Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph

by Swafford, Jan

  Besides walks there were carriage trips to Krems; Johann sometimes had to go to Vienna on business, the fifty miles necessitating a two-day trip in each direction. From old habit the brothers were soon squabbling, partly over Johann’s demand that Beethoven shell out a little for his board. At this point Johann, who was having trouble paying off his estate, was pressing his brother to live with him regularly in the warm months—again, for a modest rent.

  Meanwhile despite everything, Beethoven had not changed his habit of riding Karl mercilessly. The boy had to fend off the attacks in the conversation books: “But why are you making such a scene today? Will you not let me go for a little now . . . I’ll come back later. I only want to go to my room . . . Will you let me go to my room?” When he heard Karl had been playing piano duets with Therese, he accused him of sleeping with her. Further noisy scenes ensued. When Karl was sent to Krems to get writing supplies for his uncle, he would try to sneak in a little billiards. When he could get away from Uncle, the nineteen-year-old was all too obviously enjoying his first vacation in years from books and schoolmasters.

  Beethoven finished the F Major Quartet and the alternate finale for the B-flat Quartet, then turned to a String Quintet in C Major. After breakfast he was out of the house, walking through the fields in his usual style, shouting and singing and waving his arms conducting the music in his head, stopping to write in a sketchbook. He returned for lunch and a rest in his room, then went back out until dusk. At one point his antics in the fields scared a team of oxen, which bolted down a hill followed by their driver, a farm boy. When the boy had gotten his team calmed down and back on the road, Beethoven once again turned up waving and shouting and spooked them again. This time the oxen ran all the way home. When the driver asked who this fool was, he was told it was the famous brother of the landowner. “A hell of a brother that is!” the boy exclaimed.45

  This was not the only time when Beethoven was mistaken for a tramp or a fool. At one point he accompanied Johann to a conference with an official. The official’s clerk noted the shabbily dressed person standing motionless by the door during the long discussion, then noted the low bows the stranger received from the official when the two men left. The clerk, who was a music lover, asked his employer who that imbecile was who received such a bow, and was astounded to learn it was Beethoven.46

  Neither work nor business slacked during his sojourn in Gneixendorf. Sending his metronome markings to Schott, he observed, “The district where I am now staying reminds me to a certain extent of the Rhine country which I so ardently desire to revisit.” He offered the coming string quintet to Diabelli and sent the F Major Quartet to Moritz Schlesinger. At the end of November he sent the alternative B-flat finale to Artaria. He wrote wry letters to friends in Vienna.

  Then another disaster unfolded. This one was close to the last.

  Ludwig received a letter from brother Johann, in whose house he was living—though by this point he was eating in his rooms and hardly speaking to the family. The subject of the letter was Karl. Johann brought up the issue on paper in an attempt to forestall the blowup he knew would happen if he presented it to his brother in person. But the blowup was not to be avoided. “I cannot possibly remain quiet any longer about the future destiny of Karl,” Johann began. “He is getting completely away from all activity, and will become so accustomed to this life that he will be brought to work again only with the greatest difficulty, the longer he lives here so unproductively. Upon his departure, Breuning gave him only 14 days to recuperate, and now it is 2 months. You see from Breuning’s letter that it is absolutely his intention [as now legal guardian] that Karl shall hasten to his profession; the longer he is here, the more unfortunate for him, because work will come all the harder to him, and therefore we may experience something else bad.”47

  Johann had always been the mildest of the brothers, also the least intelligent. But when Ludwig came to him in a fury over the letter, what ensued was a battle worthy of the old set-tos between Ludwig and Carl. The main issue was Ludwig’s demand that Johann cut Therese out of his will and leave his considerable fortune to Karl. Johann would not be battered into submission. As for Karl, Johann was clearly right: the boy had recovered from his wound, he was getting lazy, it was time to join his regiment. Meanwhile Beethoven’s physical condition was deteriorating. His stomach was bothering him, he had no appetite, his feet were swelling, his diarrhea acting up. He was meanwhile downing a good deal of wine.48 His failing liver, his temper, and his drinking were working together now to bring him down.

  For all those reasons on top of the blowup between the brothers, it was clearly time to go back to Vienna, where among other things Beethoven had his doctors. Karl resisted, saying his wound was still too obvious. But Beethoven wore him down, as Karl’s entries in the conversation book show: “I beg of you once and for all to leave me alone. If you want to go, good . . . If not, good again . . . But I beg of you once more not to torment me as you are doing; you might regret it, for I can endure much, but too much I cannot endure. You treated your brother in the same way today without cause. You must remember that other people are also human beings . . . These everlastingly unjust reproaches!”49

  Beethoven was determined to leave, come what may. Therese was going to Vienna in the comfortable family carriage and likely offered them a ride, but he refused.50 He set Karl to checking coach schedules. There being nothing convenient, he decided they would catch a ride on a milk cart that was headed for Vienna. Perhaps he remembered the time years before, when he had fled from a row with Prince ­Lichnowsky in an open cart in the rain and arrived back in Vienna laughing and healthy. But he had been two decades younger and stronger then. Nevertheless, on December 1, because of his argument with Johann and his hatred of Therese, both rising from his rage and his solipsism, Beethoven and his nephew climbed into the open milk cart in freezing weather. It took him back to Vienna and his deathbed.

  Beethoven had only summer clothes with him. He and Karl stopped midway at an inn and got an unheated room in a tavern. In the middle of the night he fell into pleurisy: dry hacking cough, violent thirst, cutting pains in the side. He tried drinking ice water, which brought on pneumonia. In the damp and frosty morning he had to be lifted into the wagon.

  Late in the day he arrived at his flat in the Schwarzpanierhaus in alarming shape. Braunhofer his doctor was summoned. He declined to come, pleading distance. The real reason was probably that Braunhofer knew what was coming and did not want to be the physician of record. After two more tries at finding a doctor, Karl Holz secured Andreas Wawruch, one of the most respected doctors in Vienna and a music lover who played the cello. When he arrived, on December 5, Wawruch declared to Beethoven, “I am a great admirer of yours and will do everything possible to help.”51

  Beethoven retired to his bed. It was a pattern familiar to him, had happened many times before. He had long known any illness might be his last, but he did not yet know that this would be the one. He never left his bedroom alive. But even in his extremity, Beethoven was the most stubborn and resilient of men. It took death a long time to catch him.

  Beethoven did not expect the String Quartet in F Major, op. 135, to be his last completed work, but he did intend it to be his last string quartet, at least for as far in the future as he cared to imagine. Even if he did not anticipate how close the end was, he could not have expected to have much time left. He had written five quartets in two and a half years, and they were his only serious efforts in that time. The first three, the Galitzins, had traced a steady and deliberate disintegration of conventional norms of structure and logic. The C-sharp Minor had been a reintegration, but on a new plane rather than a return to the past.

  The F Major Quartet is a look back, retrospective and essentially comic like the Eighth Symphony but again on a different plane than either Beethoven’s past or the Classical past. The tone of this last work, written in a time of trauma when his body was sliding toward collapse, is full of laughter and irony
as Haydn and Mozart expressed them, and in the middle lies a soulful song. Its laughter is hard to define, though—not exactly carefree, rather a performance by a clown old and tired, a final smiling doff of the cap, and an ironical exit from the stage.

  It begins with a couple of questioning fillips, piano, answered by pianissimo hiccups. The three-note upswoop of grace notes that mark them all will be a motif. The fillips condense toward a graceful theme, but it is interrupted by a mock-solemn incantation in octaves.52 A couple of bars of transition and we arrive precipitously at the second-theme section. What has been established is a tone wry and quirky, a texture as lucid and open as in Mozart and Haydn—and early Beethoven. If the rapid shifting of ideas in the first couple of lines reminds us that this is late Beethoven, the much longer second-theme section, with its parade of small themelets, adds up to a more sustained, lighthearted, Classical dancing stretch. After a short and unrepeated exposition comes a short development in which earlier ideas are woven together, all of it marked by the tipsy upswoop. The development includes a false recapitulation that leads to more excursions. That the recapitulation is developed and reconfigured might remind us of Haydn; the coda as long as the other sections reminds us this is Beethoven. In it the upswoops find their denouement. The brisk final cadence, piano, is without fuss.

  The middle two movements are about as contrasting as contrast gets. The scherzo, placed second, is another of his short, minimal, more or less absurdist ones, the humor here perhaps the driest of all. It involves simple lines that seem to be devoted to three different downbeats. Occasionally an errant E-flat blurts in on the offbeat, without explanation.53 The absurdity reaches its denouement in the trio, which begins racing crazily, traces keys upward from F to G to A (the notes of the scherzo’s theme), and reaches a boggling moment when, under a screeching folk tune in the violin, the other instruments play a swirling manic fortissimo figure in three octaves, unchanged, fifty times. The effect is outlandish, scarcely believable, and intended as such. The slow movement that follows is a transcendently songful theme and four gentle variations, all flowing together, in D-flat—as in the Appassionata, Beethoven’s key of noble resignation. Here in a quartet whose texture and sound look back to Classical clarity and lightness, the scoring of this movement begins Romantically warm, in low strings with rich double-stops.

  By the time he reached the finale, Beethoven was badly ill and perhaps weary of quartets. He confessed to publisher Moritz Schlesinger (to whom he had promised a new quartet to make up for losing the A Minor) that he had a lot of trouble finding ideas for the finale: “Here, my dear friend, is my last quartet. It will be the last; and indeed it has given me much trouble. For I could not bring myself to compose the last movement . . . And that is the reason why I have written the motto: The decision taken with difficulty—Must it be?—It must be, it must be!—”54 That is one explanation of the mysterious inscription on the finale of the quartet, if not the only explanation. In effect, as a good Romantic would do, Beethoven picked up a story from his life and retold it with appropriate gaiety mixed with mock solemnity—appropriate both to the story and to the tone of the quartet.

  The story went so: one Ignaz Dembscher, a rich music lover, had been hosting quartet parties at his house. Some players wanted to go through the B-flat Major at Dembscher’s, but when he asked Beethoven for the parts, it came out that Dembscher had neglected to buy a ticket for Schuppanzigh’s premiere of the quartet. Beethoven sent word that he would not supply the parts until the merchant shelled out the price of the ticket, a quite steep 50 florins. Hearing this, Dembscher laughed, “Must it be?” Hearing about this response, Beethoven gave a laugh and dashed off a canon on “It must be! Out with your wallet!”

  That canon was what came to him to solve his finale problem in the F Major. It accounts for its mysterious preface: The finale is headed Der schwere gefaßte Entschluss, “The Hard-Won Resolution.” Under it lies a grave musical question of G–E–A-flat noted Muss es sein?, “Must It Be?” Then a laughing allegro phrase is noted, Es muss sein! Es muss sein! Neither of these phrases is to be played; together they are a preface and program for the finale. Future generations would try to make this a metaphysical question and answer, appropriate to a man at the end of his life.55 But in the movement proper, the solemn introductory music around the Muss es sein? phrase is part of the joke: it is the rhetoric of tragedy applied to comedy. The allegro is all swirling, dancing gaiety, the Es muss sein! figure its motto, and otherwise there are two delicious themes, one legato and the other bouncing, all of it laid out in lucid textures and equally lucid sonata form.

  In his early and middle music Beethoven wrote a great many memorable pieces without particularly striking melodies, the fragmentary Hero theme of the Eroica an example. In all the late quartets and much other music of his last years, he produced one splendid melody after another. Here Beethoven made another mark on the rest of the century: the ascent of melody, especially singing melody, to a dominant position in the way music was heard and the way it was conceived in terms of form. As the marvelous mechanism of Classical form receded along with its foundation on key relations, melody stepped forward to take center stage. For theorist Adolph Marx, sonata form was above all a pattern of themes. That process was abetted by the leading younger composer in Vienna in those years, Franz Schubert, who happened to be one of the greatest born melodists who ever lived.

  The end of the F Major Quartet, the end of the end for Beethoven (with two asterisks to follow), is a smiling pizzicato reminiscence of the bouncing second theme, the first violin then taking up the bow to render a squeaky version of it high above the staff, followed by a lusty and entirely unfraught final cadence. Whether or not Beethoven planned it this way, the retrospective, humorous, Haydnesque quality of the quartet rounded his career in the medium in a natural way. With op. 18, its first number also in F major, he began his journey with quartets grounded in the eighteenth century, but at moments looked ahead toward conceptions that had not yet fully taken shape; with op. 59 he put on the medium the stamp of his maturity and his most searching side; in the late quartets he reached for a more distant future but ended his journey with a look back at the beginning.

  The F Major done and dispatched to Vienna, he finished the first asterisk in the conclusion of his life’s work, the new finale—an alternative, not a substitute—for the B-flat Major Quartet. What his friends and publisher hoped for was something lighter and less bizarre than the Grosse Fuge, even something with the popular touch of the middle movements. Exhausted, depressed, his body failing, Beethoven agreed, or at least obliged. The new finale begins with a Haydnesque tick-tock on octave Gs and presents us a robust, perky, folkish tune that will never leave the scene for long. The theme, the texture, the general atmosphere have the light and dancelike quality of a Classical rondo finale. It is as if the new finale of the B-flat Major Quartet were conceived through the prism of the F Major Quartet. But these days Beethoven never took tradition whole; in practice the movement is a melding of sonata and rondo. The theme sounds, actually, like one of those ditties that in the late music he often takes up in a middle movement, plays with briefly, then drops. But here he needed a substantive finish, so this ditty dances on for more than seven minutes.

  As a whole, the B-flat Quartet has two divergent tendencies: the dissociation and general eccentricity of the first movement, and the lyrical and popularistic qualities of the middle movements. Uniting them all were two more tendencies: an air of whimsy and irony to the proceedings (except the tragic “Cavatina”), and the intense individuality of each movement. The Grosse Fuge climaxed the eccentric strain of the quartet and took it to an almost unimaginable level. The new finale takes up the whimsical and ironic aspect and embodies it in another distinctive, quasi-freestanding individual. It has echoes of earlier movements, also echoes of the fugue—one example being the beginning, which begins, like the fugue, on an off-tonic G and falls by fifths until it reaches home on B-flat.

&
nbsp; The exposition is, by Beethoven’s present standards, shockingly regular: first theme (its second part repeated like a dance), second theme in the dominant, lively closing section in the dominant. It goes on to the development with no repeat. That development begins with a lyrical new theme that has the air of a B section in a rondo. Into it is woven a four-note figure that recalls the motto theme of the A Minor Quartet and main theme of the Grosse Fuge—the step–leap–step figure.56 At the end of a long development there is a quiet false recapitulation in G minor that slips into the real recapitulation.

  That long development was one means by which Beethoven expanded this rondo-like theme to the substantial movement he needed to make a balanced conclusion to the quartet. The other means was an enormous coda that amounts to a development of the development. It is as if Beethoven were reluctant to stop, perhaps wondering whether he was going to be writing his last concluding double bar. The coda builds to a fortissimo peroration, then calms to pianissimo and a poignant pause. At the end, two brisk and unexceptional bars of cadence.57 And that was that.

  With the F Major Quartet and this movement, at the end of his creative life Beethoven finished with a comedy, like Shakespeare in The Tempest. In the spectrum of his art one places the sixteen string quartets next to the thirty-two piano sonatas, both bodies of work incomparable journeys of growth and discovery enfolding the whole of life and feeling, and something like the whole potential of a medium and of music itself. The sonatas and the quartets are surveys of what music can be and do. In that achievement lies, to say it again, their kinship with another great synoptic work that had been part of Beethoven’s musical consciousness from the beginning: Bach’s Well-Tempered ­Clavier.

  In The Tempest Shakespeare says good-bye to his art when he makes Prospero cast his magic staff into the sea. There is a valedictory quality to that play, which is as profound as comedy gets. In Beethoven’s last movement there is no valediction. He was already at work on a new symphony and string quintet and had plans for more pieces, and no plans to retire until the pen fell from his hand.