Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph

by Swafford, Jan

  18. The quotations and points from Kant are from his “What Is Enlightenment?” passim; and in Schmidt, What Is Enlightenment?

  19. Berlin, Age of Enlightenment, 24.

  20. Parsons, “Deine Zauber binden wieder,” 5–7.

  21. Blanning, Pursuit of Glory, 470.

  22. Some of this paragraph derives from Gay, Age of Enlightenment, 11–12. As that book notes, even if the Enlightenment was not innately antireligious, there was a common belief among philosophers that “when science advanced, religion had to retreat” (20). Kant was troubled by the thought that his ideas might weaken religion partly because he insisted that humanity had to rely on itself rather than on God. In the end, Kant’s ideas did often have the effect on philosophy that he feared.

  23. Anderson, vol. 2, no. 376.

  24. Quoted in Im Hof, Enlightenment, 270.

  25. Quoted in Blanning, Pursuit of Glory, 296.

  26. Dülmen, Society of the Enlightenment, 4. Dülmen views the German Aufklärung as largely a struggle for power and status by the new German bureaucratic middle class—so it was an effort to challenge the hegemony of the aristocracy at the same time that the civil servant class diligently served the aristocracy.

  27. Levy, Beethoven, 8.

  28. Solomon, “Beethoven, Freemasonry,” 108.

  29. Quoted in Solomon, Beethoven, 47.

  30. Quoted in Kross, “Aufklärung,” 10.

  4. Loved in Turn

  1. A reproduction of the title page is in Lockwood, Beethoven: Music, 54. Forbes, in Thayer/Forbes, 1:66, notes that the countess was wife of Ignaz von Metternich, president of the High Court of Appeals.

  2. Thayer/Forbes, 1:66.

  3. The suggestion that the Dressler Variations may be a memorial for Franz Rovantini comes from Barry Cooper, in Beethoven, 7.

  4. Bodsch, “Das kulturelle Leben,” 68.

  5. Schiedermair, 83–84.

  6. Gutzmer, Chronik der Stadt Bonn, 77.

  7. Wegeler/Ries, 13 and 17.

  8. Thayer/Forbes, 1:92–93.

  9. One of the startling things about the Electoral Sonatas is how many of Beethoven’s future “innovations” are already in place in them. The “radical” idea in the Pathétique of repeating the introduction within the first movement he had already done in the F Minor Electoral. Meanwhile it is often noted that Beethoven expanded the frequency and variety of expression marks in music, especially in his piano music. He used more expressions than anyone ever had, and he made regular use of the extreme dynamic marks, ff and pp, which are infrequent in Mozart and Haydn. Yet Beethoven’s mature piano music uses significantly fewer articulation elements and dynamic effects than the Electoral Sonatas. The difference is that in the mature works, these elements contribute to the total effect, whereas in the earlier ones, they often don’t; they are forced attempts at idiomatic piano writing. Here as much as anywhere we are reminded that this is still a preteen boy composing his first pieces. There is also the question of how much his teacher Neefe helped Beethoven with these sonatas. One would expect Neefe to critique and edit them, but it is hard to imagine that the awkwardness of the markings would have escaped a professional like Neefe. Maybe that is something Beethoven did on his own. (It should be noted that some dynamic and articulation elements that are awkward to impossible on modern instruments may have been less so on the pianos of Beethoven’s day.)

  10. Translation based on the website of the Raptus Association for Music Appreciation, http://www.raptusassociation.org/sonindexe.html.

  11. Wetzstein/Fischer, 102–3, text and notes. Gottfried and Cäcilie Fischer give an exhaustive account of the sightseeing of the trio. The identities of the wealthy widow and her daughter are not known.

  12. Albrecht, vol. 1, no. 3, nn3–4. The concerto is WoO (work without opus) 4.

  13. Ibid., no. 3.

  14. Wetzstein/Fischer, 111–12.

  15. Ibid., 72n261.

  16. Solomon, Beethoven, 36.

  17. Albrecht, vol. 1, no. 4.

  18. Gutzmer, Chronik der Stadt Bonn, 78–80; Wetzstein/Fischer, 70 and n252.

  19. Wetzstein/Fischer, 72n261; Thayer/Forbes 1:71.

  5. Golden Age

  1. Quoted in Landon, Beethoven, 32. There is no indication that Johann fell into debt or lived in desperate circumstances. The “respectable conduct” shows Johann was not yet given to extravagant public drunkenness.

  2. Neefe’s letter is in Schiedermair, 146–48. Though they were friends and colleagues, Neefe uses the formal Sie with Grossmann.

  3. B. Cooper, Beethoven Compendium, 13.

  4. Thomson, “Mozart and Freemasonry,” 36 and 43.

  5. G. E. Lessing, quoted in ibid., 25.

  6. Quoted in Thomson, “Mozart and Freemasonry,” 43.

  7. Dülmen, Society of the Enlightenment, 55; Blanning, Pursuit of Glory, 332.

  8. Dülmen, Society of the Enlightenment, 53.

  9. Ibid., 64.

  10. Irmen, “Neefe,” 170.

  11. Dülmen, Society of the Enlightenment, 108; ibid., 171. As is noted in Jackson, “Spectrum of Belief,” 680, Goethe briefly became an Illuminatus in Weimar in 1783, but with his conservative temperament he soon turned vigorously against all secret societies as organizations that fomented revolution.

  12. Quoted in Solomon, “Beethoven, Freemasonry,” 119.

  13. Adam Weishaupt, quoted in Dülmen, Society of the Enlightenment, 194n79.

  14. Dülmen, Society of the Enlightenment, 113–14. Perhaps inevitably, the Order of Illuminati’s secret agenda and its philosophy of covert infiltration soon gave birth to a vigorous and splendidly fanatical conspiracy theory that in its course, over the next two centuries and counting, would paint the order as a secret, evil, atheistic, fundamentally Jewish/Rothschild cabal that has essentially run the world ever since it incited the French Revolution. Today some members of the American religious right are of the conspiracy persuasion. Leaders of the John Birch Society discern the guiding hand of the Illuminati in the Communist revolution, the Vietnam War, and the Council on Foreign Relations. The reality of the Illuminati appears to be that they were a small, weak, short-lived movement, another case study in the Enlightenment’s excesses of hope for human perfectibility. See Edward L. King, “The Illuminati,” Anti-Masonry Points of View, http://www.masonicinfo.com/illuminati.htm.

  15. Thomson, “Mozart and Freemasonry,” 27. Thomson notes that while it is not clear whether Mozart was really an Illuminatus, several of his close friends were. These included Joseph von Sonnenfels, to whom later Beethoven dedicated his op. 28 Sonata, and scientist Ignaz von Born, a possible model for the godlike Sarastro in Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte.

  16. Ernst Wangermann, cited in Solomon, “Beethoven, Freemasonry,” 126.

  17. Irmen, “Neefe,” 171.

  18. Ibid., 187. Disparagement of female intellect and power was a feature of Freemasonry at the time, and turns up in Die Zauberflöte—though at the end Pamina is initiated as the equal of Tamino, a Mozartian touch contrary to Masonic practice.

  19. Weck, “Wer ist ein freier Mann?” 853.

  20. Kross, “Aufklärung,” 16.

  21. Irmen, “Neefe,” 179n23.

  22. Ibid., 171–80.

  23. Weck, “Wer ist ein freier Mann?” 854.

  24. Thayer/Forbes, 1:79.

  25. Valder-Knechtges, “Andrea Luchesi,” 49.

  26. Both of the preceding Neefe quotations are from Schiedermair, 152–53.

  27. Quoted in Baker and Christensen, Aesthetics, 31, 45–47, 64, 68, 77, 96, 100–101, respectively. It should be noted that any or all of these ideas from Sulzer were in the air in the eighteenth century and could have been gleaned from other sources. It’s also true that most, if not all, of them would apply to the music of Haydn, Mozart, and other composers of the time. The direct echoes of those passages in Beethoven may be summarized thus: the manifest ethical intentions of his music; the concern with wholeness and the central importance of what he, like Sulzer, cal
led das Thema, the opening idea; his statement, “It is my habit . . . always to keep the whole in view”; his program pieces and his observation that he always wrote with some sort of story or image in mind; the attention to the primary motifs and conceptions of a work in his sketches; the sense in his sketches, backed up by observers including Bettina Brentano, that from the beginning of work on a piece, he had a conception of the whole.

  28. In saying Beethoven could not understand any path but his own, I’m not including his understanding of his musical models, which in technical terms he “understood” profoundly—as evidenced by how he absorbed, say, the motivic technique of Haydn and turned it to his own ends.

  29. Scherman and Biancolli, 37–38. It is pointed out that Mozart’s two piano quartets, the eighteenth century’s masterpieces in this relatively uncommon genre, may not have been written when Beethoven’s were done, and even if Mozart’s were finished, they were too recent for Beethoven to have heard.

  30. Another example of Beethoven’s taking Mozart’s model and ratcheting it up is in the matter of descending-third patterns in both C-major pieces. That pattern is a motif in the Mozart, as is seen in the two sets of descending chain-of-thirds outlines before and during the second theme, starting in m. 26. While Mozart never goes beyond five notes in the chain, Beethoven on his second page starts a wild and witty pattern of fifteen descending thirds, both covertly and overtly, in the melodic lines.

  31. Barry Cooper, in Beethoven, 18, makes this point.

  32. Lockwood, Beethoven: Music, 60. Lockwood notes (55–56) that when these quartets were published, after Beethoven’s death, many people, including his one-time student Ferdinand Ries, did not believe they were by Beethoven. They simply could not accept that anyone at age fourteen, even Beethoven, could have written them. But the manuscript in Beethoven’s hand exists, likewise his reuse of ideas from the quartets. On the manuscript, incidentally, Beethoven had first written his correct age and then changed it to thirteen. His uncertainty about his age was now ingrained and would stay that way for much of his life. Solomon’s biography elevates that uncertainty to a major element of Beethoven’s psyche, an identification with the Ludwig who was born and died the year before he was born.

  33. Ibid., 59. Heartz, Mozart, 696, identifies the Mozart symphony as the Linz.

  34. Irmen, “Neefe,” 181–82.

  35. Ibid., 188.

  36. Solomon, “Beethoven’s Productivity at Bonn,” 165–66.

  6. A Journey and a Death

  1. Gutzmer, Chronik der Stadt Bonn, 82; Knight, Beethoven, 16.

  2. Quoted in Kross, “Aufklärung,” 15.

  3. Gutzmer, Chronik der Stadt Bonn, 78 and 82.

  4. Teschner, “Bartholomäus Fischenich,” 28.

  5. Bodsch, “Das Kulturelle Leben,” 66.

  6. Braubach, “Von den Menschen,” 97.

  7. Mozart, quoted in Clive, Beethoven and His World, 228.

  8. Quoted in Irmen, “Neefe,” 183.

  9. Schiedermair, 56.

  10. Knight, Beethoven, 16.

  11. Albrecht, vol. 1, no. 5.

  12. Solomon, “Economic Circumstances,” 348–49.

  13. Wetzstein/Fischer, 76.

  14. B. Cooper, Beethoven, 31–32 and 23.

  15. Ibid., 20–21. The Trio is WoO 37; the Romance cantabile survives only in a fragment.

  16. Solomon, Beethoven, 27.

  17. Thayer/Forbes, 1:108.

  18. Davies, Character of a Genius, 10.

  19. Irmen, “Neefe,” 28–29.

  20. Thayer/Forbes, 1:87.

  21. Mozart, quoted in Gartenberg, Vienna, 45.

  22. It is not known when Beethoven began the kind of improvisations that became legendary in his lifetime. His friend Wegeler said Count Waldstein encouraged the boy to start improvising, but when Beethoven met Mozart, Waldstein had not yet moved to Bonn. Barry Cooper, in Beethoven, 22, notes that soon after he met Beethoven, Mozart wrote his G Minor String Quintet, which twice touches on the rare key of E-flat minor, and that may indicate that Beethoven indeed showed Mozart the E-flat Major/Minor Piano Quintet.

  23. Wetzstein/Fischer, 122.

  24. Anderson, vol. 1, no. 1.

  7. Bildung

  1. Clive, Beethoven and His World, 385.

  2. Wegeler/Ries, 19.

  3. Ibid.

  4. Schiedermair, 179, from the memoirs of Countess Lulu von Thürheim. Marek, Beethoven, 68, notes that Waldstein was a hotheaded Austrian patriot and a hater of the French, and that led to the break with Max Franz, who tried not to antagonize the French even after they beheaded his sister Marie Antoinette.

  5. Solomon, “Beethoven, Freemasonry,” 108.

  6. Wegeler/Ries, 19–20. Wegeler and Ries are generally reliable but do make mistakes on details they are recounting from memory. They might be correct that Waldstein first encouraged Beethoven to improvise variations, but it is more likely that Beethoven gravitated to improvisation earlier on his own, with encouragement and stimulation from Waldstein.

  7. Knight, Beethoven, 15.

  8. Wegeler/Ries, 50. Schindler reported that Beethoven said Helene had kept him away from shady friends: “She knew how to keep the insects off the flowers.” Schindler can never be trusted, but that sounds authentic.

  9. Thayer/Forbes, 1:84.

  10. Wegeler/Ries, 15.

  11. Ibid., 25.

  12. Schiedermair, 307.

  13. As Brigid Brophy notes in Mozart the Dramatist, the misogynistic doctrines that defaced Masonry are on display in Die Zauberflöte: the evil Queen of the Night is denounced as a “proud woman” who wants to gain dominance over men. (She is surely also a representation of the anti-Masonic empress Maria Theresa.) Despite several antifemale rants in the opera, Brophy notes that Mozart manages to make the opera “feminist after all” by admitting Pamina into the brotherhood with Tamino.

  14. Wegeler/Ries, 42n4.

  15. Wetzstein/Fischer, 88.

  16. Wegeler/Ries, 39.

  17. Zehnder, Die Bühnen des Rokoko, 165.

  18. Clive, Beethoven and His World, 279–80. Reicha’s “fourteen years” of their friendship, if accurate at all, would have to include their years together in Vienna.

  19. Thayer/Forbes, 1:95–96.

  20. B. Cooper, Beethoven, 26.

  21. The article on the Rombergs in Grove Music Online notes that they often made themselves out to be brothers rather than cousins, and they are often called brothers in the literature.

  22. Thayer/Forbes, 1:96.

  23. Clive, Beethoven and His World, 189; Braubach, “Von den Menschen,” 81–82. Babette Koch was close friends with Lorchen von Breuning. Babette later married well, to Count Anton Belderbusch, nephew of Bonn’s famous minister, who divorced his first wife to marry her. Her mother, Widow Koch, was close enough to the Beethoven family to serve as godmother to another of the children, who died soon after birth (Clive, 189).

  24. Wegeler/Ries, 148.

  25. Bildung is a German word that resists translation, with no standard definition. The Oxford Duden German Dictionary notes that it combines concepts of education and culture. My definition aims at an average of relevant concepts, taking into account that Bildung also involves experience in life and learning from it: thus the Bildungsroman, a novel whose narrative concerns the Bildung of its main character via a series of adventures. The model of the Bildungsroman is Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, equal in importance and popularity to his Werther. To a degree, both of those novels defined the age in German lands.

  26. Blanning, Pursuit of Glory, 340.

  27. Edmund Burke, quoted in Brinkmann, “Time of the Eroica,” 2.

  28. Friedenthal, Goethe, 297.

  29. Anderson, vol. 1, no. 3.

  30. Albrecht, vol. 1, no. 7. Two hundred Reichsthalers equals 300 florins.

  31. B. Cooper, Beethoven, 27. Certainly it is possible that Beethoven was writing pieces in these years that have not survived.

  32. Brion, Daily Life, 19.

/>   33. Johnston, Austrian Mind, 17.

  34. Brion, Daily Life, 18.

  35. See Clive on Schneider in Beethoven and His World, 320, and the entry on Schneider in Biographisch-Bibliographisches Kirchenlexikon, at http://www.bautz.de/bbkl/s/s1/schneider_eu.shtml.

  36. Clive, Beethoven and His World, 10–11. Clive notes that Helene Averdonk, who became a singer in the Kapelle, must have remained close to the Beethoven family because she was godmother to Franz Georg, another of the ill-fated Beethoven children. She died in 1789, the year before her brother wrote the text to the Joseph Cantata.

  37. Thayer/Forbes, 1:120.

  38. Translation of the cantata text is on the website of the Raptus Association for Music Appreciation, http://www.raptusassociation.org/cantatas.html.

  39. Brahms, when he examined the Joseph Cantata after its rediscovery in the 1880s, exclaimed in one of the most rhapsodic passages in all his letters, “Even if there were no name on the title page none other could be conjectured!—It is Beethoven through and through! The beautiful and noble pathos, sublime in its feeling and imagination, the intensity, perhaps violent in its expression, moreover the voice leading and declamation, and in the two outside sections all the characteristics which we may observe and associate with his later works” (quoted in Thayer/Forbes, 1:120). All the same, Brahms went on to say that he believed the cantata, because of its youthful excesses, should not be published.

  40. Of the beginning of the Joseph Cantata, Barry Cooper writes, in Beethoven, 28, “No previous composer had exploited register as a compositional parameter to anything like the same extent, and the opening bars . . . provide a highly prophetic and striking example of his use of the technique.”

  41. In The Classical Style, 96, Charles Rosen makes the point that the style of the period of Haydn and Mozart was closer to comedy than tragedy: “The classical style . . . was, in its origins, basically a comic one . . . the pacing of classical rhythm is the pacing of comic opera, its phrasing is the phrasing of dance music, and its large structures are these phrases dramatized.”