by Suchet, John
Heiglnstadt [sic] Ludwig van Beethoven
on 6th October
1 8 0 2 [seal]
For my brothers Carl – and
To be read and executed after my death
Heiglnstadt [sic] on 10th October 1 8 0 2 – and so I bid thee farewell – with such sorrow – to think of the hope I had when I came here, that I might be cured even just very slightly – that hope I must now realise has abandoned me completely, as the leaves fall from the trees in autumn and fade away. Thus has – thus has my hope also withered, so that it is now no more than it was when I came here – but I will go on – even that Noble Courage – which so often inspired me in those beautiful days of summer – it has gone for ever – Oh Providence – let one last day of pure joy be granted me – for so long now the innermost echo of true joy has been denied me – Oh when – Oh when Oh Divine One – shall I be able to share it again with Nature and Mankind, –Never? – – no – Oh that would be too cruel.4
The main body of the Will is written over two and a half pages, ending with signature and seal. The last part, beginning with instruction to his brothers, is written on the fourth page, but above the fold. It was clearly added as an afterthought, after he had finished and folded the document.
A straightforward Will, in one sense, leaving his effects to his brothers, but also a cri de cœur, full of self-pity one moment, defiance the next. Through it runs the single thread of his deafness. He has, finally, decided to confront it head on, to write about it, to think about it, to consider its effect on his artistic calling, to understand that for a musician it is a fatal defect. He talks about suicide, how he has considered it in the past but only his art held him back, how he holds it in reserve for the future. In his whole life, neither before or after, did he write a document of such intensely personal thoughts.
What, then, is it? One thing I am utterly convinced it is not is a suicide note. Yes, he talks about suicide, but he is clearly not about to commit it. His art, he says, saved him from taking his own life. ‘Come death when you will, I shall face you with courage.’ Not the words of a man about to take his own life. But they are the words of a man who might decide to take his own life one day. When might that be? When ‘pitiless fate determines to break the thread’. And what might that mean? We have no clear answer, but I am convinced he is saying that when the day comes when he can no longer hear his own music, and to compose has become impossible, if that day ever comes, then he will take matters into his own hands and obtain release from his ‘endless suffering’.
We know now, of course, that that day never came, that he continued to compose to within days of his death twenty-five years later. He struggled, certainly, but he was still able to compose. That points to two factors, one intangible, one more practical. The courage that he speaks of in his Will never left him, for which he, and generations of human beings, can be grateful. It further suggests that he never totally lost his hearing. Something always got through, however distorted, right to the end.
Some commentators have seen the first line of the postscript, ‘and so I bid thee farewell’, where he suddenly slips into the more familiar, and poetic, ‘thee’, as an announcement of intended suicide. But in the original German, just as in the English translation, this is entirely ambiguous. He could just as easily be referring to the village of Heiligenstadt, which is altogether less dramatic.
There are several other points of interest concerning what is known to history as the Heiligenstadt Testament. The first, and most evident, anomaly is that he does not write his brother Nikolaus Johann’s name. Those spaces are there in the original document. In fact it applies to Carl too, though he filled in the name later (it fits oddly into the space). What could this mean? Plenty, or nothing.
To take the ‘plenty’ explanation first. Both Beethoven’s brothers, when they came to Vienna, decided to be known by their second name, thus Caspar Carl became Carl, and Nikolaus Johann became Johann. Beethoven clearly did not like this. It represented a break with the past of which he did not approve. He might also have considered it pretentious, and there might have been a twinge of jealousy in that he had only one Christian name and so could not do likewise. Also, as elder brother and head of the family, they should have consulted him first. Either they failed to do so, or if they did they ignored his objections.
A straightforward Will ... but also a cri de coeur
Why, then, was he ultimately able to bring himself to write Carl’s name, but not Johann’s? Because Johann was the name of their father – the man Beethoven considered ruined his childhood, who dragged him from bed on his drunken return from the tavern and forced him to play the piano, who abused him verbally and very probably physically too by rapping him across the knuckles when he played a wrong note, who as he descended into alcoholism brought shame upon the family, whom Beethoven as a teenager had to rescue once from police jail, who made his wife’s life a misery, and from whom Beethoven had finally managed to escape, and whose death probably came as something of a relief to his eldest son.
And here was his youngest brother consciously adopting the father’s name! Probably because he knew the pain it would cause his eldest brother, and be some sort of revenge against the sibling who had inherited all the talent.
Given Beethoven’s fraught relationship with both brothers in the years to come, this explanation, dramatic, even incomprehensible though it might seem, is not all that far-fetched.
The far simpler explanation is that since Beethoven was aware his Will was a quasilegal document, he was not sure how to address his brothers, and would leave Johann’s name out until he took legal advice on his return to Vienna.
Given the family history, coupled with Beethoven’s character, I believe it is not unreasonable to subscribe to the ‘plenty’ theory.
A further point of interest is that, by Beethoven’s standards, the document is remarkably neatly written. The handwriting is quite precise, the lines narrowly but tidily spaced. On the first page, roughly A4 size, he fits in no fewer than forty-five lines, on the second page forty-three. Despite the emotion of what he is writing, the stream of consciousness concerning intimate details of his life, the writing nowhere becomes ragged. It would be tempting to say he wrote it at several sittings, but the way the sentences flow into each other suggest a single sitting as far down as the signature. This is reinforced by the single date.
There are some ink blots at the top of page two, and one or two crossings out lower down both pages one and two, but nothing that would prevent this Will being accepted in law. It is, in fact, considerably neater than most of his musical manuscripts. He is clearly taking great care to make sure the document is legally valid.
It is very possible he tried out his wording first on other pieces of paper, and then copied them onto the final version. The punctuation, and individual sentences, suggest this. By contrast, the final paragraph on the folded page is redolent with dashes – nineteen in just fifteen lines, with only a handful of commas and no full stops – making it certain this was added at the last moment in a single unprepared sitting.
The final curiosity is that, on completing it, he folded the document twice, across the centre and then lengthways across the centre again, so that it was no wider than an envelope, and hid it. He not only hid it in his bag in Heiligenstadt, he hid it when he returned to Vienna, and kept it with him, hidden, for the rest of his life. He must have remembered it and seen it each time he moved apartment – more than sixty times, including summer sojourns, in the remaining years of his life – but he never told anybody about it, never consulted a lawyer about it, never attempted to have it enacted.
Now that really is curious.
These are all fascinating details, but ultimately they pale before the most important set of inferences the Heiligenstadt Testament allows us to make about Beethoven’s life. He had, at last, come to terms with his deafness. He had confronted it, and in a sense defeated it. He was now in control of it, not the other way round.
He also no longer cared for it to be kept a secret. His deafness was now part of him. It was what he was. He was also now in control of his life. He would choose to end it when he thought fit. He alone would make that decision.
God gets barely a look in. The closest he comes is in the sentence: ‘Divine One, you alone can see into my innermost soul.’ But the word he uses is ‘Gottheit’, which properly translates as ‘Divinity’. It is more nebulous, ethereal, than ‘God’. And in the postscript he refers only to ‘Providence’ (Vorsehung), which is a spiritual power rather than a deity, and again to ‘Gottheit’.
Beethoven has not only comes to terms with, and therefore conquered, his deafness. He has taken control of his life. The Beethoven who arrived in Heiligenstadt six months earlier was to an extent a broken man. But the man who returned to the city had a new resolve. He still had much to give the world, and he was determined to go on doing that until it became impossible. He would no longer mourn for his loss of hearing. By writing the Testament he had buried it.
On returning to Vienna he said to Czerny, ‘I am not very well satisfied with the work I have done thus far. From this day on I shall take a new way.’
And take a new way he most certainly did. He was about to embark on the richest period of his life, when the works that flowed from him were not just new, and different, but unlike anything any composer had written before. Not for nothing is it known as Beethoven’s Heroic Period.
1 It has been suggested that the opening four notes of the Piano Variations, Op. 35, are taken from the first bar of Steibelt’s music, when turned upside-down!
2 Ries went on to become an admired musical administrator, and as composer he wrote dozens of pieces, including symphonies, piano concertos, oratorios and chamber pieces, none of which has remained in the repertoire.
3 A statue of Beethoven today stands outside St Michael’s Church.
4 My translation.
Chapter
EIGHT
Egyptian Hieroglyphics
BEETHOVEN, AGAINST ALL expectations – including his own – landed a job. In January 1803 he was appointed composer-in-residence at the Theater an der Wien, which, as the title implies, came with a small apartment in the theatre.
It’s worth a brief detour to explain the background to this, particularly since it will introduce into the story – albeit briefly – one of those colourful figures that the world of the arts can occasionally throw up, and who, were it not for a fortunate set of circumstances, would have disappeared without trace. Instead they achieve a certain immortality.
Vienna, at the turn of the century, enjoyed an extremely healthy theatrical life. There were several theatres that came under imperial administration, headed by Baron von Braun; the most prestigious was the Burgtheater. There were also a number of independent theatres in direct competition with them, of which the most important (to our story as well) was the new Theater an der Wien.
Crucially, the Theater an der Wien – named for the small river that ran past it to the Danube Canal – stood outside the city wall, the Bastei. It was therefore suburban, which gave it an entirely different feel from the ambience of the imperial court theatres – more relaxed, more innovative, and favoured more by ordinary suburban people, rather than the nobility.1 There were no purpose-built concert halls in Vienna as yet (London alone could boast that), and musicians had to compete with all other theatrical pursuits to secure a theatre – which is why Beethoven failed to obtain the Burgtheater for his second benefit concert.
The Theater an der Wien was built in 1800–1801 as the result of an unlikely collaboration between a wealthy businessman and a thoroughly eccentric theatre director whose elaborate and expensive productions had led to huge debts, which cost him his job at his previous theatre. The two men needed to do something quickly to establish their theatre, and they hit on works by the Paris-based Italian composer Luigi Cherubini. Just as they began to taste success, Braun travelled to Paris and signed up Cherubini exclusively to the court theatres.
And then the eccentric theatre director made the second decision of genius in his career. The first, for which the world remembers him today, was to write the libretto for Mozart’s The Magic Flute, playing Papageno in the premiere. The second was to engage Beethoven as composer-in-residence at the Theater an der Wien – all the greater stroke of genius since what he wanted was opera, and Beethoven had not as yet composed one.
Beethoven was about to embark on the most important creative period of his life to date, producing works that would echo down the centuries. To a large extent, we owe the somewhat carefree conditions in which he was able to do this to a man who was ‘a strange compound of wit and absurdity, of poetic instinct and grotesque humour, of shrewd and profitable enterprise and lavish prodigality, who lived like a prince and was to die like a pauper’ – but not before the name of Emmanuel Schikaneder became forever linked with two immortals of music.
THERE WAS A small downside to the accommodation in the Theater an der Wien that came with the job. Beethoven’s brother Carl moved in with him. We do not know which of the two brothers was the instigator of this, but given Beethoven’s antagonism towards both his brothers, it cannot have made for harmonious living. Carl was now more and more running his elder brother’s business affairs, and making enemies in the process. He even managed to upset the publisher Simrock, a friend of Beethoven from his Bonn days, who described Carl’s demands as ‘impertinent and incorrigible’.
But whatever fraternal tension there might have been in the small apartment in the Theater an der Wien, there was no stopping Beethoven’s creativity. He had now completed his Third Piano Concerto, and had composed an oratorio, Christus am Ölberge (Christ on the Mount of Olives).
An immediate bonus of his new job was a benefit concert on 5 April 1803 in the Theater an der Wien – a sort of public snub to Baron Braun and the imperial court theatres. This time he needed to do no persuading, no cajoling; the theatre was his, and he could perform any programme he wished. He did not hold back. He put together a programme so ambitious, with so little time to rehearse, it was almost doomed from the start. In fact, so ad hoc was the whole thing that the announcements in the press advertising the concert stated only that Beethoven would produce his Christus am Ölberge, the other pieces to be performed being announced later on posters.
No complete programme has survived, but we know that Beethoven intended giving his First Symphony, the premiere of his Second Symphony, the premiere of his Third Piano Concerto, and the premiere of his oratorio Christus. It is also highly likely he planned to interject some vocal pieces as well. Nothing if not ambitious. And, as was not unusual with Beethoven, preparations continued right up until the last minute.