Beethoven's Eroica

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  In the event Beethoven did meet the rushed and preoccupied Mozart and played for him—or so goes the legend, since there is no reliable record of this visit. Tradition also has Mozart turning to some others as Beethoven was playing to say, ‘Keep your eyes on that boy—some day he’ll give the world something to talk about’, in the approved way by which legendary figures endorse their worthy successors, just as Haydn had the young Mozart. It makes a story. But nothing else is known about this visit, which was anyway cut short after less than a fortnight when news reached Beethoven that his mother, Maria, was now mortally ill. He returned post-haste to Bonn, arriving somewhat ill himself after the days of travel in lurching coaches over appalling roads. He nursed her until she died barely two weeks later, aged forty. Deeply attached to her as he was, Beethoven was bereft, saying he had lost his best friend. (Her gravestone is marked by her famous son’s words: Sie war mir eine so gute liebenswürdige Mutter, meine beste Freundin). He was old enough to recognize the struggle she had had to make a home for him, his two brothers and an afterthought—a one-year-old baby sister—in a household in which Johann had lately been a barely effectual husband.

  In this way at the age of sixteen Ludwig became the family’s main breadwinner, Johann having already begun his decline into alcoholism, eventually losing his employment at court because his singing voice had deteriorated so badly. Many of the family’s possessions were pawned. The baby girl died in November. Two years later Johann was sacked, and Ludwig petitioned to be recognized as the de facto head of the Beethoven family. This was granted, so the eldest son’s moral duty became also a legal one. His father had become an embarrassment, and Beethoven’s closest friend Stephan von Breuning later remembered an occasion when Ludwig had furiously intervened to prevent his incapably drunk father from being arrested in the street.

  There is no doubt that at dark periods at this stage of his life Beethoven relied heavily on his friendships to save him from utter despondency. He had long given piano lessons to the slightly younger children of the large and well-to-do von Breuning family, and the widowed Frau von Breuning, a most intelligent lady who recognized young Ludwig’s exceptional talent and understood his black moods, was motherly and infallibly kind. Another lifetime friend of Ludwig from this period was Franz Wegeler, a young doctor who would marry one of the von Breuning girls and eventually write a biography of Beethoven. The young musician might have been a loner, not to say impossibly difficult on occasion, but it is clear he must have had something lovable about him that was capable of being coaxed into lasting friendships. It is anyone’s guess whether Beethoven would have survived this grim period in his life without his supportive friends.

  Another of his long-term friendships from this period was with Count Ferdinand von Waldstein, some eight years older than Beethoven and a keen amateur musician as well as a close friend of the Elector. Waldstein gave Beethoven a piano, and in due time Beethoven dedicated his Piano Sonata in C major, Op. 53, to him, the work every pianist knows as the ‘Waldstein’. As the 1780s ended Beethoven was busy refining his piano technique, acquiring a working knowledge of the orchestra and composing numerous works varied enough to show his competence in different forms. Then suddenly, in February 1790, the news came that Joseph II, the Elector’s older brother, had died in Vienna.

  Joseph II, like his Prussian contemporary Frederick the Great, had been an admirer of Voltaire and Rousseau and the Enlightenment generally. Despite commanding the Holy Roman Empire he had privately hankered after such things as a secular state and the abolition of serfdom. His mother, the Empress Maria Theresa, had summarily banned the Jesuits from the Empire in 1773, causing uproar in the Vatican. While he himself remained a Catholic, Joseph went on to grant religious autonomy to Protestants and Jews. Although never joining a lodge, he was also amiably inclined towards Freemasonry.

  Joseph II was musical, a great admirer of Mozart and especially of his operas. It was he who commissioned Die Entführung aus dem Serail in German rather than in the usual French or Italian, and in Vienna this break with tradition was welcomed as refreshingly nationalist. However, Joseph’s basic attitude was less revolutionary than reformist. Frederick the Great had proclaimed that a monarch was not the absolute master of the state but only its first servant. Joseph, as an enlightened despot, might have aspired to this ideal but in the event merely discovered how little power some servants actually wielded. He succeeded in changing very little of the Austrian state, finding himself opposed at every turn by the dead weight of the Church and the conservatism of the aristocracy, the military and the imperial bureaucracy. He tried to change too many things too quickly in the face of powerful men and institutions with too much to lose. Ironically, having been known as ‘the people’s emperor’, he wound up considerably more disliked than loved. Ill and alone and facing revolt on all sides, he asked that his own sad epitaph should be: ‘Here lies Joseph II, who failed in all he undertook.’ To this day the humble copper sarcophagus he lies in is in stark contrast to the monstrous elaborations in bronze that lie around him in Vienna’s Imperial Crypt, the Kaisergruft.

  At the time, though, Joseph’s progressive ideas were widely celebrated beyond the Austrian Empire’s boundaries, and when news of his death reached his brother the Elector in Bonn, the twenty-year-old Beethoven was given two weeks to write a commemorative cantata. This, the best work of all the composer’s early Bonn period, was never performed, probably because it was not finished in time but also on account of its difficulties. For a first attempt at a big choral work with full orchestra it is much better than commendable and full of ambitious and effective writing. The impressively solemn C minor opening strikes a note of distilled sorrow that is strangely personal and affecting for what was, after all, a commissioned occasional piece. The Elector’s own sadness at the loss of his brother must have pervaded his court. A similar fate befell the cantata Beethoven then wrote to celebrate the accession of Joseph’s successor, his brother Leopold II. The sumptuous orchestration of both these early compositions shows the influence of contemporary French composers such as Le Sueur, Méhul and Gossec, all of whom were busily writing imposing celebratory music at the behest of the Revolution’s new institutions.

  Thereafter the Elector redoubled his efforts to recruit first-rate musicians for his court orchestra, and soon it was being spoken of as rivalling the famous orchestra at Mannheim. All the players wore scarlet uniforms trimmed abundantly with gold. At last, as a violist, the ex-urchin Beethoven was clad in splendid livery. Better still, he was now valued as easily the best pianist in Bonn and far beyond. Karl Junker, a visiting chaplain who was also a keen amateur musician, referred to him as ‘the dear, good Bethofen [sic]’. He not only heard Beethoven play but gave him a theme on which to extemporize and spoke of Beethoven as an ‘amiable, light-hearted man’, praising him for the

  almost inexhaustible wealth of ideas, the altogether characteristic style of expression in his playing, and the great execution he displays.… Yet he is exceedingly modest and free from all pretensions.… His style of treating his instrument is so different from that usually adopted that it impresses one with the idea that by a path of his own discovery he has attained that height of excellence whereon he now stands.6

  In December 1790 the Elector’s orchestra feted Haydn as he passed through Bonn on the way to England for his first visit. On his return in July 1792 the orchestra gave him a celebratory breakfast by the Rhine at Godesberg, a few miles upstream. It is still uncertain whether it was on this occasion or the earlier one that Beethoven showed the great man one of his compositions—very probably the Cantata on the Death of Joseph II—and was no doubt pleased when, according to Wegeler, he was ‘encouraged to further study’. But certainly on this second visit it was planned that Beethoven should go to Vienna to study with Haydn and then accompany him to England for the great man’s second visit to London, for which Haydn had been contracted by the Bonn-born impresario Johann Peter Salomon. Haydn was privately toy
ing with the idea of staying permanently in England, so warm and lucrative had his reception been there, and it turned out that Beethoven too was thinking seriously about a career in London. The evidence for this is a poem in his Stammbuch (commonplace book) by another of the von Breuning brothers, Christoph, dated 19 November 1792:

  See! The shady grove, which entices the singer

  hasten then without delay

  over the surging sea

  where a more beauteous grove offers you its shade

  and a bard [Salomon] stretches out his hand to you in friendship,

  who from our fields

  fled to Albion’s protection.

  There let thy song ring loudly and victorious,

  let it ring wildly through the grove, across the waves of the sea

  to those fields

  whence thou hast fled with joy.7

  In the same commonplace book is Count Waldstein’s more famous farewell to his younger friend:

  Dear Beethowen! [sic]

  You are now going to Vienna in fulfilment of a wish that has for so long been thwarted. The genius of Mozart still mourns and weeps the death of its pupil. It has found a refuge in the inexhaustible Hayden [sic], but no occupation; through him it desires once more to find a union with someone. Through your unceasing diligence, receive Mozart’s spirit from the hands of Hayden.

  Your true friend Waldstein.

  Bonn, the 29th Oct. 17928

  In this way Beethoven finally left Bonn for Vienna, and possibly also for England, in early November. It was as well for him, because Bonn was about to be overtaken by political events that had looked increasingly menacing ever since 1789. Even as he left, the French army was closing in on Mainz and Limburg. In France itself the monarchy of a thousand years’ standing had just been abolished, and Louis XIV had been arrested, tried and found guilty of high treason (to be guillotined the following January as ‘Citizen Louis Capet’). Joseph II’s sister, Marie Antoinette, had been in prison in Paris since the Revolution, and another of her late brother’s mortified self-accusations of failure had been over the botched attempt to rescue her (she would herself be guillotined in October 1793).

  The boy from Bonn finally arrived in Vienna in November 1792. The deal he had with the Elector was that with the Elector’s financial help he would stay and study in Vienna for an unspecified period before returning to his service in Bonn. (Beethoven had presumably kept to himself his intention of defecting to England in case the plan didn’t come off.) Two days after Beethoven’s twenty-second birthday in December, the news reached him of his father’s death. Worse, it turned out Johann had managed to embezzle the money Ludwig had carefully arranged for his younger brothers. He also discovered that the 400 florins he was expecting as a full year’s stipend from the Elector to get him settled in the city turned out to be a mere 100 for the first quarter, and by June the following year the stipend itself had dried up entirely because of the Elector’s own worsening financial state. Eighteen months after Beethoven’s departure Elector Maximilian Francis’s reign over Bonn and his adjacent territory came to an end when he fled the advance of the French army that soon annexed the entire left bank of the Rhine. An era had come to an end. Bonn’s university was shut down, a ‘Freedom Tree’ was planted in the market square and the Code Napoléon adopted as civil law. The Elector retreated to the city of his birth, Vienna, where he died in 1801 at the age of forty-five, ill and grotesquely fat. Beethoven had planned to dedicate his first symphony gratefully to the man in whose employ he had learned his trade and come of age as a composer and performer, but the Archduke was dead before it could be finished.

  * See Appendix.

  3

  VIENNA

  Strapped for cash but with letters of introduction to some powerful aristocratic contacts and the priceless calling card of his brilliance as a pianist, Beethoven at once began his studies with Haydn. They did not go well. The famous old composer was soon to refer to him with a mixture of amusement and sarcasm as ‘The Grand Mogul’ to describe his young pupil’s manner. Although well able to judge his pupil’s musical brilliance, Haydn noted that Beethoven lacked both discipline and a knowledge of counterpoint. Beethoven was outwardly respectful but evidently felt there was not much he could learn from a man whose heyday had surely passed (he was quite wrong there; Haydn had some of his greatest music still to write) and who anyway represented a style of music from which he needed to liberate himself.

  For his part the unhappily married and childless Haydn had probably hoped this young genius from Bonn might treat him affectionately as a father figure. Beethoven could certainly be excused for being disillusioned with father-son relationships; but his disenchantment had left him not the slightest insight into their dynamics, a lack tragically evidenced towards the end of his life when he himself tried to be a surrogate father to his young nephew Karl. What neither Haydn nor Beethoven can have realized was that in a musical sense Haydn was a father figure to his begrudging student. His fame was Europe-wide and secure; his immense reputation cast a deep shadow out of which Beethoven longed to step without knowing how. It was to be many years before he managed it.

  The old composer meanwhile was long-suffering, genuinely kind and proud of his impoverished pupil who could afford to pay him only pennies compared with the guinea per lesson that Haydn had been earning in London. His haughty student criticized him behind his back for not correcting his exercises with the attention he felt was his due. The truth was that Haydn was preoccupied with writing the music he had promised he would bring back to London for Salomon’s new season. At any rate in mid-January 1794 he left for England without Beethoven.

  Beethoven’s financial state at this time was still miserable, as were his lodgings, but he had put up with it mostly because he always imagined (he was still in his early twenties) that once he was in London where the streets were surely paved with gold he would make plenty of money. With the failure of that scheme, though, and in addition to taking counterpoint lessons from the Kapellmeister at St Stephen’s, Johann Albrechtsberger (lessons that went little better than those with Haydn), he concentrated on acquiring patrons among the nobility. This he accomplished remarkably easily, not only as a pupil of the celebrated Haydn but because of his connections through men such as the Elector Maximilian Francis and Count Waldstein. But his real calling card was the reputation he was making for his sensational piano playing. Nearly all the early concerts he gave were not public in the modern sense but took place in the salons and music rooms of the nobility and grandees, attended by small numbers of discerning listeners. The short, dark-complexioned young firebrand from Bonn was soon recognized as a musician quite out of the ordinary, and aristocratic sons and daughters came to hear him and begged for lessons.

  The Viennese palace of the Lobkowitz family in 1805, from a coloured engraving by Vincenz Reim. Two years younger than Beethoven and a keen musician himself, Prince Lobkowitz became one of the composer’s most loyal and long-suffering patrons. The palace remained in the Lobkowitz family’s possession until 1980 and is today the Austrian Theatre Museum.

  CREDIT: IMAGNO / GETTY IMAGES

  In particular, his powers of improvisation soon became legendary. If they also contained an element of pugnaciousness it was partly because that was his character, but it was also because improvising always implied a challenge. In effect it meant inventing a composition on the spot, often on a subject supplied by one of his audience, in a way that made for coherent listening with plenty of showmanship thrown in. As the de facto capital of European music, Vienna was full of highly accomplished musicians from all over the Habsburg Empire, including many well-known pianists, all of whom had their champions. It was a highly competitive musical scene, and by no means always good natured. One famous incident took place at a party in Prince Lobkowitz’s palace. Lobkowitz was by then one of Beethoven’s patrons, and the party he threw was in honour of Ignaz Pleyel, a man thirteen years older than Beethoven. Pleyel’s latest qua
rtets were played, after which the prince called on Beethoven himself to play, which Beethoven clearly resented. He walked to the piano with bad grace, on the way snatching up the second violinist’s part of Pleyel’s last quartet, which he then slammed upside-down on the piano’s music stand and began to improvise. Carl Czerny, an outstanding pianist himself, described what followed:

  He had never been heard to improvise more brilliantly, with more originality and splendour than on this evening. But for the entire improvisation there ran through its middle voices, like a thread or cantus firmus, the notes—in themselves utterly insignificant—which he found on the random page of the quartet he had grabbed and on which he built up the most daring melodies and harmonies in the most brilliant concerto style. At the end poor old Pleyel could only show his amazement by kissing Beethoven’s hands.1

  All the same, Beethoven’s piano-playing style, invariably praised for its astonishing technique, was not always preferred to those favouring the earlier style of the Viennese school of Mozart and Haydn. The piano was in a state of rapid development at that time, and instruments varied considerably. They also bore scant resemblance to the modern piano with its vastly greater volume of sound over a much wider range of notes. In Beethoven’s boyhood fortepianos were still only patchily available, and his early Bonn works would often have been played on a harpsichord. When he reached Vienna he discovered that Viennese pianos were extremely light in touch, with little sustaining power. Consequently their sound died quite quickly, which was good for a slightly superficial or tinkly style of rapid playing but less good for smoothly sustained slow passages. Mozart had been praised by many for the speed and clarity of his scales and passagework. But Mozart was dead—and Beethoven had famously disparaged his playing as ‘choppy’ (he heard him play on his brief visit to Vienna in 1787). Beethoven’s own speciality—apart from the unequalled rapidity of his double trills, runs and skips—was his slow legato playing and richness of tone. This demanded not only a much better instrument but a different technique. Beethoven’s early piano sonatas with their requirements of fortissimo as well as pianissimo playing were to do much to stimulate piano-makers into building heavier and more powerful instruments with faster actions and pedals. In the early part of the nineteenth century it was said that Beethoven had given the piano its ‘soul’. If that meant anything, it was an indication that the instrument was evolving rapidly to meet the demands of much more expressive music that needed to be audible in halls larger than salons. But even in the 1790s it was noted that Beethoven’s playing of his slow movements would often move his aristocratic listeners to tears. No other pianist of his day managed that.