by Suchet, John
Then there was a development that must have taken Ludwig’s breath away. Four years after Neefe wrote in Cramer’s Magazin der Musik that ‘this young genius deserves support so that he can travel’, it happened. How it happened, we do not know. Most likely Neefe approached the Elector directly. Maximilian Franz might have been becoming obese, his limp and the way he acquired it might have led to derisory comments, but he soon made his mark as an effective, and tolerant, ruler. He was an avid supporter of education and the arts, and over a period of time reopened the court theatre, maintained the court orchestra, and founded the University of Bonn. He would have heard young Ludwig play the organ at services, and he might well have heard him give recitals at the keyboard.
It might have been at Neefe’s suggestion, or the Elector might well have made the decision himself. Either way, Ludwig’s dream was about to come true. The Elector granted him leave of absence to travel to Vienna to meet Mozart, and agreed to cover the costs. It is beyond doubt that his father would have protested loudly. How could he possibly cope with the children, and a sick wife, if Ludwig was going to swan off to Vienna? But Ludwig had powerful support, and there was no stopping him.
In late March 1787, Ludwig van Beethoven, aged sixteen and a quarter, left Bonn and left his family to travel to the capital of the Holy Roman Empire, and the capital city of European music. Vienna.
WHEN I FIRST began researching Beethoven’s life, and discovered that he and Mozart actually met, I expected to find page after page of information, documents, eye-witness accounts, letters, and so on. And what is there? Nothing but secondary accounts. A single paragraph in a biography of Mozart written more than sixty years after Mozart’s death (in fact, to coincide with the centenary of his birth), one inconclusive line in a Beethoven biography again written many years after his death, and a couple of anecdotes running to no more than a line or two each.
Why might this be, given that both composers were household names while still alive, and famous beyond words within a short time of their deaths? There really can be only one explanation, and that is that neither Mozart nor Beethoven spoke or wrote about their encounter, meaning we have no first-hand account of what happened. This alone raises more questions.
It is a similar case in the myriad of biographies of Beethoven. The encounter with Mozart barely rates more than a swift paragraph. I know of one biography, published in 2003, that does not mention the meeting at all. Their authors would no doubt justify this by pointing to the obvious: that, as with the trip to Rotterdam, we know virtually nothing. But I believe that a meeting between the two most revered, respected, admired, beloved composers in history deserves as close an examination as possible, with speculation allowed after that.
First, then, this is what we know.
On 1 April 1787 ‘Herr Peethofen [sic], Musikus von Bonn bei Kölln’ arrived in Munich and checked into the tavern Zum schwarzen Adler [‘At the Black Eagle’], according to the Münchener Zeitung. It appears either the newspaper knew about his musical prowess, or it did its homework while he was away, because when he checked into the same tavern on 25 April on his way home, it described him as ‘Herr Peethoven [sic], Kurköllnischer Kammervirtuos von Bonn’ (‘Piano virtuoso at the Electoral Court of Cologne from Bonn’). This is the furthest that word of his musical talent had spread to date.
He reached Vienna on Easter Eve, 7 April. We do not know where he stayed or how soon after arriving he met Mozart. All we know, from the Mozart biography,3 is that Ludwig was taken to Mozart, who asked him to sit at the piano and play something. Ludwig did this, but Mozart was cool in his praise, saying he had obviously prepared a showpiece specially. Ludwig then asked Mozart to give him a theme that he could improvise on. Mozart did so, and Ludwig began to improvise. His playing became more and more elaborate, because he was inspired in the presence of the master musician whom he so greatly admired. Mozart became more and more impressed, and finally, without saying anything to Ludwig, went into the adjoining room where some friends were sitting, and said, ‘Watch out for that boy, one day he will give the world something to talk about.’
That is the sum total of the most comprehensive second-hand account we have. We do not even know who recounted it, only that it could not have been either of the two principals, who had both been long dead. As far as other evidence goes, Beethoven’s friend and helper Ferdinand Ries (who collaborated with Wegeler on their book of reminiscences) says Beethoven told him he regretted never hearing Mozart play, but Beethoven’s pupil Carl Czerny claimed Beethoven did hear him, and described his playing as ‘choppy’ and ‘unsmooth’.
As for Beethoven himself, it appears the only recorded reference to Mozart in conversation came late in life when his deafness led him to carry a notebook, so-called ‘conversation books’, for people to write down their questions. His nephew Karl wrote in one of these, ‘You knew Mozart, where did you see him?’ And in another conversation book a few years later, ‘Was Mozart a good pianoforte player? It [the instrument] was then still in its infancy.’
Of course the utterly maddening, infuriating, frustrating fact is that Beethoven spoke rather than wrote his answer, so we have no idea of what he said.
Given how significant I believe this meeting, however brief, to be, I will now allow myself to put a few speculative clothes on the bare bones of what we know.
First, I believe Mozart was in no mood to see Ludwig. In fact it was the last thing he needed. His health was poor. Two and a half years earlier, at an opera in the Burgtheater (not one of his own) he was taken ill, ‘sweated through all his clothes’, caught a chill in the night air on the way home, began to vomit violently, and was diagnosed with rheumatic fever. His recovery was slow, and he was ill again in April 1787, the month young Beethoven came to visit.
His domestic life was in turmoil. With two small children, he had moved the family into a large apartment in the Grosse Schulerstrasse, where the rent was four times higher than in their previous apartment. He could not afford the rent, and at the time of Ludwig’s visit, the family was in the throes of moving out to the suburbs.
On top of this he was worried about his father’s health (Leopold Mozart was to die a little over a month later), and last but not least he was fully preoccupied with his new opera, Don Giovanni.
So when a sixteen-year-old boy was ushered into his apartment, presumably on the strength of a letter of introduction from Max Franz (who had met Mozart in Salzburg some years earlier),4 he is unlikely to have welcomed him with open arms. One can imagine him looking the youth up and down, probably unimpressed with his attire, tousled hair with no wig or queue, the boy’s Rhineland accent more guttural than he was used to in Vienna, and barking, ‘Well, boy, they say you can play the piano. To me you look more like a street urchin than a musician. There’s the piano, play something, and be quick about it.’
That is shameless fictionalising, I readily admit, but it gives a flavour of what I believe probably happened.
‘Watch out for that boy, one day he will give the world something to talk about’
It is also more than likely that once Ludwig started improvising on the theme Mozart had given him, the older man became more and more impressed. The quote about ‘watching out for that boy’ is famous, and who knows how it might have become embellished in the years before it was written down? But we can safely say that Mozart was impressed with what he heard, almost certainly impressed enough to offer to take Ludwig on as a pupil.
We can make this assumption, I believe, because in the first place Mozart would have welcomed the chance to earn some extra cash, and Ludwig clearly had the Elector’s financial backing, and also because he is likely to have recognised that the boy had pianistic skills well beyond his years, and this would have appealed to the virtuosic musician in Mozart. One other factor: Ludwig stayed in Vienna for almost two weeks. It was during this time, obviously, that he must have heard Mozart play. We can probably reconcile the evident contradiction between Ries and Czerny by
assuming he heard Mozart play in private, but not in performance.
But the big question is: did Mozart give Ludwig lessons in the brief time he was in Vienna? That takes us back to the question I posed earlier. Given that Beethoven admired Mozart so much, performing his piano concertos on a number of occasions in Vienna, if he had received even a single lesson, would he not have trumpeted it for the rest of his life? And if Mozart was that impressed with Ludwig’s playing, so much so that he immediately went into the adjoining room to tell friends, would he not have told more people, and wouldn’t they also have told other people, particularly in the years following Mozart’s death when Beethoven’s fame was spreading across Europe?
Yet there is nothing. Even that is puzzling. If no lessons took place, you would expect even that fact to have been referred to by Beethoven later in life, in tones of regret.
So it remains something of a mystery. The only possible explanation I can think of – and I accept this is far fetched, even a little scurrilous – is that in both cases there were singular reputations to uphold. Mozart’s family and friends did not want his legacy to be overshadowed by Beethoven, and Beethoven did not want to attribute any part of his genius to Mozart.
One last piece of speculation. What if the sixteen-year-old boy had taken lessons with Mozart. Might Mozart the perfectionist have smoothed off the rough edges, rounded the corners, tamed the wild spirit we know today? Impossible to answer. I suspect that could have been the case. Fiercely independent he might have been, but what sixteen-year-old boy would not have been susceptible to guidance from Europe’s greatest living musician?
Enough conjecture. What we know for a fact is that within a short time of arriving in Vienna, Ludwig received word from his father that his mother was seriously ill, and that they feared for her life. He had no choice but to leave, which he did within the fortnight, arriving again at the Zum schwarzen Adler on 25 April.
On arriving home he was devastated to find his mother’s consumption had advanced so far that she was in the terminal stages, and she died on 17 July.
If things were serious before he left for Vienna, they were critical now. He truly was head of the family, and the task of not only providing for the family, but trying to control the nominal head, Johann, fell squarely on his shoulders. There was no mother for him or his brothers to turn to when, later in the same year, their baby sister died.
The situation in the Beethoven household was indeed dire.
NOT FOR THE FIRST TIME in his life, Ludwig benefited from an extraordinary stroke of good fortune. Just as Christian Neefe had been the perfect teacher to satisfy his musical ambitions, and Maximilian Franz the ideal Elector to further them, on or about 1 February 1788 there arrived in Bonn a certain Count Ferdinand Ernst Joseph Gabriel Waldstein und Wartenberg von Dux.
Count Waldstein, to give him his simple title, was a member of one of the most aristocratic families in the Habsburg Empire. His misfortune was to be the fourth son, and as such was allowed to play no role in the power politics at the Viennese court. After a couple of fruitless years in the military, he opted to join the Teutonic Order.5 This led to him being summoned to Bonn by Maximilian Franz, who was Grand Master of the Order. There he was made a Knight on 17 June 1788.
Count Waldstein was in every sense Ludwig van Beethoven’s most important patron in his teenage years. Max Franz might have subsidised Ludwig’s abortive trip to Vienna and rubber-stamped his appointment as court organist, but his interest in music beyond that was not great. Waldstein, by contrast, was himself a dilettante pianist and composer, and had a deep love for the arts, in particular music. Wegeler, in his memoir, describes Waldstein as ‘Beethoven’s first, and in every respect most important, Maecenas’.
It is more than likely that Waldstein first encountered Ludwig at the Breunings’ house, and heard him play. He immediately recognised an extraordinary talent, and decided to make it his mission to nurture it. He did more than that. From Wegeler we learn that he visited the Beethoven family in their new apartment in a rather fine house in the Wenzelgasse, which was in a better part of town than the Rheingasse down by the river. There, after the death of Maria Magdalena, they employed a housekeeper.
Wegeler leaves us in no doubt that Waldstein gave money to Ludwig on a number of occasions, always disguised as an advance from the Elector. The move to the Wenzelgasse certainly came before Waldstein’s arrival in Bonn. One wonders how long the family would have been able to remain there, and employ a housekeeper, without Waldstein’s help.
There now occurred a dramatic change in the Beethoven family’s circumstances. It was almost certainly brought about by an incident as humiliating for Ludwig and his family as it is possible to imagine, and it is inconceivable Ludwig would have taken the step he did without advice and guidance from Waldstein, who had the Elector’s ear.
Johann van Beethoven became so drunk in public that he was arrested. Ludwig had to go to the police station, where he argued furiously with the police, before obtaining his father’s release.
It was, for Ludwig, the final blow. His father’s reputation was ruined once and for all. Something needed to be done, action taken. Some time in the autumn of 1789 Ludwig petioned the Elector to dismiss his father from court service, and pay half his salary over to him. The Elector went further. He not only agreed to Ludwig’s demands but ordered Johann to leave Bonn and go and live in exile in a village in the country.
In the event this latter demand was not enforced. Johann remained in the Wenzelgasse house until his death. It is probable Ludwig, having taken the action he did, felt the humiliation was enough. Financially, half his father’s annual salary of 200 thalers was now paid to him. As further lessening of the humiliation, Johann continued to receive the other half, but quietly made it over to his son.
Ludwig was now, at the age of eighteen, no longer just the de facto head of the family, but de jure head as well, recognised as such by the Elector. It was a turning point. The pain of his father’s degradation must have been difficult to bear, but it had been going on for some time, was no secret in Bonn, and Ludwig was now at last able to acknowledge it, to have no need any longer to make excuses. The formalising of his father’s disgrace was, for him, in some sense a liberation.
That immediately proved itself in his musical activity. It led to a burst of creativity. The pieces poured out of him. Among them is the most significant work that he was to compose in his first twenty-two years, and it was brought about by an unexpected, and thoroughly sad, event in the Habsburg capital, Vienna.
On 20 February 1790, Emperor Joseph II, eldest son of the great Empress Maria Theresa, died at the age of forty-nine. The Empire went into mourning. In Bonn, the remainder of the opera season was cancelled. The Lesegesellschaft met to discuss a way of marking the death, given that the Emperor was Max Franz’s brother, and commissioned a young poet to write a text, which would subsequently be set to music. The text was duly delivered, and then the question arose of who should be asked to compose the memorial cantata.
The Lesegesellschaft had a number of names for consideration, all court musicians senior to Ludwig. But Waldstein was a member of the Lesegesellschaft, and he undoubtedly brought his influence to bear. The duty of commemorating the Emperor’s death in music went to the nineteen-year-old Ludwig van Beethoven.
He certainly rose to the occasion. His Cantata on the Death of Emperor Joseph II is justifiably regarded as his first mature composition. For a start he is now working with full orchestral forces, solo singers and chorus. If the work has an added dimension, it is surely because he had empathy with the subject matter.
Emperor Joseph had been a reformer. He made education compulsory for all boys and girls, and brought about the freedom of serfs throughout the Empire. He completely reformed the legal system, abolished brutal punishments for minor crimes, and abolished the death penalty except for serious crimes. He ran into opposition when he tried to reform the Catholic Church – that was an ambition too far.
Of greater significance to the higher levels of society in Vienna, he was an enthusiastic patron of the arts. He was known as the ‘Musical King’, and championed German culture. It was he who commissioned a German language opera from Mozart,6 and he ended censorship of the press and the theatre. At the same time he was intolerant of opponents to his rule, encouraging his Chancellor to establish a network of informants. He has rather unkindly been called the creator of the secret police. He was, to use the language of historians, an ‘enlightened despot’.
In Bonn, he was a popular figure, and not just because he was the elder brother of the Elector. His reforming ideas, his ‘enlightened despotism’, appealed to this cultured town, which was, in some sense, an outpost of the Empire, away from the court intrigue and rigidity of life in Vienna. Without a doubt his ideas would have been debated by the lluminati and then the Lesegesellschaft, and it is beyond question that the Protestant Neefe would have lauded the Emperor’s praises to his young pupil.
Ludwig would have appreciated the poet Severin Anton Averdonck’s text too. Although the language is highly subtle and allusory, it is an unmistakable paeon of praise to a reforming Emperor. Even if that is an exaggeration, it is undoubtedly how Ludwig would have seen it. Joseph’s untimely and unexpected death would have come not just as a shock to the people of Bonn but, more than that, as very sad news indeed.
Ludwig captures this in the very first bar of his Cantata, a strikingly soft low note on strings, followed by a pause. The wind then echo this, followed again by a pause. Daring and original, he repeats the exchange more loudly, before leading into a fragmented mourning phrase on flute. After several more bars of fragmented, almost tortured phrases, the chorus enters with the single portentous word ‘Todt’ (‘Dead’). The listener is hooked from the very start.
There are also elements that he was to use later in more mature works. Several passages presage the ‘Eroica’ Symphony, and there is a striking oboe phrase, soaring above the rest of the orchestra, that was to reappear to dramatic effect in the dungeon scene in Fidelio. Beethoven knew better than to waste a good idea.