Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph

by Swafford, Jan

  This winter of 1817, Fanny Giannatasio was at the height of her infatuation and her sensitivity. In February Beethoven wrote her father a letter about Karl’s new boots hurting his feet and about the boy needing more time to practice piano; he announced that he was coming to pick up Karl the next day, to take him to a concert. That letter, not warm but hardly angry, nonetheless put Fanny into a tizzy: “That Beethoven is vexed with us is a very great trial to me, but that he should show it in the way he does adds to its bitterness. It is true that father has not behaved very well to him; still, I think that Beethoven ought not to retort with biting sarcasm, when he knows how much affection and interest we have always had for him. I expect he wrote that letter in one of his misanthropical humors, and I forgive him for it.” Two weeks later Fanny wrote with relief, “He has been to us, and we are friends again. It has pained me very deeply to be obliged to acknowledge how much Karl has been to blame in all these misunderstandings, and it grieved me still more deeply that we were forced to inform his uncle of several misdemeanors of his, which have angered him beyond measure.”64 Here a new theme entered the saga: the tendency of people around Beethoven to blame Karl for whatever problems arose. The boy was now eleven.

  Piano maker Nannette Streicher had known Beethoven for a long time, possibly having met him in her teens. Now she started to advise him on domestic matters, especially concerning servants. He wrote her after an unpleasant encounter in February, “I ask you a thousand times to forgive me about yesterday. We had a meeting on the question of my nephew . . . and on such occasions I am really always in danger of losing my head. And that’s what happened yesterday. I only hope that you may not have felt offended.”65

  Still on his campaign to find a reliable servant so he could bring Karl home, Beethoven wrote many letters to Nannette in these years. He dubbed her “my good Samaritan.” “What does one give two servants for dinner and supper?” he asked her. He approached the question as if servants were domestic animals. “How often are they given roast meat . . . How much bread money for the housekeeper and maid per day?” Nannette answered in detail: no roast meat at night, cook their vegetables together to save fat, and so on and so on.66 She and Zmeskall interviewed servants and sent them on to Beethoven. Sooner or later, usually sooner, he declared them beastly and threw them out. At one point he told Zmeskall he had found for a servant a former soldier who “wanted to devote himself entirely to me.”67 Within two weeks he had given the soldier notice: “He gets drunk and stays out of the house . . . and is so shockingly rude and insolent.”68

  Most of the female servants that came to him were older, but at one point Nannette found him a plump young woman named Peppi. “Ask if she is really a cook,” he wrote Nannette. “If she is skilled with venison, fish., etc. Can she protect her 22-year-old virginity until we rightfully allow her to marry herself off? Boyfriends will not be allowed in the house.”69 Peppi turned out to be quite a good cook and lasted awhile. An older woman named Nanni also endured his treatment for some time. He wrote Nannette at the end of the year, “Things are really better—although today I had to put up with a good deal from N[anni]—But as a New Year wish I threw a half dozen books at her head.”70 He was not joking. “I don’t think that Nanni is absolutely honest,” he wrote Nannette, “apart from the fact that she is also a disgusting beast. I now realize quite clearly that people of that type must be ruled not by affection but by fear.”71 Later he accused the servants of being in collusion with Karl’s mother, which drove him wild.

  In practice, fear was one of his child-raising tools. He wrote Giannatasio, “As for Karl, I beg you to enforce the strictest obedience and to punish him immediately if he doesn’t obey you . . . You will remember that I have already told you how during his father’s lifetime he would only obey when he was beaten. Of course that was very wrong, but that was how things were done, and we must not forget it.”72 Here was another gap between theory and practice in Beethoven’s life. He wrote Nannette, “I often give him a good shaking, but not without valid reason.”73 Karl would get his share of shaking and blows from his uncle.

  In the spring of 1817, Beethoven lost another longtime friend and champion, Wenzel Krumpholz. The violinist fell dead in the middle of a walk on the Glacis outside the city walls. Around 1802, it was to Krumpholz that Beethoven had declared he was striking out on a new path. There is, remarkably, no record of a quarrel in their long friendship. Beethoven wrote a short Song of the Monks and inscribed it “In memory of the sudden and unexpected death of our Krumpholz.”

  Even good news tended to get tangled up in the general confusion and indecision. In London, Ferdinand Ries had been championing Beethoven to good effect. In June Ries relayed an invitation and commission from the Philharmonic Society: “My dear Beethoven, we would very much like to have you among us here in London next winter . . . I have been commissioned in the name of the Directorship to offer you 300 guineas on the following conditions.”74 He was to come to London the next winter and write two new symphonies. Everyone remembered Haydn’s sojourns in England and how they had established the fame and fortune he enjoyed in his last years. Beethoven and everybody involved hoped for the same for him. He replied happily, adding some further stipulations (which the society declined to accept), and made a few sketches for a symphony in D minor. But the symphony and the commission and his promise of a visit languished for what turned out to be years.

  An apparent resolution to some financial tangles appeared in the middle of 1817 when after extended negotiations Johanna van Beethoven signed a contract agreeing to pay Ludwig support for Karl, including an immediate 2,000 florins and thereafter half her yearly pension payments.75 Lately Johanna had been less troubling and Beethoven more forgiving. He wrote Zmeskall, “It might hurt Karl’s mother to have to visit her child at the house of a stranger; and in any case it is a less charitable arrangement than I like. So I am letting her come to me tomorrow.”76 He enjoyed being generous.

  His Tagebuch shows the guilt Beethoven felt over Johanna’s situation: “It would have been impossible without hurting the widow’s feelings but it was not to be. And Thou, almighty God, seest into my heart, know that I have disregarded my own welfare for my dear Karl’s sake, bless my work, bless the widow . . . God, God, my refuge, my rock. O my all, Thou seest my innermost heart and knowest how it pains me to have to make somebody suffer through my good works for my deal Karl!!! O hear, ever ineffable One, hear me, your unhappy, most unhappy of all mortals.” Then he got wind that Johanna was spreading malicious gossip about him and peremptorily decreed that she could see Karl only twice a year.

  Part of his depression in the summer of 1817 came from his inability to shake off the lung infection that had afflicted him since the previous October. He wrote Countess Erdödy that he had changed doctors from the “wily Italian” Malfatti, “who lacked both honesty and intelligence.” He details his daily medical ordeal: From April 15 to May 4, “I had to take six powders daily and six bowls of tea . . . After that I had to take another kind of powder, also six times daily; and I had to rub myself three times a day with a volatile ointment. Then I had to come here [to Heiligenstadt] where I am taking baths. Since yesterday I have been taking another medicine, namely, a tincture, of which I have to swallow 12 spoonfuls daily.”77 His poor health he blamed on any number of causes, most often bad food (never the cheap wine he was fond of), but in a letter to Franz Brentano he came up with a new and perhaps not entirely fanciful reason: “My health has been undermined for a considerable time. The condition of my country has been partly responsible for this; and so far no improvement is to be expected, nay rather, every day there is a further deterioration.”78 The agenda of the Metternich regime was to draw the net tighter and tighter around any freedom of action, speech, thought. The police had begun going systematically through bookshops, confiscating any volume they deemed suspicious, sometimes destroying whole print runs.79

  Yet these miseries and political and medical distractions could no
longer restrain the tide of Beethoven’s ideas. The cello sonatas had showed him more clearly where he wanted to go. Out of the same creative ferment that produced them, in November he finished a new piano sonata in A major, op. 101, that confirmed his second new path in the same way that the op. 31 Sonatas had done with the previous path.

  This first full bloom of what the future would call his Third Period begins with a short movement of ineffable, limpid beauty. The first and third movements will be quiet and inward; he called them “impressions and reveries.”80 These, note, are high-Romantic images. The ­second and fourth movements are as vigorous and outgoing as the others are gentle. That joining of apparent opposites, inward and outward, is another sign of his late music at its most poetic. Most of this sonata is contrapuntal. In a move he had been heading toward since at least the Fifth Symphony, the finale is the weightiest movement, a payoff of the gentle reverie of the opening. To reserve the climax of the piece for the finale, he lightens up the beginning.

  The A Major begins as if in the middle of a thought, its singing 6/8 drifting gently upward and back down. The indication is etwas lebhaft und mit der innigsten Empfindung, somewhat lively and with the most intimate sentiment. In this movement one can make out on the page the familiar sonata-form elements: an exposition with two themes, development, recapitulation. But that is not the sounding impression. The landmarks are blurred, the second theme only a wisp, there is no repeat of the exposition, the recapitulation flows unnoticed from the development. The familiar form has receded under the surface, leaving a sense of a steady unfolding with little repeated exactly—like a fantasia. Though the sense of A major is clear enough, the music never cadences unequivocally on A until bar 93. As in the cello sonatas, the lack of resolution, the purposeful meandering of the harmony, creates not tension but rather a rapt suspension. As the harmony drifts like a summer cloud, likewise the sense of pulse and downbeat drift around the bar.

  Now he is generating themes from primal motifs. The leading ones here are the four stepwise ascending notes of the first bar and especially the mellifluous fall of a third and a step in the second bar. The sonata will be permeated by both motifs, but the second one, a skip and a step, will be the most pervasive, the most essential to the tone of the whole (the third is sometimes expanded to a larger interval).

  Second comes a jaunty march, or a dream of a march, the first of several in his late music. For all its lusty striding it integrates some of the drifting quality of the first movement. With its 2/4 march tempo it stands in for a scherzo and has the overall form of one, including a contrapuntal trio. The first movement’s reveries and impressions are just over half the size of the march. Is that actually the opening movement, or is it the introduction to the march, which is the first movement proper? With Beethoven, harmony, rhythm, and form are all becoming more fluid. Part of that development is the receding presence of the old lucid, usually four-bar Classical phrasing that moved the music forward in clear segments.

  In keeping with those kinds of ambiguities, the short slow movement of the A Major also serves as an introduction to the finale. It is another reverie, intensely inward, marked langsam und sehnsuchtvoll, slow and full of longing, the only time Beethoven ever used that last word (longing another high-Romantic sentiment) in a sonata. The tone of the movement has a touch of the archaic, like a Baroque lament with rich ornaments. It also sounds like a solemn reworking of the opening movement, and in fact after a chain of roulades it drifts into a brief recall of the opening that quickens into the finale. Now part of his old idea of drawing together the movements can be accomplished by more or less literal recalls and by blurring movement divisions, making the form more fluid and ambiguous. Are these interludes a two-part introduction to the finale, or if not, what? When Beethoven was young, critics called his sonatas too free, too much like fantasias. Now that the musical world had embraced his earlier work, he became more rhapsodic, more fantasy-like than ever.

  For a second time he leaps from inward to outward, soulful to ebullient, now with a muscular and contrapuntal Allegro finale, whose angular theme mostly stays in the foreground. In the development, for the first time in his piano sonatas, that theme is turned into an extended fugato. In spirit, and covertly in the sound of the counterpoint, he is going back to Bach, whose Well-Tempered Clavier his fingers and musical mind learned in childhood. But as he did in the second cello sonata of op. 102, he integrates fugue into classical forms in new ways. Here the idea is fugue as development section. At the same time, in dealing with fugue and its contrapuntal elaboration of a subject he returns to Bach’s sense of inventio, where the whole of a work is spun out of a single theme and a single character. Bachian counterpoint and Bachian invention: these no less than Haydn and Mozart were his foundations as a composer, but they had never expressed themselves more directly and cogently than here.

  Beethoven’s sonatas had always been distinct individuals, starting with their distinctive sonorities. With this one and after, that quality intensified: each sonata became in itself a legendary individual. In the history of piano sonatas, more than any other, op. 101 is the A Major. Neither he nor anyone else ever wrote one more subtly enrapturing, more beautifully enigmatic.

  He dedicated the sonata to his admired Baroness Dorothea Ertmann, surely hoping it would particularly suit her to play. Who knows how much of it was not only a poem for but also a portrait of the baroness. Many musicians admired this “amateur” from the nobility. When composer and virtuoso Muzio Clementi heard her he could not help repeatedly calling out as she played, “She is a great master!” Composer J. F. Reichardt wrote, “Never have I encountered such power allied to such exquisite delicacy.” The influence of Ertmann’s playing spread around Vienna as well; Anton Schindler called her “a conservatory all by herself.” Her playing, of course, took place entirely in private, because women soloists were not yet allowed on the concert stage and because piano sonatas were not yet played in public. Ertmann left Vienna in 1817 and returned, if at all, only for visits.81 Wherever she went, she spread the gospel of Beethoven.

  If op. 101 helped Beethoven to define a new path, it did not immediately lift him out of the most fallow period of his career. He was too busy, to distracted, too ill, too overwhelmed for sustained work.

  Another musical effort of this year was the result of his continuing interest in using Maelzel’s metronome to set tempos. (He and the inventor had reconciled, Maelzel hoping for a profitable venture together in England—one more scheme that never came to pass.) Earlier Beethoven had written to Viennese conductor and composer Ignaz Franz the kind of considered technical treatise he was still entirely capable of. This one was about tempo:

  I am heartily delighted to know that you hold the same views as I do about our tempo indications which originated in the barbarous ages of music. For, to take one example, what can be more absurd than Allegro, which really signifies merry, and how far removed [in expressive terms] we often are from the idea of that tempo. So much so that the piece itself means the very opposite of the indication . . . But the words describing the character of the composition [such as con fuoco, giocoso] are a different matter. We cannot give these up . . . these certainly refer to the spirit of the composition—As for me, I have long been thinking of abandoning those absurd descriptive terms, Allegro, Andante, Adagio, Presto; and Maelzel’s metronome affords us the best opportunity of doing so. I now give you my word that I shall never again use them in any of my new compositions—82

  At the end of 1817, the Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung published Beethoven’s complete metronome markings for symphonies 1–8. At the same time he decreed that the A Major Piano Sonata should be designated not for the fortepiano but rather for the Hammerklavier, one of the German words for the piano (the more common name was Flügel, “wing,” for the open lid). He began using German rather than Italian expressive terms—with a random sprinkling of the usual Italian ones. As a German, he wanted to use German rather than Italian terms, and he
believed the metronome marks would be far more useful and precise than the vague traditional Italian indications like “Allegro.” In fact, Beethoven did not stick with German terms in his music; before long he went back to the old Italian ones.

  The relatively few metronome marks he issued—in the symphonies, the early and middle quartets, a few other pieces including the Hammerklavier Sonata—became a historic sticking point. Some of those tempos work, many of them are too fast, and some of them, mainly in the Ninth Symphony, are outlandish. A notorious example is the first movement of the Hammerklavier, whose pulse is given at 138.83 What happened? Should performers attempt to observe Beethoven’s tempo marks religiously for all times and places?

  No. The ones that seem strangely fast are in fact too fast, and the reason is Beethoven’s deafness. By and large, he could hear music now only in his head, and even the finest musician does not precisely hear acoustics and the physical weight of sound in the inner ear. The sounds in a musician’s inner ear are literally lighter than air, weightless. They do not involve bows and lips and lungs physically putting air in motion. Also one cannot predict the physical resonance of rooms, each of which is different and each of which inflects the tempo of a performance. For that reason the tempos in one’s head are usually too fast—say, two to four metronome clicks too fast. If Beethoven’s given tempos are adjusted downward an average of two to four clicks, that will usually be a good starting place—except for the ones, as in the Ninth, that are just inexplicable.84