Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph

by Swafford, Jan

  He continued to think of himself not just as a Komponist but as a Tondichter, a tone poet. The late sonatas and quartets are the distilled essence of his Poetic style, when the larger narrative and larger formal patterns are covered over by an intimate involvement with the moment—shifting ideas and shifting emotions, approaching at times the effect of a stream of consciousness. In the first movement, after that parade of some six distinct ideas in the course of a minute, suddenly without a repeat we begin the short development. It gives way almost undetectably to the recapitulation, which is transformed in its own development, its diaphanous arpeggios wafting over the whole of the keyboard.

  From tender lyricism to farce: for the second movement a rambunctious two-beat scherzo based on two German folk songs—first, “My cat has had kittens,” second and more intriguing, “I’m a slob, you’re a slob.” Another instant change of mood: a slow movement on the order of an operatic recitative and arioso, the beginning indescribably sorrowful, then a long-arched arioso in A-flat minor (and 12/16 time) marked “plaintive song.”37 Here is music rising from Beethoven’s own sorrow to become universal, what the Romantics called Weltschmerz, “world-pain.” It sinks to a whisper and a pianissimo pause.

  The finale is fugal, the main subject based on the opening theme of the first movement. While the fugues in earlier sonatas were mostly robust unto aggressive, none more so than the Hammerklavier, this one flows like a choral work. As it reaches a climax comes another one of those startling but somehow inevitable turns that mark the late music: the fugue abruptly falls to pieces and we find ourselves back in the third-movement arioso, now in G minor, more devastated than before. After its gasping, sobbing song, it too seems to dissolve, and we return softly to another fugue, its theme the inversion of the first one. Its opening is marked “little by little coming back to life.” The technique of thematic inversion, for centuries a staple of formal counterpoint, here is made into intense drama and emotion.38 Soon the fugue theme returns triumphantly right side up, and the music gathers strength to the rippling arpeggios of the end.39

  More than ever, the late sonatas seem to survey the entirety of life in one vision, from tragic to earthy to exalted, often shifting in the blink of an eye—just like Beethoven’s own emotional life. That pattern is distilled further in the next sonata.

  Beethoven may or may not have intended the two-movement op. 111 in C Minor to be his last piano sonata, but there is no question that it stands as a summation and apotheosis of the man and composer, of the late style, of the furthest potentials of expression in tone.

  The overall form of the first movement is a Maestoso introduction and an Allegro that unites fugue and sonata form in yet another singular way. It is also the last appearance of Beethoven’s “C-minor mood,” with the intense-unto-demonic qualities that implies. On a sketch page for the movement he copied out fugue subjects from Mozart’s Requiem and Haydn’s early F Minor String Quartet.40 So op. 111 is at once a return to models, a summation, and a radical reconception.

  The introduction begins with pealing, ambiguous diminished chords, the effect recalling the introduction to the Pathétique—twenty-five years of growing and suffering later. That gives way to a low, snarling trill, then a roaring, striding C-minor theme breaks out. It starts, stops, stutters, trails off, sounding like a fugue subject that cannot find its footing, that struggles to become a fugue—which it finally achieves, briefly, on a variant of the theme. After a tender hint of a second theme and a repeat of the exposition, the music falls into another short but furious fugue in the development.41

  In Baroque terms, that first movement of the C Minor is a sort of prelude leading to a sort of fugue. The movement proper, marked Allegro con brio ed appassionato (“fast and with fire and passion”) rages to its end largely on the opening motif, sometimes varied and fragmented, most of it loud until a calming coda that seems to enfold the whole of the movement while preparing the next. The tempo is constantly in flux, slowing, speeding, lurching. This movement is the anti–opp. 109 and 110. Call it a representation of the turbulent, the disjointed, the furious: the manic, unheroic earthly.

  The answer, perhaps Beethoven’s ultimate answer, is transcendence. From furious and fragmented to a poignant song that seems to stop time in its course. The movement is labeled “Arietta,” the tempo Adagio molto semplice e cantabile—very simply and songfully. It is as if C major were discovered for the first time, like a revelation. As in the op. 109 finale, here are variations on a simple and profound theme, but variations beyond any by anybody else: an unbroken flow that gradually increases in speed, by the third variation reaching a swirling, rhythmic gaiety. The music rises and speeds further, reaching magical shimmering realms high on the keyboard, until finally and unforgettably, the piano is alight with triple trills.

  At the coda a specter of the original melody returns and with it the trills, the uncanny celestial light that shimmers on and on, finally making a slow descent back to earth and a simple conclusion.42 These last pages are music beyond words, beyond poetry and philosophy, almost beyond earthly life, but encompassing them all.

  In these incomparable pieces Beethoven largely left behind not only the heroic style of his middle music but also the heroic ideal, the dream of happiness bestowed from above by benevolent despots like Joseph II or conquerors like Napoleon—or by revolutions. In the late music power is overcome by tenderness and spirituality, narrative trumped by poetry.

  Here then is his Poetic style. As with the Heroic style of his middle years, “poetic” describes some but not all of the music of the period, but it can be called the central current. In the Eroica Beethoven gave the responsibility for creating a new world to the conquering hero. Now in his mind the road to happiness, to Elysium, to the perfected society, has become inward, within the heart and soul of each man and woman.

  Business under God’s sky was a different matter. Beethoven had always been a shrewd and sharp dealer of his wares, but now his desperation over finances and his estrangement from reality, including the reality of his own actions, took him past any reasonable moral and ethical line—though it never shook his treasured but increasingly hazy sense of his own goodness. Again, though, part of his desperation was that works like the Diabelli Variations and especially the Missa solemnis could never pay him back for the time they cost. Any prospective publisher knew that bringing out the mass was going to be a money-losing proposition for many years to come, and the only reason to do it was for the prestige of bringing out what Beethoven was calling his magnum opus.

  Another element of his dealings in the next years was that brother Johann had begun seeing to his interests. In the middle of 1822, Beethoven did what he could to reconcile with Johann, whose wife Therese he had long detested (not entirely without reason). Ludwig wrote Johann in May:

  I have made inquiries about apartments . . . the scheme [of living together] would enable us both to save a good deal . . . I have nothing against your wife. I only hope that she will realize how much could be gained for you too by your living with me . . . Please, let us have peace. God grant that the most natural bond, the bond between brothers, may not again be broken in an unnatural way. In any case my life will certainly not last very much longer . . . owing to my indisposition which has now lasted for three and a half months [the “gout in the chest”] I am very sensitive and irritable . . . Away with everything that cannot promote my object, which is, that I and my good Karl may settle down to a kind of life that is particularly necessary and more suitable to me.43

  Beethoven had, of course, a great deal against Johann’s wife, and Therese soon gave him cause for further outrage. The idea of the brothers living together was absurd, and it appears Johann understood that. Still, they drew closer, for a while lived next door to each other in Vienna when Johann was wintering at the house of his baker brother-in-law.44 This brother prosperous from the pharmacy trade began to advise Ludwig again and to carry on some dealings with publishers—just as their late bro
ther Carl used to do but this time with better results.

  Having bought his mansion in Gneixendorf, Johann had begun to play the man of property and leisure, but he seems to have fooled no one. Nephew Karl opined in a conversation book that while Johann might be “worldly, money-grubbing, and vain,” he still had a genuine desire to help.45 Johann had been kind to Karl, enough to arouse Ludwig’s suspicion that his brother wanted the guardianship for himself.

  Gerhard von Breuning, the son of Beethoven’s old Bonn friend Stephan, remembered Johann cutting an outlandish figure, with his bony physique and out-of-plumb features, his clothes an attempt at elegance including white gloves that were always too long for his fingers, so the ends dangled. He was often seen in the Prater park joining the procession of the fashionable in his fancy carriage, sometimes with two liveried servants on board. “Everybody thinks him a fool,” Count Moritz Lichnowsky wrote in a conversation book. “We call him the Chevalier . . . all the world says of him that his only merit is that he bears your name.” Certainly Johann was proud of his connection to his famous brother. He attended concerts of Ludwig’s music during which he applauded in his flapping gloves and attempted to shout the loudest bravos.46

  At least partly as a result of Johann’s advice, in 1822 Beethoven started promising the mass to a row of publishers. The year before, Nikolaus Simrock in Bonn had put his payment for it on reserve with Franz Brentano. In May Beethoven wrote Brentano, “The Mass will be with you in Frankfurt [for Simrock] at the end of next month at the latest.” He had meanwhile offered the mass to Schlesinger in Berlin and now—along with smaller pieces—to C. F. Peters in Leipzig as well. Beethoven was at first uneasy about making the Peters offer, but Johann told him, “That’s business.”47

  C. F. Peters aspired to have new Beethoven works in his catalog, and the mass seemed like a prestigious start. So began months of machinations by both of them. Since Beethoven acknowledged that he had shown the piece to others, Peters’s main device in pushing his case was to run down the competition. He wrote Beethoven that Steiner “has dealt unfaithfully with me and has repaid my friendship with ingratitude.”48 In this he was surely playing on Beethoven’s break with Steiner, who in turn advised Peters that Beethoven was “absolutely not to be dealt with.”

  When it came to the publishers Adolf Schlesinger in Berlin and his son Moritz in Paris, things got nastier. Shortly before he assured Simrock that he would have the mass in his hands in another month, Beethoven had written Adolf Schlesinger, “As to the Mass I have already agreed to let you have the work itself together with the pianoforte arrangement for an honorarium of 650 Reichsthaler in Prussian currency.”49 Knowing it had been offered to Schlesinger, Peters heatedly wrote Beethoven that “a Christian Mass composed by a Beethoven cannot come into the hands of a Jew,” above all not “this Jew [Schlesinger], who is nowhere respected.”50

  With that cue, Beethoven responded to Peters in kind: soon after offering the mass to Schlesinger, Beethoven wrote Peters, “I agree to give you the Mass together with the pianoforte arrangement for—1000 [florins] . . . You will receive a careful copy of the score by the end of July . . . In no circumstances will Schlesinger ever get anything more from me, because he too has played me a Jewish trick.”51 But Beethoven had his own tricks. Instead of the mass, whose final score was well in the future, Beethoven assembled a stack of lesser pieces to send to Peters: three small lieder including Der Kuss, more or less finished in 1798, six bagatelles, all but one from 1802 and earlier, and four marches for military band.52 He touched up all the pieces before sending them, so it was some time before Peters got them.53

  Beethoven had not needed much prodding to become disgusted with the Schlesingers. He wrote Moritz in Paris, “Apparently I am to have several unpleasant experiences with you and your father.” They had fumbled his intended dedication of op. 110 to Antonie Brentano (it went to Archduke Rudolph), and he believed Moritz had shortchanged him by a dozen florins in the payment for opp. 110 and 111: “such insulting niggardliness, the like of which I have never experienced.”54

  Was Beethoven a habitual anti-Semite, as Peters seems to have been, in common with a large percentage of Germans? The record shows only a few Beethoven cracks about Jews, and the foregoing is one of the worst of them—in some ways still worse because it was done cynically to abet his courtship of a manifestly anti-Semitic publisher. Racial and ethnic bigotry was general in those days; another example appears in a Mozart letter to his father: “A charlatan, like all Italians.” In the end, there is no indication that Beethoven had any more animus toward Jews than he had to the aristocracy, to the Viennese, to much of the rest of humanity. In any case, he kept submitting works to both Schlesingers, even after Moritz pirated some bagatelles.55

  Likewise he kept dangling the mass in front of more publishers. Peters had offered 1,000 florins. Three weeks after receiving that offer, Beethoven wrote Artaria in Vienna that for the same fee, “All I can do is to give you the preference.”56 Why would he double-deal like this for the same fee? Perhaps because he owed Artaria money and he hoped he could fob off Peters with the “trifles” he intended to send.

  By this point, Beethoven had unequivocally promised the mass to Simrock, Schlesinger, Peters, and Artaria, assuring them that the score would be immediately forthcoming. Those four houses would not be the last he courted and double-crossed, and in the end none of them got the piece.

  Toward the end of 1822, he tried another and yet more dishonest gambit to keep publishers on the line. Now he said there were actually two masses under way; soon he was claiming three. To Peters in November: “In regard to the Mass things are as follows: I had already finished one long ago but I have not yet finished another . . . I do not yet know which of these two Masses you will receive.”57 By the “long ago” work he did not mean the already-published Mass in C but indeed the Missa solemnis, still not finished at all. The other mass he wrote of, which eventually metamorphosed into two, was bogus. True, for a while he did float the idea of writing a mass expressly for Franz II, and for it he made inquiries about the emperor’s taste in masses. A few, very few, sketches survived for a mass in C-sharp minor.

  To what extent do these promises represent deliberate lies, as opposed to an excess of optimism? Beethoven probably hoped to write two more masses, one of them for the emperor. If one wants to be generous, one can say that in his desperation he took the intention for the reality.

  In spring 1823, an outraged Peters, having advanced Beethoven money, not only gave up on the mass but rejected all the miniatures he had received, starting with the bagatelles: “I have had several of them played but not one person wants to believe me that these are by you.” He wanted, he wrote Beethoven heatedly, only “exceptionally” good pieces.58 Beethoven was perhaps boggled by this response, since publishers were always plaguing him to write simpler and easier things.59 Yet he doggedly kept after Peters. In the end nothing came of their years of negotiations. At some point, very apropos, Beethoven confessed in a letter to Peters, “Everything I do apart from music is badly done and stupid.”60

  Amid all this frustration, busywork, and chicanery, he kept composing and retained some of his high spirits. He wrote Johann gaily in autumn 1822, “Two women singers called on us today and as they absolutely insisted on being allowed to kiss my hands and as they were decidedly pretty, I preferred to offer them my mouth to kiss.” The two singers were probably Henriette Sontag and Karoline Unger, both of them teenagers at the time, both of them to be involved in the premiere of his new symphony.61 Later he passed on to both of them some wine given to him by an admirer. A friend reported that after drinking it, Sontag “vomited fifteen times the night before last . . . With Unger the effect was in the opposite direction. What a pair of heroines! . . . Both beauties send you their regards and ask for a better and more wholesome wine in future.”62

  Work continued on the mass and he made some sketches toward ninth and tenth symphonies. In early September he got word that the
director of the newly built Josephstadt Theatre wanted him to adapt for its opening the Ruins of Athens incidental music, written for a similar opening in Pest and quite unknown in Vienna. Beethoven agreed. While a lyricist came up with new words for the existing vocal music, transferring the story from Hungary to Vienna, Beethoven mounted one of his old-style marathons. In a couple of weeks or so he wrote a new chorus, a ballet segment, and an overture he called Die Weihe des Hauses (The Consecration of the House)—having decided the old Ruinin von Athens Overture would not do for this occasion.63 The grand and rather Handelian Weihe des Hauses, with stately trombone parts in the introduction and a fugue in the Allegro, showed that he still had his old professional skill at writing polished and effective occasional pieces in a hurry. For the premiere on October 3 the hall was packed with listeners primed for a new Beethoven sensation, but with the deaf composer directing and the orchestra uncertain, the response was muted.64

  From that performance came an equally mixed result. Leading the violins in the house orchestra was Anton Felix Schindler. Then twenty-seven, he had played violin since childhood but studied philosophy and law at the University of Vienna. Schindler kept performing as an amateur, and in that capacity may have first met Beethoven in 1814 and occasionally encountered him thereafter—among the opportunities being the time he spent working as a clerk for Beethoven’s lawyer and friend Johann Baptist Bach.

  By the time the new theater opened in 1822, Schindler was accomplished enough to go professional and became concertmaster of the orchestra.65 In his person Schindler was gaunt unto sepulchral, in manner dour and pretentious. He was an able musician and ambitious in other ways as well. By his own later account, he served as a confidant and unpaid secretary of Beethoven from 1819 to the end. Schindler’s entries in the conversation books seem to bear out that claim.