Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph

by Swafford, Jan

  When he got back to Vienna, despite his raging illness he sent Holz a four-bar canon, Wir irren allesamt, ein jeder irrt anders, “We all err, each one errs differently.” That second, small asterisk was the last gasp.

  At the end it was as it is with all such figures: to paraphrase a poet, a great mind and spirit fastened to a dying animal.58 Few men’s journeys to death have been so minutely and painfully chronicled as Beethoven’s. His primary physician Dr. Wawruch wrote a report of the next months. He begins with a survey of his patient’s deafness, his chronic digestive miseries; he notes that Beethoven slept only four to five hours a night. “He began to develop a liking for spirituous beverages, in order to stimulate his decreasing appetite and to aid his stomachic weakness by excessive use of strong punch and iced drinks.” At Gneixendorf he had run around in all weathers, to the detriment of his health. Then, “as he himself jovially said, [he] used the devil’s own most wretched conveyance, a milk-wagon, to carry him home.”59

  When Wawruch first arrived at the Schwarzpanierhaus he found Beethoven in frightening shape, lungs inflamed with pneumonia, choking, spitting blood, with shooting pains in his side that kept him from sleeping. Within a week that crisis passed and he was briefly out of bed, reading and writing. Then a fit of rage over his treatment by friends and family set off an attack of jaundice and vomiting and diarrhea that had him writhing in pain. His anger had now joined his train of enemies.

  He lay in the big bedroom that held his two pianos, his bed facing the window. His cook and maidservant stayed on the job. Friends and relatives gathered: brother Johann, Karl Holz, publishers Diabelli and Haslinger, violinist Franz Clement.60 Once again among the inner circle was the scorned Anton Schindler, who since Karl Holz was busy getting married had been returned to his place as Beethoven’s lackey in chief. Gerhard, Stephan von Breuning’s son, maintained a regular afternoon shift at the bedside. Stephan did what he could, but he was himself afflicted with a serious liver disease. There was, at last, a rapprochement between Beethoven and Karl. The conversation books show the now twenty-year-old helping to keep his uncle at his medical regimens, giving him enemas.61 After Karl left for his regiment on January 2, 1827, he wrote a couple of letters but never saw his uncle again. In a letter to his lawyer on January 3, Beethoven named Karl his sole heir.62

  Out of the blue, in the middle of December arrived the forty-volume set of Handel’s works sent by his British admirer Johann Stumpff, who had been searching for the volumes for years. Beethoven was overjoyed. He pointed out to Gerhard the newly arrived stack of books: “I received these as a gift today; they have given me great joy with this . . . for Handel is the greatest, the ablest composer. I can still learn from him.”63 He wrote Stumpff a long letter of thanks, also asking him to propose to the Philharmonic Society that it give a concert for his ­benefit.

  Several physicians were brought in for consultation, chief among them Dr. Johann Malfatti, uncle of the teenage Therese to whom Beethoven had proposed years before. Malfatti had been Beethoven’s doctor for a time before Beethoven dismissed him as “a crafty Italian” and a quack. Now Beethoven had to be persuaded to accept Malfatti’s treatment, and the doctor had to be mollified concerning the earlier insults he had been subjected to. Finally, Gerhard recalled, Beethoven “awaited Malfatti’s visit as eagerly as the coming of the Messiah.” Once when he was expecting Malfatti and Wawruch showed up instead, Beethoven turned to the wall and barked, “Ass!”64

  In early December he penned a letter to Franz Wegeler in Bonn, finally replying to that old friend’s nostalgic greeting of months before. He began with elaborate regrets for his delay in writing and all the things that had kept them separated: “Our drifting apart was due to the changes in our circumstances. Each of us had to pursue the purpose for which he was intended and endeavor to attain it. Yet the eternally unshakable and firm foundations of good principles continued to bind us strongly together.” It was those Bonn-inspired principles he belabored Karl with, and they had turned back on him. He responded to Wegeler’s query about the rumor that he was the son of the king of Prussia, and urged his friend to “Make known to the world the integrity of my parents, and especially of my mother.” If Wegeler’s son came to Vienna as planned, “I will be a friend and a father to him.”

  He said he still had a silhouette of Lorchen, Wegeler’s wife, whom Beethoven had loved long ago. “So you see how precious to me even now are all the dear, beloved memories of my youth.” He reviewed his latest honors and initiatives. He sent a portrait. He sighed, “I still hope to create a few great works and then like an old child to finish my earthly course somewhere among kind people.” He succumbed to nostalgia: “My beloved friend! You must be content with this letter for today. I need hardly tell you that I have been overcome by the remembrance of things past and that many tears have been shed while the letter was being written. Still we have now begun to correspond and you will soon have another letter from me.”65

  Dr. Wawruch observed that when the jaundice set in, Beethoven’s decline proceeded “with giant strides.” He began to swell with edema, water building up in his abdomen from the effects of a deteriorating liver.66 Finally Wawruch told Beethoven he had to be drained, which was not a simple matter. A specialist was called in. While Johann, Karl, and Schindler watched, the doctor cut into his abdomen and inserted a tube. Water spurted out, twenty-five pounds of liquid by Wawruch’s estimation, and an afterflow from the tube several times that much. It was all perfectly ghastly, but Beethoven felt immediately better, enough to make a joke: “Professor, you remind me of Moses striking the rock with his staff.”67 At one point the incision became infected and gangrene was narrowly averted.68 Gerhard discovered that Beethoven was being tormented with bedbugs and arranged to have his bedding changed. The edema continued, and three more tapping operations were performed over the next two months.

  The dreary weeks stretched on in similar wretched scenes. To pass the hours, Beethoven leafed through the Handel volumes, read Walter Scott and Homer and other Greeks and Romans, made a pathetic attempt finally to learn the multiplication tables.69 The ongoing train of visitors paid their respects, suspecting they were final ones. There were few if any attempts at musical sketches.

  His letters continued, mostly dictated to Karl and Schindler, a mixture of business (including the eternal corrections of proofs) and pleas for favors. He wrote to publisher Schott asking for some Rhine or Mosel wine, hard to find in Vienna. Schott was remarkably slow to see to this request. On February 18 Beethoven wrote his old helper Baron Zmeskall, crippled with gout, “I do not despair. The most painful feature is the cessation of all activity . . . May heaven but grant you relief in your painful existence. Perhaps health is coming to both of us and we shall meet again in friendly intimacy.”70 His hopefulness may have been due to a letter from Wegeler dated February 1, in which his old friend gave his medical opinion that Beethoven would recover, and proposed they meet in the Karlsbad spa to complete his recovery and then revisit Bonn together.71 If anything by then could have heartened Beethoven enough to spark a recovery, the thought of seeing his physical and spiritual homeland would have.

  His anxiety about money never abated. Among the letters were ones in February to onetime protégé Ignaz Moscheles and to conductor George Smart in London, both letters pressing their recipients to get him a loan from the Philharmonic Society. On February 22 Schindler wrote Moscheles, “As the matter presently stands with his illness, a recovery cannot be considered; although he does not know this for sure, he already suspects it.”72 Moscheles surely conveyed that to the society. The long-hoped-for Beethoven visit to London was never going to happen.

  Hope rose and fell, but the slide was inexorable. After the third tapping drained his abdomen, he was hauled out of bed and propped in a tub for a sweatbath. Instead of easing him, this treatment made him swell up again with water. At the fourth tapping, the water from his belly soaked the bed and gushed across the floor. At that moment, Beethoven se
emed to give up. Dr. Wawruch told him he would feel better now, but Beethoven replied, quoting a line from Handel’s Messiah, “My day’s work is finished. If there were a physician who could help me, ‘his name shall be called Wonderful.’”73

  Then his spirits rose again. He was excited when publisher Diabelli showed up to give him a framed picture of the humble cottage Haydn was born in. Beethoven directed it to be hung on the wall near his bed, and pointed it out to Gerhard: “Look, I got this today. See this little house, and in it so great a man was born!” The time for rivalry with his old teacher was past. Also hanging on the wall, as it had been for most of his adult life, was the portrait of grandfather Ludwig van Beethoven, whom he had hardly known, who was still his model of a musician’s life.

  On March 8 composer Johann Hummel turned up with his wife and young student Ferdinand Hiller. Given what they had heard, they were astonished to find Beethoven sitting by the window in a long gray dressing gown and high boots. He was skin and bones, but he managed to stand and greet them. The two onetime rivals embraced warmly. They had long been on a du intimacy. They settled down to talk, Hummel writing in a conversation book. Since Hummel was now the court Kapellmeister in Goethe’s town of Weimar, Beethoven asked after the old poet’s health. As for himself, after his long siege in bed Beethoven felt more bored than tragic: “I have lain about for four months already, and one’s patience finally wears out!” It is as if the pain meant nothing to him, that only the inability to compose hurt. (For Beethoven and for creators like him, not to work is barely to be alive. Virtually the only vacations he had ever taken from composing were when he was too sick to work.) With Hummel he went on to his usual complaints: the Viennese, the government. “Write a bookful of penitential songs and dedicate it to the Empress,” he said with a bitter laugh. He was, for the moment with an old friend, more or less his usual self.

  That was the last respite. Hummel visited three times more, each time the prospect sadder. The next time he found Beethoven in bed, groaning in pain. At the sight Hummel was about to burst into tears, but he was shushed by piano maker Johann Andreas Streicher. Yet Beethoven was still in control. He showed Hummel the picture of Haydn’s birthplace, asked him to play in a benefit concert Schindler was giving (Hummel did, a week after Beethoven died). On the third visit Beethoven whispered, “I will probably be up above soon.” (Was he finally convinced of immortality, or was he being metaphorical?) Yet he went on to talk about visiting London when he was well. Hummel saw that Beethoven’s eyes were dull, and he could barely sit up.74 On the last visit they found Beethoven lying sighing and mute in a haze of sweat. As they sat with him Hummel’s wife took her handkerchief and wiped his brow. Hiller never forgot the grateful look Beethoven gave her.75

  Then hope again. A bank official arrived to announce that the Philharmonic Society was sending him 100 pounds sterling, equivalent to around 1,000 florins. The official reported to Moscheles, “It was heartrending to see him, how he clasped his hands and almost dissolved in tears of joy and gratitude . . . I found poor Beethoven in the saddest state, more like a skeleton than a living being . . . Malfatti gives him little hope.”76 Beethoven roused himself to dictate a pitch to Moscheles, offering the Philharmonic Society a new overture or the tenth symphony, “sketches for which are already in my desk.”77 He was still making wild promises.

  In fact, by then the doctors had given up. Malfatti, like Wawruch convinced that Beethoven was alcoholic, advised letting him have frozen punch in moderation, along with administering stomach rubs with ice water. It was a gesture at making him happier, not at healing. For the moment, it worked. After taking some punch, Beethoven became euphoric, writing Schindler, “Truly a miracle .�. .��. [the musical sign for repeating a figure]. Those very learned gentlemen have both been beaten; and it is only thanks to Malfatti’s skill that my life is being saved. It is necessary that you should come to me this morning for a moment—” Schindler had been ill or injured and absent, but Beethoven had chores for him to do. Inspired by the punch, he began to joke again, to talk about writing the oratorio Saul for the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde.

  His euphoria lasted only a couple of days. He overdid the punch, fell into violent vomiting and diarrhea that weakened him further.78 The condition of his body and bed by this point is painful to imagine. As best he could, declining day by day, he kept dictating letters and signing papers. On Stephan von Breuning’s advice, he added a codicil to his will saying that until his maturity Karl could draw interest on his inheritance but not be able to touch the principal. Toward the end Gerhard remembered his father sitting on the bed beside a propped-up Beethoven, guiding his hand in signing document after document. At this point Beethoven could not manage to sign his name fully intact.79

  Around March 22, Dr. Wawruch suggested to Beethoven that he allow a priest to administer last rites. By then he mostly lay in a stupor, staring emptily into space. But he extended his hand to Wawruch and said, “Let the priest be called.” It was done. After the ceremony Beethoven joked to the priest, “I thank you, ghostly sir! You have brought me comfort!”80 He dictated his last note, to his old landlord Baron Pasqualati:

  How can I thank you sufficiently for that excellent champagne which has so greatly refreshed me and will continue to! I need nothing more for today and I thank you for everything.—Please note down what further result you achieve in respect of the wines, for I would gladly compensate you as much as my strength allows.—I cannot write any more today. May Heaven bless you in every way and reward you for your affectionate sympathy with your respectful and suffering BEETHOVEN.81

  That note was surely touched up from Beethoven’s rambles by Schindler or whoever wrote it down. The requested Rhine wines from Schott had still not arrived; he yearned to taste the vintages of his youth. The stupor deepened, yet he roused occasionally to mumble something about letters of thanks or proposals: “write . . . Smart . . . Stumpff.”82

  But the great mind and seething imagination were still at work. On March 24 he suddenly awoke and announced his own end, by way of a formula that was used to conclude ancient Roman comedies. In what Gerhard von Breuning remembered as “his favorite sarcastic-humorous manner as though to imply: nothing can be done,” Beethoven declaimed in Latin: Plaudite, amici, comoedia finita est. Applaud, friends, the comedy is over.83

  Later that day the Rhine wines finally arrived from Schott. Schindler put the dozen bottles on the table beside the bed. Beethoven opened his eyes and at the sight whispered, “Pity, pity, too late.” He never spoke again.84 They gave him a few spoonfuls of the wine. Then he fell into coma and delirium. As Gerhard and the others sat watching, the death rattle began. At times he rolled his eyes and beat his head on the pillow.85 Outside, the sky was getting ominous, dark clouds gathering. The question of a grave arose. Gerhard suggested that they look in the village of Währing, where Stephan von Breuning’s beloved first wife Julie von Vering was buried. Schindler and Stephan went to the graveyard there and found a spot near the Vering plot.

  For two days Gerhard, Schindler, Johann, Stephan, the servants, and a few visitors came and went, watching over Beethoven. All were stunned and anguished that he was lasting so long. “His strong body and unimpaired lungs struggled titanically with approaching death,” Gerhard recalled. “It was a terrible sight.” On the afternoon of March 26 a violent thunderstorm broke out, pelting Vienna with snow and hail. “Just as in the immortal Fifth Symphony and the everlasting Ninth there are crashes that sound like a hammering on the portals of Fate,” Gerhard wrote, “so the heavens seemed to be using the gigantic drums to signal the bitter blow they had just dealt the world of art.”86

  At about 5:15 p.m. on March 26, Gerhard was called home to study, leaving in the room young composer Anselm Hüttenbrenner and a woman whom Hüttenbrenner remembered as “Frau von Beethoven,” meaning Johanna. That Beethoven’s most despised enemy attended his death would have been remarkable. But Hüttenbrenner probably remembered wrong; the woman was more l
ikely Beethoven’s maid Sali.

  The circle around the deathbed had been counting days and then hours. Now they counted minutes. At 5:45, lightning lit up the chamber and there was a terrific clap of thunder. Suddenly Beethoven jerked into life, opened his eyes, raised his clenched fist into the air as if in defiance of it all, the whole mess of fate, the fickle gods, the worthless Viennese and corrupt aristocracy, the whole damned comedy. His hand fell, his eyes half closed. Hüttenbrenner had a hand under Beethoven’s head, the other over his breast. He found no breath, no heartbeat.87 Shortly after, when Gerhard, Stephan, and Schindler returned to the house they were told it was over.

  Or so Hüttenbrenner reported the moment, many years later. Brother Johann gave a different version, saying Ludwig had died in his arms.88 Inevitably history chose Hüttenbrenner’s scene. His account is a death from myth, the last defiance of a demigod amid thunder and lightning. It may as well have happened that way as any other. What is certain is that Beethoven died the same death as any man, alone in his agony. But he was unafraid.

  Then as later, Vienna loved a funeral and planned a grand occasion. The doctors were eager to get at him. When the body was lifted out of bed for the autopsy it was discovered Beethoven had terrible bedsores, about which he had hardly complained. The autopsy found his auditory nerves withered, his liver shrunken and diseased; he had cirrhosis, which usually results from long abuse of alcohol.89 A painter made a plaster death mask, the features disfigured by the autopsy. Another artist drew the lifeless figure. Over the years Beethoven had suffered from deafness, colitis, rheumatism, rheumatic fever, typhus, skin disorders, abscesses, a variety of infections, ophthalmia, inflammatory degeneration of the arteries, jaundice, and at the end chronic hepatitis and cirrhosis of the liver.90