Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph

by Swafford, Jan

  Sailer agreed to accept Karl in his school, and around this time Beethoven bought two books of Sailer’s for his library. He would have been particularly attracted to Sailer’s belief that religious convictions must come from inside, not be imposed from outside: one must make faith one’s own or it is empty orthodoxy.67 The plan to enroll Karl with Sailer could have been an ideal solution all around, might have forestalled much misery. But Johanna vetoed it, and the Magistrat supported her. From there the situation deteriorated dangerously.

  During an argument Beethoven jerked Karl out of a chair, injuring his groin still tender from the hernia operation. One imagines the boy rolling screaming on the floor, Beethoven standing over him in horror. To make sure Karl would not go to Landshut, Johanna apparently persuaded him to fail his spring examinations, which set his schooling behind for a year. In May the twelve-year-old was let out of boarding school to attend his mother’s name-day celebration. He celebrated too much, spent the night at Johanna’s, and in the morning made his way back to school nursing a miserable hangover. Finally he returned to his mother’s house and stayed there in bed for three weeks. To the court, Johanna blamed his illness on the injury Beethoven had inflicted.68

  Desperate, Beethoven declared, “I must now eat humble pie,” and attempted to place Karl back in Giannatasio’s boarding school. The schoolmaster said no.69 In her diary, Fanny Giannatasio appears to have recovered from her infatuation. “Much as it pained us to refuse a request of Beethoven’s,” she wrote, “I am quite sure that we did the right thing, for we could have done no real good, and, perhaps . . . a great deal of harm.”70

  That these boundless admirers of Beethoven washed their hands of Karl testifies to how frustrating their experiences had been. Beethoven had been especially attentive to the family lately, as always to daughter Nanni in particular. Earlier that year Nanni was married. When the family returned to the house they heard a song for voices and piano coming from musicians hidden in a corner. When the music was done Beethoven stepped out and presented the bride with the manuscript of the piece he wrote for her wedding.71 There are his kindness and generosity, which were as constant as his wrath and paranoia.

  In June, Beethoven’s friend Mathias von Tuscher resigned the co-guardianship, saying he found it “in every respect burdensome and vexatious.” The court appointed Johanna full guardian again. At the end of the year the Magistrat rejected two Beethoven pleas to be reinstated as guardian. Toward the end of 1819, the exasperated Magistrat declared that Karl had been “subject to the whims of Beethoven and had been tossed back and forth like a ball from one educational institution to another.” In the wake of Tuscher’s resignation, the court gave the co-guardianship to Johanna and a municipal employee named Leopold Nussböck. In January 1820, Beethoven and his legal adviser Johann Baptist Bach gave up on the Magistrat and petitioned the Appeals Court.

  Meanwhile Karl was enrolled in a progressive school in Vienna run by Joseph Blöchlinger. This educator was a follower of Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, whose progressive ideas on education were caught in his aphorisms “Learning by head, hand, and heart” and “The role of the educator is to teach children, not subjects.” In those days Pestalozzi was virtually unique in deploring physical punishment in schools.

  Beethoven approved the move, but it was not long before the conversation books began to ring with his denunciations of one more educator. To editor friend Bernard, who had approved of Blöchlinger, he cried, “You yourself a few days ago in the city gave me to understand clearly enough that my nephew hates me—oh, may the whole miserable mob be cursed and damned.”72 In the conversation books Blöchlinger was at first “the ice-house” and “that glacier.”73 Karl’s reports picture him as stingy with food; he punished a student who had wet his bed with a beating and kept him on thin soup for days.74 During an interview, Blöchlinger’s mother was horrified to see Beethoven spit into a handkerchief and carefully examine the spittle.75 Most likely, after losing a mother and brother to tuberculosis, he was looking for blood. Yet in the end Karl settled into the Blöchlinger institute, surely as good a school as could have been found for him in Vienna, and stayed there until 1823.

  As the wrangles over schools receded, Karl’s restlessness and distraction mounted, and his studies became more and more unsteady. “I had a terrible time with him,” Blöchlinger reported to Beethoven in a conversation book, “getting him to stick to work again, good words are often fruitless with him and do not pull him out of his rut.”76 And worse: “The boy lies every time he opens his mouth. His laziness . . . leads him astray into everything . . . The boy will be and must be completely without character, even if we do manage to make him learn something worthwhile.”77 In the conversation books, Beethoven prepared lectures for himself or Blöchlinger to deliver to the boy: “You are little by little becoming habituated to abominable [things].”78 One day the schoolmaster heard Beethoven shouting at Karl in the school: “I am known all over Europe! Don’t you dare disgrace my name!”79 What Karl became habituated to in practice was enduring his uncle’s jeremiads and then going his own way.

  All this trouble tempered but did not stem the creative wave Beethoven had been riding. His popularity in Vienna remained high. By now he had reached something of the status of a settled classic—at least, his more popular pieces had. He still went through the motions of conducting. A performance of the Prometheus Overture and the Seventh Symphony he conducted in early 1819 was received with shouts and tears. The new Vienna Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung declared, “He who has not experienced Beethoven’s symphony under his direction, cannot comprehend fully this major instrumental work of our time . . . Praise him and us! We name him ours, Europe’s greatest composer, and Vienna recognizes thankfully what it possesses in him.”80 This from the Viennese whom Beethoven denounced every day. Another article, commemorating his forty-ninth birthday (correctly, despite Beethoven’s own chronic confusion about his age), said that his works “belong completely to a poetic, primarily novel-like, fantastic world.” The old complaints about his tendencies to fantasy and bizarrerie were now resolved to a Romantic admiration of the same qualities.

  In March came an invitation with great consequences. Anton Diabelli sent out a proposal to all the leading Vienna composers asking each to contribute one variation on a little waltz tune of Diabelli’s own. The results were to be put out in a series of issues. Diabelli had worked for Steiner’s publishing house, and now had set out with a partner as a publisher of works both serious and light—the latter including arrangements of popular tunes for piano and guitar. Among his discoveries was an obscure young phenomenon named Franz Schubert. Diabelli published Schubert’s teenage efforts Erlkönig as op. 1 and Gretchen am Sprinnrade as op. 2; in the centuries to come, they would remain two of Schubert’s most famous songs.81

  The variations project, its contributors dubbed the Patriotic Society of Artists, constituted the opening gambit for Diabelli’s firm. Being a small part of a patriotic artistic society was not Beethoven’s style, but writing piano variations suited his present situation; they could be done in short bursts worked in around his physical and legal struggles. He notified Diabelli, whom he had dubbed “Diabolus diabelli,” that he was on the job—not on a single variation but on a set of them. On the face of it, given the slightness of Diabelli’s tune (Beethoven dismissed it as a Schusterfleck, a cobbler’s patch), he appeared to be continuing the sort of lightweight folk-song variations he had lately been turning out for Thomson. But this project quickly spread into something enormously more ambitious.

  By the beginning of summer Beethoven had sketched nearly two dozen variations on Diabelli’s theme; at that point, as far as he was concerned, the piece was practically done. He put it aside for a bigger project, the mass for Archduke Rudolph’s investment as archbishop. In June he wrote Rudolph from Mödling, “The day on which a High Mass composed by me will be performed during the ceremonies solemnized for Your Imperial Highness will be the most glorious day
of my life; and God will enlighten me so that my poor talents may contribute to the glorification of that solemn day.” The tone of the letter shows the two had already discussed the project together. The impetus came, presumably, from Beethoven, his rewards to be considered later.

  The new mass was going to be exponentially more massive than the variations, though at this point Beethoven probably had little idea how massive. But he was ready to get going on major projects again. He got to work laying the foundation of the mass. He made a copy of the text, with parallel German translation, and began to study the pronunciation, accentuation, and shadings of meaning in the Latin. A minute concern for the text was going to be the foundation of what became the Missa solemnis. He began sketching the Kyrie, Gloria, and Credo, and jotted ideas for other segments.82 At the same time he added sketches for a symphony in D minor. Now in a relatively short time, soon after finishing the monumental Hammerklavier, he had conceived the next three gigantic works of his last period: Missa Solemnis, Ninth Symphony, and Diabelli Variations.

  Meanwhile he was doing better healthwise and working steadily, but his feelings had never been more tumultuous. Around the middle of summer he wrote a sulfurous letter to his friend Bernard:

  I heard from Oliva that Karl asked Blöch[linger] for permission to write me a letter in Latin for my name-day—I am of the opinion that you should make it clear to K[arl] in the presence of Herr B that I do not wish to receive any letter from him . . . His stubbornness, his ingratitude and his callousness have so got the better of him that when O[liva] was there he never once even asked for me . . . Away with him, my patience is at an end, I have cast him out of my heart. I have shed many tears on his account, that worthless boy . . . My love for him is gone. He needed my love. I do not need his.

  He goes on venting in that vein for a while, yet by the end of the letter he has calmed down: “You understand, of course, that this is not what I really think (I still love him as I used to, but without weakness or undue partiality, nay more, I may say in truth that I often weep for him.)”83

  On the same day that he wrote that letter in a blind rage to Bernard, Beethoven wrote to Archduke Rudolph as teacher to aristocratic pupil:

  I was in Vienna in order to collect in Y.I.H.’s library what was most useful for me, the chief purpose is rapid execution united to a better understanding of art . . . The older composers render us double service, since there is generally real artistic value in their works (among them, of course, only the German Händel and Sebastian Bach possessed genius). But in the world of art, as in the whole of our great creation, freedom and progress are the main objectives. And although we moderns are not quite as far advanced in solidity as our ancestors, yet the refinement of our customs has enlarged many of our conceptions as well. My eminent music pupil, who himself is now competing for the laurels of fame, must not bear the reproach of being one-sided.84

  There is no better illustration of how emotionally fickle Beethoven could be, how intellectually and spiritually fickle, from moment to moment.

  Around this time younger brother Johann van Beethoven bought an estate called Wasserhof near Gneixendorf, in the vineyard-rich Wachau Valley up the Danube from Vienna.85 Johann was wintering in Vienna and had been spending time with Karl. Beethoven immediately suspected treachery, that Johann was pushing Karl to become a mere pharmacist like himself, that he was colluding with Karl’s mother, that he wanted the guardianship for himself. Beethoven’s possessiveness toward Karl was boundless. Like a mother bear protecting her cubs, he demanded total control of the boy and everything around him, wanted no one else close to him. Once he arrived at that point, he was capable of nearly any kind of jealous lashing out.

  A month after he wrote the preceding letters, Beethoven drafted a truly over-the-top one to Blöchlinger, who had allowed Johanna access to Karl:

  I protest, first of all, against the letter which you have written to Fr[au] B[eethove]n without my approval—Secondly, I absolutely insist that . . . the mother shall not be allowed to see K[arl] anymore. If she is, then legal proceedings will be taken against you as a seducer of my nephew into low company—Here is the letter which you wrote to me as if I were a schoolboy, thus displaying your ignorance of human nature . . . Men of high standing are not of your insignificant opinion about miserable trifles . . . All kinds of people, and, I may say, several of the most eminent men show me their regard and affection. Among them are even several of the most distinguished and most worthy men of your native land, with whom, however, I would never associate you.86

  And so forth. It appears that he never mailed the letter. It was private venting.

  Karl stayed in the Blöchlinger institute for four more years. What most drove Beethoven to distraction now was Karl’s not responding to him, not wanting to be with him. “He doesn’t even express a wish to see me or speak to me,” Beethoven cried to Bernard, “and indeed as long as I live he shall never see me again, for he is a monster.”87 That a teenager naturally rebels, pulls away from elders and especially from a demanding, suffocating love like Beethoven’s, was hardly part of the understanding of adolescence in those days. Even if it had been, Beethoven still would have crucified himself. It is a reasonable guess that many of his excesses over Karl were fueled by wine. And through it all, he continued working doggedly on the mass, shaping some of the most remarkable creative conceptions of his life or anyone’s life.

  His affairs now were at loggerheads in a way that would have been fatal to most men and most artists. But not to him, though it certainly affected his production. Now and then he said, I am not crazy yet. Somehow he never was, not quite. And somehow in the throes of his suffering he never lost his kindness or his humor. From Mödling in the fall he wrote publisher Artaria in Vienna, “Most excellent Virtuosi senza Cujoni [without balls]! We inform you of this and of that and of other things as well, from which you must draw the best conclusions you can; and we request you to send us what is due to the composer, i.e., six . . . copies of the sonata in B♭.”88

  In autumn came another portraitist, Frederick Schimon. Heavily involved in the mass, Beethoven allowed the painter to set up his easel in an adjoining room and otherwise ignored him. Schimon worked at his leisure, finishing everything in the picture but the eyes, which were the most important part. He got his chance when Beethoven, pleased at how this artist had not discommoded him but came and went quietly, invited him to coffee. Schimon added the eyes: filmed, electric, and searching, the most striking part of an otherwise lumpy portrait, just as Beethoven’s actual eyes were the most electrical part of his peasant’s face.89

  At the end of 1819, Beethoven offered to sell the new mass, “which will soon be performed,” to Simrock in Bonn. The piece was far from finished—he had no idea how far. “My most gracious Lord,” he wrote Simrock, “the Archbishop and Cardinal has not yet got enough money to pay his chief Kapellmeister what is right and proper . . . Therefore one must earn one’s bread elsewhere.” He was Kapellmeister in ironic terms only. If he hoped to secure a formal Kapellmeister position from Rudolph, that never came to pass. But the mass forged on. Meanwhile in March, as Beethoven worked on the Credo with a long way to go on the work, his only deadline passed when Rudolph was enthroned as archbishop of Ölmutz.

  Beethoven spent much of the late winter preparing yet another legal memorandum, this one for the Appeals Court—forty-eight carefully argued pages, his longest one yet. It was written with the help of lawyer Bach, who urged Beethoven “to proceed as moderately as possible in all things so that it does not appear as if there were malice.”90

  Dated February 18, 1820, the draft of the memorandum begins, immoderately, “It is painful for a man like me to have to sully himself to the smallest extent with a person like fr[au] B[eethoven]. But since this is my last attempt to save my nephew, for his sake I am submitting to be so humiliated.” He cites horrible crimes, nefarious purposes, unconscionable consequences. Meticulously he reviews the financial details. He admits that “once i
n a passion I dragged my nephew from the chair because he had done something very wicked; and since he has had to wear a truss ever since his hernia operation . . . the swift pulling consequently caused him some pain in the most tender place whenever he turned around quickly.” The doctor, however, had assured him that “not the least damage was done.”91 He ends with an appeal to the Almighty.

  Presumably Bach tempered the malice and bile in the document the court received, but there was plenty left. To add to the tragicomedy, it was in this period that Johanna van Beethoven gave birth to an illegitimate daughter.92 That may have been the last nail in the coffin for her case. (In an utterly inexplicable footnote, Johanna named the daughter Ludovica, the feminine form of Ludwig, presumably in honor of the brother-in-law who loathed her and stole her son.)

  This time, Beethoven’s barrage of words worked. On April 8, 1820, the Appeals Court issued a judgment in his favor. He and his friend Karl Peters were named co-guardians, Johanna excluded. Beethoven and his circle celebrated what seemed at last to be a final victory. But the object of these years of struggle, Karl van Beethoven, had his own life and agenda. To him, Uncle was becoming more a meddlesome nuisance than a guardian. And Karl had his own tricks in how he handled adults.