by Suchet, John
There was a certain Jeanette d’Honrath, from Cologne, a friend of Eleonore who would come to Bonn and stay with her. Wegeler describes her as ‘a beautiful, vivacious blonde, of good education and amiable disposition, who enjoyed music greatly and possessed an agreeable voice’. She was clearly well aware of Beethoven’s attraction to her, because she used to sing him a teasing little song, of which the words lamented her being separated from him, and being unable to prevent this, which was too hurtful for her poor heart. We do not know how Beethoven reacted to this. Suffice it to say she went off and married a soldier who later rose to the rank of field marshal.
Then one Fräulein von Westerholt, whom Beethoven took on as a pupil and with whom he fell in love with such a passion that Wegeler discreetly calls her just ‘Fräulein von W.’ and Romberg was telling tales of his friend’s unrequited love forty years later. Fräulein von Westerholt became Frau von Bevervörde.
Beethoven and his friends frequented a tavern near the town hall in Bonn called the Zehrgarten, run by a certain Frau Koch, assisted by her beautiful daughter Babette. It is certain that Beethoven was attracted to her. Whether he tried to pursue this we do not know, but if he did he was clearly disappointed, since he wrote from Vienna shortly after arriving that he was hurt she hadn’t replied to his letters.
It was around this time that an incident occurred that perhaps best – and most painfully – sums up Beethoven’s lack of success with girls.
One evening he was in a restaurant with a number of the younger members of the court orchestra. There was a particularly attractive young waitress, and they persuaded her to tease Beethoven and flirt with him. This she did (we are not told how), and Beethoven reacted with ‘repellent coldness’. They encouraged her to flirt more. Finally Beethoven lost patience and ‘put an end to her importunities with a smart box on the ear’.16
‘You have been constantly and most vividly in my thoughts...’
This merits slightly closer examination. Why would his colleagues do this, if they did not already know of his gaucheness with girls? Had some of them previously witnessed his attempts at seduction? If so, the attempts must have failed. Clearly alcohol was flowing when they put the waitress up to her antics, but that would simply have exaggerated what they all knew already – that Beethoven was pretty hopeless when it came to girls.
More importantly, can we really believe that a twenty- or twenty-one-year-old Beethoven would strike a girl? Or is the teller of the tale merely using a euphemism? We cannot be sure. But this was clearly no simple prank. It was calculated to upset Beethoven, and upset him it did. It must also have deepened a certain self-loathing he is bound to have had over his inability to acquire a girlfriend.
Which leads us back to Eleonore von Breuning, Lorchen as she was known, and the speculation I shall now indulge in. I am assuming that in order to have his autograph book signed, Beethoven went to the Breuning house on the Münsterplatz with which he was so familiar. He found Stephan out or away, but Lorchen was there, alone. He asked her to sign his autograph book.
This she did, choosing to write three lines by the German poet and philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder. They read:
Friendship with that which is good
Grows like the evening shadows
Until the sunshine of life finally sinks.
She signed it: Bonn, 1 November 1792, your true friend Eleonore Breuning.
Hardly an overwhelming declaration of affection, in fact bordering on the formal. Compare this with a birthday card she presented him with one year earlier. Two four-line verses wishing him happiness and long life, and in return asking from him, her piano teacher, kindness, patience and favour. She drew round the verses a garland of flowers, and signed it with her pet name, Lorchen.
What had happened? I am convinced Beethoven fell in love with Lorchen very soon after beginning to teach her. I believe that, at some point in his teenage years, he expressed this to her, and that later – in between the birthday card and the autograph book – he put his feelings into action with an attempted kiss, which she rejected.
Now, alone in the house with her, about to leave for Vienna, he made – I believe – one more attempt to show his affection. I imagine he made an ungainly lunge at her, which she again rejected and which left her seriously upset.
How else to explain the language he used in a letter to her written a full year after arriving in Vienna?
Although it has been a year since you have heard from me, you have been constantly and most vividly in my thoughts, and very often I have conversed in spirit with you and your dear family, though frequently not as calmly as I should have wished. For whenever I did so I was always reminded of that unfortunate quarrel. My conduct at that time really was quite detestable. But what was done could not be undone. Oh, what I would give to be able to blot out of my life my behaviour at that time, behaviour which did me so little honour, and which was so out of character for me ... It is said that the sincerest repentance is only to be found when the criminal himself confesses his crime, and this is what I have wanted to do. So now let us draw a curtain over the whole affair.
Eleonore, it seems, was prepared to forgive him, to an extent. She sent him a hand-knitted neckcloth (he had asked her to send him something made by her hands). But he is still tortured by guilt, no doubt made worse by the fact that he now knew that Eleonore had formed a close friendship with his friend Wegeler, and that the two would soon be married.
The beautiful neckcloth, your own handiwork, came as a lovely surprise to me ... But it also made me sad, awakening memories of things long past. Also your generous behaviour made me feel ashamed. Indeed I could hardly believe you would think me still worth remembering ... I beg you to believe, my friend (please let me continue to call you friend), that I have suffered greatly, and am still suffering, from the loss of your friendship ... I know what I have lost and what you have meant to me. But if I were to attempt to fill this gap, I would have to recall scenes which you would not be happy to hear about, and I would not be happy to describe.
I rest my case.
The most important entry in Beethoven’s autograph book, without question, is that written by the man who had done more to further Beethoven’s musical ambitions in Bonn than any other, Count Waldstein. In fact his entry has earned him a certain immortality. For the first time in Beethoven’s life, his name is linked in writing with music’s two greatest contemporary names (though the reference to Haydn is a trifle barbed).
Dear Beethowen! [sic]
You journey now to Vienna in fulfilment of your long frustrated wishes. The Genius of Mozart is still in mourning and she weeps for the death of her pupil. With the inexhaustible Haydn she has found refuge but no occupation. Through him she now wishes to be united with someone else. With persistent hard work you shall receive: Mozart’s Spirit through Haydn’s Hands.
BEETHOVEN LEFT BONN at six o’clock on the morning of Friday, 2 November (the morning after the encounter with Eleonore von Breuning), carrying a large amount of musical scores, finished and unfinished, and little else. The journey was not without danger. At one point the coach driver whipped the horses into a gallop and drove right through the Hessian army.
The coach drove south along the river, turning east at Ehrenbreitstein, the home town of Beethoven’s mother. He would certainly have taken a last look at the Rhine, expecting to see it again in six months or a year.
He never saw the Rhine, or Bonn – or, indeed, Eleonore von Breuning – again.
1 The Middle Rhine was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2002.
2 In another version of the legend, the chosen virgin stood naked and trembling in the mouth of the cave, suddenly holding the crucifix round her neck up to the dragon, which took fright, reared, and plunged into the swirling waters below – all without Siegfried’s assistance.
3 This description dates from around ten years earlier, but reflects the kind of vessel that plied the Rhine.
4 The legend that
treasure was cast into the Rhine was taken and used by Richard Wagner in his epic sequence of operas, Der Ring des Nibelungen.
5 As recently as January 2011 a barge carrying 2400 tonnes of sulphuric acid capsized close to the Loreley, blocking the river. Two crew members lost their lives.
6 Today there are markers in the river to indicate the treacherous shallows, and Rhine pleasure-boats helpfully play a tenor voice singing the song of the Loreley – words by Heinrich Heine, music by Friedrich Silcher – as the boat passes the rock. A statue of Loreley, naked and with her legs enticingly entwined, stands on an island in the river just north of the rock, and a rather unprepossessing statue of her sits outside the tourist centre on the summit of the rock, mercifully not visible from the river below.
7 It was not until a century or so later that a navigable passage was blasted out of the rock.
8 One of the most picturesque towns on the Rhine, Rüdesheim is famous today (though postdating the Bonn musicians’ trip by a century) for its production of Asbach Uralt brandy.
9 We do not know what rank he was promoted to. Waiter?
10 The palace was almost completely destroyed during the Second World War, but has been faithfully restored. Even today it is impressive, and is likely to have been much more so when Beethoven and his colleagues saw it.
11 A Mannheim pianist, regarded as the finest virtuoso of his generation.
12 Alexander Wheelock Thayer, The Life of Ludwig van Beethoven.
13 The orchestra apparently rehearsed one of the two cantatas Beethoven had composed following the death of the Emperor, and given that they considered both unplayable, it is possible there might have been a little tension in the air.
14 Bad Mergentheim, proud of its young visitor, today holds a regular Beethoven Festival, and conducts walking tours of locations and buildings dating back two centuries.
15 In later years he would be regarded in Vienna as a finer piano virtuoso than Mozart.
16 Thayer (see above), who recounts this, does not name his source(s).
Chapter
FIVE
Impressing the Viennese
VIENNA, CAPITAL CITY OF the Holy Roman Empire, seat of the Holy Roman Emperor, formal, correct, proper. Into its midst there arrived in November 1792 a young man just one month short of his twenty-second birthday, from Bonn in the Rhineland several hundred miles to the northwest, who had never worn a wig in his life, let alone a powdered one, whose clothes were ill fitting and in need of repair, and whose accent was rough and harsh on the sophisticated ears of the Viennese.
And what of the city in which he had arrived? At the crossroads of Continental Europe, Vienna could lay claim to being Europe’s most exotic city. Less than a decade before Beethoven’s arrival, a traveller had written that the streets of Vienna teemed with ...
Hungarians in their close-fitting trousers, Poles with their flowing sleeves, Armenians and Moldavians with their half-Oriental costumes, Serbians with their twisted moustaches, Greeks smoking their long-stemmed pipes in the coffee-houses, bearded Muslims with broad knives in their belts, Polish Jews with their faces bearded and their hair twisted in knots, Bohemian peasants in their long boots, Hungarian and Transylvanian wagoners with sheepskin greatcoats, Croats with black tubs balanced on their heads.
And everywhere there was music. It went from the very highest social strata to the lowest. In the 1790s every member of the Emperor’s immediate family had taken music lessons and was proficient either on an instrument or in singing. The late Emperor himself was capable of directing an opera from the harpsichord, with his sisters singing the main parts and performing in the ballet sequence. There was a first-class court orchestra, court choir, and court opera company. The same traveller wrote:
One cannot enter any fashionable house without hearing a duet, or trio, or finale from one of the Italian operas currently the rage being sung and played at the keyboard. Even shopkeepers and cellar-hands whistle the popular arias ... No place of refreshment, from the highest to the lowest, is without music. Bassoonists and clarinettists are as plentiful as blackberries, and in the suburbs at every turn one alights upon fresh carousing, fresh fiddling, fresh illuminations.
Vienna could lay claim to being the most easygoing, even frivolous, city in Europe (a mantle that Paris would assume in later decades), where enjoyment came before anything else. An English traveller wrote that ‘good cheer is pursued here in every quarter, and mirth is worshipped in every form’.
A famous Viennese motto was that ‘matters are desperate, but not serious’. There was street entertainment, dancing was everywhere, and cafés and Weinstuben were full late into the night. Prostitution was rife, and if the Emperor himself is to be believed, reached into every corner of the city. When it was proposed to him that brothels should be licensed, he replied, ‘The walls would cost me nothing, but the expense of roofing would be ruinous, for a roof would have to be constructed over the whole city.’
Another British visitor neatly caught the twin themes that ran through Vienna, when he wrote, ‘No city can at the same time present such a display of affected sanctity and real licentiousness.’
There was, however, a dark side to the city. Just as, a century later, the Viennese would waltz towards the oblivion of the First World War and the end of the seemingly indestructible Habsburg dynasty, so in the 1790s the carousing masked deep fear and tension. No one, though, could have foreseen that within a few short years the Holy Roman Empire and its Emperor would have been consigned to historical oblivion by a certain Napoleon Bonaparte.
Three years earlier the people of Paris had invaded the Bastille, and the French Revolution had begun. Three months before Beethoven’s arrival in Vienna, the French King had been found guilty of treason, and would mount the scaffold in January of the following year. Before that year was out, his Queen would follow him. To the people of Vienna she was not Marie Antoinette, but Maria Antonia, youngest daughter of the ‘mother’ of their nation, the great Empress Maria Theresa, and they were aware of how she had been vilified by the French, who called her the ‘Austrian whore’.
What had seemed impossible – the downfall of the oldest hereditary monarchy in Continental Europe – had happened. How safe was the Habsburg Emperor in Vienna? As the French Revolutionary Army under its inspired young commander began to rampage across Europe, the threat became ever more real. Time and again Austria entered into alliances with other European powers to take on Napoleon; time and again it suffered humiliating defeat. The old officer class of the Habsburg Empire, the cavalry still wielding lances, were no match for the revolutionary cannon of the French.
When words were dangerous, which commodity was safest of all? Music.
So outward frivolity masked an underlying tension. The least-safe commodity in Vienna was words. Increasingly spies proliferated, ears pricked in cafés and taverns, and above all in the back of horse-drawn fiacres. And when words were dangerous, what was the commodity that was safest of all? Music. That is how Vienna became Europe’s capital city of music.
Beethoven was to live in Vienna for just over thirty-four years until his death. For the first half of that time, roughly, Vienna was a city at almost permanent war; for the second half it was what today would be called a police state, as Foreign Minister and later Chancellor Metternich clamped down on political freedom.
Cataclysmic events were taking place across Europe. Beethoven absorbed the drama, the tension, the danger, and it all left its mark on his music.
BEETHOVEN’S LIFE in Vienna began in the humblest of ways. He was given an attic room in a house owned by a Viennese aristocrat who was a distant relative of Count Waldstein. His name was Prince Karl Lichnowsky, and he was no ordinary aristocrat. He happened to be one of the wealthiest in the city, and one of the greatest patrons of the arts, in particular music. His salon was home to the leading artists of the day.
Initially, though, Beethoven was on his own. One can almost sense his loneliness – coupled undoubtedly
with a feeling of freedom – as he made a shopping list days after his arrival: ‘Wood, wig-maker, coffee ... overcoat, boots, shoes, piano desk, seal, writing desk ...’
He was aware too that he would have to cut a figure in keeping with the elevated class that he hoped to penetrate, but that his small allowance from the Elector would be sorely stretched. Another shopping list reads: ‘Black silk stockings, 1 ducat. 1 pair winter silk stockings, 1 florin 40 kreutzers. Boots, 6 florins. Shoes, 1 florin, 30 kreutzers.’ One suspects these domestic issues were a distraction from the real task at hand: to become a part of the sophisticated, very formal, very aristocratic, musical scene in Vienna.
He began lessons with Haydn immediately, and then six weeks after arriving he received the worst possible news from home – or what should have been the worst possible news. On 18 December his father died.
There is no reference to this sad event, as far as I can tell, in anything he said or wrote down at the time, and no indication of any inner struggle over whether he should return to Bonn for the funeral. Maybe the fact that central Europe was at war made the journey inadvisable. I suspect, though, it merely hardened his resolve to get on with his new life without interruption. He did not return. It was a symbolic putting of the past behind him. His new life as professional musician in Vienna had begun.