Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph

by Swafford, Jan

  The program began with the Consecration of the House Overture. During all the pieces, Beethoven stood somewhere in front of conductor Michael Umlauf. Accounts of the concert, most of them from years later, differ on whether he was directly in front of the orchestra or among the chorus. He was supposed to give the tempo for each movement, but Umlauf had told everyone to ignore him.

  The performing forces were enormous for the time, the house orchestra filled out with less experienced amateurs from the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde: twenty-four violins, ten violas, twelve each of basses and cellos, and doubled winds. The chorus for the mass and symphony numbered ninety, including some boy sopranos who had even more trouble with their part than the women.3 At the head of the strings sat Ignaz Schuppanzigh. The two men still addressed each other as er, “he,” like servant and master. But Beethoven had given up a better hall, the Theater an der Wien, and its house orchestra, partly because the management would not allow Schuppanzigh to lead the violins.

  After the overture came the Kyrie, Gloria, and Credo of the Missa solemnis, translated into German to pacify the censors and billed as “Three Grand Hymns.” There is little indication of how fared these movements of the mass. The Gloria and Credo are overwhelming in every respect, even more so than the Ninth Symphony. The slim response of critics and audience to the mass may have been a matter of something embarrassing being passed over in silence. The idea of mounting these movements and the Ninth with an amateur chorus and mostly amateur orchestra after a few rehearsals is painful to contemplate. Here could be at least one day in his life when Beethoven was lucky to be deaf.

  Then came the Ninth Symphony, the inchoate whispers of its beginning coalescing into towering proclamations. The harmonic restlessness and formal vagaries of Beethoven’s music of the last years had turned away even some of his devotees. This was the same on a gigantic scale. Though there were moments of fraught peace and desperate hope, the music of the first movement must at times have seemed like a physical assault. It ended, for some reason, with a funeral march.

  But his devotees were there to cheer him, come what may. The stalwarts had come to accept like a force of nature the fact that this shoddy little man with the bulldog face, deaf and widely said to be half-mad at best, was one of the most remarkable figures of his time or of any time. Furious applause after the first movement of the symphony. When the second movement scherzo began, the orchestra’s exclamations interrupted by timpani, the audience broke into delighted applause. At one point the scherzo was entirely interrupted by the commotion in the house. Frantic cheers after. The slow movement, with its languid beauty, may actually have been conveyed well enough by the orchestra, and surely the crowd was rapt.

  Then it was as if after a sublime interlude of peace Beethoven unleashed a scream from the orchestra: the finale began with a brassy dissonance. The Ninth as a whole was the most formidable symphonic concoction Beethoven had issued since the Eroica. He had been accused of bizarrerie many times in the past, but nothing approached this finale. Even before it began, a good percentage of the audience had trickled away. The survivors heard something bizarre indeed: one after another, snippets of the previous movements were recalled, with the double basses of the orchestra seeming to dismiss each of them in gestures that sounded like an operatic recitative. In this performance, even that oddity was incomprehensible, because the basses had no idea what they were supposed to do and produced, a listener recalled, “nothing but a gruff rumbling.”4

  The soloists and chorus had been sitting waiting for their entrances, the audience waiting to hear what in the world the singers would do. There was no conception of what might happen because there had never before been voices in a symphony. After the orchestra had reviewed and dismissed the recalls of previous movements and presented a simple little theme, the dissonant fanfare broke out again. The bass soloist rose. “O friends, not these tones!” he cried. “Rather let us sing something more pleasing.” He sounded like a fellow in a tavern, inviting his comrades to try a merrier tune. The men of the chorus obliged, shouting “Joy! Joy!” Whether or not they knew about the text in advance, many of the audience would have recognized Schiller’s verses from their famous first lines: “Joy, thou lovely god-engendered Daughter of Elysium, Drunk with fire we enter, Heavenly one, thy holy shrine!” The older listeners knew what those verses stood for: the time of revolutionary fever, forty years before.

  The choral finale ran its erratic course, fugues and perorations interrupted by a military march in Turkish style. Soloists Karoline Unger and Henriette Sontag, young and brilliant, both with splendid careers ahead of them, struggled to reach the high notes, or substituted lower ones. Some of the weaker string players were seen to put down their bows during the harder parts. The sopranos in the chorus simply left out many of the high notes. (The next two centuries would not suffice to render some of the vocal parts other than miserable to sing.) In the hall the ecstatic last pages rang out. A pandemonium of applause and cheers and vivats.

  Through all this Beethoven stood in front of the conductor, dressed in a green frock coat because he didn’t have a proper black dress coat, his eyes on the score that lay on a music stand, beating time, hearing nothing. Some described him as sunk in thought as he turned the pages. But violinist Joseph Böhm recalled, “Beethoven himself conducted, that is, he stood in front of a conductor’s stand and threw himself back and forth like a madman. At one moment he stretched to his full height, at the next he crouched down to the floor, he flailed about with his hands and feet as though he wanted to play all the instruments and sing all the chorus parts.”5 That is closer to the usual reports of Beethoven’s conducting.

  Legend says that after the scherzo, or perhaps at the end of the symphony, he was still beating time, lost in the music in his head, when Karoline Unger pulled his sleeve to turn him around so he could see the ovation he could not hear.6 It was as if the audience were breaking their voices to make him understand that this was a triumph in spite of everything—in spite of the incapable performance, the impossible music, the emptying seats, his lost hearing. However it happened, the thought of it is sad beyond description.

  The immediate aftermath was unpleasant for everybody concerned. Friends walked Beethoven home after the concert. It fell to government minister Joseph Hüttenbrenner to present the report from the box office. Beethoven had tried to raise the usual ticket prices at the hall, but the management refused. He had banked on this concert to turn his finances around from years of disaster. When he read that despite the full house, after the enormous music-copying costs and other expenses his profit came to a measly 420 florins, he collapsed to the floor.

  His friends carried him to the sofa and sat by him late into the night. He seemed stunned, did not ask for food, could not speak. Finally he fell asleep and was in the same position, still wearing his concert clothes, when his servants came in next morning.7 From that point he built up toward the inevitable explosion. He was not interested in hearing facts and figures. In his mind, if the proceeds were that bad it had to be somebody’s fault; he had to have been cheated, and that by his friends.

  Next day Anton Schindler tried to fend off Beethoven’s outrage and convince him that the concert had been a sensation. “Never in my life,” Schindler wrote in a conversation book, “did I hear such frenetic and yet cordial applause. Once the second movement of the symphony was completely interrupted by applause, and there was a demand for a repetition. The reception was more than imperial for the people burst out in a storm four times. At the last there were cries of Vivat! . . . When the parterre broke out in applauding cries the 5th time the Police Commissioner yelled Silence!”

  Certainly the ovations had been authentic, at least among the part of the audience who came to cheer and stayed to the end. Everyone knew Beethoven was chronically ill. Any work, any concert could be his last. He had always called the Viennese superficial, fickle, hostile to his music. In some degree the Viennese were all those things, but the c
ity was no less the epicenter of his fame and the cult of genius that gathered around it. Could anyone in the hall have absorbed those gigantic conceptions in those scrambling performances? Were the bravos for the music, or for the man and his legacy? Surely it was mostly the latter. And perhaps in some quarters cheers for one more reason, in those days nearly unspeakable: the connection of Schiller’s poem to the lost dream of liberty and revolution.

  But no amount of testimonials to the premiere’s success could clear the clouds gathering around Beethoven. Two days after the concert he invited Schindler, conductor Umlauf, and concertmaster Schuppanzigh to dine with him and Karl at Zum Wilden Mann in the Prater park. He arrived first and ordered everyone an opulent dinner. When his guests arrived they knew what was coming from the look on his face. As soon as they sat down the accusations began. In a cold and biting voice he said he knew for a fact that the management and Schindler had colluded to cheat him. Umlauf and Schuppanzigh tried to reason, reminding him that Karl had overseen the box office.

  Beethoven brushed them aside. He said he had been told of the treachery by a reliable witness.8 In these scenes with him over the years there always seemed to be a reliable witness, and it generally seems to have been one of his brothers. If there was anybody fanning the flames in this case it was probably Johann van Beethoven, who detested Schindler and it appeared was making a play to have him expunged from the circle. Finally Beethoven’s accusations drove Umlauf and Schindler away, their dinners uneaten. Schuppanzigh made another attempt to calm things, but after more insults flung at him he fled too. Beethoven and Karl finished their bitter repast alone, with nobody to rage at, Schindler recalled, but the waiters and the trees of the Prater.

  Shortly after the concert Beethoven wrote to Schindler with a show of temperance, but in humiliating terms:

  I do not accuse you of having done anything wicked in connection with the concert. But stupidity and arbitrary behavior have ruined many an undertaking. Moreover I have on the whole a certain fear of you, a fear lest someday through your action a great misfortune may befall me . . . that day in the Prater I was convinced that in many ways you had hurt me very deeply—In any case I would much rather try to repay frequently with a small gift the services you render me, than have you at my table. For I confess that your presence irritates me in so many ways . . . For owing to your vulgar outlook how could you appreciate anything that is not vulgar?!9

  Before long he permitted Schindler to serve him again, but the two were never fully reconciled.

  Reviews of the music were largely sympathetic. After a cheerleading beginning, the critic in the new Wiener Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung turned to the obvious deficiencies in the performance and the acoustics:

  Beethoven’s genius evidenced itself to us as entirely in its youth and original strength again in these grand, gigantic compositions. His rich, powerful fantasy holds sway with lofty freedom in the realm of tones familiar to it, and it raises the listeners on its wings into a new world that excites amazement . . . Neither the chorus nor the solo singers were sufficiently prepared for such difficult and deeply intricate music . . . the sound faded away and dissipated in the bare spaces [of the hall] between the wings to such an extent, that we could barely hear half of the noteworthy effects in the lively moving mass of sound.10

  After the second performance, the same critic expanded his sense of the pieces:

  Like a volcano [in the first movement] Beethoven’s power of imagination makes the earth, which tries to impede the rage of his fire, burst, and with an often wonderful persistence, develops figures whose peculiar formation . . . not seldom expresses an almost bizarre character, but which become transformed under the artful master’s skilled hand into a stream of graceful elaborations that refuse to end, swinging upward, step by step, into an ever more brilliant loftiness.11

  The rest of that review proceeded in kind. It was written, however, by Friedrich August Kanne, now one of Beethoven’s inner circle. Kanne had been primed, had perhaps looked over the score, and he did his duty toward his friend.

  The Vienna correspondent for the older Leipzig Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung was stunned but as positive as he could manage. Toward the end, this critic added a twist of the knife:

  But where can I find the words about these giant works to relate to my readers, especially after a performance that in no way could suffice in light of the extraordinary difficulties, especially in the vocal sections . . . And still the effect was indescribably great and magnificent, jubilant applause from full hearts was enthusiastically given the master, whose inexhaustible genius revealed a new world to us and unveiled never-before-heard, never-imagined magical secrets of the holy art! . . . The wildest mischief plays its wicked game in the Scherzo . . . What heavenly song [in the slow movement]; how overwhelming the variations and combining of motives, what artful and tasteful development . . . The finale (D minor) announces itself like a crushing thunderclap . . . Potpourri-like, in short phrases, all previously-heard principal themes are paraded before us once again . . . The critic now sits with regained composure at his desk, but this moment will remain for him unforgettable. Art and truth celebrate here their most glowing triumph . . . Even the work’s most glowing worshipers and most inspired admirers are convinced that this truly unique finale would become more incomparably imposing in a more concentrated shape, and the composer himself would agree if cruel fate had not robbed him of the ability to hear his creation.12

  Two weeks later, on May 23, the Ninth Symphony had its repeat in a concert at the big Redoutensaal in the Hofburg. Also on the program was the Kyrie of the mass without the other movements; a Beethoven Italian vocal trio, Tremate, empi tremate, from 1802; and, of all ironies, an aria by Rossini. But the concert started just after noon, the day was beautiful, many Viennese were already off to their summer retreats, and the hall was less than half full.13 The concert lost money. At least the house manager honored a 500-florin guarantee he had promised Beethoven. There was talk of a third concert, but the idea evaporated.

  At that point Beethoven had a number of plans for big pieces: the opera on Grillparzer’s libretto, an overture on the notes B–A–C–H (in German notation, B-flat–A–C–B) as a testament to that master, a tenth symphony, maybe even the oratorios for Vienna and Boston. None of them got off the ground. His epic phase and his orchestral music were both finished. Now he turned to an intimate medium he had neglected for years: the string quartet.

  A review in the Caecilia noted, “In general . . . the interest in compositions of this genre [the symphony] is declining substantially, and the artistic disciple who travels this road . . . without profit, often without applause, must fight with unspeakable difficulties even to bring his work to performance.” This, as history turned out, was the most prophetic notice. It took decades, and the advent of the modern specialist conductor, for the Ninth Symphony to be represented well and to enter the familiar repertoire. The Missa solemnis never did.

  Missa solemnis

  Why did Beethoven write the Missa solemnis? That he took up a second work on a far larger scale than the Mass in C without a commission is something he never entirely explained. That he planned it for the ceremony elevating Archduke Rudolph to archbishop of Ölmutz was his stated intention. That he hoped Rudolph might, by way of thanks, make him his Kapellmeister is a reasonable speculation. Given that his major projects of those years—the Hammerklavier, the Diabelli Variations, the Ninth Symphony—were carried out on a massive scale, the same tendency naturally affected the Missa solemnis. That the mounting ambitions of the piece meant that Beethoven missed the deadline of Rudolph’s ceremony by three years was to be expected.

  But there was more to it than that. There were two streams in Beethoven’s music, the secular-humanist and the sacred, and the latter had never gotten its due. His main sacred works before, the oratorio Christus am Ölberge and the Mass in C, were respectively a rush job and a modest experiment. He had repented the operatic style of the ora
torio. In its way, his most successful sacred work was the Pastoral Symphony.

  Pious Haydn had once called Beethoven an atheist, and Beethoven once declared that Jesus was only a poor human being and a Jew.14 Had he become more conventionally religious in his age, turning away from the personal deism of his younger years? Yes and no. In age one’s thoughts turn toward the end, toward eternal things, often toward God. With death’s breath at his shoulder closer and chillier than ever, Beethoven looked to the beyond more intently. At the same time, there is the psychological reality that when any artist takes up a work that is going to consume a large part of that person’s life, the artist will become for the necessary time a believer in the project at hand.

  Did Beethoven believe every word of the Latin Mass, including the ones that proclaim the one truth of the Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church? Certainly not, any more than the Lutheran Bach did when he wrote his B Minor Mass. In their settings both men raced through the more dogmatic parts of the text. Did Beethoven believe in eternal life? No unequivocal statement about that survives, but what he said in private is reflected in a conversation-book entry from his friend Karl Peters: “Even if you don’t believe in it [religion, and/or immortality], you will be glorified . . . You will arise with me from the dead—because you must.”15 At one point when it was proposed he write a requiem, Beethoven said it should be a memorial for the dead and “the Last Judgment may be given a miss.”16