Beethoven's Eroica

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  Beethoven’s comparative penury in those early days in Vienna also threw him into less grand company, and there is abundant evidence that he fell in with people of his own age who shared revolutionary and radical beliefs. No doubt they endorsed Robespierre’s stirring motto of Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité. The storming of the Bastille had occurred when Beethoven was eighteen and a half, and the extent to which he as a youth was affected by the French Revolution has been much debated. It is probably less significant than the question of how much of his adolescent idealism later persisted in the adult composer, what shape it took, and the degree to which it influenced the ‘Eroica’ Symphony. French twentieth-century biographers’ opinions usually fell somewhere on the spectrum between that of the composer Vincent d’Indy, who implausibly claimed that Beethoven was entirely uninfluenced by the French Revolution and its progressive ideas (an impossibility, given his age and background), and the writer Romain Rolland, who hailed him as a true ‘Son of the French Revolution’.2

  Almost as soon as he had arrived in Vienna, Beethoven joined in a public subscription for a book of Jacobin verse by one Eulogius Schneider (‘the Marat of Strasbourg’), whom Beethoven had known back in Bonn when Schneider was teaching Greek literature at the university. The storming of the Bastille had clearly galvanized Schneider’s muse, and one of his poems began ‘Oh dear Guillotine! How welcome thou art!’ which nicely set the volume’s general tone.

  Like Prague, Vienna of the day was a magnet for students and artists of all kinds living bohemian lives of semi-penury as well as genuine Bohemians from what is today’s Czech Republic, many of whom were outstanding musicians. In fact, young hotheads needed to watch their step. The recent developments in France were sending shivers of alarm through Europe’s royal families. No matter how enlightened any despot fancied himself to be, a despot he remained. Within days of the fall of the Bastille the Austrian emperor Joseph II reversed many of the liberal social policies he had previously endorsed. A certain Count Pergen, a zealous reactionary, was appointed minister of police to take over the management of censorship from Mozart’s old patron and lodge brother, Baron Gottfried van Swieten.3 Within a short time newspapers were censored, suspected radicals arrested and imprisoned without trial, and even the Freemasons were menaced. When Joseph died in 1790 his brother and successor Leopold II maintained the police state Joseph had inaugurated in such panic. When Leopold himself died after a reign of barely two years, he was succeeded by his son, Francis II, who likewise had no intention of dismantling the state security apparatus. By then the Austrians had mostly forgiven Joseph his reformist excesses and looked back to his reign with affection.

  The power and reach of the secret police in Austria’s unwieldy empire were considerable, and even small provincial cities such as Salzburg had long been full of spies. The clandestine reading of mail was common if correspondents were suspected of even mildly subversive views. Like many others, Mozart and his father had occasionally used a private code in their letters when mentioning politically sensitive matters. Things were even worse in Vienna, despite the capital’s apparent preoccupation with music-making and pleasure-seeking. The young Beethoven rapidly acquired a reputation for political intransigence and unconventional religious views that was to last the remaining thirty-odd years of his life. In a diary entry in 1793 he wrote, ‘Do as much good as you can—love freedom above everything. Never deny the truth, not even to the throne.’ For the rest of his life he showed no reluctance whatever in loudly airing what he thought of as the truth with splendid impartiality, whether speaking to the throne, to a cardinal or to a stranger in a pub. He would share his scathing attacks on politicians and the aristocracy with anyone who would listen. Yet his was more the outspokenness of an opinionated egotist than of a revolutionary, and it was often aided by drink, a violent temper if thwarted and an increasing refusal to observe dress codes and conventions. This was especially apparent when dealing with the aristocracy, whom he treated familiarly as equals when, indeed, he deigned to recognize them at all.

  Johann Georg Albrechtsberger (1736–1809) was the Kapellmeister of St Stephen’s Cathedral who inherited Beethoven as a pupil from Haydn. Albrechtsberger gave Beethoven fugue and counterpoint lessons thrice weekly for over a year, later commenting on his pupil’s stubbornness while Beethoven derided his teacher’s compositions as ‘musical skeletons’. The portrait, dating from around 1800, is anonymous.

  CREDIT: HULTON ARCHIVE / GETTY IMAGES

  His impatience with Vienna for not at once offering him a suitable paid post merely increased his antipathy towards its citizens in general. It would have depressed him immeasurably had he known he was in fact destined to live there for the remainder of his life, restlessly changing his lodgings and escaping to the surrounding countryside whenever he could. He was essentially a small-town boy who never really felt at home in the big city. He soon gave up on the Austrians’ revolutionary potential and had harsh things to say about them, both in conversation and in letters. ‘So long as your Austrian gets his brown beer and sausages he’s not about to join a revolution’, he wrote to a friend back in Bonn, the publisher Nikolaus Simrock, on 2 August 1794. ‘Double-damned mangy, Viennese trash!’4 he would growl. Or if referring to an individual, ‘Scruffy scoundrel! Stingy riff-raff!’5 Vienna was a city of two hundred thousand people, and in his opinion most of them were either aristocratic fops and wastrels or scum from all corners of the Habsburg Empire, the whole lot being dedicated to carnal pleasures of the lowest and most frivolous kind. By comparison Bonn (he must have told himself and others countless times) was not at all like that, being a quiet and self-contained Rhenish town of fewer than twenty thousand inhabitants with a musically literate Elector, an excellent court orchestra and people who knew how to behave—excluding, regrettably, his own late father (whose name he would never mention). For all that he himself was fated to die of drink-induced liver failure, Beethoven retained some distinctly provincial, even Puritan, attitudes, especially on sexual matters.

  From quite early on the Vienna police must have opened a file on this difficult foreigner given to frequent anti-clerical pronouncements and loud saloon-bar dissections of eminent public figures. Since he habitually referred to priests by the derogatory term Pfaffen and his letters were full of profanities, it was put about by his enemies that he was an out-and-out atheist, although there would come a day when ‘pantheist’ would be a more accurate description. As for his politics, Beethoven’s first biographer, Anton Schindler, was probably correct when he observed that in his leanings Beethoven was a Republican.6 The extraordinary Albanian polymath and scholar Fan S. Noli (1882–1965) was even more specific:

  All the slogans of the French Revolution can be found in Beethoven’s writings and, sometimes, in places where we hardly expect them, in business letters and love letters. And it must be borne in mind that all those slogans were anathema to the old regime of Vienna, which considered them dangerous to the state and forbade their use to its citizens.7

  Yet despite the perils, Beethoven thrived, increasingly successful as both performer and composer, presumably well enough protected by his aristocratic mentors. Then in February 1798 the French Directorate sent General Jean Bernadotte to Vienna as its ambassador. He was young, handsome, dashing and had distinguished himself as Napoleon’s aide-de-camp in his Italian campaign. Viennese ladies fell for him in heaps; the city authorities much less so. Ambassador he might have been; diplomat he was not. Apart from sporting the French tricolour in his hat and addressing everybody impartially as ‘citizen’, he and his retinue would hiss in the theatre when anyone cried, ‘Long live Emperor Francis!’8 Bernadotte was musical and brought with him France’s foremost violinist, Rodolphe Kreutzer. Prince Lichnowsky, by this time one of Beethoven’s several noble patrons, introduced Beethoven to Bernadotte and Kreutzer. By all accounts the feisty composer and the two Frenchmen hit it off. Bernadotte had brought with him a collection of revolutionary music from Paris by composers s
uch as Méhul, Le Sueur, Gossec, Catel and Kreutzer himself, which Beethoven studied eagerly.

  Some of this music would already have been familiar to him from his days in the court orchestra in Bonn, but there was much that was new. This was music for open-air festivities and official celebrations, often martial. The essence of the style was that it should be stirring, the supreme example being Rouget de Lisle’s magnificent setting of ‘La Marseillaise’, written in Strasbourg in 1792 just after France had declared war on Austria. Above all, it was designed to be ‘people’s music’; anything too ‘learned’, such as counterpoint, had been purged from it. Rather it emphasized memorable, singable tunes that crowds could easily pick up, often with a degree of quasi-Masonic solemnity.9 (Something of the same prescription would be used after 1860 for the Church of England’s Hymns Ancient and Modern with their narrow vocal range and simple Mendelssohnian harmonies.) It might not be too fanciful to see the tune Beethoven used in 1823 to set Schiller’s ‘Ode to Joy’ for the Ninth Symphony as owing something to this French revolutionary music.

  General Bernadotte’s appointment was destined to last fewer than three months. In April he was recalled, having gone too far in his revolutionary fervour by flying the French tricolour from his hotel, which incited a stone-throwing mob of patriotic Viennese to attack the building. This in turn led to Bernadotte making bombastic flourishes with his sword and noisily vowing to slay ‘members of the rabble’ (formerly ‘citizens’). He had to be saved by a detachment of the emperor’s cavalry as the crowd set fire to the French flag.

  In November 1799 Napoleon led a coup against the increasingly corrupt and inefficient post-revolutionary Directorate and replaced it with the Consulate, in true Roman style appointing himself First Consul. The Battle of Marengo in 1800 was his decisive victory over the Habsburg empire, driving the Austrians out of Italy and greatly reinforcing his own pre-eminent position. In the Vienna of 1800 it would have been easy for Beethoven, in common with many thoughtful and politically aware people, to foresee that within a very few years the whole of central Europe might well come under French administration, and who knew for how long? Certainly Napoleon seemed militarily unstoppable.

  To this uncertain political future could be added Beethoven’s worry at his failure so far to find a secure paid position in Vienna. True, he had acquired a stable of aristocratic patrons who between them were generously supportive, even in the face of his occasional bouts of boorishness: a tribute to their musical discernment. They included Prince Joseph Lobkowitz, Baron Gottfried van Swieten, Prince Karl Lichnowsky and Count Andreas Razumovsky. These gentlemen are posthumously due history’s gratitude in that they were perceptive enough to humour, indulge and support Beethoven financially with commissions despite his contempt for their social position and their city. But like most artists throughout the ages (and everybody else) what Beethoven really wanted was the financial security of a regular income. He already entertained a socialist—or possibly schoolboy—fantasy of the ideal artist’s life, when there would exist a single ministry of art for the entire world. The artist would merely hand in his work in exchange for the money he needed.10 Such a utopian dream hardly accorded with the system of patronage that still obtained in the city where the immigrant Beethoven earned his living.

  In the first two or three years of the new century he began quietly planning a move to Paris. His idea was that not only would the French capital be an improvement on Vienna but to take up residence there might also be a canny career move. Apart from anything else, Beethoven was ambitious to see his compositions published abroad. By now he had acquired a young student and admirer, Ferdinand Ries, who in exchange for lessons acted as an informal agent, one of whose duties was to make contact with foreign publishers. On 6 August 1803 Ries wrote to the publisher Simrock in Bonn, saying Beethoven would be staying in Vienna for only another eighteen months, being determined to move to Paris. Ries was depressed about this plan and admitted he had jokingly dropped broad hints to Beethoven that he hoped he could go with him as the composer’s ‘student and financial manager’. It is safe to assume Beethoven had been mulling over this radical move for some time before telling Ries.

  Prince Karl Lichnowsky by an unknown artist. The prince was Vienna’s leading musical patron. He shared the same Masonic lodge as Mozart and had been one of his pupils. He befriended the young Beethoven and helped arrange his studies with Haydn and Albrechtsberger. In 1806 Lichnowsky and Beethoven had a serious falling out and were never wholly reconciled before the prince’s death in 1814.

  CREDIT: HULTON FINE ART COLLECTION / GETTY IMAGES

  In view of events that suggested French influence in Europe could only increase in the foreseeable future, Beethoven evidently calculated that it would make sense to take advantage of Paris as the likely future centre of European culture. After all, his music was already known to Parisian music-lovers, and printed editions were available in music shops there. His First Symphony had been performed there and probably the Second as well. Both had been found agreeable and interestingly different without being too aggressively ‘modern’. However, Beethoven was probably over-estimating French receptivity to his orchestral music, since the ‘Eroica’ was not to be performed in Paris until 1825, some twenty-two years after it was composed, when it was compared to the two earlier symphonies and not to its advantage.

  For some years now Beethoven had evidently been thinking seriously about writing something inspired by—if not actually a tribute to—Napoleon. In 1802 he had begun sketches for a symphony but had laid them aside in order to finish other work. By early 1803 Beethoven had decided to take two big new works with him to France to act as calling cards: an opera and a symphony. He was already at work on the opera; the symphony would be the ‘Eroica’. By the end of that summer the ‘Eroica’ was finished and in another letter to Simrock on 22 October Ries wrote that Beethoven had recently played it through on the piano for him and very much wanted to dedicate it to Bonaparte. Since then he had turned his attention to other things, including the opera, which, Ries said, was a setting in German of the French librettist Jean-Nicolas Bouilly’s Léonore, ou l’amour conjugale: a ‘rescue opera’ whose plot had already been used by other composers.

  The ‘rescue opera’ was a genre pioneered by Cherubini’s Lodoïska, which had been first performed to wild acclaim in Paris back in July 1791. This type of story, full of evil tyrants holding in servitude and chains innocents who were eventually freed in a grand climax, had become very popular in revolutionary France, combining as it did patriotism, idealism and an urge to sweep away the old regime. The idea of the triumph of freedom and justice undoubtedly appealed to Beethoven, who calculated that the genre’s popularity would ensure his own opera’s success. After all, Bouilly had also written the libretto of Cherubini’s Les Deux Journées, which had taken Vienna by storm a couple of years earlier. Ries reckoned his teacher would probably need eighteen months to finish the opera and so was hopeful of being able to accompany Beethoven to Paris late the following year or in early 1805. In fact the opera (initially called Léonore but soon renamed Fidelio) was finished by early 1804, having given Beethoven a good deal of trouble, and had already been bought by the Theater an der Wien. By this time the opera’s theme was interpreted as less subversive of the Habsburg Empire than supportive of pan-Germanism faced with the Napoleonic threat.

  Considering that Beethoven had thought about defecting to Paris even before composing the ‘Eroica’ in the summer of 1803 and given also his known earlier republican sympathies with revolutionary France and its figurehead, Napoleon Bonaparte, how is one to assess the French influence on the symphony? There is reason to suspect Beethoven had considerably revised the revolutionary enthusiasms he had nurtured in his twenties, and he had probably already put his plans to move to Paris on hold on account of musical commitments in Vienna and the now serious deafness that was causing him much misery. At any rate it was surely significant that a full year earlier in the spring o
f 1802 he had written a decisive letter to one of his publishers, the composer Franz Anton Hoffmeister, who had recently moved to Vienna and had already published the ‘Pathétique’ Piano Sonata.