Beethoven

by Suchet, John

  On the morning of the concert, at around 5 a.m., he summoned Ries, who gives a compelling account of what he found. Beethoven was sitting up in bed, writing on separate sheets of manuscript paper. Ries asked him what it was he wanted. He replied that he was adding trombones to the score of Christus. Ries was dumbfounded. The final rehearsal was due to begin at 8 a.m. Though Ries does not say so, he must have remonstrated as tactfully as he could with Beethoven, pointing out that it was surely too late to add an entirely new instrumental section to the orchestra. For one thing, there was no time for the copyists to write out the parts, and in any case where on earth would they be able to find trombonists at three hours’ notice so early in the morning?

  There was no stopping Beethoven’s creativity

  Beethoven was adamant: he wanted trombonists, and I imagine Ries scouring the city at dawn to find them. Find them he did, and at the performance in the evening they played from Beethoven’s handwritten manuscript sheets!

  Before that there was the rehearsal, and it was, unsurprisingly, a disaster. Beethoven drove the musicians for hour after hour, until by 2.30 p.m. they were exhausted. Fortunately Prince Lichnowsky – possibly alerted by Ries, who sensed problems – attended the rehearsal from the start, and ordered bread and butter, cold meat and wine, to be brought in large baskets. He invited the musicians to help themselves which, according to Ries, they did ‘with both hands’, re-establishing good feelings – good enough, in fact, to risk one more rehearsal of the oratorio at Lichnowsky’s urging.

  The concert began at six o’clock, but threatened to be so long that several pieces were omitted. Definitely performed were the First and Second Symphonies, the Third Piano Concerto, and Christus am Ölberge.

  The concert master of the theatre, Ignaz Seyfried, later wrote a fascinating account of the performance of the piano concerto, which gives a wonderful insight into the chaotic working mind of the towering genius that is Beethoven.

  Beethoven asked Seyfried to turn the pages for him. But, ‘as was so often the case’, says Seyfried, Beethoven had not had time to put it all down on paper. Seyfried’s blood ran cold when he looked at the piano part on the stand and saw almost nothing but empty sheets of paper. ‘At the most on one page or the other a few Egyptian hieroglyphics which were wholly unintelligible to me, scribbled down to serve as clues for him ... He gave me a secret glance whenever he was at the end of one of the invisible passages, and my scarcely concealable anxiety not to miss the decisive moment amused him greatly, and he laughed heartily at the jovial supper which we ate afterwards.’

  Which, if nothing else, demonstrates that Beethoven was capable of a sense of humour at least after the event. Seyfried lived with the memory for years to come. To this day I cannot hear the Third Piano Concerto without thinking of the hapless Seyfried and Beethoven’s ‘Egyptian hieroglyphics’.

  The good humour at the post-concert supper probably dissipated when the reviews came out. The Freymüthige found the two symphonies, and certain passages in the oratorio, very beautiful, but thought the oratorio ‘too long, too artificial in structure, and lacking expressiveness, especially in the vocal parts’. The Zeitung für die elegante Welt liked the First Symphony, but thought the Second strived too hard to be new and surprising. It also said Beethoven’s performance of the Third Piano Concerto was ‘not completely to the public’s satisfaction’. But Ries would have been pleased to read that the paper particularly liked the Seraph’s air in the Christus, with trombone accompaniment which ‘in particular makes an excellent effect’.

  Some concert-goers were harsher even than the critics, and prepared to say so publicly. Angry that the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, the most respected of the musical journals, described the Christus as having been received with ‘extraordinary approval’, even opining with remarkable foresight that Beethoven in time could ‘effect a revolution in music like Mozart’s’, a correspondent wrote to the paper flatly contradicting this. ‘In the interest of truth, I am obliged to contradict the report ... Beethoven’s cantata did not please.’

  Interestingly Beethoven himself somewhat rejected the oratorio and was later to make substantial changes to it. Possibly the criticism was offset by the fact that he made a clear profit of 1800 florins on the evening, a substantial sum. His residency at the Theater an der Wien had therefore got off to a solid financial start, even if the musical results were somewhat mixed.

  NOT ONE to learn from his mistakes, Beethoven again ran things very tight at a smaller-scale, but highly prestigious, recital just a few weeks later. A brilliant young violinist arrived in Vienna from England, by the name of George Bridgetower. Poor George Bridgetower. Rather like Schikaneder, his brush with the greatest living musician looked set to immortalise him too, but alas it was not to be.

  Bridgetower, son of an African father and Polish (or German) mother, had established a fine reputation for himself, being employed by the Prince of Wales, and remaining in his employ when he succeeded to the throne as George IV. His letter of introduction on arriving in Vienna gained him access to the highest salons, and Prince Lichnowsky introduced him to Beethoven.

  Beethoven heard Bridgetower play, almost certainly accompanying him on the piano, and was seriously impressed. A colleague of Beethoven, the Viennese violinist Ignaz Schuppanzigh (whose name will appear again in these pages), ran the summer series of concerts in the pavilion of the Augarten public park,2 north of the city across the Danube Canal. The suggestion was made – it is not clear by whom, probably Schuppanzigh – that Beethoven should compose a new violin sonata, and he and Mr Bridgetower would give it its premiere at the inaugural concert of the season on 22 May.

  Beethoven agreed. Bridgetower, having probably been forewarned, panicked. He pressed Beethoven to finish the violin part in good time so he could practise it. There was less than a month to the concert, and as far as he knew nothing had yet been written. Beethoven, realising time was short, decided to take the final movement from a sonata he had composed the preceding year, and make it the final movement of the new sonata. That much at least Bridgetower was able to work on.

  Beethoven set to work on the opening movement, beginning it with fiendishly difficult double-stopping across all four strings, possibly because Bridgetower had demonstrated he was capable of it. But the movement became ever longer and more complex. In a repeat of what had happened just before the benefit concert the preceding month, Beethoven summoned Ries at 4 a.m. and told him to copy out the violin part for the first movement.

  It was clear that the second movement would not be ready in time, and the concert was put back two days, to 24 May. The Augarten concerts were held at 8 a.m. The night before, Beethoven was still writing out the second movement. It is probable Bridgetower, fearing his reputation was about to be torn to tatters, stood over Beethoven, rehearsing as he composed.

  At the performance, in the first movement something quite extraordinary happened. In bar 18 of the Presto Beethoven had written a huge arpeggio run just for the piano, up two octaves, down two octaves, up two octaves again, with a final leap from a top note to a bass note. During this virtuosic display, the violinist can do nothing but stand and watch. But Beethoven had marked the Presto to be repeated, and in the repeat, when it came to the run, Bridgetower watched Beethoven’s fingers fly up and down the keyboard, then he fixed the violin under the chin, and imitated it on the violin.

  Beethoven looked up at Bridgetower in utter astonishment. The audience must have held its breath as Beethoven leapt up from the piano stool, ran across to Bridgetower, hugged him, shouted, ‘Noch einmal, mein lieber Bursch!’ (‘Again, my dear fellow!’), ran back to the piano, played his run, then held down the sustaining key as Bridgetower again copied it on the violin.3

  The audience was entirely won over, which was no bad thing since Bridgetower was compelled to play the second movement from Beethoven’s hastily scribbled manuscript. This he achieved with success, and the third movement, the only movement that Bridgetower had
had time to rehearse fully, was flawless.

  The performance was a triumph, so much so that Beethoven dedicated the sonata there and then to the Englishman. Sadly for Bridgetower that is not the end of the story.

  It might have been at the celebratory supper following the concert, or it might have been shortly afterwards, that Bridgetower made a mistake. He made the mistake of his life. He made an off-colour remark about a lady. Beethoven was appalled, utterly appalled, so much so that he withdrew the dedication from Bridgetower. Bridgetower tried to reason with him, no doubt arguing that it was just a joke, he hadn’t meant anything bad by it. He might also have urged Beethoven’s friends to intercede on his behalf. But it was no good. Beethoven’s mind was made up. Nobody who could say such a thing was to have a Beethoven composition dedicated to him.

  Soon afterwards Bridgetower left Vienna, and the two men never met again. Very many years later, Bridgetower was an old man living in poverty in Peckham, South London, where he was visited by a music researcher. He recounted the story of how he had lost the dedication of Beethoven’s Violin Sonata through one off-colour remark which led to an altercation over a lady.

  There are two sad codas to this story. Bridgetower died in poverty in a home for the destitute. We know this because the woman who witnessed his death signed the death certificate with a cross for her name. He is today buried in Kensal Green cemetery, west of London, his name forgotten to history.

  After withdrawing the dedication, Beethoven sent the manuscript to a French violinist living in Paris by the name of Rudolphe Kreutzer, with a dedication to him. The sonata that bears his name, the ‘Kreutzer’ Sonata, is now acknowledged as the greatest violin sonata by Beethoven, or anyone. And do you know what Monsieur Kreutzer said when he received the manuscript and examined it? ‘C’est impossible, c’est la musique du diable, on ne peut pas la jouer’, and never once performed it in public, the sonata that bears his name.

  Bridgetower lived with the knowledge of what he had lost for the rest of his life. Beethoven quickly forgot it. He was moving on to something on an altogether much larger scale.

  FIRST THERE was the matter of the opera he had without doubt committed himself to in order to secure the position of composer-in-residence. Schikaneder had just the thing: an opera based on Roman mythology to be entitled Vestas Feuer (Vestal Flame). He produced a libretto and gave it to Beethoven, who began work. He soon tired of it, finding the sentiments banal. ‘Just picture a subject from ancient Rome – with language that comes out of the mouths of our local apple-women,’ he wrote in a letter to a friend. There was no reasoning with Schikaneder, who was ‘too infatuated with his own opinion’ to allow anyone else to improve the libretto.

  So Beethoven abandoned the project, a somewhat rash move since it was probable his job depended on producing an opera that Schikaneder could stage.4 But he had other things on his mind. He had begun work on a new symphony, his Third. It was a symphony that would, quite simply, set music on a new course. It is a cliché, and usually an exaggeration, to say any one thing changed the course of any other thing. In this case it is true. Beethoven’s Third Symphony changed the course of music. We are talking here about the ‘Eroica’.

  As always with Beethoven, ideas began with fragmentary sketches and jottings, but it seems he composed the ‘Eroica’ in an intensive three-month period in the summer of 1803. This is all the more remarkable in that the work is longer, and more complex, than any symphony hitherto written by anybody. The first movement alone runs to almost 700 bars, anything between fifteen and twenty minutes in performance.

  I could spend the next chapter and a half examining the musicological innovations and surprises in the ‘Eroica’, from the utterly unexpected and startling opening two chords with the descent to C sharp in bar seven, the ‘false’ horn entry before the recapitulation in the first movement, to the strange decision to make the second movement a funeral march, labelling the third movement ‘scherzo’, literally ‘joke’, and borrowing the main theme of the final movement from the finale of his ballet The Creatures of Prometheus, composed nearly three years earlier. But true to my pledge to reach the music through the man rather than the man through the music, I will limit myself to aspects that throw light on Beethoven the man.

  Beethoven himself was in no doubt he had composed something out of the ordinary, nor were those close to him. Shortly after completing it, but before orchestrating it, he played it on the piano to Ferdinand Ries. Ries wrote to Simrock that a full orchestral performance would make ‘Heaven and Earth tremble’. Some months later Ries was at Beethoven’s side as the orchestra rehearsed it for the first time. Ries states candidly that the rehearsal was ‘horrible’. In bar 394, over extreme pianissimo (ppp) first and second violins, the lone horn enters with the opening motif, before the full orchestra crashes in fortissimo for the recapitulation.

  Ries, assuming the horn player had mistimed his entry, said, ‘Can’t the damned horn player count? That sounded dreadful!’ Beethoven looked witheringly at Ries and muttered that the horn player had played exactly what he had written. Ries looked embarrassed and kept quiet. He wrote later that he had come pretty close to receiving a box on the ear, and that Beethoven didn’t forgive him for a long time. That horn entry has exercised musicologists and put the fear of God into horn-players ever since.

  By far the most illuminating aspect of the ‘Eroica’, in so far as it throws light on Beethoven’s character, is its dedication – or, rather, non-dedication. Beethoven had made no secret of his admiration for Napoleon Bonaparte, a man of the people who had risen through the ranks and was now, as First Consul, leading the people of France in a new era of liberty, equality and brotherhood, following the French Revolution. Indeed, he approved of events in France to such an extent that he had spoken openly of leaving the aristocratic stuffiness of Vienna for good and going to live in Paris.

  Ferdinand Ries said Beethoven considered Napoleon as great as the greatest consuls of ancient Rome. This is conjecture, but I can see his friends telling him to keep his voice down in taverns and restaurants as he extolled the virtues of Napoleon and France, Austria’s enemy, at the same time knowing that any spies or government agents who might be within earshot would know this was just the eccentric musician who was losing his hearing – he was no harm to anyone.

  At what stage Beethoven linked his new symphony with Napoleon is not clear, but he undoubtedly had Napoleon in mind as he composed, because when he had completed the autograph manuscript, he had a fair copy made, which he intended forwarding to Paris through the French Embassy. Was it intended as a gift for Napoleon himself? We don’t know, but it’s quite possible, since Beethoven wrote at the top of the title page, ‘Buonaparte’, and at the extreme bottom, ‘Luigi van Beethoven’.5 He probably intended to write the title of the piece in the space between.

  In late May 1804 Ferdinand Ries recounts how he went to see Beethoven and gave him the news that a few days earlier, on 20 May, Napoleon had proclaimed himself Emperor of France. Beethoven flew into a rage, shouted out, ‘Is he then, too, nothing more than an ordinary human being? Now he, too, will trample on all the rights of man, and just satisfy his own ambition. He will exalt himself above all others and become a tyrant!’ He stormed over to the table on which the fair copy of the ‘Eroica’ score lay, snatched up the title page, tore it in two, and threw it on the floor.

  But he did not entirely let go of his admiration for Napoleon. The title page of the copyist’s score reads: ‘Sinfonia grande/intitolata Buonaparte/del Sigr/Louis van Beethoven’. Still, though, he could allow his distaste for what Napoleon had done to overwhelm him. In a further fit of temper, he scratched out the name ‘Buonaparte’ with such force that there is a hole in the paper! And still he could not make up his mind. In faded pencil below his own name, he wrote ‘geschrieben auf Bonaparte’ (‘written on Bonaparte’). He really could not – and never did – make up his mind about the Corsican. What he most certainly did do, though, was abandon an
y serious desire to go and live in Paris.

  IF THIS behaviour conforms to the irascible Beethoven of legend, it can perhaps be mitigated slightly by the unfortunate turn of events that occurred at this time. The man Beethoven disliked so much, Baron Braun, fed up with the competition provided by the Theater an der Wien, bought it. In short order he sacked Schikaneder and terminated Beethoven’s contract. With the loss of his job, the composer lost his apartment too.

  Beethoven moved into an apartment in the same building as his good friend Stephan von Breuning, but Stephan suggested that he move in with him, to save rent. This Beethoven did. But Stephan soon had good reason to regret his offer. Apparently due notice had not been given to the previous landlord, thus incurring a penalty. At the dinner table in Stephan’s apartment, Beethoven accused his friend of being entirely responsible. Stephan, appalled, defended himself. Beethoven, in a sudden overwhelming rage, stood up at the table, knocking over his chair, stormed out of the apartment, and went to live elsewhere.

  There would, before too long, be a full reconciliation – Beethoven, as so often, having been utterly belligerent, was then overwhelming in his remorse – but it would not be the last time Beethoven would cause a severe rift with his long-suffering and loyal friend.

  Beethoven’s unpredictability was now well known among his circle, and on the whole they bore it with good grace since they recognised that a genius such as his could not come without flaws. But he most certainly did test their loyalty, and these were not just casual friends but people without whose help he could barely have survived.

  Prince Lichnowsky had been paying Beethoven an annuity of 600 florins since 1800, purely out of the goodness of his heart. Ferdinand Ries was at Beethoven’s beck and call, as we have seen, at all hours of the day and night. Perhaps two men who knew the composer so well were slightly foolish to have decided to play a practical joke on him, but that is what they did, and they suffered the consequences.