Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph

by Swafford, Jan

  On March 19, 1823, came a watershed moment in Beethoven’s life, when he presented a copy of the Missa solemnis to Archduke, now also Cardinal, Rudolph, five years after he had proposed the idea. There is no record that Rudolph paid Beethoven anything for the mass or for the presentation copy, but Rudolph did write to the Saxon court suggesting it buy a subscription, and it did. When the cardinal was in Vienna now, he expected a three-hour composition lesson every day, which all but precluded composing. Beethoven felt frustrated but resigned. To Ries in London he wrote, “I am being shorn by the Cardinal more closely than I used to be. If I don’t go to him, my absence is regarded as a crimen legis majestatus,” Beethoven’s bad Latin for “high treason.” He ends, naughtily, “Give my best greetings to your wife until I arrive in London. Take care. You think I am old, but I am a youthful old man.”92

  In April there were two more watersheds. He finished the monumental Diabelli Variations, most of which had been sketched in 1819 and then put aside for the mass and other projects. And his rotund violinist and champion Ignaz Schuppanzigh returned to Vienna from Russia, reconstituted his string quartet, and resumed concertizing.93 His first orchestral concert of 1824 in the Augarten included three movements of the Fifth Symphony.94

  For the summer of 1823, Beethoven was invited to stay at the house of a Baron von Prony at Hetzendorf. Perennially disgusted that his noble patrons were not more generous with him and did not treat him as an equal, he found this patron annoyingly worshipful, bowing and scraping and following him around. Beethoven took to playing as loudly as he could above the baron’s bedroom at night, until his victim regretfully sent him packing.95

  From there, in mid-August Beethoven headed for Baden. Now, he was suffering from a painful and dangerous eye infection. In Baden his friends worried about that, and also that he was eating too much of his favorite fish with eggs and macaroni. His irritability with life in general and with Anton Schindler in particular led to a stern letter to Schindler in May: “When you write to me, just write in exactly the same way as I do to you, that is to say, without giving me a title, without addressing me, without signing your name . . . And you need not use figures of speech, but just say precisely what is necessary.” Soon he was back to teasing Schindler as “Samothracian scoundrel!,” sending him on errands, reporting his health: “I have to bandage my eyes at night and must spare them a good deal, for if I don’t, as Smetana [his doctor] writes, I shall write very few more notes.”96

  More dissonance was on the way in the form of a new disaster from brother Johann and family. But amid the contrapuntal miseries, Beethoven had to have been satisfied that after so much trouble, so much illness, so much pain, near complete deafness, and years of rumors that he was crazy and written out—theories he at times had come close to believing himself—he had in a few months completed the mass and the Diabelli Variations, which he knew were among the crowning works of his life. The first was his magnum opus so far, the second the summit of his piano variations and somewhere near the summit of all his piano music. Both works involved old heroes and models. With the mass, he had put himself on the plane of Handel, with the op. 120 Variations on the plane of J. S. Bach.

  The long genesis of op. 120 had begun in 1819, with Diabelli’s little waltz and an invitation to join a collection of fifty composers in writing a single variation on it. This was a scheme to advertise Diabelli’s new publishing house with miniatures composed by a row of famous names. For Beethoven, writing the requested variation could have been a throwaway or a source of quick cash. So why did he decide to make what he called this Schusterfleck, “cobbler’s patch,” the foundation of the most elaborate piano work of his life, one that, like the Missa solemnis and the Hammerklavier threatened to become unwieldy, impractical, hard to sell?

  No matter how desperate Beethoven was, his artistic goals came first. With serious works, he wrote what he wanted, how he wanted, and then worried about how to sell it. Some of what lay behind the Diabellis seems simple enough. He had written variations since childhood, starting with his first published piece at age ten. Now if he was going to write a set, it was going to have the epic quality of most of his serious pieces in these years. As usual, this one was involved with models. To take something simple and inconsequential in itself and in a set of variations make it into something rich and unexpected was Haydn’s game. Once again Beethoven took up his model and amplified it. As he became more concerned with the transcendent and sublime, he was also more concerned with the ordinary and everyday, like the raunchy folk tunes that followed the exquisite first movement of op. 110.

  The ideal of simplicity had been with him from early on, something he learned from Handel and Haydn and Mozart, and from the folk music he had known from childhood and worked with later in his dozens of folk-song arrangements. “Please please please keep it simple,” he wrote on a sketch for the Mass in C. The simple bass line in The Creatures of Prometheus represented the creatures unenlightened by art and feeling, mere moving clay. Like that commonplace bass line that became the germ of the Eroica, the creatures of Prometheus had infinite potential. Schiller said that every artist aspires to create form that transcends content. Prometheus and the Eroica exemplify that principle, using form to give meaning to the meaningless.

  At times there is another side to Beethoven’s concern with simplicity, pushing that concern a degree further into irony, parody, even a kind of aesthetic cynicism: the implication that the fundamental material of a piece is not so important, that it may as well be one thing as another. It was in this spirit that once in a soiree Beethoven took a cello part of his would-be rival Daniel Steibelt, turned it upside down, picked out a few notes at random, and on that foundation proceeded to improvise with his usual brilliance. In that same spirit of irony and bravado he seized Diabelli’s Schusterfleck: I can take anything at all, parody it, laugh at it, and still make something magnificent out of it, far beyond anything anybody including its originator could imagine doing with it. Here he is close to mainstream Romantic irony, like those writers who in their works turned around to look at their material and themselves as if in a mirror, reminding the reader of the artifice before them, the artist grieving and laughing over his own creation.

  There is a still-deeper layer to Beethoven’s interest in taking up the ordinary and raising it toward the sublime. Apart from the grandfather he was named for, a first-rate musician, he came from ordinary people with ordinary jobs, ordinary troubles, ordinary tragedies. In the popular myth, so did Napoleon Bonaparte. Beethoven understood that, like Napoleon, he had on the foundation of his natural gifts lifted himself from the ordinary to the extraordinary by the forces of his labor, discipline, and vision. Both of them were men like the creatures of Prometheus, rising from the common clay of humanity, but in their case the rise was self-willed.

  So Beethoven took up Diabelli’s rattling little barroom tune with a certain cynical delight in its trashiness, and proceeded to transmute this ordinary dreck into gold. Ultimately, after all, as with Steibelt’s cello part it didn’t much matter where he started—and he wanted the world to understand that. The piece begins with nothing, just as he entered history as a mewling infant of a struggling family in a freezing church baptistery. What made the difference was what he did with his life, and in this piece what makes the difference is what he does with a meaningless waltz, to transmute it into meaning.

  So parodistic intentions were part of the game from the beginning. The fundamental tone of the work, like other of his piano variations including the Prometheus set, is ironic and comic. Call the Diabelli Variations a kind of sublime prank, in the sense of what Goethe called Faust: “a very serious joke.”

  He sketched twenty-two variations in 1819, in the first burst of fervor for the work, but laid aside the piece to take up the Missa solemnis, some new bagatelles, and the last three piano sonatas.97 In 1819, a big set of variations had been an ideal project for him, trying as he was to get past years of relative inactivity by his sta
ndards, past his creative uncertainty and struggles with health and courts. The Hammerklavier had been a major sustained effort. The Diabellis were to be a series of miniatures that could be discovered in improvisation, sketched quickly, revised and polished in bits and pieces, arranged and rearranged like a collection of gems. Alone at the keyboard he probably improvised dozens if not hundreds more variations that never reached paper.

  There is one metaphor for the Diabellis: a string of multicolored gems. Or a parade of bagatelles, a galaxy of tiny worlds, a collection of poems on a common theme. Or portraits of Beethoven himself, who contained worlds. Or all of life and music in a series of lightning flashes: here wistful, here absurd, here dancing, laughing, remembering, weeping. Improvisation and variation had always been his wellspring, his engine. In the Diabelli Variations he made those intertwined arts the substance of the music. Perhaps more than anything else, his first work on the project got his creative engine up to speed again.

  In the Diabellis we see a fundamental aspect of Beethoven’s technique in a nutshell. The beginning is central, every part of that beginning: melodic, harmonic, rhythmic, coloristic, emotional. Now the fundamental material is somebody else’s tune, but the handling is the same, carried to a new level. While every aspect of Diabelli’s theme is going to be grist for the mill, some elements will be steady leading motifs:

  From Kinderman, Diabelli Variations

  All Beethoven’s variations have an overarching plan. The plan here is among his loosest but is still consistent, and it is made evident in the first three variations: Variation I is comically pompous, no. II light and mercurial, no. III lyric and pensive. As established in those first variations, the principle is going to be constant kaleidoscopic contrast. For the purpose of establishing that idea, the mercurial second variation was one of the last he composed, as he finally closed in on how to lay out the elements.98 Beethoven surely knew Bach’s Goldberg Variations, already famous and called a summit of the genre, likewise founded on a simple dance tune. The Goldbergs—and The Well-Tempered Clavier—were further models for the Diabellis in their conception and sometimes in their sound.

  Beethoven was not interested in a structure like the Goldbergs’ systematic one of groups of free variations regularly marked off by canonic ones. Here and there in the Diabellis two variations are joined, here and there one seems to be an answer to the previous, but mostly the order is loose, founded on contrasts calculated to sustain an impression of capriciousness and play.99 All but two variations are in the C major of the theme (also including the familiar minore, a turn to C minor), but within each variation he went for maximum harmonic contrast, much chromaticism, internal modulations.100 For one example of the tonal variety he injected into the theme, the C-minor ­Variation XIV has a passage in D-flat major, which is nowhere hinted in the theme.

  When Beethoven returned to the piece in 1823, he added eleven more variations, including the first two.101 The final Variation I solved a problem he had left hanging in 1819, when the set started with the lyrical no. III: to follow the garishness of Diabelli’s waltz with that quietly pensive and entirely Beethovenian variation was too big a jump. Instead, his new addition follows the theme with a faux-majestic march, forming a parody of the theme.102 That march of Variation I is unlike anything else in the genre, in which the theme is always the beginning and, in a way, sole proprietor. Here Beethoven’s first variation is more weighty, a second beginning, in which he lampoons the theme in his own voice.

  Then the poems, the variegated gems, tumble out one after another, some breathlessly short like the scampering Variation II, some broad and inward, like no. III, some parodistic. Each of Beethoven’s piano sonatas had been a distinctive individual with a distinctive handling of the instrument. Here that quality is boiled down to brief moments, each of them memorable. In this period Beethoven wrote Ferdinand Ries that the ideal for art was the combination of the beautiful and the unexpected. Here every moment is beautiful and unexpected.

  Flowering and dancing and jumping, sparkling and singing, introverted and extroverted, the little worlds unfold. Variation XIII, with its jumpy starts and stops, is the most broadly comic yet in its parody of the theme. Next comes one of the surprises: no. XIV is in a richly chordal C minor with an ornamented melody marked Grave e maestoso, recalling the style of a Bach prelude.103 For Beethoven, to write variations looks back to his first pieces, back to how he learned to compose by writing variations: taking a single piece of material through the most varied avatars. To pay homage to Bach is to look back at his childhood as well, when he grew up playing the WTC. It is also to look back at music itself. Here is another feature of Beethoven’s late work: often it is music about music.104

  There are further homages, more music about music, in unexpected ways. The somber slow chorale of Variation XX, recalling his equali for trombones, is answered by another parody emphasizing the rattling repeated chords of the theme. Variation XXII jumps in with the most startling moment in the piece: a quotation, in blank octaves, of “Notte e giorno faticar” from Mozart’s Don Giovanni, the aria that introduces us to the don’s comic sidekick Leporello. At some point Beethoven had realized that Mozart’s tune has a similar harmonic structure to the Diabelli waltz, and it begins with a descending fourth, the leading melodic motif gleaned from the waltz. Woven into the piece, Mozart is another spirit hanging over the Diabellis.

  That homage to Mozart is wry but not satirical, any more than is the Handelian fugue of Variation XXXII. Nothing overtly conjures Haydn, but the whole of the Diabellis is in effect a testament to what Beethoven’s teacher did with variations. So the Diabellis are music about life, about the piano, and about the past of music, with homages to Handel, Bach, and Mozart, and tacitly to his rival Haydn.105

  The Handelian fugue is preceded by the spiritual core of the Diabellis: Variation XXV, a magnificent tragic aria full of Baroque figuration that streams like tears. Then comes the big fugue, the climax but not the end. Instead he concludes the variations with a gentle farewell enfolding two final evocations—of Mozart again, and of himself.

  Rather than a final cadence, the fugue falls into cadenza-like roulades, as if wiping away everything that came before. There is a muted, magical moment of transition. Then Variation XXXIII, an epilogue rather than a climax, takes shape as a little minuet looking back to Mozart. At the same time it has some of the exquisitely simple and ingenuous quality of the ending variations of op. 111, where Beethoven turned our eyes upward to the stars and said farewell to piano sonatas. Both that sonata’s finale theme and the final variation of the Diabellis begin with a descending fourth; both are in an artless and supremely artful C major.

  With the minuet the variations end on a gesture of wistful irony, of profound play. At the conclusion the minuet seems to dissolve, to evanesce, until the final forte thump in the middle of the bar. It is like a gentle wave of farewell, and a wink. The irony of the ending points to a fundamental quality of the genre. In a sonata, after the exposition and development and recapitulation, the piece comes to an end, with or without a coda. There is no such model for finishing variations, no predetermined conclusion. Ordinarily, when finished with a set of variations, the composer fashions an ad hoc conclusion—say, a vigorous fugue with a rousing final cadence. Otherwise, the music threatens to go on endlessly. Recall the time when painter W. J. Mähler visited Beethoven when he was finishing the Eroica. Beethoven played him the variation finale of the symphony and kept going with improvised variations for two hours.

  So variations are in theory an infinite form, and Beethoven’s ending ironically reminds us of that: I could keep going at this forever, friends, and all of it would be marvelous. But I have to stop somewhere, so here it is: lebewohl. Ta-da! His very serious joke ends the way life can, in the middle of a sentence. There is the final poetry of the Diabelli Variations. They were conceived in terms of radical contrasts from one to the next, and the last notes are contrasted to a silence on the brink of eternity.106<
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  When Diabelli’s house brought out the variations on the publisher’s theme, in his advertisement he struck a note that must have made even Beethoven proud: “We present here to the world Variations of no ordinary type, but a great and important masterpiece to be ranked with the imperishable creations of the old Classics . . . more interesting from the fact that it is elicited from a theme which no one would otherwise have supposed capable of a working-out of that character . . . All these variations . . . will entitle the work to a place beside Sebastian Bach’s masterpiece [the Goldberg Variations].”107 History thereafter hardly put it better.

  The quotidian marched on. The tangle of Beethoven pieces in circulation, both sold and offered, became increasingly complicated. He had never juggled so many balls at once, in the moil of offering works large and small to a smorgasbord of publishers at the same time that he kept an eye out for others, and meanwhile composing at something close to his old heat. Peters turned down the bagatelles Beethoven sent him; Clementi published a set of them in England that was promptly pirated by Moritz Schlesinger and then by a publisher in Vienna. As a result, Beethoven ended up getting no money for the Continental edition of the bagatelles. This fee had been earmarked to pay off his debt to Johann. He had to write a new set of bagatelles to address his brother’s loan.108 Yet the next February he offered Moritz the Missa solemnis and the Ninth Symphony.109