Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph

by Swafford, Jan

  Above the right-hand staircase of the palace, meanwhile, resided Wilhelmine, duchess of Sagan—beautiful, twice divorced, and available. Metternich had known her slightly; now he fell helplessly in love with her. (A British diplomat at the congress reported Metternich as “most intolerably loose and giddy with women.”)68 Then, catastrophe: the duchess took a liking to the tsar. Soon spies were noting that the tsar’s evening ascents went up the right-hand staircase more often than the left-hand one. Metternich was prostrate. For weeks he spent much of his time writing long, heartbroken letters to Wilhelmine. The congress languished while he wept. Much of Beethoven’s conversation in the coming years concerned the frivolity, immorality, and excesses of the ruling class. The congress provided endless fuel for his outrage.

  In this fashion the business and pleasures of the congress forged on. At the end of the year negotiations had become so poisonous that war threatened, but that was averted by Talleyrand’s brilliant, two-faced negotiating. Among other things he engineered a secret treaty of France, England, and Austria against Russia and Prussia. After keeping Europe at war for most of a quarter century, France was now an equal among its former enemies.69

  Citizens across Europe hoped the congress would bring peace, reform, a return to old borders and empires, a new age of liberté, egalité, and fraternité under the rule of enlightened monarchs. The people, including Beethoven, had not yet understood the implacable hostility of Metternich and many others to the least hint of democracy or constitutional government. The famously enlightened Tsar Alexander, who declared that he wanted to turn Poland into a republic attached to Russia, went home to devolve into an unstable, reactionary tyrant. The ruling class wanted its power, its privileges and fun secured forever. This continent-wide reassertion of power, excess, and reaction constituted the status quo against which Beethoven’s last symphony was to propose an alternative.

  In September 1814, as the Congress of Vienna began, Beethoven reported to Archduke Rudolph that “my health some time ago suffered a severe blow owing to an inflammation of my intestines, which brought me almost to death’s door. But I am now much better.” He had sent Fidelio to Prague, where Carl Maria von Weber conducted it in November.70 The opera’s popularity began to spread beyond Vienna. Despite everything, Beethoven managed to compose the Piano Sonata in E Minor, op. 90. Its two small movements are far from slight in effect. The opening alone has enough contrasting material for two or three movements.

  The E Minor joins one of the most mercurial of movements to one of the most constant. It begins with a bluff striding three-beat; then follow without transition passages one could label tender, then poignant, then (after some fierce downward swoops and stabbing chords) a second-theme section suddenly driving and passionate, then fleet and urgent. Each of these ideas/moods will be developed in the movement, but by no means resolved.

  The resolution, a kind of spiritual one, is the second movement. After one of the most fickle movements imaginable comes a sunny and songful E-major rondo whose delicately beautiful and a-touch-wistful theme comes back over and over, soothing moments of unease like a lullaby from which one does not want to stray for long.

  Here is the first hint of the atmosphere of Beethoven’s late piano music, including the long singing lines and the ability to touch the heart with moments that seem utterly ingenuous. He dedicated the sonata to Count Moritz Lichnowsky, brother of the recently passed Prince Karl. Count Moritz reported that Beethoven told him the sonata was a dialogue between “Head and Heart.”71 Beethoven wrote Moritz about the dedication, “I have never forgotten how much I owe you in general, although an unfortunate event produced conditions which prevented me from proving my gratitude as much as I should have liked.” He probably meant the fight of 1806 with Karl Lichnowsky.

  Even this lovely little outing, or rather its dedication to the count, had its practical ramifications for Beethoven. In the letter to Count Moritz Beethoven goes on to suggest, “I would say that it would be best for Lord Castlereagh not to write about this work on Wellington until the said lord has heard it here.”72 This refers to his campaign to get the prince regent of England to acknowledge the dedication of Wellington’s Victory, which in fact the future King Georg IV never did. As part of that campaign, Beethoven was hoping to use Moritz to reach Viscount Castlereagh, head of the British delegation.

  For artists as for diplomats and lovers, there was hay to be made in the Congress of Vienna, and plenty of dignitaries there knew Beethoven’s name. He was quick to strike, pulling in his patrons and attaching himself to the hoopla. The congress was his apotheosis in the public eye. He would gain much, even if to most of the glittering personages at the congress he was still a sideshow, one entertainer among many. “There are two camps, pro and contra Beethoven,” ran a police report to Prince Metternich. “Opposite Razumovsky, Apponyi and Kraft who idolize Beethoven, stands a much larger majority of connoisseurs who do not want any music by Beethoven.”73

  However accurate that might have been, Beethoven’s ultimate glorification began in the first days of the congress, with a performance of Fidelio before a houseful of dignitaries. Already a sensation in town and now in its final form, it was the first grand opera to be heard at the congress. In 1805 it had been a fashionable “rescue opera” connected in the public mind with the spirit of the French Revolution—even if, to placate the censors, the libretto was set two centuries earlier. Now rescue operas were long out of fashion, but its story of triumph and jubilation fit the mood of the city and of the moment.

  In his thoroughgoing revision, with a number of elements cut and rearranged and tweaked by Treitschke, Beethoven had fixed at least some of the first act’s nagging problems of pace and mood. He wrote a new, fourth overture, this time not a tone poem tracing the story but a bustling curtain-raiser in E major, with only subtle relations to the opera: the opening fanfare foreshadows Leonore’s E-major aria “Komm Hoffnung” (Come, Hope); the answering theme in horns foreshadows Florestan’s heroic resignation.74 As in the first version, the curtain opens on a mood of Mozartian light comedy in a dark setting: Leonore, suspecting her vanished husband Florestan is a political prisoner, has disguised herself as a man called Fidelio—fidelity—and gets a job in the prison. The idea of a woman disguised as a man was a familiar opera buffa and singspiel staple used by Mozart and many others. As tends to happen in these “pants roles,” there comes a gender jumble, also returned from the earlier incarnation: the jailer’s daughter Marzelline falls in love with Fidelio and pushes away Jaquino, the hapless turnkey who is courting her. Chief jailer Rocco approves of this prospective match for his daughter. Complications ensue.

  With this libretto Beethoven had made his escape from Mozart, whom he could not equal as a theatrical soul and a painter of character, by embracing French opera and taking as a model its exemplar Cherubini. Having made his escape, he still needed Mozart as a foundation for the first act’s banter and courtship and gender confusion. In tone and texture and rhythmic gait, the opening duet with Marzelline turning away Jaquino recalls the beginning of Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro—except there sex is at the center of the banter between the lovers: Figaro is measuring the floor for their marital bed. Other than a few effusions from the besotted Marzelline, there is no sex in Fidelio. The quasi-comic bits and characterization in the first act Beethoven handles professionally enough, but only just. The low ebb of the buffa aspect is Rocco’s wan “Gold” aria, which after much back-and-forth Beethoven put back in for good, further slowing down the first act.

  The orchestra throughout the opera is richer in texture than Mozart’s, from beginning to end marvelously varied and expressive in color. For all the dramatic deficiencies, this is Beethoven at the height of his powers, and there is going to be magic and splendor in it. The magic begins with one of the more beautiful and moving numbers in any opera: the quartet “Mir is so wunderbar.” It is also the one moment in Fidelio where librettist and composer memorably paint a mingling of characters
and feelings (something that came naturally to Beethoven in instrumental music, with difficulty in vocal music). In a gentle four-part canon, each picking up the theme in exactly the same notes as the others, Marzelline pines for Fidelio, Leonore/Fidelio grieves for the pain she is causing Marzelline, Jaquino writhes in jealousy, and Rocco looks forward to the wedding. Because of the canon and the filmy coloration of the orchestra based on low divided cellos and violas, there is an unforgettable, trancelike atmosphere. Here Beethoven shows that if he cannot write an opera with characters who consistently cast a shadow, he can wield music to raise a pedestrian story to great heights—as Mozart did with the patchwork libretto of The Magic Flute, Beethoven’s favorite Mozart opera.

  The actual drama at hand, which has nothing to do with unrequited love, commences with the entrance of Pizarro, commandant of the prison, whose corruption Florestan has exposed. Now Pizarro has imprisoned his enemy and ordered him starved to death in the dungeon. Like the other characters, Pizarro is a familiar dramatic type. Leonore is the devoted and heroic wife, Marzelline the lovelorn teenager, Jaquino the rejected chump, Rocco the buffoon. If in the libretto Pizarro is a cardboard villain, in the music Beethoven makes him the embodiment of tyranny. Pizarro learns from Rocco that a minister, having heard of arbitrary incarcerations, will appear within a day to inspect the prison. If he is to complete his revenge, Pizarro must act immediately. “Ah, what a moment!” he cries in his furioso aria, “to murder the murderer myself!” His aria is riveted on the note D as he is riveted on his vengeance. Failing to recruit Rocco to dispatch the prisoner, Pizarro vows to put in the knife himself, so Florestan’s last sight will be his enemy’s triumph.

  Leonore sings her heroic aria accompanied by a bravura trio of horns: “Come, hope, let the last star not forsake the weary! Love will reach it.” She persuades Rocco to let the prisoners out for a few moments in the courtyard. Here is not only another supreme moment in opera but also the ethical and moral heart of Fidelio. As they emerge from the dungeons to music like a sunrise, the men whisper, “O what joy, to breathe with ease in the open air!” The first two notes in the violins are A and E-flat, forming a tritone, the ancient diabolus in musica. Those notes will return in the dungeon scene as the throb of despair.

  The chorus of prisoners rises to a climax on the word Freiheit: “O freedom, freedom, will you return?” It is remarkable that that line was allowed to be sung in Austria, where the very word Freiheit was apt to be censored wherever it appeared. It could be argued to the censors that the chorus reflected Europe’s release from the Napoleonic Wars, but with the prisoners’ cries of “Freedom!” Fidelio reveals itself as what it is: a hymn to liberation from all tyranny.

  The second act is set in the dungeon, the opening music a tone poem of darkness and desolation. It begins with a low unison F answered by a piercing chord in the winds. It is the same gesture that in Bonn began the Joseph Cantata, which celebrated Joseph II as a liberator, a bringer of light. Over and over the timpani strikes its eerie A–E-flat.75 In the obscurity we see Florestan in chains. “God! What darkness here!” he groans. His laments and resignation give way to an aria of great, gentle beauty where he recalls the springtime of his life. That leads him to an ecstatic vision of Leonore as an angel who brings freedom. “Zur Freiheit!” (“To freedom!”), he cries over and over in spine-chilling high Gs. The larger resonance of Freiheit is again unmistakable. The aria is in A-flat major, Beethoven’s key of noble resignation. Exhausted by his excitement, Florestan sinks into sleep.76

  Leonore/Fidelio and Rocco enter the dungeon to dig the prisoner’s grave before the appearance of Pizarro. At first she can’t see the sleeping prisoner’s face. The duet of the grave digging is presented in a texture of low strings with horns and trombones and contrabassoon, the sound baleful and archaic. Florestan raises his head; Leonore recognizes her husband and faints away with the horror of it. After she recovers, Pizarro appears. Still the archetypal villain, he snarls, “Let him die! But first he shall know who hacks his proud heart from him.” As he strides toward Florestan with his dagger, Leonore throws herself between them. They struggle until she gives the shattering cry, “First kill his wife!” Astonishment all around, but Pizarro recovers himself and advances again. Leonore pulls out a pistol: “One more sound and you are dead!”

  At that moment of maximum tension Beethoven unveils his coup, the moment the whole opera has been leading to: a trumpet fanfare. Pizarro had ordered a trumpeter to the ramparts to signal the approach of the minister, because Florestan must be dead and buried before the official arrives. Always keep the whole in view, Beethoven said. Only he would arrange the whole of an opera over a single moment that is at once a musical and a symbolic climax. The trumpet call is the sounding image of liberation. The minister arrives, shocked to find his old friend Florestan ravaged and enchained. Amid a throng in the town square the tyrant gets his just deserts, his prisoners are released. In a heartrending moment, Leonore unshackles her husband: general rejoicing in C major, the key that ends the Fifth Symphony so joyously. The music is full of shouts of “Retterin!” (“Savior!”).77 Near the end, probably at Beethoven’s insistence, there is a quote from Schiller’s “An die Freude”: “He who has won a splendid wife may join our jubilation.”78

  Fidelio had first been created in the stupendous burst of creative energy and inspiration that followed the Eroica, when Beethoven first connected his Aufklärung ideals to his art. In the Third Symphony the bringer of liberation is Napoleon, the supposedly enlightened despot. In Fidelio it is a woman and wife who attains the summit of heroism, bringing down a tyrant by the power of her courage and her love.

  Here Fidelio shows itself to be a descendent of Mozart’s Zauberflöte.79 That opera, steeped in Masonry and its humanistic ideals, is a fairy tale of love in all its manifestations: the earthy love of Papageno and Papagena, the exalted love of Tamino and Pamina, the divine love of Sarastro for all humanity. All contribute to the triumph over the tyrannous Queen of the Night. At the end of Die Zauberflöte Sarastro exalts the lovers as the crown of humanity: love between two people as the answer, the representative of divinity on earth. Beethoven in his own way, full of grand abstractions but animating them with all his powers in shaping tones, says the same in Fidelio. For listeners, much of what lingers in the mind from the opera are words and phrases he underlines in the music: “O what joy”; “Farewell, warm sunlight”; “What darkness here”; “May you be rewarded in better worlds”; “Savior!”; and above all “Freedom.”

  In the Ninth Symphony he would return to these matters again. Fidelio is another link in the chain of thought stretching from the Aufklärung spirit Beethoven imbibed in Bonn to the Eroica and Fidelio and the Fifth Symphony, to end in the Ninth, where all despots are put away. In its stylistic reach Fidelio stretches from the eighteenth-century buffa elements through the voice of the Eroica and Fifth Symphonies to prophecies of the Ninth and the Missa solemnis.80 In other words, for Beethoven the final version of Fidelio became the bridge between the heroic and the post-heroic styles.

  At the close of the performance in Vienna at the beginning of the congress, the cheers went on and on. The performance, conducted by Beethoven, was well done; Kapellmeister Umlauf again sat behind his back to deal with problems en route caused by Beethoven’s deafness. Soprano Anna Milder, now Milder-Hauptmann, had been the first ­Leonore as a teenager with a big voice but little experience. Now as a mature singer and actress, she became the first great Leonore. Pizarro was Johann Michael Vogl; he went on to be an important champion of Schubert’s songs.

  It was librettist Treitschke who wrote the final and splendid new conclusion to Florestan’s scene. He got a rare view of Beethoven composing when he presented him with the text:

  What I am now relating will live forever in my memory. Beethoven came to me about seven o’clock in the evening . . . [and] asked how matters stood with the aria. It was just finished, I handed it to him. He read, ran up and down the room, muttered, gro
wled, as was his habit instead of singing—and tore open the pianoforte. My wife had often vainly begged him to play; today he placed the text in front of him and began to improvise marvelously . . . Out of it he seemed to conjure the motive of the aria. The hours went by, but Beethoven improvised on. Supper . . . was served, but—he would not permit himself to be disturbed. It was late when he embraced me, and declining the meal, he hurried home. The next day the admirable composition was finished.81

  The key element here is music arrived at by improvisation in a deep raptus, when Beethoven forgot his mental and physical travails in the same way that he forgot to eat.

  He had no time to rest after his labors finishing the new Fidelio and putting it onstage. Immediately he got to work on a cantata called Der glorreiche Augenblick (The Glorious Moment), a paean to the congress and its luminaries. Its text was by Salzburg surgeon and writer Alois Wiessenbach. He left his impressions of Beethoven at age forty-three:

  Beethoven’s body has a strength and rudeness which is seldom the blessing of chosen spirits . . . The sturdiness of his body, however, is in his flesh and bones only; his nervous system is irritable in the highest degree and even unhealthy. How it has often pained me to observe that in this organism the harmony of the mind was so easily put out of tune. He once went through a terrible typhus and from that time dates the decay of his nervous system and probably also his melancholy loss of hearing . . . It is significant that before that illness his hearing was unsurpassably keen and delicate, and that even now he is painfully sensible to discordant sounds . . . His character is in complete agreement with the glory of his talent. Never in my life have I met a more childlike nature paired with so powerful and defiant a will; if heaven had bestowed nothing upon him but his heart, this alone would have made him one of those in whose presence many would be obliged to stand up and do obeisance. Most intimately does that heart cling to everything good and beautiful by a natural impulse which surpasses all education . . . There is nothing in the world, no earthly greatness, nor wealth, nor rank, nor state can bribe it.82