Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph

by Swafford, Jan

  One example can stand for many—his 1817 metronome marks for the Sixth Symphony. For the first movement he gave half note = 66, which makes the quarter note 132, which is absurd. This tempo is not a matter of pleasant thoughts on arriving in the country; it is a brisk jog. In this case even four metronome clicks slower is still brisk, though at least imaginable. His second-movement tempo of dotted quarter = 50 is workable, though most conductors take it two or three clicks slower. His scherzo tempo, dotted half = 108, is likewise reasonable; most take it one or two clicks slower. His dotted quarter = 60 for the last movement is actually a notch slower than many performances. There is, in short, no detectable consistency in Beethoven’s tempo markings.

  At the same time, with his usual common sense regarding his craft, he also understood the limitations of metronome markings and tempered his initial enthusiasm. There are reports that in his performances he tended to speed up in crescendos, slow down in soft passages, and revert to the main tempo at structurally important points.85 He wrote on a manuscript, “100 according to Mälzel, but this must be considered applicable only to the first bars, for sentiment also has its tempo and cannot be completely expressed by this number.”86 So in performance he believed in a nuanced, flexible tempo—the opposite of the metronomic tendencies of the next century. As Beethoven acknowledged, tempo is a matter of a performer’s sensibility and musicality. One cannot put a metronome mark on feelings—or on the acoustics of every room.

  As soon as Beethoven finished the A Major Piano Sonata he set out on another one in B-flat major, as expansive as the earlier one was intimate. He intended to make it his greatest sonata. If in the sorrows and tumults of the last years he had doubted whether he could find his stride again, he was no longer daunted by the intention of composing his “greatest” anything.

  His creativity faced more grueling challenges than it ever had before. His body had been his first enemy. That was the most fundamental betrayal, the one that colored everything else. His friends saw how deafness affected his social being, soured him, stoked his paranoia and his rage. To have seized on Karl as his salvation when he was physically and mentally at his lowest ebb heaped on him another set of troubles. Even though he had plenty of real enemies (few of them able to do him harm anymore), he found them everywhere now, even among his friends.

  Now his human incapacities, the worst of himself—his solipsism, suspicion, hotheadedness, and misanthropy—became his worst enemies, whether he was dealing with servants, with Karl, or with Karl’s teachers. He was terrible at dealing with people in general, except publishers and lackeys, and terrible at dealing with the rest of life outside music. Now, starting with a young boy and his mother, he had no choice but to deal with people all the time, had to cope with the lives and needs of other people whom he could not begin to understand. He did it all badly.

  His music and his raptus were his only escape, even though in his extremity he had taken to praying to God for help in a way he had not before. His prayers were not answered. In the time of the Heiligenstadt crisis he had seized his art like a drowning man. That had saved him, because then he saw in front of him a new path promising to take him to marvelous places. Now another creative path revealed itself, away from the heroic and toward at once the spiritual and the immediate, the quotidian and the childlike. As his miseries piled up unabated, the trajectories of his music and his life diverged more than ever. The courage demanded of him in order to work, which had seemed a crushing burden in 1802, was going to have to be stronger than ever. But his work was beginning to flow again, and his work fueled his courage.

  He had always reached for more. Despite the most galling obstructions, by 1820 the tide of his creativity was rising and nothing could stem it. Now his work was going to enfold wider and deeper divides than ever: more seriously internal and more exuberantly external, a new transcendence and a new immediacy. In his music a more pervasive use of motifs underlay an atmosphere of improvisation. Narrative and drama were giving way to a sense of poetic fantasy. And given what Beethoven was enduring in his daily life, what he was going to achieve in the music of his last years would, to ordinary understanding, seem impossible, unbelievable.

  28

  What Is Difficult

  IN JANUARY 1818, Beethoven’s plan to bring Karl home to live with him was finally realized. The servant problem had receded to a degree, in that Nanni and Peppi were still with him and submitting to his little disciplines: “Fräulein N has been quite different since I threw those half dozen books at her head.” More to the point, he wrote his domestic adviser Nannette Streicher, “If you happen to meet those Giannatasios at Czerny’s, pretend to know nothing whatever about what is being done about my Karl . . . For those people might still like to interfere even more; and I don’t want those commonplace people either for my Karl or for myself.”1

  Giannatasio had made an effort to keep Karl at the school by lowering the fee, but Beethoven was adamant, and Fanny Giannatasio crushed: “We shall have to part from the boy, and, with his departure, one of the links which bind us to our beloved friend, Beethoven, who has lately caused us a good deal of trouble . . . I did not recognize at first why this gives me such intense pain. I know now that it was the manner in which it was done, the cold and formal, but extremely polite letter, without one particle of affection or interest for us expressed in it.”2

  Beethoven did have some legitimate reason to be concerned about his ward’s treatment at the school; in winter Karl’s room had been so cold that he developed chilblains on his feet. But despite his astonishing words to Nannette, in a better moment Beethoven had written the Giannatasios, “Please accept my most sincere thanks for the zeal, integrity, and honesty with which you undertook the education of my nephew.”3 To Nannette he wrote delightedly, “Karl is arriving tomorrow, and I was mistaken in thinking that perhaps he would prefer to stay there. He is in good spirits and much livelier than he used to be; and every moment he shows his love and affection for me.”4

  Karl entered a situation that for a child was difficult from the ground up, because his guardian could hardly hear him speak. Beethoven’s hearing still came and went, but overall it had declined to the point that he could only with difficulty make out music or even conversation shouted into an ear trumpet. Now others were going to have to write down their part of the dialogue. At home with Karl and the servants he used a slate and chalk. Outside the house he began to carry, in addition to his pocket music sketchbooks, notebooks of blank pages for conversation. As with his sketchbooks he never threw these conversation books away, and many survived. So from then on, history could eavesdrop on much of Beethoven’s daily discourse—rather, other people’s part of it, since he largely spoke his responses. Of the entries he wrote in the books, most were items for himself: musical sketches, marketing schemes, shopping lists, addresses, book recommendations. There were also rants concerning the government, the courts, and other things not safe to speak aloud in a police state.

  In the first years of the conversation books the bulk of the encounters are with three friends, none of them aristocrats. Karl Joseph Bernard, as of 1819 editor in chief of the Wiener Zeitung, was a well-known and powerful man in Vienna; for Beethoven he had revised the text of the Congress of Vienna cantata, Der glorreiche Augenblick.5 Karl Peters was an amateur painter and worked as a tutor to the Lobkowitz family, who had bestowed on him the coveted title, in that title-loving society, of Hofrat, privy councillor. Bookkeeper and amateur pianist Franz Oliva had been a factotum of Beethoven’s since around 1810, in and out of his good graces and in and out of Vienna.6 These men were all in their thirties, they had earned Beethoven’s trust, they were able to advise and entertain him. For all his independence, Beethoven was sometimes too ready to take suggestions from anybody and everybody. Anton Schindler, his hanger-on of these years, once said that Beethoven was like “a ball thrown from one hand to the other—all his life the prey of conflicting advice.”7

  As the conversation books sho
w, Bernard, Peters, and Oliva regularly dined with Beethoven in restaurants and inns. On his editor friend Beethoven bestowed the nickname “Bernard non sanctus,” “unholy Bernard,” to distinguish him from the church’s St. Bernard. All three friends had pressing family and professional lives of their own, but they were prepared to give Beethoven a good deal of their time. All the same, they were no sycophants. The tone of their responses to Beethoven suggests they related on a relatively equal plane, even if none was on a du basis with him. One observer of his circle, probably at a restaurant, wrote, “Those about him contributed little, merely laughing or nodding their approval. He philosophized, or one might even say politicized, after his own fashion.”8 But there was more give-and-take than that. Based on his companions’ responses in the conversation books, Beethoven did not always dispense sermons and rants but also joined in the ebb and flow of talk, except that responses to him had to be written down, and there was no question that he was the center of this particular circle. The others were the ones doing the favors.

  In the first years the conversations were largely quotidian, ranging from the practical to the bawdy. The dominant theme was Karl and the legal processes that roiled around him. “As long as you are guardian and K is here,” Bernard wrote, “not only will you have the same troubles as before, but will always have to struggle with his mother’s intrigues.” Bernard polished Beethoven’s legal papers. Knowing that these were not his own strong suits, Beethoven relied on Bernard’s judgment, his skill with words, his common sense. Oliva tended to advise on practical matters, from buying a heating stove to rentals, banks, investments, and interest.

  Bernard and Peters were the more literary and imaginative companions of these years. Bernard was given to jotting down drinking songs and the like, including his own improvised poetry. At one point he wrote out a jovial lyric by Lessing that he wanted Beethoven to set, “In Praise of Laziness.” Some of their humor concerned Peters’s lively and lusty wife Josephine, a well-known singer in Vienna who presided over a group of friends interested in literature and the arts. Peters observed in the book, “Bernard thinks it’s no good that I have a wife and want to be at home; I think he’s jealous.”

  “He doesn’t pay enough attention to his wife,” Bernard responded. “She says I’m her vice-husband, and I always say if Peters dies I’ll inherit her.”9

  It got more naughty sometimes. After all, there were virtually no women in the circle of people who dined with Beethoven and wrote in his conversation books. In the middle of winter Peters wrote, “Do you want to sleep with my wife? It’s so cold.”10 This was presumably a joke. Beethoven knew Josephine, had probably accompanied her in private musicales. His reply to the offer was not written down. Beethoven thought well enough of Peters to make him at one point Karl’s co-guardian. Oliva left Vienna in 1820 and the others drifted off in some degree, but there were no angry breaks as with many Beethoven acquaintances. One who appears less and less often in Beethoven’s correspondence in these years is his old factotum Baron Zmeskall, who was afflicted with chronic gout, so could be of little service.

  The first items in the first conversation book were sketches of Beethoven’s, one of them putting a bass line under a natural minor scale. His friends were not given to flattery, and his music came up only now and then. Beethoven got reports on new plays and operas opening in town. Here and there word of a hearing remedy appears. Beethoven noted an “Electro Vibrations Machine” advertised to cure deafness.11 Oliva reported a more outlandish cure: “You take fresh horseradish just as it comes from the ground, rub it on cotton, wrap it up and stick it in your ear.” With this remedy, he assured Beethoven, the wife of a foreign count had regained her hearing.12

  Each member of the circle had his quirks. Oliva generally noted when a name that came up was Jewish; when Ignaz Moscheles gave a recital, “the Jew played.” At the same time Oliva was not particularly prone to gossip, though he heard one item he knew would please Beethoven concerning Karl’s mother: “[Johanna] is lowdown riffraff. Isn’t it true that Karl knew she was sleeping with her lover when your brother was lying dead in the house?”13 Meanwhile this was the Metternich era; any person young or old could be a spy working on commission. Oliva warned Beethoven, “Freedom—don’t say it so loud . . . Everybody harks and listens.”14

  In the conversation books of the first years, Karl’s hand shows up only occasionally—he probably wrote most of his responses on the slate at home. The boy’s words in these days are mild, obedient, usually answering his uncle’s questions. “I don’t know where the lice are coming from. Anyway it’s healthy to have lice.” Already Karl keeps up with issues concerning his fate: “Have you asked Peters to be co-guardian?”15 Peters in turn liked Karl and praised him to Beethoven: “Your nephew looks good, beautiful eyes, he’s graceful, expressive physiognomy, excellent deportment.” Others’ testimonies also imply that Karl was an attractive and charming boy, and he had been doing reasonably well at school.

  Beethoven wanted to make a great man of his nephew but did not particularly pressure him toward music beyond expecting him to keep up with his piano lessons. In the long run Karl did get around the keyboard a little and showed some sophisticated musical tastes. By his mid-teens he was correct and well spoken in the conversation books—as a writer, far more lucid and correct than his uncle—and he had the clear schoolboy hand Beethoven had possessed in his teens. To that point the impression Karl left to history was of a reasonably personable boy, intelligent but only so much, good at languages, more dutiful than many children his age but not at all ambitious. The tempests swirling around him did not overtly affect Karl for a while. In due course, they would.

  Beethoven’s domestic adviser Nannette Streicher crafted some of the most admired pianos in Vienna, which she signed “Streicher née Stein” to show her pedigree as daughter of the celebrated maker Johann Andreas Stein. Beethoven had preferred Stein pianos in his youth; later he liked Streichers even as he pressed the company to make its instruments stronger and louder.

  In early 1818, he received exciting news: the British firm of John Broadwood & Sons was sending him a piano as a gift. During his travels around the Continent, Thomas Broadwood, the current head of the firm, had met Beethoven. Broadwood recalled that he “was kind enough to play to me, but he was so deaf and so unwell.”16 The gift was a splendid six-octave, two-pedal instrument with a mahogany case. In a time of incessant experiment and evolution in design, Broadwoods were in the forefront of the art, but then and later, every piano from a given factory was different. This one had been tried out and signed by distinguished musicians including Muzio Clementi, John Cramer, and Beethoven’s pupil Ferdinand Ries. Above the keys lay the Latin inscription Hoc Instrumentum est Thomæ Broadwood (Londini) donum, propter Ingenium illustrissimi Beethoven.

  This Broadwood had to have been strongly made, to have survived its journey. On its way from London to Vienna it was sent to Trieste by boat, then carried 360 miles over the Alps on primitive roads.17 When it arrived at the Streicher showroom in Vienna Beethoven was summering in Mödling. Concerned about its British action, heavier and with a bigger key dip than Viennese instruments, the Streichers had local pianist and Beethoven protégé Ignaz Moscheles try it out. He found it very hard to play. But the visiting British composer Cipriani Potter declared it top-notch, so it was sent on to Beethoven in Mödling.18

  Potter was used to the British action; the Streichers worried that Beethoven was not going to be comfortable with it. Years before, he had tried to have the touch of his French Érard lightened, with little success. But he was delighted with the Broadwood. For one thing it was British, and he was an Anglophile hoping to enhance his reputation in that country. Most importantly, it was louder than Viennese instruments. He wrote the maker a delighted letter in French:

  My very dear friend Broadwood—I have never felt a greater pleasure than in your honor’s notification of the arrival of this piano, with which you are honoring me as a present. I sha
ll look upon it as an altar upon which I shall place the most beautiful offerings of my spirit to the divine Apollo. As soon as I receive your excellent instrument, I shall immediately send you the fruits of the first moments of inspiration I gather from it, as a souvenir for you from me, my very dear Broadwood; and I hope that they will be worthy of your instrument. My dear sir, accept my warmest consideration, from your friend and very humble servant—Ludwig van Beethoven.19

  Before long he had some sort of metal chamber attached above the strings to amplify the sound. Potter told him the piano needed to be tuned. “That’s what they all say,” Beethoven growled. “They would like to tune it and spoil it, but they shall not touch it.” Only when a tuner sent from Broadwood showed up did Beethoven allow it to be regulated and tuned—but like most of his pianos, even when he could hear them, this one would be habitually out of tune. When it arrived he had begun sketching a new piano sonata he intended to dedicate to Archduke Rudolph. Just as in the decade before his Érard had helped inspire the Waldstein and Appassionata, perhaps the Broadwood, the most robust piano in build and sound he had ever encountered, helped take him in the direction of writing the most massive piano sonata of his life.