Beethoven Variations
Page 8
Seven years later, 7 May 1824, he conducted the premiere, his first stage appearance in twelve years. He beat time, stretching to his toes, crouching, waving his arms, while the players followed the real conductor behind. Beethoven did not realise when they finished and went on conducting until the alto soloist gently turned him round to see, since he could not hear, the wild applause.
In 1819, the publisher Diabelli asked for piano variations on a waltz and Beethoven wrote the Diabelli Variations, perhaps his greatest piece for piano.
Also in 1819, Archduke Rudolph asked for a mass to celebrate his enthronement as Archbishop at Olmütz. Beethoven began work on the Missa Solemnis, but by the time of Rudolph’s celebration he had only reached the Credo. ‘We heard the master howling and stamping behind closed doors,’ said his assistant Anton Schindler. ‘The door opened and Beethoven stood facing us with features so distorted as to fill one with alarm. He looked as if he had just survived a life-and-death battle.’ Beethoven finished it in 1823 and wrote on the score, ‘From the heart – may it go to the heart.’
The fourth commission led to his last quartets. In 1822 Prince Galitsin, a Russian amateur cellist, asked for a set of three. I saw the manuscripts of two in Poland, in the Archiwum Uniwersytet Jagiellon´ski, Kraków.
Beethoven began them in 1824, the year Karl entered Vienna University to study philology. Karl really wanted to join the army, but Beethoven was against it; Karl later switched to business studies at the Polytechnic. Obsessing over Karl and sex, Karl and money, Beethoven asked his friends and Karl’s landlord to spy on him.
Beethoven finished Opus 127 in January 1825, and at once began sketching another quartet but fell seriously ill. In May 1825 he recovered, went to Baden and began work on Opus 132. He wrote the slow movement, a ‘Holy Song of Thanks’ for his recovery, in the archaic Lydian mode anciently associated with healing. ‘I came with a cold and catarrh,’ he wrote to Karl in June, ‘my constitution being naturally rheumatic which will, I fear, soon cut the thread of my life. Send your linen here; your grey trousers must still be wearable; for, my dear son, you are indeed very dear to me! My address is, “At the coppersmith’s.” I embrace you from my heart. Your faithful and true FATHER.’
But he was tormented by the idea of Karl seeing his mother behind his back. Other letters he wrote that month, as he finished Opus 132, reflect the almost nuclear power he must have had of splitting (as in the ‘deep lovely thoughts’ of his raptus long ago) his creative imagination from his feelings about other people. ‘Someone tells me you and your mother have again been associating in secret. Am I to again experience the most horrible ingratitude? God is my witness my sole dream is to get away from you and that horrible family foisted upon me.’
Then he began Opus 130. Distraught to hear that Karl was now living with his mother, he wrote molto espressivo above the crisis of that quartet, the Cavatina. One section, where the three lower voices break into dusky triplets and the first violin responds with lonely choked-off cries, he marked beklemmt: anguished, stifled.
In October 1825, he moved back to Vienna, to lodgings in the Schwarzspanierhaus, House of the Black Spaniards, near his friend Stephan von Breuning. Stephan’s wife helped with housekeeping and maybe he felt some whisper of the care he first experienced when he met Stephan’s family in Bonn. He enjoyed the company of Stephan’s thirteen-year-old son Gerhardt, whom he nicknamed Trouserbutton.
After fulfilling his commission of three quartets, he went on to write more. In December, he began work on Opus 131, using, ‘a new manner of part-writing, and, thank God, less lack of imagination than before,’ he told violinist Karl Holz.
He normally left Vienna in the summer, but in 1826 he stayed to keep an eye on Karl, now nineteen and living in a boarding house. They had arguments over money, Karl’s friends, how he spent his time, whether he was working hard enough. During one row Karl hit him, fled to his mother, and told one of the friends Beethoven sent to spy on him that he was going to shoot himself. The landlord removed two pistols he found in Karl’s trunk and Beethoven went on with Opus 131.
At the end of July, Karl pawned his watch, bought more pistols, went to Baden where he had often stayed with Beethoven, climbed the castle ruins outside town and fired both guns at his head. The first bullet missed, the second grazed his temple. He was found bleeding and taken to his mother, then to hospital.
Beethoven rushed round Vienna distraught saying, ‘My Karl has a bullet in his brain. I love him so much.’ But when he was finally allowed into the hospital, he told a doctor, ‘Is my scoundrel of a nephew here? I didn’t want to visit him, he doesn’t deserve it, he has made me too much trouble.’ Karl wrote in the Conversation Book, ‘Don’t torment me with reproaches and complaints.’ Five days later Beethoven took Opus 131 to the printer.
Stephan urged Beethoven to let Karl join the army. A Lieutenant-Marshal Baron von Stutterheim said he would admit Karl to his regiment, and Beethoven dedicated Opus 131 to him in gratitude.
But Karl’s scar had to heal first, and Beethoven’s brother Johann invited Beethoven and Karl to stay. Just as Beethoven fled to one brother’s house in the siege, now he took refuge in the other’s. At the end of September, he and Karl made the two-day journey to Johann’s mansion near the village of Gneixendorf. He brought with him the unfinished manuscript of Opus 135.
The countryside reminded him of the Rhineland, and his rooms had murals of the Rhine commissioned by Johann in memory of their childhood, but there was friction all round. Beethoven was jealous of Karl’s relations with Therese and her daughter, even though Therese wrote in the Conversation Book, ‘It is you Karl loves, to the point of veneration.’ On 1 December, he and Johann had a row, Johann refused to provide a closed carriage for the trip back, so Beethoven trundled off with Karl on an open cart and returned to Vienna dangerously ill.
Karl looked after him, but on 2 January 1827, Karl went off to the army. Beethoven never saw him again. He grew weaker and weaker. Old friends visited, he was delighted by £100 from the Philharmonic Society of London, talked of writing another symphony for them and visiting London when he was better, read Walter Scott and Homer, tried finally to learn the multiplication tables, wrote letters, thanked his old landlord Baron Pasqualati for a bottle of champagne.
When he was nearly unconscious, a case of Rhine wine arrived, wine from his homeland. ‘Pity, too late,’ he said and they gave him a spoonful. In a storm on 26 March there was a flash of lightning, he raised his fist in a muscle spasm or last defiance, and was gone. They performed an autopsy to discover, as he requested, the cause of his deafness. One detail recorded was ‘exaggerated folds’ of his brain: ‘twice as deep as usual and more numerous, more spacious’. On the day of his funeral, Vienna’s schools were closed and thousands of people followed the cortège through the streets.
A SELECTION OF HIS WORKS
Music in the Dark of the Mind
Birth to Twenty-one: 1770–92
1782 Variations Pour le Clavecin, WoO 63
1785 Quartets for Piano and Strings, WoO 36
1790 Cantata on the Death of Emperor Joseph II, WoO 87
1790 Cantata on the Accession of Leopold II, WoO 88
Virtuoso
Twenty-one to Thirty-one: 1792–1802
1794–95 Piano Trios Opus 1
1795 Piano Sonatas Opus 2
1795 First Piano Concerto, Opus 15
1788–95 Second Piano Concerto, Opus 19
c.1795 ‘Adelaide’, song, Opus 46
1796 Cello Sonatas Opus 5
c.1796 Duet for Viola and Cello with Two Obbligato Eyeglasses, WoO 32
1797–98 String Trios Opus 9
1797 Piano Trio Opus 11
1796–98 Piano Sonatas Opus 10
1798 Violin Sonatas Opus 12
1798 Pathétique Pi
ano Sonata, Opus 13
1799–1801 String Quartets Opus 18
1799–1800 Septet Opus 20
1795–1801 First Symphony, Opus 21
1801 Creatures of Prometheus, ballet, Opus 43
1801 Moonlight Piano Sonata, Opus 27, No. 2
1801–02 Second Symphony, Opus 36
1801–02 Violin Sonatas Opus 30
1802 Tempest Piano Sonata, Opus 31, No. 2
1802 Eroica Variations for Piano, Opus 35
1802 Christ on the Mount of Olives, Opus 85
Hero
Thirty-two to Forty-one: 1803–12
1803–04 Third Symphony, Eroica, Opus 55
1803 Kreuzer Violin Sonata, Opus 47
1803–04 Andante Favori, WoO 57
1804 Waldstein Piano Sonata, Opus 53
1804–06 Appassionata Sonata, Opus 57
1805 ‘To Hope’, song, Opus 32
1804–05 Fidelio (first & second versions known as Leonore; revised version Fidelio published 1814), Opus 72
1805–06 Fourth Piano Concerto, Opus 58
1806 String Quartets Opus 59
1806 Fourth Symphony, Opus 60
1806 Violin Concerto, Opus 61
1807 Mass in C Major, Opus 86
1804–08 Fifth Symphony, Opus 67
1802–08 Sixth Symphony, Pastoral, Opus 68
1808 Cello Sonatas Opus 69
1808 Choral Fantasia, Opus 80
1809–11 Fifth Piano Concerto, Emperor, Opus 73
1809–10 Les Adieux Piano Sonata, Opus 81a
1809 Harp String Quartet, Opus 74
1810 ‘Für Elise’, bagatelle, WoO 59
1809–10 Overture & incidental music, Egmont, Opus 84
1810 String Quartet, Quartetto Serioso, Opus 95
1811 ‘To the Beloved’, song, WoO 140
1812 Allegretto for Piano Trio, WoO 39
1811–12 Seventh Symphony, Opus 92
1810–11 Archduke Piano Trio, Opus 97
You Must Not Be Human
Forty-one to Fifty-six: 1812–27
1812 Eighth Symphony, Opus 93
1812 Three Equals for Four Trombones, WoO 30
1812 Violin Sonata Opus 96
1813 Battle Symphony (Wellington’s Victory), Opus 91
1816 An die ferne Geliebte, song cycle, Opus 98
1816 Piano Sonata Opus 101, No. 28
1818 Hammerklavier Sonata, Opus 106
1820 Piano Sonata Opus 109
1821 Piano Sonata Opus 110
1821–22 Piano Sonata Opus 111
1819–23 Diabelli Variations, Opus 120
1819–23 Missa Solemnis, Opus 123
1822–24 Ninth Symphony, Choral, Opus 125
1824–25 String Quartet Opus 127
1825 String Quartet Opus 132
1825–26 String Quartet Opus 130
1826 String Quartet Opus 131
1825–26 Grosse Fuge, Opus 133
1826 String Quartet Opus 135
FURTHER READING
Albrecht, T., editor and translator, Beethoven’s Conversation Books, Vol. 1, The Boydell Press, 2018
Breuning, Gerhard von, Memories of Beethoven: In the House of the Black-Robed Spaniards, edited by M. Solomon, Cambridge University Press, 1992
Cooper, Barry, The Beethoven Compendium, Thames & Hudson, 1991
—Beethoven, Oxford University Press, 2008
Eaglefield-Hull, A., Beethoven’s Letters, translated and edited by J. S. Shedlock, Dover Publications, 1926
Hamburger, Michael, editor and translator, Beethoven: Letters, Journals, Conversations, Thames & Hudson, 1951
Lockwood, Lewis, Beethoven, The Music and the Life, W. W. Norton & Company, 2003
Solomon, M., Beethoven, Schirmer Books, 1977
—Late Beethoven: Music, Thought, Imagination, University of California Press, 2003
Sonneck, O. G., editor, Beethoven, Impressions by His Contemporaries, G. Schirmer Inc., 1926
Suchet, John, Beethoven: The Man Revealed, Elliott & Thompson, 2017
Swafford, Jan, Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph, Faber, 2015
Skowroneck, T., Beethoven the Pianist, CUP, 2010
Thayer, A. W., Life of Beethoven, edited by Elliot Forbes, Princeton University Press, 1970
Tyson, Alan, editor, Beethoven Studies 3, CUP, 1982
Watson, Angus, Beethoven’s Chamber Music in Context, The Boydell Press, 2010
Wegeler, Franz, and Ries, Ferdinand, Beethoven Remembered: Biographical Notes (1838), translated by F. Bauman and T. Clark (1906), Great Ocean Publishers, 1987
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
We know directly about Beethoven’s life from five main sources. His sketchbooks are a unique detailed record of his creative process: thousands of pages in which he worked out musical ideas but also scribbled occasional personal thoughts. There are thousands of letters and also two diaries. One is an expenses log, the Memorandum Book he kept when he first came to Vienna, the other a journal he wrote for six years in his forties. Finally, from 1818 on, when completely deaf, he carried home-made Conversation Books for people to write in. Most entries in these are by other people but occasionally he writes shopping lists, or copies out ads for flats. Or, if the conversation is in public and he wants no one else to hear, he writes his replies.
In addition, close friends wrote memoirs of him and contemporaries mention him in letters. He was well known, famously eccentric, and loved company, joking, drinking and eating in taverns. He made warm friendships, especially with other musicians, and had a gift for enjoying people as well as exploding at them. So there are hundreds of stories: some conflict with one another, many may not be true. His first biographer, Alexander Wheelock Thayer, interviewed people who knew him but they may not have told the truth or remembered correctly.
From all this, drawing also on police records, coach timetables and hotel registers, biographers and scholars have tried to sift false from true, and piece his life together, sometimes in extraordinary detail. Recent research suggests that some often-told anecdotes and ideas about his life on which a few of my poems are based – such as what Mozart said about him, whether he got on with Haydn, how harsh his father really was, visits to brothels, his drinking before he tried to propose to Therese – may be apocryphal or speculative. But I have tried to make the poems reflect as accurate a historical picture, and open up as many insights which might deepen enjoyment of the music, as I can.
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Many people have helped with this book and I am grateful to them all, especially David Waterman who dreamed up concerts with me, lent me books, and talked Beethoven with me for years; and to his colleagues in the Endellion String Quartet, for concerts in which they played music and I read the first versions of these poems. Many thanks also to Paul Barritt and Tring Chamber Music, for commissioning poems, inviting me to read them in concerts, and talk in intervals between Paul’s extraordinary performance, over a single weekend, of all the violin sonatas. The Aspect Foundation puts on unique chamber music concerts in New York and London which mix music and words. I am deeply grateful to Irina Knaster, who founded and runs it, for talking Beethoven with me and commissioning me to write poems which became the beginning of this book.
The Corporation of Yaddo gave me a wonderful month’s writing among snowy trees, deer, wild turkeys and clear moons. It was a privilege to work there and I am grateful to the Corporation and staff, and to comments from other artists there at the time.
For detailed comments on poems I am very grateful to Daphne Astor, Gwen Burnyeat, Jane Duran, David Harsent, Andrei Gomez-Suarez, Alberto Manguel and Declan Ryan. For further thoughts, and conversations on playing and listening to B
eethoven, many warm thanks to Thomas Adès and Steven Isserlis – and a big thank you to Steven for encouraging me to end the poems on a note of hope rather than heartbreak. On Vienna and its complexities, many thanks to Angelika Klammer. Many thanks to everyone at Chatto & Windus, especially Parisa Ebrahimi, dedicated editor, and Charlotte Humphery. I am also very grateful to Barry Cooper for correcting and refining historical details.
Further back, many thanks to my family for playing music with me and sharing all that lucky musical growing-up, and my parents for making that happen. Also my viola teacher Kay Hurwitz, and Sheila Nelson who taught violin to my sister, two of my brothers and my daughter, for her inspirational approach to playing, especially chamber music. It was a privilege to watch her teach. I am also warmly grateful to my piano teacher Olive Lewin, especially for encouraging me to sing. I have learned a lot since from her book Rock It Come Over, about her own musical journey, joining a classical concert pianist training to her career in preserving Jamaican folk music.
I also enjoyed singing Cole Porter with Alan Tyson, a Beethoven scholar famous for, among other things, deciphering Beethoven’s blotchy handwriting. I remember turning up for coffee one morning when he was working on a manuscript: a memorable picture of someone completely happy in his work. He pioneered work on dating manuscripts by watermarks on paper, and is behind the ‘Stained Manuscript’ poem somewhere, so thank you, Alan.
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Thanks to editors of these publications, where some of these poems first appeared:
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Echoes of Paradise: On the 350th Anniversary of John Milton’s Epic, edited by Edward Allen, Cambridge, Christ’s College, 2020
Financial Times
The Guardian
The New York Review of Books