Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph

by Swafford, Jan

  The two men found some mutual sympathy partly because Wiessenbach was about as deaf as Beethoven. They conversed in shouts. In the same period came pianist Wenzel Tomaschek’s visit to Vienna and Beethoven, about which he wrote a memoir. Tomaschek transcribed a bit of shoptalk, most of it devoted to putting down young Giacomo Meyerbeer as a pianist and composer—and timid bass drum player in Wellington’s Victory. Tomaschek recalled Beethoven saying, “It has always been known that the greatest pianoforte players were also the greatest composers; but how did they play? Not like the pianists of today, who prance up and down the keyboard with passages which they have practiced—putsch, putsch, putsch;—what does that mean? Nothing! When true pianoforte virtuosi played it was always something homogeneous, an entity; if written down it would appear as a well-thought-out work. That is pianoforte playing; the other thing is nothing.”83 What Beethoven was talking about was not playing from score but rather improvisation. Czerny noted that Beethoven’s more formal improvisations sounded like a published piece, just as Beethoven here said they should.

  The triumphs kept coming. At the end of November there was a gala performance before dignitaries including the king of Prussia (he left early) and Tsar Alexander and his wife. Wellington’s Victory and the Seventh Symphony were given another whirl, but the main event was the premiere of Der glorreiche Augenblick, the cantata Beethoven had whipped up over the previous month or so. If in moments here and there it presages the Ninth Symphony and the Missa solemnis, the cantata is mostly another testament to Beethoven’s professionalism. When the occasion calls for bombastic hosannas to the ruling class, he is ready to oblige.

  “Europe arises!” the cantata begins. A sample of its wretched couplets: “And Karl of Habsburg, ancient line, / Battled with trust in God divine. / Where Habsburg struck on the Danube’s strands / There struck he him—and Austria stands.”84 Much brass and percussion, children adding their innocent voices to the rejoicing, “a wonderful, crowned figure bathed in light,” figures representing Genius and Vienna in its moment of greatness, and so on. One listener was impressed by the music but found the text of the cantata “extremely mediocre”: “All that it really contains is the fact that there are now many sovereigns in Vienna; exactly like so many poems written for occasions.”85 This was a charity concert, with a packed audience. It was repeated twice in December, first in a program for Beethoven’s benefit, only half full, then again for charity, again packed.

  Beethoven’s old patron Count Razumovsky, Russian plenipotentiary to the congress, presented Beethoven to the assembled monarchs at the palace of Archduke Rudolph. Among them were the tsar and tsarina. Afterward Beethoven’s physician friend Joseph von Bertolini suggested that he write a polonaise for the tsarina, since that dance was in fashion. Beethoven sat down and improvised several dances and asked Bertolini to pick one. The result was the op. 89 Polonaise for piano, which he presented to the tsarina at an audience. Delighted by the dedication, she in turn presented Beethoven with an equally welcome 50 ducats (about 450 florins). She asked if her husband, years before, had acknowledged Beethoven’s dedication of the op. 30 Violin Sonatas. The tsar had not, Beethoven humbly admitted. The tsarina dutifully handed over another hundred ducats.86

  In relating all this later, Beethoven scornfully noted that at the concert for his own benefit, the king of Prussia had done nothing but buy a 10-ducat ticket, while the tsar paid for his with 200 ducats.87 The tsarina later received the dedication of the piano arrangement of the Seventh Symphony. He wrote a Baron von Schweiger, as a go-between, “Since the grand symphony in A can be regarded as one of the happiest products of my poor talents . . . I would take the liberty of presenting to Her Majesty the pianoforte arrangement of this work together with the polonaise . . . Should Her Majesty desire to hear me play, that would be the highest honor for me.”88

  The rampant gaiety of the congress inevitably led to disasters small and large. On the last day of 1814, Beethoven’s patron Count Razumovsky gave a dinner in honor of the tsar for seven hundred guests in his almost-completed palace filled with almost-inconceivable fineries. At the congress Razumovsky was at the zenith of his prestige, at the top of his world. For days an army of cooks worked around the clock preparing the banquet. While they labored, a baking oven overheated unnoticed and fire got into the heating system. As the guests were eating, the palace erupted in flames.

  By the time all the fire engines of Vienna arrived along with thousands of Viennese, who enjoyed a good fire, there was nothing to be done. Gone were three blocks of mansion, the great stables and riding school, the chapel, the carpets and tapestries, the old-master paintings, the hall of sculptures by Canova. Razumovsky was found sitting stunned on a bench on his grounds, wrapped in sables and wearing a velvet cap. Emperor Franz appeared to say what he could. When Razumovsky tried to kiss his hand, Franz snatched it away.89 The tsar gave Razumovsky a loan of some 700,000 florins to recover, but he never did resurrect his palace, his fortunes, or his spirit. His string quartet headed by Schuppanzigh lingered for a while, but soon he had to give them up.

  From late 1813 to the end of the next year, Beethoven had written two big patriotic potboilers, Wellington’s Victory and Der glorreiche Augenblick, and a small one, Germania. He began 1815 with an ambitious slate of serious works planned: a sixth piano concerto in D major; an oratorio commissioned by the new Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde (Association of the Friends of Music); an opera Romulus and Remus on a Treitschke libretto; a symphony; and a piano trio. The symphony, or something of that order, was the D-minor one he had been thinking about. On a sketch he wrote, “Freude schöner Götterfunken Tochter” (“Work out the overture!”). (At this point the idea may have been for a freestanding piece on Schiller’s ode.) With the piano concerto he got nearly half a first movement in full-score draft and then gave up on it.90 He finished no more concertos. None of the other planned pieces got far, either. His health, which had tormented him for years, was getting worse and likewise his hearing. If he had found ideas and directions that seized him, nothing would have stopped him from working, and the enthusiasm of the public for his music was the highest it had ever been. But nothing seized him.

  In January 1814, the final settlement with the Kinsky estate returned to him the largest share of his annuity. Lobkowitz followed suit in April. The latter, fallen on hard times but still one of Beethoven’s oldest and most devoted patrons, had no illusions left. In a rueful letter to Archduke Rudolph, Lobkowitz wrote, “Although I have reason to be anything but satisfied with the behavior of Beethoven toward me, I am nevertheless rejoiced, as a passionate lover of music, that his assuredly great works are beginning to be appreciated. I heard ‘Fidelio’ here and barring the book, I was extraordinarily pleased with the music, except the two finales, which I do not like very much. I think the music extremely effective and worthy of the man who composed it.”91 The gentle prince, who had nearly bankrupted himself because of his passion for music, died at the end of 1816, but his estate kept up the payments. No surviving letters of Beethoven memorialize either Prince Lobkowitz or Lichnowsky, the leading patrons of his first decades in Vienna.

  That April Beethoven received a letter from his old friend and patron Countess Marie Erdödy, a peace offering after some quarrel had kept them apart for years. He responded: “I have read your letter with great pleasure, my beloved Countess, and also what you say about the renewal of your friendship for me. It has long been my wish to see you and your beloved children once again. For although I have suffered a great deal, yet I have not lost my former love for children, the beauties of nature and friendship.” His brother Carl had apparently written her an entreaty. “I beg you,” Ludwig wrote her, “to make allowances for him, because he is really an unhappy, suffering man.”92 He was bereft of many old friends now, and moved to hear from one of them. At the same time, he had to cultivate any potential patrons he had. Far gone were the brash days when he told off Prince Lichnowsky and laughed at losing an annuity. A note in his
Tagebuch shows that the countess had sent a more tangible peace offering: “34 bottles [of wine] from Countess Erdödy.”

  Beethoven arranged a 1,500-florin loan to brother Carl from publisher Steiner, which was to be paid back in the form of rights to future pieces.93 But even with his dying brother, Ludwig’s capacity for rage had not mitigated. One day around this time, he burst into Carl’s house at mealtime shouting, “You thief! Where are my notes?” He was referring to some score he thought Carl had lifted. Outraged, Carl took a pile of music from a drawer and threw it down on the table. Ludwig calmed down and apologized, but when he left Carl said he never wanted “that dragon” in the house again. All this was observed by the little boy Karl, seven then, who recalled the scene years later. Soon after, Ludwig saw his brother in town, looking very ill. Ludwig embraced him, covered him with kisses, and took him home in a cab, kissing him all the way.94 His paroxysms erupted uncontrollably and passed. His later friend the playwright Franz Grillparzer said that in his rage “Beethoven became like a wild animal.”

  Beethoven had shared the general hope that the Congress of Vienna would turn out a progressive force in Europe. Before long he realized it had been one more failed hope, like the French Revolution, like Napoleon. Still keeping his lines open to Breitkopf & Härtel despite their not having taken anything from him in years, he wrote Gottfried Härtel in his usual confiding tone: “Since I last wrote to you . . . how much has happened—and far more evil than good! As for the demons of darkness, I realize that even in the brightest light of our time these will never be altogether chased away.”95

  Beethoven’s Teplitz admirer Karl Varnhagen von Ense, now part of the Prussian diplomatic corps, found his hero had grown “uncouth . . . he was particularly averse to our notables and gave expression to his repugnance with angry violence.”96 After the congress, rants against the aristocracy and their morality became a constant theme of Beethoven’s conversation. Part of it at this point was his fury at Lobkowitz and the Kinsky estate over the stipend, and his general disgust at being dependent on aristocratic patronage. At the same time he knew that nearly all the notables in attendance at the congress, all those who had led the war against Napoleon, all those kings and emperors and princes and counts and dukes and archdukes and barons ruled the world not because of their skill or talent or labor but because of the titles before their names, glory they had been born to and never had to earn. The Enlightenment and the French Revolution had challenged that ancient network of privilege, but an ocean of blood had not succeeded in changing it.

  As for Napoleon, exiled to the island of Elba, it turned out that he had one more grand trick up his sleeve. On March 7, as Prince Metternich headed for bed exhausted after a negotiating session that ended at 3 a.m., a valet handed him an envelope marked “Urgent.” He threw it on the bedside table and tried to sleep. Failing that, he got up and opened the envelope. It was an inquiry from the English commissioner who oversaw Napoleon in exile, asking rather pathetically whether anyone had seen Napoleon in the Genoa harbor, because he was no longer to be found on Elba. Metternich, and soon the whole of Europe, was electrified and horrified. Napoleon had fled exile with his soldiers and horses and cannons in his ships, all conveniently supplied him by his conquerors.

  Napoleon landed in the south of France. Onshore his first act was to declare the Congress of Vienna null and void. Over the next three months he made his way to Paris, gathering troops as he went, installed himself in the Tuileries (Louis XVIII having fled), and began to form a new government. The allied armies marched toward France. With his reconstituted army, Napoleon decided to strike north against the Prussians and the multinational forces of Wellington before they were joined by the Russians and Austrians.

  After beating the Prussians at Ligny, Napoleon attacked Wellington’s outnumbered forces at the village of Waterloo, near Brussels. The battle was tipping toward the French when the Prussians appeared and gave the victory to the allies. The battle had been, Wellington admitted, “a close-run thing.” Back in Paris, Napoleon abdicated for the second and last time. Now there was no coddling from the allies. His second exile was to the remote South Atlantic island of St. Helena, where he lorded it over the locals, dictated his self-glorifying memoirs, and faded away with cancer. From his death in 1821, Napoleon ascended into myth and legend. As myths and legends tend to do, they mostly glossed over his crimes and despotism and reconstituted his glory. At least in terms of human freedom, Napoleon had surely been better than the leaders who followed him. The negation of what he achieved was accomplished with relentless repression on a cowed and exhausted European population.

  During the sound and fury of Napoleon’s last hurrah, Beethoven pursued his life of a composer barely composing. He occupied himself with business, fulminations, and abortive projects. His old friend Carl Amenda wrote from Courland, pushing an acquaintance’s opera libretto, Bacchus. The success of Fidelio was bringing librettists flocking. Beethoven was interested in Amenda’s idea. (One of the sketched titles for the Ninth Symphony was “Festival of Bacchus.”)97 He made a few sketches toward the Bacchus opera, one of which reveals some of his method of extracting and relating themes. Under a line of music he jotted, “It must be evolved out of the B.M. . . . Throughout the opera probably dissonances, unresolved or very differently, as our refined music cannot be thought of in connection with those barbarous times—Throughout the subject must be treated in a pastoral vein.”98 The “B.M.” seems to mean “Bacchus motif,” representing the main character, to be used in developing further themes in terms both abstract and symbolic. The harmonic style of the piece was to be expressive of the subject—breaking harmonic rules to symbolize barbarous times.

  In April, he signed a major publishing contract with Steiner in Vienna, sending him the Archduke Trio, symphonies Seven and Eight, and Wellington’s Victory as repayment for Steiner’s loan to brother Carl.99 He was already on warm, bantering terms with Steiner and his partner Tobias Haslinger, of whom Beethoven was particularly fond. He had given everybody joking military titles: Steiner the “Lieutenant General” and his shop in the middle of Vienna the “military headquarters.” Haslinger was “Adjutant,” himself “Generalissimo.” The firm issued the Seventh and Eighth Symphonies in score and parts during 1816–17, their inevitable losses for that publication offset by sales of arrangements of the works for wind ensemble, string quintet, piano trio, piano duo, and so on.100

  News of an unauthorized performance of Wellington’s Victory in London again brought out his ire that the prince regent had not responded to his offer of a dedication: “All the papers were full of the praises and the extraordinary applause which this work had won in England. Yet no one [i.e., the prince regent] thought of me, its composer; nor did I receive the least mark of gratitude or acknowledgment of indebtedness.”101 Soon there was some gratitude from London, by way of an offer from the Philharmonic Society to compose three overtures. In earlier years Beethoven would have sat down and dashed them off. Instead, the next year he sent three overtures already composed, all of them minor, claiming they were new: Die Ruinen von Athen, König Stephan, and the relatively new Namensfeier, finished in March 1815 (this is a stately and slight overture based on sketches from years before).

  Beethoven knew and was fond of the young composition student Charles Neate, who bought the overtures for the Philharmonic Society. When the society realized that for its commission of three new overtures it had been given used and not-all-that-excellent goods, its members were understandably put out. Beethoven made things worse with a sudden demand for an additional five pounds for expenses. When matters came to a head he blamed Neate, back in England, who had also tried, without success, to sell publishers the overtures and other pieces including the Seventh Symphony and the F Minor Quartet. Admitting that indeed the overtures were not exactly new and “do not belong to my best and greatest works,” Beethoven insisted they had found considerable success and ought to fulfill the commission. Publishers did not share t
hat opinion. His old pupil Ferdinand Ries, now living in London and championing Beethoven, found the Ruinen Overture in particular “unworthy of him.”

  When the overtures did not sell, Beethoven further blamed Neate for accepting them in the first place, and wrote some nasty words to his young British friend: “I swear that you have done nothing for me and that you will do nothing and again nothing for me, summa summarum, nothing! nothing! nothing!!!”102 He got a hurt letter from Neate: “Nothing has ever given me more pain than your letter to Sir George Smart. I confess . . . that I am greatly at fault, but must say also that I think you have judged too hastily and too harshly of my conduct . . . What makes it the more painful is that I stand accused by the man who, of all the world, I most admire.” Among other things, Neate explained, he’d had fiancée problems.103 Touched and sympathetic, regretting his fury as he often did, Beethoven apologized: “What can I answer to your warm-felt excuses? Past ills must be forgotten and I wish you heartily joy that you have safely reached the long wished-for port of love.”104 From his futile efforts to sell Beethoven in Britain, Neate received a letter from one publisher saying, “For God’s sake don’t buy anything of Beethoven!” Another rejected the overtures with, “I would not print them if you would give me them gratis.”105 For some time after, the imbroglio soured British publishers on Beethoven.106 His relations with publishers had always been forthright and more or less aboveboard, but a new element of fudging, manipulation, and finally outright deception had begun to creep in.