Beethoven

by Suchet, John

  And, in this case, wasted is exactly what these extraordinarily original ideas would have been. The court orchestra in Bonn – particularly the wind – declared the piece unplayable, as it did with the sister piece that came a few months later, a Cantata on the Elevation of Emperor Leopold II. Neither piece was performed in Beethoven’s lifetime. We do not know how the composer reacted to this rejection, but whatever he may have said, it was good practice for his later years. This might have been the first, but certainly was not the last, time in his life that musicians complained to him that his music was unplayable.

  The following year another composition followed, and it could not have been more of a contrast to the two cantatas, for an extraordinary and at first sight incredible reason.

  1 Franz Wegeler and Ferdinand Ries, Biographische Notizen über Ludwig van Beethoven. As with Gottfried Fischer’s memoirs, this account was written several decades after the event, but both Wegeler and his collaborator were educated to a much higher level than Fischer, and their accounts are regarded as largely reliable.

  2 Where today a huge bronze statue of Beethoven stands.

  3 Otto Jahn, W. A. Mozart (1856).

  4 He tried to persuade Mozart to come to Bonn as Kapellmeister. Mozart turned him down, saying he was too busy with his new opera, Le nozze di Figaro. How different the history of music might have been had he accepted!

  5 A prestigious – but by the nineteenth century largely ceremonial – body of German knights formed in the Middle Ages to protect and help German Christians making pilgrimages to the Holy Land.

  6 Die Entführung aus dem Serail (The Abduction from the Seraglio), which occasioned the famous story that when the Emperor heard it, he said to Mozart, ‘That is too fine for my ears – there are too many notes’, to which Mozart replied, ‘There are just as many notes as there should be.’

  Chapter

  FOUR

  Word Spreads

  LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN the composer had come of age. More than that, he was an all-round musician, and was recognised as such. Assistant court organist to Neefe, he also played viola (!) in the court orchestra and he was the composer of several works. The complexities of the cantatas might have been regarded as unplayable, but for precisely that reason were judged to be highly impressive. The commission alone gave him an unrivalled reputation.

  Given these factors, his decision regarding the next composition seems all the more surprising. The idea was Count Waldstein’s. As a leading figure in Bonn, he was deputed to arrange a celebratory occasion to mark the end of the operatic season and the beginning of the annual Carnival in early March 1791. He decided to organise a ‘ballet’ in one of the grander rooms of the Town Hall, to be preceded by a procession of the town’s nobility dressed in traditional German costume.

  A ballet in the late eighteenth century meant in effect a series of tableaux, men (it was rare for women to take part) assuming dramatic poses on stage. For this, music was required. Waldstein asked Beethoven if he would compose it. We do not know if Beethoven received any money. It is more than likely that he did, and that it was passed to him clandestinely, for Waldstein made another request: that the music should be published under his name. And indeed it was: Musik zu einem Ritterballet (Music for a Ballet of the Knights) by Count Waldstein.

  The event duly took place, and was a magnificent spectacle. Noblemen in medieval German costume, accompanied by their ladies – who, as one observer subtly put it, lost none of their charms by donning costumes of antiquity – processed across the square to the Town Hall, where in the Ridotto room more men in appropriate medieval costume took up poses from German folk legends.

  We can get an idea of what this involved from the titles to the pieces composed by Beethoven: March, German Song, Hunting Song, Love Song, War Dance, Drinking Song, German Song, Coda. It must have been a picturesque spectacle, depicting the sort of Germanic legends a certain Richard Wagner would get hold of half a century or more later.

  The music was acclaimed, later published, and attributed to Waldstein, and it stayed that way for the best part of a century, until musicologists established beyond doubt that it was composed by the nineteen-year-old Beethoven. In fact we should not be too shocked that the music was appropriated by Waldstein. Such behaviour was not all that uncommon in eighteenth-century Europe, the most notorious example being the composition, at about this very time, of the Requiem by Mozart, in the knowledge that it was to be presented as having been composed by Count Walsegg, the nobleman who commissioned it as a memorial to his wife.

  The Ritterballet, to my knowledge, is never performed today, and is regarded as having no real significance, particularly when measured against the two cantatas that preceded it. But it does hold one distinction: it is the only composition for orchestra by Beethoven that was actually performed while he was living in Bonn.

  THERE IS A DELIGHTFUL anecdote about Beethoven that dates from around this time. It shows him in a very different light from that usually described by his contemporaries, and I cannot help believing (though there is no proof) that his unusual congeniality relates to a remarkable occurrence in December 1790, and what followed it.

  The event itself happened many miles away, and did not concern Beethoven in any direct way. But indirectly it was to have the most profound musical influence on him imaginable. In September 1790 Prince Nikolaus Esterházy, great patron of the arts, died at his sumptuous palace at Esterháza. This led to freedom from a rigorous regime of musical servitude to which his composer-in-residence had been subjected for almost thirty years.

  The composer was a certain Joseph Haydn, and he relished his sudden liberty. His name was well known in several European countries, and a friend of his, Johann Peter Salomon, who was a concert manager based in London, persuaded him to come to England. The two men could have chosen any one of half a dozen routes, but Salomon had been born in Bonn and had family there, and so they decided to stop off in Bonn.

  This was another amazing stroke of good fortune for Bonn’s young musical wunderkind, Ludwig van Beethoven. Haydn and his companion arrived in Bonn on Christmas Day 1790, and were scooped up by the musical establishment. Haydn gave his own account of what happened to an interviewer some years later. This is usually compressed into a few sentences by Beethoven biographers, but it offers such delightful insights into Haydn’s character, as well as the behaviour of Bonn’s senior musicians – including, without doubt, Beethoven – that it is worth recounting in some detail.

  On Sunday, 26 December, Haydn and Salomon were invited to attend Mass in the court chapel. No sooner had they taken their seats than the first chords sounded, and Haydn immediately recognised one of his own works. He professed himself flattered but embarrassed. The Mass over, the two men were invited into the oratory, where they were surprised to find none other than the Elector himself, Max Franz, along with a group of Bonn’s most prominent musicians.

  The Elector took Haydn by the hand and presented him to the assembled company, with the words: ‘Gentlemen, allow me to introduce you to the Haydn you all revere so highly.’ The musicians gathered round the esteemed composer, who clearly enjoyed the adulation, but retained his natural modesty. This turned to genuine embarrassment when the Elector invited him to dinner.

  The problem was Haydn and Salomon had not expected this, and had arranged for a small dinner to be served to them in their lodgings. They were committed, and it was too late to cancel. Haydn, by his own account, apologised profusely, explaining the problem, and the Elector accepted with good grace. After a suitable time, Haydn and Salomon returned to their lodgings. On entering the dining room, they discovered the small dinner had become a banquet, and there were around a dozen court musicians present. The Elector had organised a surprise party.

  If Haydn, now nearly fifty-nine years of age, was feeling any weariness, he did not say, and it seems a convivial evening ensued. Was Beethoven in the company in the chapel oratory, and subsequently at Haydn’s lodgings? We do not know. B
ut I believe it is beyond doubt. He was not only Bonn’s finest pianist, he was also far and away its most prolific composer, having written piano works, chamber works, ballet music, songs, not to mention two substantial cantatas commissioned by the Lesegesellschaft. To host a composer of the standing of Joseph Haydn in the small town of Bonn without introducing him to a homegrown young composer with an already outstanding reputation is, frankly, unthinkable.

  I shall now shamelessly indulge in speculation, but in a way that is borne out a year and a half later when Beethoven’s future musical course is decided in the most dramatic way. At the dinner, with musical conversation flowing easily and good food and wine being enjoyed, Haydn tells the company some home truths about being in the employ of Prince Esterházy, how he and his musicians were often treated no better than servants, made to wear uniforms, and eat in the kitchens with the staff. In return the musicians tell him about musical life in Bonn, and – singling out Beethoven – regale Haydn with tales of the two cantatas that were impossible to play.

  Beethoven, probably with some pique, retaliates that the pieces were by no means impossible, all that was lacking was musicians sufficiently proficient to play them. Haydn then says, ‘Look, it is a bit late now, and I have to leave early tomorrow, but I’ll tell you what I’ll do. On my return journey I’ll make sure I come via Bonn, and I would very much like to look at the cantatas, see the manuscripts. Would that be all right?’

  I confess the conversation and that last quote are drawn from my imagination, but in July 1792 that is exactly what happened, and it led to a life-changing decision for Beethoven. But that lies ahead.

  TO TURN NOW to the anecdote that finds Beethoven in a particularly benign and cooperative mood. It was recounted nearly fifty years after the event, and the date is given as the summer of either 1790 or 1791. In the summer of 1790 Beethoven was at the height of his troubles over the cantatas. The musicians were refusing to perform the first, and he was about to embark on the second, which would meet a similar fate. In the summer of 1791, though, he was basking in the afterglow of having met the great Haydn, who had expressed a personal interest in his compositions. So let us place it at the later date.

  Beethoven and a companion – likely to be either Wegeler or one of the Breuning sons – were walking in Godesberger Brunnen, a small village just outside Bonn renowned for its natural springs. They approached an older man – the source of the anecdote – and fell into conversation with him, during which he happened to remark that the church in the monastery at Marienforst, in the woods behind Godesberg, had been repaired and renovated, which was also true of the church organ, which was either entirely new or greatly improved. Beethoven’s friend suggested that they go to the church, and that Beethoven should try out the new organ. The older man joined in, and soon they were urging him to play.

  This is something Beethoven was by now used to. So virtuosic was he at the keyboard that he was forever being asked to demonstrate his skills. He quickly came to hate this, and in later years in Vienna, where the demands intensified as his fame spread, he would point blank refuse. On one occasion a titled lady went down on her knees in front of him in one of the most aristocratic salons in the city, and still he refused.

  And on this occasion in Godesberg? ‘His great good nature led him to grant our wish,’ recalls the older man. The group walked to the church, but found it locked. Undeterred, they sought out the prior, who was very obliging and had the church unlocked. Beethoven went straight to the organ, tried it out, then asked his companions to give him a theme. This they did, and Beethoven improvised on it. Then another theme, and another. Always Beethoven improvised, variations flowing out of him. His playing was such that ‘it moved us profoundly’, recalled the older man.

  Then he adds – and this is what gives the whole story an extra layer of credibility, even poignancy – workmen who were clearing up the building debris outside the church laid down their tools and came into the church to listen ‘with obvious pleasure’. That more than anything, I am convinced, is what will have persuaded Beethoven to play on and on. Here was an audience of genuine music-lovers who appreciated what he was doing, not a collection of aristocrats eager to be seen to be supporting the arts.

  So why do I bother recounting this anecdote, when it first appeared in print almost two centuries ago, and rarely finds its way into modern biographies? Because this is the real Beethoven, not the permanently choleric and uncooperative Beethoven of myth.

  ALSO RARELY MENTIONED, or given no more than a passing reference, is a trip up the Rhine that Beethoven and around twenty-five members of the court orchestra took in the late summer of 1791. Rarely mentioned because it yielded nothing in terms of composition, but with regard to Beethoven’s reputation as keyboard virtuoso it was to prove very important indeed. Also, as with the Godesberg anecdote, it shines a light into the character of the young man who was to go on to become such a titan in the world of music. So, with no apologies, I intend to recount it in detail.

  The trip, which Beethoven was to remember fondly for the rest of his life as ‘a fruitful source of loveliest visions’, was occasioned by the fact that the Elector, Maximilian Franz, as Grand Master of the Teutonic Order, was due to attend a gathering of the Order’s leadership in Bad Mergentheim, which was the official residence of the Grand Master. For his and his fellow Knights’ amusement, he decided that the court orchestra should join him there for a full month. Beethoven was among those selected to go.

  The spa town of Bad Mergentheim lies around two hundred miles south-east of Bonn, and by far the most comfortable and practical way to make the journey two centuries ago was by boat, first up the Rhine, then along its tributary the Main, and finally the smaller Tauber. It is apparent from the few details we know that the Bonn court orchestra was under no compulsion to reach Mergentheim in the shortest time possible, probably because the boat could make only slow progress sailing against the direction of the fast-flowing water.

  There is no river in Europe richer in myths and legends than the Rhine, and the portion of it that the orchestra was about to travel on, the Middle Rhine from Bonn to Mainz, with its medieval castles standing guard over villages clustered on the waterfront, is the richest in its 760-mile length.1 Anyone born and brought up on the banks of the Rhine, or close to it, learns of the legends from childhood, and passes them on to their children. We know from the Fischer memoir that there were two telescopes in the attic of the Fischer house, a small one and a large one, and that with them one could see twenty miles up river, to the hills of the Siebengebirge (Seven Mountains) stretching away from the river on the far bank. It was Ludwig’s delight to go to the attic and gaze through the telescopes, Fischer recalls, because the Beethovens had a love for the Rhine.

  It is therefore beyond doubt that Ludwig learned of the legends as a child. He would have heard of how the hills of the Siebengebirge were created by dwarves digging lakes and throwing the earth over their shoulders. And he would certainly have been familiar with the legend attached to the largest of the hills, the massive rock that stood – and stands – on the west bank of the Rhine about eight miles up river, and which he would have been able to see clearly through the telescope from the attic window.

  The Drachenfels (Dragon Rock) is named for the fearsome dragon that inhabited a cave halfway up the rock, whose lust for human flesh was such that it could be sated only by the annual sacrifice of a virgin. So the heathen people of the right bank of the Rhine each year crossed the river to the Christian left bank to kidnap the intended sacrifice. One day into their midst on a snow-white charger there rode a young Teutonic hero by the name of Siegfried. Fortuitously he happened to arrive on the day the heathen warriors returned to their own left bank with a bound and trembling girl intended as the annual human sacrifice for the dragon.

  Beethoven was to remember the trip fondly as ‘a fruitful source of loveliest visions’

  When challenged by Siegfried, the heathens explained that without such
a sacrifice the dragon would come down into their town and devour their children. Siegfried realised that only the death of the dragon would bring an end to this awful state of affairs. Clutching his invincible sword he climbed the rock, to be met by a startled dragon who had been expecting his yearly sacrifice. It reared up at the sight of Siegfried, blowing first smoke then two jets of fire from its nostrils. Siegfried struck its neck with his sword, but it merely glanced off the scaly armour-plating. But Siegfried saw that under the dragon’s neck was a soft patch of skin. He swiftly gathered up as much dry brushwood as he could hold, and when the dragon again breathed fire at him, he thrust the bundle of brushwood into the dragon’s jaws. The dry brittle wood immediately burst into flames. Roaring with pain and anger, the dragon lifted its head to shake the wood free.

  Its soft neck was exposed for an instant, and Siegfried rammed the sword home. The dragon fell to the ground, its blood draining fatally into the soil. The danger to the people was at last over.2

  The yacht carrying the court musicians would have glided past the Drachenfels within an hour, or less, of setting off from Bonn, and I can picture them clustering onto the deck to gaze in awe at the Drachenfels, and its clearly visible cave, as the bass singer Joseph Lux – elected ‘king’ for the voyage – recounted the legend in tremulous tones. Is it too fanciful to imagine King Lux gazing with trepidation at the sopranos and mezzo-sopranos, urging the men to protect and shield them, as the yacht sailed past the rock?

  Probably not, since before leaving Bonn the musicians had themselves held the joyful ritual of electing Lux ‘Great King of the Journey’. He, in turn, then handed out duties to musicians whom he appointed senior members of his regal court, the tasks becoming more menial as he progressed to the junior ranks.