Beethoven's Eroica

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  Evidently Hoffmeister and others had suggested he write some kind of revolutionary or Bonapartist sonata. Only the year before, Austria’s Francis II, who was also the Holy Roman Emperor, had signed the Treaty of Lunéville with France following the defeat at Marengo, when the Austrian Empire had been obliged to make a series of humiliating territorial concessions. Hoffmeister’s suggestion was presumably meant to cash in on the Austrians’ abiding—if nervous—interest in Napoleon’s future intentions. Beethoven was having none of it.

  Vienna, 8 April 1802

  May the devil ride the whole lot of you, gentlemen—what, suggest I should write a sonata of that sort? At the time of the revolutionary fever—well, then it might have been worth a thought. But now that everything is trying to get back into the old rut and Bonaparte has made his concordat with the Pope—a sonata of that sort?… at the beginning of this new Christian era? Ha ha! Count me out, for nothing will come of it.

  The satirical religious reference was to the Concordat Napoleon had agreed with the Pope, Pius VII, in July 1801, which undertook to reverse the French revolutionary decree that Church and State should be separate entities. Although by 1809 Beethoven had long since abandoned his plans to go abroad, Jérôme Bonaparte, Napoleon’s brother, was to offer Beethoven the job of Kapellmeister in Westphalia. Beethoven didn’t consider this seriously for a moment, but he did use the offer craftily to strengthen his bid for an annuity when dealing with his patrons. He finally got what he wanted from Archduke Rudolph, Prince Lobkowitz and Prince Kinsky when they offered him an annuity for life provided he promised to stay in Vienna. He promised; and by then thankfully.

  But back in April 1802 and in the light of his early sketches for a Bonaparte symphony only a couple of months later, it seems his intentions were musically grander as well as less focused on the immediate political situation. It is likely that the figure of ‘Bonaparte’, as processed by Beethoven’s imagination, was based on the man he had once seen as spreading the egalitarian and secular ideal of the French Revolution throughout Europe and even the world. The Corsican who now did deals with the Vatican to reinstate the Church’s stifling hegemony was no longer Beethoven’s Bonaparte. The French army had long been in possession of his beloved birthplace, Bonn, together with the previously German left bank of the Rhine, and was threatening Vienna and the Habsburg Empire. So whose side was he on now? Beethoven was by no means alone in facing this quandary: it was shared by half Europe’s intellectuals. (The subject will be explored in Chapter 7, which deals with the question of the dedication of the ‘Eroica’.) And any theory of Napoleon’s exact significance to Beethoven at the time he was writing his ground-breaking symphony is further muddied by the conflation in his mind of the French conqueror with another hero, this one mythical: Prometheus.

  4

  PROMETHEUS

  In Greek mythology Prometheus was a divine helper of mankind, albeit an ambivalent one. Having stolen fire from Zeus, the supreme deity, he gave it to the human race. Beware of Greeks bearing gifts (as Virgil wisely warned), for fire was to prove a mixed blessing. In obvious respects it was a boon, providing light and heat; but in time it would lead to destructive technologies that would enslave mankind. Zeus, furious at the theft, exacted a twofold punishment. He created Pandora, the first woman, to spread misfortune among the human race, a task she ably achieved with her allegorical box (actually a jar) of assorted evils. He then had Prometheus bound to a stake on Mount Kaukasos where an eagle regularly flew in to snack on his liver, which regenerated itself between the bird’s agonizing visits.

  It is not hard to see why this myth might have had powerful private significance for Beethoven. From at least 1800 he had been forced to confront his increasing deafness as a permanent condition that would now never be reversed. He had done his best to maintain a brave optimism that this or that doctor prescribing this or that treatment might miraculously effect a cure. But in his heart he must have known it was of no avail and that he must resign himself to a future in which he could no longer earn his living as a lionized performer and instead subsist only on what he could earn from his compositions. Like Prometheus’s liver, his deafness seemed self-perpetuating and destined to cause him constant anguish.

  When asked in 1800 to write the orchestral music for a ballet called The Creatures of Prometheus he presumably welcomed it as just another paid commission, albeit an important one, since it was for Vienna’s Burgtheater and was to be designed by the famous ballet-master Salvatore Viganò. But as he worked on the lengthy score (a good hour’s worth of music) the Promethean myth of the eternally suffering hero must have suggested striking parallels with his own predicament and even with his idealized but inconsistent identification with Napoleon Bonaparte. Was Napoleon not a bringer of freedom’s fire, a great uplifted torch, as a gift to mankind? And was this freedom not being stolen from the formerly godlike figures of Europe’s reigning monarchs and popes? True, he would doubtless pay for it later: in Greek mythology hubris was always punished. But the gift had been given. The secret of mankind’s freedom was out and surely could never now be recaptured.

  And then—a step further—why might Beethoven not view himself as a spiritual henchman of Bonaparte, his music bringing fire and light and showing that the brotherhood of man would prevail? Chained to the rock of his private fate he might be constantly tormented, but like Prometheus himself he had unconquerable will. That at least endured: Beethoven never lost his belief in the ultimate triumph of his music and its message to all humanity.

  It inevitably sounds fanciful and novelistic to ascribe such detailed intentions to anyone, let alone to a genius working in an abstract art at a time of great political unrest well over two centuries ago. And yet the evidence is strong that Beethoven’s muse, at least, perceived such parallels. It is unfortunate that the original choreography for Viganò’s Prometheus ballet has not survived, so the exact onstage context of each of the sixteen numbers remains guesswork. What is not guesswork is the significance of the ballet score to the ‘Eroica’ Symphony that was beginning to occupy another part of Beethoven’s brain. There are significant parallels between the works. The adventurous sonorities and effects of the fullest orchestra he had so far used became those of the ‘Eroica’: the ballet’s use of three horns, for example, which were to reappear so memorably in the trio of the symphony’s Scherzo; the use of syncopation; the influence of his French contemporaries in the martial passages with their drums and trumpets.

  However, despite—or maybe because of—Beethoven’s large and complex score, the ballet Die Geschöpfe des Prometheus was not a great success. A certain J. C. Rosenbaum went to a rehearsal and later wrote, ‘The ballet was not at all well received, the music little better.… At the end the ballet was more hissed down than applauded.’1 By then Haydn was back from his second visit to England. Since the huge success of his 1798 oratorio The Creation (Die Schöpfung) the celebrated composer was at the height of his fame, often referred to affectionately as ‘Papa’ Haydn. He went along to a performance of the ballet, probably curious to see what his brilliant but difficult pupil had been doing while he had been away. The next day Beethoven ran into his former teacher in the street. According to Robbins Landon, Haydn stopped him and said:

  “‘Now, yesterday I heard your ballet and it pleased me very much.’ Beethoven thereupon answered, ‘Oh, my dear Papa, you are very kind, but it is very far from being a “Creation.”’ Haydn, surprised and almost offended by this answer, said after a short silence, ‘That is true, it is not yet a “Creation” and I very much doubt whether it will ever succeed in being one.’ Whereupon each of them, somewhat dumbfounded, took leave of the other. The play on words, ‘Geschöpfe’ and ‘Schöpfung’, which Beethoven used to taunt his former teacher, does not come off in English; but even without it the insult must have appalled the courteous Haydn. Relations between the two men were now deteriorating to the point of no return, and from the documentary evidence at our disposal it is clearly Be
ethoven who wished to disassociate himself from Haydn, not vice versa.”2

  From Landon’s account it is difficult to see what was offensive in what Beethoven said. The great Haydn scholar’s gloss notwithstanding, it must be remembered that Beethoven had a lifelong habit of crude and ill-judged puns. By a long way this was neither the first nor last occasion that his hit-or-miss wordplay gave unintended offence to someone. Yet no matter what jealousy he might still have nurtured for his laurelled ex-teacher’s international success, it seems most unlikely that Beethoven’s clumsy attempt at wit was a deliberate ‘taunt’ and, given that Haydn was well aware of the ‘Grand Mogul’s’ social awkwardness, it seems equally improbable that he would have taken offence.

  It is a great pity that although the ballet’s overture is quite often played, the rest of the music remains little known to the majority of concertgoers even though they would instantly recognize the last tune in the finale. Beethoven reused the one he had just written for the seventh of a set of twelve little contre-dances (WoO14), which in turn might have had its roots in his early Bonn piano quartets.* The first violins have the tune:

  Heiligenstadt village at around the time of Beethoven’s residence in the early 1800s. His doctors recommended rural tranquillity to save what was left of his hearing, and the bucolic scene with the view across the Danube to the foothills of the Carpathians on the horizon must have afforded him solace.

  CREDIT: THE ART ARCHIVE / HISTORISCHES MUSEUM (MUSEEN DER STADT WIEN) VIENNA / GIANNI DAGLI ORTI

  In the ballet’s finale Beethoven worked this simple tune up with contrasting sections, almost as if it were an orchestrated version of one of his bagatelles for piano. It must have had a particular significance for him because once the ballet was out of the way he went straight on to use it yet again, this time for a set of fifteen variations and a fugue for piano. At one level this was a showpiece for Beethoven himself as a virtuoso performer since it is a compendium of pianistic tricks that include hand-crossing, rapid skips and glittering passagework. In this instance the tune, as it first appears, is in the top line:

  At another level these taxing variations clearly functioned as a kind of trial run for the ‘Eroica’ Symphony’s Finale, which is based on the same tune used yet again in the same rhythm and key and treated with even greater inventiveness, fugue and all. In fact, the form in both cases is unique in musical history. Never before or since had a set of piano variations started not with the main tune but with a bald, 16-bar statement of its bass line alone:

  Thereafter this bare outline gathers accompanying voices until the main theme is finally stated. The symphony’s Finale begins in the same way, only this time it takes 67 bars until the ‘Prometheus’ tune is heard in full. So famous did this theme become as the symphony’s Finale that the earlier piano work is known today as the Eroica Variations, Op. 35, rather than the ‘Prometheus Variations’. The tune’s musical significance is that it perfectly lends itself to almost limitless development and elaboration. Certainly in its earliest version as a little dance tune it gave no hint of the potential for its own apotheosis as a grand symphonic finale.

  Unlike the ballet, the piano variations were very well received, and so they should have been given their remarkable originality. Variation 10 in particular, with its impressionistic fragmentation of the theme and its outrageous tonal surprises, inhabits a world akin to that of the Diabelli Variations, Op. 120, of some twenty years later. A critic in the 22 February 1804 issue of the respected Leipzig weekly, Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, was to write a lengthy and admiring review of Op. 35:

  Inexhaustible imagination, original humour and deep, intimate, even passionate feeling are the particular features that give rise to the ingenious character that distinguishes nearly all Herr van Beethoven’s works. This earns him one of the highest places among first-rate instrumental composers. His latest works in particular show the care he takes to maintain a chosen character and to combine the greatest freedom with purity of phrasing and contrapuntal elegance. All this composer’s peculiarities just cited can be found to a marked degree in this work. Even its overall form, which deviates so far from what is customary, bears witness to unmistakable genius.3

  The ‘deviation’, of course, was the unheard-of idea of starting a set of variations without immediately stating the theme to be varied. Or, rather, without any music critic being quite sure if that really was what Beethoven had done. The absurdly naked bass line that gradually gathers harmonic garments before at last appearing fully clothed as the ‘Prometheus’ tune: might that not actually be the main theme? To this day, nobody can say for certain.

  Where the Prometheus myth itself was concerned, Beethoven’s classically educated contemporaries would have spotted the parallels easily enough when eventually they heard the symphony a few years later. Many then no doubt recalled seeing the ballet and recognized its symbolic elements in the symphony’s four movements that one by one outlined the sequence of struggle, death, rebirth and apotheosis. As for the theme’s inner significance to its composer, it is quite difficult for us today not to see this notion of Promethean creativity and punishment as a multiple metaphor. For him the political struggle of the times was intimately tied in with his shifting opinion of Napoleon Bonaparte and France in general. At a private level there was above all his penitential battle with deafness. There would also have been associations with his rescue opera Fidelio, which at the time was constantly and naggingly on his mind. A prisoner being brought up from a Stygian dungeon into bright sunlight was a perfect Promethean motif. And at an obscurer level still there was his struggle as a composer to forge a new music in the teeth of the old, not to mention finally being able to step out of ‘Papa’ Haydn’s shadow.

  The Op. 35 Eroica Variations were written at perhaps the most despairing point of Beethoven’s life, and it is extraordinary that their creative energy and even humour betray no hint of this. Beethoven’s new physician, Dr Johann Schmidt, had urged the composer to spare his hearing the din of the big city and retreat to the countryside. So in the summer of 1802 Beethoven took up residence in Heiligenstadt: in those days a pretty hamlet just to the west of Vienna with vistas across the Danube to the Carpathians on the horizon. The rooms he took in a farmhouse had uninterrupted views up a secluded valley behind the house: in fact the very valley he was later to walk while composing the ‘Pastoral’ Symphony. Yet despite the peacefulness of his surroundings, his life’s major crisis was steadily overwhelming him even as he wrote the piano variations. Matters came to a head in early October when he scrawled the despairing document known today as the Heiligenstadt Testament. In the guise of a last will and testament citing his two brothers as joint heirs, it is a cry from the heart: by turns self-pitying, resigned and histrionic. Even today it is impossible to read it without being moved by Beethoven’s depression as he apologizes for having appeared to his family and friends as difficult, morose and misanthropic while all the time not daring to divulge the reason, his darkest secret: that he was going deaf.

  The autograph of the Eroica Variations for piano, Op. 35 (1802). Since it was inherited from the ballet of two years earlier the theme of the variations ought really to be called the Prometheus Theme; but Beethoven’s use of it yet again in the following year for the Eroica Symphony’s finale has made the later association indelible. This page of the finale shows the calm restatement of the theme immediately following the athletic fugue.

  CREDIT: BEETHOVEN HAUS, BONN, COLLECTION H. C. BODMER

  Beethoven had evidently become aware of a problem with his hearing in around 1796 when he was still only twenty-five and at the peak of his career as a pianist. He waited a further four years before admitting it for the first time in a touching and intimate letter dated 1 June 1800 to his close Viennese friend Carl Amenda. After a further two years when the deafness had inexorably progressed, he poured his heart out in the Heiligenstadt Testament addressed to his younger brothers. In it Beethoven described himself as still only twe
nty-eight whereas in fact he was nearly thirty-two. (He was always confused about his birth date because his father Johann used randomly to knock years off his age as a boy to make him appear a more marketable ‘Wunderkind’). It is a pitiful confession, as though of a crime. ‘For me there can be no relaxation in human company, decent conversation, mutual exchanges. I can talk to people only when it is absolutely necessary. I must live like an exile’, he wrote. ‘If I come near people a hot terror seizes me, a dread of putting myself in danger that they will detect my condition.’ And on and on in the same vein, erratic punctuation betraying his lack of elementary schooling. It is dated ‘Heiglnstadt [sic] October 6 1802’. Four days later he added an even more heartbroken codicil:

  Heiglnstadt October 10 1802.

  So I take leave of you—and sadly, for the blessed hope I brought here that I might at least be partly cured must now be utterly abandoned. It has withered like the falling leaves of autumn. I go away again almost as I came. Even the high courage that often inspired me in the beautiful days of summer has vanished. Oh Providence! Just give me one day of pure joy: it is so long since I heard the inner echo of real happiness. Oh immortal spirit! When, oh when can I once again feel it in the temple of nature and mankind? Never? No—oh, that would be too cruel.

  Whatever else, this is not the fervent prayer of an orthodox Catholic. There are no appeals to the Virgin or the saints, and even God is de-Christianized as Providence. Together with the use of the word ‘temple’ the tone harks back to the usage of his old teacher Christian Neefe and his Masonic friends in the Bonn of his adolescence. The Heiligenstadt Testament reads almost like a suicide note—it was, after all, his will—except of course that Beethoven did not kill himself despite admitting ‘only a little more and I would have put an end to my life, it was only art that held me back. Ah! it seemed impossible to leave the world until I had produced everything I felt capable of, and so I carried on my miserable existence…’ This is the record of someone confronting the lowest point of his life, realizing he would not be cured, that his natural social ineptness was fatally worsened by being deaf, that he was doomed always to be misunderstood and never to acquire a partner, that he truly was alone. One wonders if years later when he was writing the choral finale of the Ninth Symphony it would seem painfully ironic as he set the lines in Schiller’s ‘Ode’ that run: