, peace, and stability at all costs; Alexander was determined to claim the whole of Poland for Russia; Frederick William deferred to the tsar almost slavishly. By this point, Metternich was essentially running the Austrian government for the shallow and indolent Austrian emperor Franz I, who was happiest out in the kitchen making toffee while obsessing about secret societies and subversion. Metternich, then forty-one, had no doubt of his capacity for this or any job. “Error,” he reported of himself in later years, “has never crossed my mind.”59 More importantly to many in Vienna, Metternich and Castlereagh were called two of the handsomest men in Europe.60

  France was represented by Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand. In the course of his career, Talleyrand had risen to power serving first the Bourbon throne, then the Revolution, then Napoleon, then the allies as a turncoat. As an English visitor described him, “He looks altogether like an old, fuddled, lame, village schoolmaster.”61 He hobbled about on a foot injured in childhood. All these appearances were deceiving. Talley­rand was the most cunning and ruthless man at the congress. Now he represented the restored Bourbon throne with the mission of making defeated France the equal of the other powers. He managed that mandate brilliantly; the Big Four became the Big Five. In the midst of this chaos of diplomats, these five men essentially decided the fate of Europe for the next century. The lesser powers, down to the smallest of the post-Napoleonic German states, schemed, bargained, pleaded, and hoped for scraps from the big table.

  The more public endeavors of the congress caught most of the attention of Beethoven and the rest of the Viennese. Someone coined the famous summary: “The congress doesn’t get on; it dances.” More accurately, it danced, ate, chased kaleidoscopic amusements, flirted, made love. In town were more than two hundred heads of princely families, all touchy about precedence, none with any real function, all looking for fun.62 Night and day there were balls, banquets, theatricals, operas, gala concerts, ballets, hunts, staged medieval jousts, picnics, sleigh rides, and tableaux vivants by aristocratic ladies (“Hippolytus Defending His Virtue Before Theseus”).63

  Countless smaller parties went on all over town, where much of the business of flirting and assignation was carried on along with informal intrigue and diplomacy. Russian ambassador Count Razumovsky, Beethoven’s patron and dedicatee of the op. 59 Quartets, entertained on a stupendous scale in his nearly finished palace overflowing with art and finery. One of his dinners for 360 people included sturgeons from the Volga, oysters from Brittany and Belgium, truffles from Périgord, oranges from Sicily, pineapples from Moscow, strawberries from England, and cherries brought in the middle of winter from St. Petersburg at the cost of one ruble per cherry.64 New and historic dishes were invented for the congress: beef Wellington, beef Stroganoff. From the sidelines, the Viennese watched the show and marveled. Day by day, gossip roiled through the streets and out the gates of the city into the suburbs.

  The behavior and morality of the nobility were hardly expected to conform to the straight and narrow path demanded of commoners. Tsar Alexander’s erratic behavior, boorishness, and bullying clogged the deliberations and finally left in ruins the almost-mythical stature he had gained as the Great Liberator.65 Mystical, depressive, and unstable, Alexander began the congress idolized by the populace and ended it widely loathed, at least by those who had to deal w
ith him. His beautiful and intelligent wife Elisabeth he treated with brutal disdain. The tsarina concentrated on entertainments, including music, and she was a fervent admirer of Beethoven.

  In every way, the nobility of Europe came to Vienna to reclaim and reassert their ancient rights and privileges, including the right to do as they pleased. The art of excess reached perhaps unprecedented heights. In his free hours, Great Liberator Alexander turned out to be a heroic womanizer. Of the endless stories of trysting during the congress, one address can stand for all. In town there was a palace with two staircases leading to separate apartments that had been rented to two aristocratic visitors. The top of the left staircase was the domain of the Russian princess Katharine Bagration, whose lifestyle earned her the nickname “the Naked Angel.” She established a virtual brothel for the aristocracy, with herself as open-armed proprietor. At one point a prince broke down a door in her flat to find his very young daughter in the arms of a Russian nobleman.66

  Years before, Princess Bagration had enjoyed a heated fling with Clemens Metternich that produced a child whom she named, with incomparable cheek, Clementine. With this affair as with numberless later ones, Metternich’s wife, slowly dying of tuberculosis, looked the other way and soldiered on in support of her husband. At the congress, Bagration became the tsar’s favorite, though neither was remotely faithful. Many nights police spies observed the tsar trudging up the left-hand staircase. Emperor Franz would chortle over the reports at breakfast the next morning. One police report ran, “The porter rang four times to announce [the tsar], and the princess . . . came out on the staircase dressed en négligé. She took Alexander into her boudoir where he at once noticed a man’s hat. The princess gave an explanation that amused the Tsar. [She said it belonged to her decorator.] The Tsar stayed for two and a half hours.”67