Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph

by Swafford, Jan

  46. Anderson, vol. 1, no. 303.

  47. Clive, Beethoven and His World, 251.

  48. Albrecht, vol. 1, no. 155.

  49. Kinsky and Halm, Das Werk Beethovens, 227.

  50. Anderson, “Beethoven’s Operatic Plans,” 5.

  51. B. Cooper, Beethoven, 195.

  52. Lockwood, Beethoven: Music, 267.

  53. Kinderman, Beethoven, 147.

  54. Lockwood, Beethoven: Music, 267.

  55. Burnham, in Beethoven Hero, writes that the coda of the Egmont Overture approaches naïveté, if not banality. I tend to agree.

  56. Thayer/Forbes, 1:484–85.

  57. Moore, “Beethoven and Inflation,” 200–202.

  58. Ibid., 212–13. Moore’s figures about the stipend and its travails differ from Thayer/Forbes’s (1:552–53). I am assuming hers are more up to date.

  59. B. Cooper, Beethoven, 203. Cooper has doubts that the music for Pest was actually written in three weeks and suspects Beethoven began it earlier. But Beethoven’s account to Breitkopf & Härtel less than a month later is unambiguous. Recall that he wrote the hour-long Christus in two weeks, or claimed to have.

  60. Anderson, vol. 1, no. 344.

  61. Landon, Beethoven, 142.

  62. Thayer/Forbes, 1:512.

  63. Clive, Beethoven and His World, 378.

  64. Ibid., 368.

  65. Anderson, vol. 1, no. 312.

  66. Thayer/Forbes, 1:515, 531–32.

  67. Clive, Beethoven and His World, 379.

  68. Anderson, vol. 1, no. 340.

  69. Ibid., no. 325.

  70. Ibid., no. 328.

  71. Lockwood, Beethoven: Music, 76.

  72. B. Cooper, Beethoven, 205–6.

  73. Thayer/Forbes, 1:519.

  74. Anderson, vol. 1, no. 330.

  75. Clive, Beethoven and His World, 377.

  76. Anderson, vol. 1, no. 334.

  77. Thayer/Forbes, 1:520.

  78. Plantinga, Beethoven’s Concertos, 272.

  79. Comini, “Visual Beethoven,” 287–90. Comini was the first to come to this commonsense understanding of why the Klein life mask turned out as it did and how that played into the Romantic cult of genius. It is the foundation of her Changing Image of Beethoven: A Study in Mythmaking, its subject Beethoven iconography.

  80. Anderson, vol. 1, no. 369.

  25. My Angel, My Self

  1. B. Cooper, Beethoven Compendium, 22.

  2. Anderson, vol. 1, no. 374.

  3. Solomon, Beethoven, 215.

  4. Based on the literal translation of Virginia Beahrs in “My Angel,” with additions for the sake of clarity from the version in Anderson, vol. 1, no. 373, plus elements from the German. I have added some paragraph breaks, also for clarity. Beahrs is a leading champion of Josephine Deym as the Immortal Beloved, Maynard Solomon (ibid.) of Antonie Brentano, Edward Walden (Beethoven’s Immortal Beloved) of Bettina Brentano. The new entry in the debate by John E. Klapproth (Beethoven’s Only Beloved) makes a book-length case for Josephine. In Klapproth I find dubious datings and translations and other fudging—see the final note for chapter 20 and note 6 below. My treatment of the Immortal Beloved mystery in this chapter gives an overview of the various theories, all of which amount to many pages of reasoning and speculation teetering on a handful of provable facts—some of those facts certainly tantalizing. As the text shows, I can’t subscribe to any of the theories, even to the point of having a provisional favorite candidate, and after years of research and speculation I have no new theory to offer. Since I have no problem with mysteries—I am a musician, and music itself is a great mystery—I have kept my discussion to a summary of the more tangible and tantalizing aspects. Interested readers should examine Solomon, Walden, Beahrs, and Klapproth, for starters, with an open yet skeptical mind. Meanwhile, the George Marek biography votes for pianist Dorothea Ertmann, Romain Rolland (Beethoven the Creator) for Therese von Brunsvik, and Anton Schindler (Beethoven) for Giulietta Guicciardi. I don’t believe any of those three are viable candidates.

  5. Unsterblich is familiarly translated as “immortal,” but the word can also mean “undying.” As Anderson notes in Letters of Beethoven, the more literal sense of Unsterbliche Geliebte (usually the first word would be lowercase, but Beethoven capitalizes both) is “undying love.” Since both translations are valid, I’ve used the familiar one.

  6. Solomon, Beethoven, 222. The resemblance of the Immortal Beloved letter to the ones to Josephine Deym is the centerpiece of Klapproth’s argument for her (Beethoven’s Only Beloved). Solomon’s detective work in Beethoven places Antonie Brentano definitely in Karlsbad when Beethoven wrote the letter saying his beloved was in that town; her presence in Karlsbad is Solomon’s centerpiece. For Walden’s part (Beethoven’s Immortal Beloved), he shows that Bettina Brentano was planning to go to Karlsbad and/or Teplitz, and Beethoven may have believed she was in Karlsbad. Bettina’s trip was delayed, and she arrived in Teplitz at the end of July—which is when Walden believes they met and Bettina told him she was staying with her husband. The centerpiece of Walden’s argument is the two disputed letters from Beethoven that Bettina published but which no longer exist. I’ll add that Walden does a far more respectable job of making his case than Klapproth, whose argument is at times forced and deceptive. Still, I think there is a case to be made for Josephine that makes roughly as much sense as the others.

  7. Walden, Beethoven’s Immortal Beloved, 4.

  8. Ibid., 2.

  9. Ibid., xiii.

  10. Perhaps inevitably, there have been theories that the child Antonie Brentano was pregnant with in 1812 was Beethoven’s. That is among the most unsupported and unlikely speculations in the debate—though, of course, unlikely things happen all the time.

  11. Solomon, Beethoven, 234.

  12. Walden, Beethoven’s Immortal Beloved, 9. Walden notes that Bettina agreed to marry Arnim in December 1811 and was probably exchanging letters (now lost) with Beethoven at the time. Though Walden duly cites this notion, it makes for a problem in his thesis. If Bettina was marrying Arnim for practical reasons and not love, and meanwhile she was in contact with Beethoven and they were falling or had fallen in love, why would she have gone ahead with the marriage? Soon after the wedding she wrote Goethe saying she was very happy with Arnim—though this was before her nearly fatal childbirth and subsequent depression.

  13. Ibid., 30–31.

  14. Bettina’s four sons had the remarkable names of Siegmund, Friemund, Friedemund, and Huehnemund (Helps and Howard, Bettina, 134). The couple were often apart, and their letters are playful and intimate: “Farewell then, Arnim, but I am annoyed with you, you are not a bit affectionate, you hug me about once in a blue moon, and you don’t kiss me as I should like to be kissed” (137). Bettina advocated giving children considerable freedom. In childhood, her daughter Gisela was given to crawling around under the table at dinner parties and biting the guests’ ankles.

  15. At the risk of adding another ambiguity to so many, Beethoven’s statement that he had met his beloved five years before is a thirdhand account, from Fanny Giannatasio del Rio via her father’s report from Beethoven. So Fanny’s note of a first meeting five years before could easily have been mistaken.

  16. Walden (Beethoven’s Immortal Beloved, 76) notes that two independent witnesses in the nineteenth century said they examined the later-missing Beethoven letters that Bettina published, and testified that they were authentic. Secondhand testimony at that distance is tantalizing but, again, not the same thing as having the originals in hand, and the witnesses could not compare the printed versions word for word with the originals. Again: there clearly were more letters between Beethoven and Bettina than the single one of his that survives.

  17. Marek, Beethoven, 282.

  18. Anderson, vol. 1, no. 374.

  19. Ibid., no. 376 (paragraph breaks added).

  20. Walden, Beethoven’s Immortal Beloved, 9.

  21. Helps and Howard, Bettina, 130. These auth
ors, incidentally, make no case for Bettina as the Immortal Beloved.

  22. Knight, Beethoven, 84.

  23. Anderson, vol. 1, no. 379.

  24. “‘Friendship Has to Be a Life’s Work’: Rüdiger Safranski on Goethe and Schiller,” interview with Rüdiger Safranski by Sabine Tenta, January 2010, Goethe Institut, http://www.goethe.de/kue/lit/aug/en5583450.htm.

  25. Sonneck, Beethoven, 88. Goethe’s tone in complaining about Beethoven should be read in the context that he is playing to Zelter’s aversion to Beethoven’s work at this time. Zelter had gone so far as to declare that Christus am Ölberge was “suggestive of Greek vice”—i.e., homosexuality (Helps and Howard, Bettina, 130). Later Zelter became a fervent admirer of Beethoven and preached that gospel to his student Mendelssohn.

  26. Anderson, vol. 1, no. 379.

  27. Sonneck, Beethoven, 86–87.

  28. Anderson, vol. 1, no. 380.

  29. Friedenthal, Goethe, 412; Kerman, “An die ferne Geliebte,” 135. Kinderman, in Beethoven, 246, notes that in 1822, Mendelssohn did play for Goethe Beethoven’s setting of “Wonne der Wehmut,” and Goethe was delighted with it.

  30. Anderson, vol. 1, nos. 377, 382, 388. After this summer it seems Beethoven and Amalie Sebald had no further contact.

  31. Albrecht, vol. 1, no. 164.

  32. B. Cooper, Beethoven’s Folksong Settings, 16.

  33. Albrecht, vol. 1, no. 163.

  34. Ibid., no. 167.

  35. Ibid., vol. 2, no. 170.

  36. Anderson, vol. 1, no. 405.

  37. Ibid., no. 352.

  38. B. Cooper, Beethoven’s Folksong Settings, 101.

  39. Ibid., 73.

  40. Ibid., 79.

  41. Ibid., 83, 89.

  42. Ibid., 164–65.

  43. Ibid., 10.

  44. Ibid., 43.

  45. Thayer/Forbes, 1:541.

  46. Landon, Beethoven, 190–92.

  47. Solomon, Beethoven, 282.

  48. B. Cooper, Beethoven, 212.

  49. Anderson, vol. 1, no. 393.

  50. Ibid., no. 428.

  51. Ibid., no. 429.

  52. Ibid., no. 411.

  53. Albrecht, vol. 2, no. 171.

  54. Anderson, vol. 1, no. 412.

  55. Thayer/Forbes, 1:553–54.

  56. Anderson, vol. 1, nos. 392, 394.

  57. Kinderman, Beethoven, 163.

  58. B. Cooper, Beethoven’s Folksong Settings, 37.

  59. I have not given page numbers for the Tagebuch entries. The “A” to whom Beethoven refers, Solomon reads as Antonie Brentano, his candidate for the Immortal Beloved. Walden (Beethoven’s Immortal Beloved) and others question whether it refers to Antonie and/or whether in Beethoven’s scrawl it was an A at all—the Tagebuch survives only in two copies made by others, and there are a number of places where the transcription either is clearly wrong or trails off because the original could not be read. Here are yet more ambiguities that keep the Immortal Beloved mystery afloat.

  60. Beethoven, “Beethoven’s Tagebuch,” 268.

  61. Anderson, vol. 1, no. 406; vol. 2, nos. 562, 681.

  62. M. Cooper, Beethoven, 31.

  63. Musulin, Vienna, 133.

  64. Quoted in Solomon, Beethoven, 284, where Solomon details Beethoven’s connection to prostitutes in this period.

  65. Beethoven, “Beethoven’s Tagebuch,” 255.

  66. Sonneck, Beethoven, 94–100.

  67. Solomon, Beethoven, 284–85.

  68. Thayer/Forbes, 1:554.

  69. Mai, in Diagnosing Genius, 146–47, outlines the medical evidence for Beethoven’s being “alcohol-dependent”—what I call a “functional alcoholic”—rather than showing “abuse,” as his father had.

  70. Anderson, vol. 1, no. 426.

  71. Nicholls, Napoleon, 197–99.

  72. This is Metternich’s account of the meeting with Napoleon, which should be taken with several grains of salt.

  26. We Finite Beings

  1. Anderson, vol. 1, no. 427.

  2. Knight, Beethoven, 159.

  3. Scherman and Biancolli, 907n2.

  4. Thayer/Forbes, 1:544.

  5. Ibid., 1:560.

  6. Marek, Beethoven, 455.

  7. Ignaz Moscheles, who was working with Beethoven at the time, said that in fact much of the plan for Wellington’s Victory and some of the military music came from Maelzel.

  8. Thayer/Forbes, 1:566.

  9. Scherman and Biancolli, 908.

  10. Part of the impression of silliness that strikes Americans, at least, about Wellington’s Victory is that in English Malbrouk (called “Marlborough” in the score) is also the tune of “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow” and “The Bear Came over the Mountain.”

  11. Dalhaus, Ludwig van Beethoven, 17.

  12. Kinderman, in Beethoven, 170, has a discussion of how Wellington’s Victory relates to kitsch.

  13. Thayer/Forbes, 1:565.

  14. Again, the connection of Classical-period music to dance is made in Rosen’s The Classical Style.

  15. The chromatically slithering bass of the Seventh’s first-movement coda returns in a new guise in the coda of the finale.

  16. Conductor James Sinclair notes that his and others’ performances slightly over-dot the Seventh’s first-movement rhythmic figure to give it more lightness. I see the three-note dactylic figure that dominates the second movement of the Seventh as an evening out of the dotted figure that dominates the first movement. The dotted figure returns in various augmentations in the scherzo, notably in the trio, but there are echoes of the dactyls in figures near the end of the scherzo. The dactylic figure is then diminished and intensified in the fiddle tune of the finale.

  17. Famously, the second movement begins and ends on a i 6/4 chord that is a color rather than a functional harmony. In that it resembles Beethoven’s use of diminished sevenths, which often are treated not functionally but rather as a color and a device for suspending tonality.

  18. The way Beethoven develops an important pitch can be seen in the adventures of F and C in the first movement. F serves as N of V in A, as the third of D minor, the fifth of B-flat major, and so on.

  19. The idea of the Seventh as unified by the moods of dance rather than a sense of dramatic narrative is not an entirely new kind of thinking for Beethoven. The A-flat Major Piano Sonata, op. 26, for example, is held together not by narrative nor particularly by motifs but by the idea of variation.

  20. Solomon, Beethoven, 276.

  21. Thayer/Forbes, 1:566.

  22. Clive, Beethoven and His World, 225.

  23. Anderson, vol. 1, no. 441.

  24. Ibid., no. 457.

  25. Thayer/Forbes, 1:557.

  26. Ibid., 1:571.

  27. Clive, Beethoven and His World, 313.

  28. Thayer/Forbes, 1:572.

  29. Ibid., 1:571.

  30. Anderson, vol. 2, no. 462.

  31. Thayer/Forbes, 1:569.

  32. Ibid., 1:567.

  33. Anderson, vol. 1, no. 485.

  34. Kinderman, Beethoven, 160.

  35. For me, part of the humor in the Eighth is that the first three notes of the opening theme, C–A–B-flat, continually reshuffled, form the motivic foundation of all the themes in the Eighth. Another element holding together the themes is the idea of a prolonged upbeat: at the beginning, the first bar (as I think it should be phrased) is the upbeat to the second bar. The second-movement theme prolongs the upbeat idea, and the minuet comically extends it to seven beats. Meanwhile the first-movement development is a study in how to intensify a single sustained harmony through the course of a phrase, using texture, rhythm, and rising lines. The “errant” C-sharp in the Eighth is the same pitch as the “sore” C-sharp in the Eroica, but here it functions quite differently, more subtly and wittily.

  36. As in the first movement, the second theme in the finale arrives in the “wrong” key, this time A-flat (with its D-flat as fourth degree) and then rights itself into the “proper” C major. From early in h
is work Beethoven used analogous harmonic moves in movements of a piece as a unifying element. (To concentrate only on pitch motivic relationships throughout a work is to miss half the kinds of relationships he is concerned with.) The D-flat-to-C-sharp intrusions near the end of the finale are a classic case of Beethoven “explaining” an underlying idea.

  37. Thayer/Forbes, 1:575.

  38. Lockwood, in Beethoven: Music, 234, observes that “the [Eighth Symphony’s] delicate shading and subtle balances may have been harder for him to achieve than the direct outpouring of action in the Seventh.”

  39. Thayer/Forbes, 1:576.

  40. Alsop, Congress Dances, 55.

  41. Nicolson, Congress of Vienna, 85, 93.

  42. Ibid., 93.

  43. Musulin, Vienna, 136–37.

  44. Thayer/Forbes, 1:578. Thayer implies, without quite saying so, that Schuppanzigh was the violinist at the premiere of the Archduke, and does not mention the cellist. According to Moscheles, Spohr was a bitter opponent of Beethoven’s music.

  45. Landon, Beethoven, 151.

  46. Anderson, vol. 1, nos. 478–79.

  47. Ibid., no. 481.

  48. Thayer/Forbes, 1:563.

  49. Ibid., 1:583.

  50. Senner, Critical Reception, 2:180.

  51. Thayer/Forbes, 1:586–87.

  52. Ibid., 1:588–90.

  53. Anderson, vol. 1, no. 502.

  54. Ibid., no. 486.

  55. Hofmann, Viennese, 97.

  56. Knight, Beethoven, 94.

  57. Brion, Daily Life, 165. It hardly needs to be said that in this period, “remedies” for venereal disease were fraudulent. There were no functional treatments at all.

  58. Hofmann, Viennese, 105.