Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph

by Swafford, Jan

  In May 1824, the same month as the premiere of the Ninth Symphony, a journal article in the new Berlin Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung delved unprecedentedly into Beethoven’s symphonies in their historical and technical dimensions. It was called “A Few Words on the Symphony and Beethoven’s Achievement in This Field.” The author was critic, theorist, and Beethoven devotee Adolph Bernhard Marx, who had founded the journal. In coming years he would be one of the men most responsible for naming and formalizing the idea of “sonata form.” Like E. T. A. Hoffmann, Marx in his approach to music was a paradigm of his era, which is to say, Romantic in his sensibilities. At the same time he stands as a founder of the modern discipline of music theory. In other words, Marx was a product of a time and a culture in the process of developing a systematic and quasi-scientific study of history. In the German conception, history was logical and progressive. For Marx, while Beethoven was rooted in tradition he was superior to anything that came before.

  Marx begins the article by reviewing the history of the symphonic genre, its relationship to the instrumental sonata, and the achievements of Mozart and Haydn. His language appears to be inspired in some degree by Hoffmann’s rhapsodic musical writings. For Marx, Mozart’s G Minor Symphony “demonstrates the expression of a restless, unsettled passion, of a struggling and fighting against a powerfully intruding agitation.” Here is the Romantic atmosphere in music criticism: dramatic and expressive terms that could as well be applied to a play by Goethe or Shakespeare. When it comes to Haydn, Marx reflects the general decline of sympathy toward the symphonies, finding in them a certain impurity: “It seems as if [Haydn’s] feeling, especially his childlike, untroubled joy . . . sometimes seizes upon certain extrinsic objects and blends their representation into the expression of the emotion itself.”

  He arrives at Beethoven, whose symphonies he views through the complementary lenses of the evocative and the technical: “In the areas of the sonata and the symphony, Beethoven began at Mozart’s level . . . Even if many a moment shone forth more freshly and brightly than in the more gentle Mozart and echoed the Haydn school, and even if a greater, more deeply founded unity became manifest in Beethoven’s compositions, the basic idea was, nevertheless, the same . . . His more advanced development led to a higher cultivation of the sonata form.”

  Probably for the first time in print, Marx takes note of Beethoven’s expansion and intensification of the development section and the coda in sonata form, and his replacement of the minuet with the scherzo in the symphonies and elsewhere. He notes that the critical conceptions that grew up in the time of Mozart (here he leaves out Haydn) could not cope with Beethoven’s innovations and his singular voice: “As long as Beethoven followed Mozart he received their applause. But in that period whenever they suspected the distinctive qualities of his music . . . it was considered to be an aberration or some kind of excess . . . Those arbiters stayed where they were, but art didn’t, nor did Beethoven.”

  In this article Marx is more interested in expression than technique. His gist is that Beethoven always paints particular emotional states and often specific images. Years before, he had responded to the Eroica with a series of poems full of heroic imagery. Here he tours symphonies 1–7 and their leading themes with evocative commentary: “Beethoven’s Symphony in C Minor emerged from the indefinite lyricism that we believed to find in Mozart’s earlier symphonies . . . However, it does not exhibit a single feeling but rather a series of spiritual conditions, with deep psychological truth. It is the struggle of a strong being against an almost overwhelming fate.” In the lyrical second subject he finds “the painful lament of a deeply wounded and yet unweakened soul.” And so on, through the symphony. He concludes, “We could regard this symphony as the first to advance beyond the Mozartian point of view.”

  He cites Wellington’s Victory, with its portrait of a battle, and applies the same kind of narrative to the Eroica. By this point in history, he writes, instrumental music was “no longer a dead artifice for expressing one’s subjectivity and feeling . . . The orchestra became for [Beethoven] an animated chorus engaged in dramatic action.” With the Eroica, “[e]verything now was united: psychological development, connected to a series of extrinsic [i.e., extramusical] circumstances, represented in a thoroughly dramatic action of those instruments that form the orchestra.” At the end of the article he concludes that whether or not a given reader agrees with his particular interpretations, he will have succeeded “if it is only recognized that a piece of [instrumental] music was capable of stimulating an idea or definite representation.”2

  With Marx we approach the nineteenth-century elevation of music, especially instrumental music, to the summit of creative endeavors, “the art to which all other arts aspire.” One of the reasons for that elevation, as exemplified in Marx, is that the perception of instrumental music began to subsume the qualities of literature, drama, poetry, psychology, and philosophy. Music, especially instrumental music, became thereby the most all-embracing, the most universal art. At the same time, instrumental music could achieve that status while remaining tantalizingly indefinable—the indefinable and unknowable being echt-Romantic qualities. Music became a transcendently evocative and emotional language beyond words.

  By Marx’s later writings, Beethoven had become not only the emperor of composers but the prime model for all future music, the standard against whom all others were to be judged. Through the nineteenth century and into the next, that was where Beethoven’s legacy rested, bestriding and virtually climaxing the history of his art. From the throne others placed him on, he loomed intimidatingly over later generations of composers. In that process, Mozart and Haydn were all but delegated to the status of his precursors. At the same time, by calling all of Beethoven’s work a series of virtual tone poems full of “dramatic action,” Marx helped solidify the nineteenth-century triumph of program music.

  Beethoven himself was not particularly historically minded (as distinct from aware of the musical past) and too busy working out the next piece to be steadily concerned about his influence. But he read this article of Marx’s and was impressed by it. There is no way to know how much he felt the critic had read his mind, as such. Beethoven had always been interested in creative responses to his work, in the ways others made his music their own. Once in a letter he had thanked E. T. A. Hoffmann for his poetic attentions. Now he thanked Marx. Writing to publisher Adolph Schlesinger in Berlin, Beethoven sent word that “I hope that he will continue to reveal more and more what is noble and true in the sphere of art. And surely that ought gradually to throw discredit upon the mere counting of syllables.”3 By the latter he appears to mean critics who blandly cite musical themes and formal outlines, comparing them to people who analyze the meter of a poem and think they know what it means. Beethoven preferred Marx’s more expressive and imaginative style. Later he wryly wrote to Adolph Schlesinger’s publisher son Moritz, “I request you to give my compliments to Herr Marx in Berlin and ask him not to be too hard on me and to let me slip out occasionally through the back door.” He had some idea of how influential Marx was going to be, and he wanted to prompt the critic to cut him some slack.4

  Marx took his cue about revealing what was noble and true in art. His article on the symphonies was only a middle stage in his journey with Beethoven. He would spend the rest of his career exploring and expanding his conceptions, which at once cinched Beethoven’s triumph and put him into some tightly constrained and, for the future of music, constraining boxes: Beethoven as not just an inspiration to the future but the model of models, a virtually unattainable ideal.5

  Beethoven’s concerns in these years were no longer his critics, good or bad, but rather the newest piece; a few friends (most of them serving in some degree as his lackeys); his ward Karl; illness; his disgusting servants; and money. Other than these things, there was little left in his life. Now alongside the notes in his sketches were long trains of sums added up—he still could not do multiplication. After prom
ising the Missa solemnis to a row of publishers, in July 1824 he sold it and the Ninth Symphony to Schott and Sons for 1,000 and 600 florins, respectively.6 At that point the Viennese publisher Diabelli still thought his house was in the running to get the mass.7 Four months earlier, Beethoven had offered the Ninth to Moritz Schlesinger and to Schott on the same day.8 He also heavily courted Probst, a new publisher for him, but after too many broken promises and pages-long excuses, Probst dropped out of the running. Beethoven was disgusted with his longtime Viennese house Steiner, mainly because he had long owed the publisher money and Steiner had been so contemptible as to press him about it. He paid the last 150 florins of his debt to Steiner in July 1824, and wrote Schott, “Steiner . . . is an out and out miser and a rogue of a fellow; that Tobias [Haslinger] is inclined to be weak and accommodating, yet I need him for several things.”9

  His letters to Tobias Haslinger himself (he was soon to take over the Steiner firm) had always been funny and affectionate. His hypocrisy in the letter to Schott lies probably not in that he was using Haslinger and had no respect for him but rather in that he was running down the competition to his now-preferred publisher, Schott, and downplaying his continuing involvement with Steiner and Haslinger. Even if he had turned to other houses, there was no complete break with Steiner. He still frequented Steiner’s store on Paternostergasse; the publisher still did him favors and bid on pieces.

  Beethoven innocently embarrassed himself to Haslinger directly, however, over an intricate piece of whimsy he wrote to Schott in the beginning of 1825. Here is Beethoven in what he called his “unbuttoned” mood. After another snipe at a rival publisher with whom he was involved (“Schlesinger is not to be trusted, for he filches wherever he can”), he concluded, in a flight of fancy subtle enough that it has to be annotated:

  Here are a couple of canons for your journal [Caecilia] . . . as a supplement to a romantic biography of Tobias Haslinger of Vienna, consisting of three parts. Part 1—Tobias appears as the apprentice of the famous Kapellmeister Fux [author of the excruciating counterpoint study Gradus ad Parnassum] . . . and he is holding the ladder to the latter’s Gradus ad Parnassum. Then, as he feels inclined to indulge in practical jokes, Tobias by rattling and shaking the ladder makes many a person who has already climbed rather high up [in the craft of counterpoint] suddenly break his neck and so forth. He then says goodbye to this earth of ours but again comes to light in Albrechtsberger’s time [this is Beethoven’s old counterpoint teacher and Fux disciple].

  Part 2. Fux’s Nota cambiata [a musical ornament] which has now appeared is soon discussed with A[lbrechtsberger], the appoggiaturas [another ornament] are meticulously analyzed, the art of creating musical skeletons is dealt with exhaustively and so forth [a dig at Albrechtsberger’s pedantry]. Tobias then envelops himself like a caterpillar, undergoes another evolution and reappears in this world for the third time.

  Part 3. The scarcely grown wings now enable him to fly to the little Paternostergaße [home of Tobias’s firm] and he becomes the Kapellmeister of the little Paternostergaße. Having passed through the school of appoggiaturas, all that he retains is the bills of exchange [a pun on Wechselnote, which means “appoggiatura,” and Wechsel, “bill of exchange”]. Thus he . . . finally becomes a member of several homemade learned societies and so forth.10

  This little fantasy shows that by this point Beethoven had acquired a good sense of what “Romantic” meant, enough so as to lampoon its tendency to the arcane and fantastic: Tobias twice dies and is reborn, and cocoons himself like a butterfly. Here particularly is the influence of a high-Romantic source, E. T. A. Hoffmann, whose stories were given to such magical metamorphoses. It appeared that Beethoven had been reading Hoffmann’s tales. The clue to that connection is one of the canons Beethoven sent to Schott, the text of which involves a pun on the writer’s name: “Hoffmann! You are no hope-man.”11

  Beethoven’s immediate creative concerns after the premiere of the Ninth Symphony were two sets of piano bagatelles and the quartets for Galitzin. The piano pieces were the eleven of op. 119, pulled together between 1820 and 1822, and the six of op. 126. The first set had been intended to bring in money to help pay his debt to brother Johann. When the London edition of op. 119 was pirated by Moritz Schlesinger in Paris and then by another publisher in Vienna, Beethoven was left with no fees from European publication. In May and June 1824, he wrote the set of op. 126 to get the money for his brother.

  The op. 33 Bagatelles had been popularistic pieces, each a delightful individual. As is noted about that set, here as much as anywhere begins the tradition of Romantic character pieces for piano. (By the time of Beethoven’s op. 119, one of the other founders of that tradition, Franz Schubert, was already in his prime.) These pieces also played their part in the allied Romantic passion for fragments: small thoughts that are part of an implied larger picture. Examples in the next generation include Chopin’s preludes. In a historical perspective, with the op. 119 Bagatelles it becomes far more imaginable that in another seven years the young Robert Schumann would publish Papillons, his wild, autobiographical collection of parti-colored miniatures evoking a masked ball.

  The op. 119 Bagatelles are a more or less random assemblage, all of them tuneful, most under a minute and a half long, no. 9 lasting less than forty seconds. Five of them had been published before, donated as a favor to friend Friedrich Starke for his piano-pedagogy book. Some came from drafts going back as far as the 1790s.12 They are arranged in terms of musical contrasts and a variety of keys, but really they are freestanding pieces, aimed more at the pleasure of an individual player than at public performance (which would have been unlikely in this period anyway). Most have a topic familiar to the time: no. 1 is a wistful dance, no. 5 a driving piece in Gypsy style, no. 9 an exquisite little waltz, and so on. All in all they constitute an echo of the kinds of pieces Beethoven could improvise on the spot, and likely began as improvisations that he touched up on the page.

  Op. 126 is a different matter, what he called on the manuscript a Ciclus von Kleinigkeiten, a cycle of little things. They range from around a minute and a half to more than four minutes. He wrote publisher Schott that they were “probably the best I’ve written” of these kinds of pieces. No less than the others were these variegated, freestanding in effect. But the six still have the mark of a concentrated effort, and some of the atmosphere of the late music. The keys progress by thirds: G–g–E-flat–b–G–E-flat. No. 1 has the sublime and artless tunefulness of some of his late piano movements. No. 2 combines dashing bursts of toccata with cantabile phrases—the late propensity for juxtaposing high contrasts. No. 3 in E-flat major is a poignant stretch of cantabile that might have served as the basis of a slow movement in a late sonata. No. 4 begins as a Presto furioso in tone but has stretches of folkish musette. The set finishes with a flowing, introverted Quasi allegretto and a finale that begins and ends with a dashing Presto but is otherwise a kind of meditation in folk style. This set of small gems constitutes Beethoven’s last opus for piano.

  As each of the quartets for Prince Galitzin was finished, Beethoven bestirred himself to get it premiered and then to sell it. By now he was confirmed in his habit of promising works to more than one publisher, trying to keep all of them on the hook. Meanwhile he continued to promise the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde its commissioned oratorio The Triumph of the Cross, which he never got around to. His letters to the society’s cellist and concert organizer Vincenz Hauschka were invariably in his unbuttoned mood, and they use the intimate du: “While hailing you as the most powerful Intendant of all singing and growling clubs, the Imperial and Royal Violoncello in Chief, the Imperial and royal Inspector of all Imperial and Royal Hunts, and also the deacon of my most gracious lord, without domicile, without a roof over his head . . . I wish you this and that, from which you may select the best.”13

  While Beethoven was finishing the first of the Galitzins, the Quartet in E-flat Major, op. 127, Ignaz Schuppanzigh claimed the premiere of th
e quartet for his scheduled concert of January 25, 1825. Given the go-ahead, the violinist immediately placed a notice in the paper. With that, he hoped to forestall Beethoven’s usual game of having second thoughts and giving it to somebody else—which Beethoven promptly did. He promised it to Joseph Linke, Schuppanzigh’s cellist, for a benefit concert. There was a tense exchange between Beethoven and ­Schuppanzigh in a conversation book. “The affair with the quartet is accursed,” Schuppanzigh began. He insisted he didn’t want to fight with Linke over the premiere, but he still wanted the quartet: “I wouldn’t say anything if it were not already in the newspaper.”14

  In the end, Schuppanzigh got his way. Beethoven treated Linke as he was doing with his stable of disappointed publishers, promising the cellist a future work, the premiere of the coming A Minor Quartet (Linke was duly annoyed over the whole matter). Then the E-flat Quartet was not ready in time for Schuppanzigh’s January concert, and he had to substitute the op. 95 Serioso.

  Schuppanzigh’s next scheduled concert was on March 6. It appears that he got the music for the E-flat Quartet only two weeks before the date, so there was great anxiety on all sides. Beethoven needed strong premieres, and from op. 18 onward he had usually gotten them from Schuppanzigh. Meanwhile, for a performer at this point a new Beethoven quartet was a more loaded matter than it had been with the ones of a decade before. Now each premiere threatened to be a historic moment, therefore to have something to do with one’s reputation not only in the present but potentially in the future. The E-flat Quartet, Beethoven’s first since the Serioso of 1810, was as novel and difficult as any he had written. For performers and listeners it demanded whole new categories of understanding.