by Suchet, John
It is also probably true to say that her unfavourable reputation extended to her morals as well, though there is no direct evidence of this before her marriage. Certainly it became a real issue in later years – again, as we shall see – and, given Beethoven’s vehement opposition to acquiring her as a sister-in-law, it is probably a fair assumption to make. As far as he was concerned, the fact that she was already three months pregnant with Carl’s child before she married him was proof enough of that.
As head of the family, Beethoven no doubt tried everything he could to prevent the marriage, but it was to no avail. Carl married Johanna on 25 May 1806. Almost immediately he stopped acting as his brother’s business manager – it is not clear whether this was his decision or Beethoven’s. Little over three months later, on 4 September, the couple’s son Karl, Beethoven’s nephew, was born. This straightforward sequence of events was to have the most profound effect imaginable on Beethoven’s life.
Beethoven’s relationship with his sister-in-law began badly, and became progressively worse as the years passed. Approximately a decade later it was to lead to what can only be described as a catastrophic period in Beethoven’s life. It is impossible, at a distance of two centuries, to understand fully the complexities that were at work. A modern-day psychiatrist would require many sessions with Beethoven on the couch to try to get to the bottom of just why he disliked Johanna so intensely. Was it to mask a hidden desire for her? Was it more simply that he was envious of his brother’s success in finding a wife? Was it that he thought she was unworthy to carry the name ‘Beethoven’? We cannot know. But the vitriol he would use towards her in later years, and the extraordinary actions he would take against her, will, I have no doubt, shock readers of this book as much as they shocked Beethoven’s circle at the time.
What we can be in no doubt about is that, at the time of Carl’s marriage, Beethoven’s mental state was precarious. He was in despair over his opera – all that effort, years in fact, the struggle to compose, arguments, tension, postponements, the failure of the premiere, the rewrite, the final showdown with Braun – and now he had what he saw as a grave domestic crisis on his hands. And yet, paradox of paradoxes (no surprise with Beethoven), he was composing at a furious pace, and these were not small compositions.
The Russian Ambassador in Vienna, Count Razumovsky – an accomplished violinist who had formed his own quartet – commissioned three string quartets from Beethoven. There is evidence he actually began writing out the score of the first of these on the day after Carl married Johanna. He started serious work on a new symphony, his fourth; he was soon to complete a new piano concerto, again his fourth, and before the year was out he would compose a violin concerto. All these are gigantic works which are staples of the repertoire today.
How did he accomplish all this, given how difficult life was for him in Vienna? By leaving the city, and that was thanks to his great benefactor, Prince Lichnowsky. Lichnowsky could see the strain Beethoven was under, having himself lived through the trauma of Leonore, and being aware now of the tension between Beethoven and his newly wed brother. Lichnowsky had a country estate at Grätz near Troppau in Silesia,1 and he suggested Beethoven come away with him and spend some weeks there.
Beethoven acquiesced, and the two men left Vienna in late August for a trip that would last longer than planned, that would have a profoundly beneficial effect on Beethoven’s compositional process – and that would end in scenes of unbelievable trauma.
IT BEGAN SO WELL. Beethoven took his manuscripts with him; Lichnowsky promised him peace and quiet; he had his own quarters with piano, and he worked with renewed energy. Within days of arriving, he received news from Vienna that Johanna had given birth, and that he had a nephew called Karl. One can imagine that momentarily disturbing his peace of mind, but it certainly did not interrupt his compositional flow.
He was also in receptive enough frame of mind to agree to travel the short distance – thirty miles or so – with the Prince to the castle at Oberglogau of another nobleman by the name of Count Oppersdorff, no doubt tempted by the knowledge that the Count maintained his own orchestra. It is likely that Lichnowsky further sweetened the pill by telling Beethoven that the Count’s orchestra had been rehearsing his Second Symphony and would perform it for him. This was a calculated risk, given the wrath the Prince had incurred over his Andante favori practical joke, but it seems all went well.
Beethoven, in fact, took a great liking to the Count, and was evidently so pleased with the performance of his symphony that he went on to assign the score of his soon-to-be-completed Fourth Symphony to the Count for six months’ private use for 500 florins,2 and promised to dedicate it to him on publication. Further proof of his unusually good relations with Oppersdorff came a year or so later when the Count was evidently so pleased with the Fourth Symphony that he offered Beethoven a further 500 florins for a new symphony, on the tacit understanding that he would receive the dedication of that too. Again Beethoven agreed, but when the new work was published Oppersdorff was somewhat disappointed to discover that he was not the dedicatee. And so he might be. It was Beethoven’s Fifth.
But that is to leap ahead. Some weeks after the visit to Oberglogau the Count paid a return visit to Grätz. One evening Prince Lichnowsky entertained some French army officers to dinner. Both Beethoven and Oppersdorff were present. This was not a particularly tactful move. The French army still occupied Vienna – albeit peacefully – as well as large tracts of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, including Silesia. Lichnowsky must surely have known of Beethoven’s fury at Napoleon declaring himself Emperor of France, and would certainly have heard Beethoven venting his fury at all things French. It is not beyond imagination that Lichnowsky, along with Beethoven’s friends, would frequently have had to calm him down when spotting uniformed French soldiers in the streets of Vienna, as well as in cafés and restaurants.
It is therefore highly likely that Beethoven was a reluctant guest at the dinner, and is certain to have made his disapproval of the French clear, no doubt to the embarrassment of everyone at the table. Which makes what happened next even more inexplicable. The French officers, well aware of who Beethoven was, brushed aside any anti-French feeling he might have expressed, and asked him to play the piano for them. Beethoven was appalled. But the officers persisted, making frequent demands throughout the meal for Beethoven to play. More extraordinary still is that Lichnowsky not only made no attempt to defuse the situation but that he too urged Beethoven to play, no doubt hoping to bask in the reflected glory of having Europe’s greatest virtuoso as a guest in his house, thereby currying favour with the French. Beethoven refused again and again, but neither the officers nor Lichnowsky would take no for an answer.
‘There have been and will always be thousands of princes. There is only one Beethoven’
Finally Beethoven, his rage overflowing, stormed up from the table, hurled abuse at the company, and charged up to his room. There he bolted the door shut, while he hurriedly packed his clothes and gathered his manuscripts, stuffing them between folders. Lichnowsky was equally furious. He too hurried up the stairs, closely followed by Oppersdorff. Livid at finding the door bolted, he summoned servants, who forced the door open. Lichnowsky – all his pent-up frustration at Beethoven’s always unpredictable behaviour boiling over – rushed in, Beethoven picked up a chair, and only Oppersdorff’s timely intervention prevented serious damage and probable injury.
Oppersdorff persuaded Lichnowsky to leave Beethoven to work off his temper. Left alone, Beethoven scribbled a note on a scrap of paper: ‘Prince, what you are, you are by accident of birth. What I am, I am through myself. There have been and will always be thousands of princes. There is only one Beethoven.’
Beethoven then grabbed his belongings and in the darkness of night left the house, and walked in the pouring rain to Troppau, which was several kilometres away. From there he took the first coach he could find back to Vienna.
Once back in the city, he climbed
the three flights of stairs to his apartment. In the hall there stood a marble bust of Lichnowsky which the Prince himself had given him. Beethoven seized it and smashed it to the ground.
Now there are several versions of this story, none of them told by direct eyewitnesses, and I confess the one I have related is the most dramatic. But the source is Ferdinand Ries, who is reliable, and all the sources agree there was a violent confrontation between Beethoven and his patron. What is also true is that, soon after, Lichnowsky stopped his annuity payments to Beethoven. It is also a fact that the autograph manuscript of the ‘Appassionata’ Piano Sonata, one of the manuscripts Beethoven had under his arm, and which has survived, carries clearly visible water stains.3
There is evidence that the two men continued to meet, but less frequently, and there was a change in the relationship. Slowly Prince Lichnowsky, who had done so much for Beethoven, providing him with accommodation when he first arrived in Vienna, gaining access for him to the most elevated salons in the city, financing him, and just generally always being there for him, slipped out of Beethoven’s life.
Later Beethoven, who rarely forgot a grudge, gave orders to his servant that Lichnowsky was not to be admitted to his apartment. Lichnowsky, hurt beyond measure but undeterred, would sit in the ante-room near the door, where Beethoven would not see him, listen to the glorious sounds coming from within, then leave as quietly as he had arrived, content that he had played a part in the development of such genius.
IN THE FOLLOWING MONTHS, at the same time as coming to terms with the failure of his intended relationship with Josephine Brunsvik, he composed the work that alone ensured his immortality, the Fifth Symphony. And as his fame increased, and his works became more magisterial, so his life seemed to do the opposite, lurching forward with no clear sense of purpose or direction.
Not that the fault for this was always entirely his. The imperial court theatres were in trouble, no doubt hit by the French occupation. The blame was laid firmly at the door of Baron von Braun, and he was forced to retire. Beethoven no doubt enjoyed a certain Schadenfreude at the downfall of his old foe, and was able to take heart in the fact that the administration was put in the hands of a committee of senior patrons of the arts, including Prince Lobkowitz, who had received the dedication of the ‘Eroica’ and the joint dedication of the Fifth Symphony.
Beethoven seized the moment and penned a long letter to the committee, in essence asking for full-time employment with a regular salary, and containing a none too veiled threat to leave Vienna if his request was refused.
His timing, from the committee’s point of view, could not have been worse. In the first place they needed to turn the court theatres’ finances round, which meant putting on popular performances. Comedies, for instance, were much cheaper to stage than orchestral concerts, with more direct appeal to a wider audience. Also, with his behaviour over Leonore, Beethoven had cemented his reputation for being supremely difficult to work with. No reply from the committee has survived – it is possible they did not accord him the courtesy of one.
It seems though that Beethoven was at least promised a benefit concert. A date was set for the spring of 1807, then cancelled. It was reset for the following December, and cancelled again.
The committee spent the best part of a year trying to reverse the fortunes of the imperial court theatres, before giving up and putting in a new director, one Joseph von Hartl. We do not know if Beethoven made a direct approach to the new man, but Hartl was clearly not in a position to make any promises.
In April 1808 Beethoven directed several of his works at a charity concert in the Theater an der Wien, and he was to do so again later in the year. This is as likely to have been a deliberate attempt to curry favour with Hartl as for any altruistic motive. He was no longer looking for employment, just a benefit concert, and he was certainly in a strong position to do so. He was by far Vienna’s most productive and respected composer, even if he had his detractors. He was publishing substantial new works at a prolific rate, and was at the same time continuing to perform in the salons of the aristocracy.
But no benefit concert was forthcoming. All this, taken with the Josephine saga and Lichnowsky debacle, his brother’s appalling choice of wife, not to mention the slow inexorable loss of his hearing, meant that by the spring of 1808 he had had enough of Vienna, of musical cabals, of personal problems. He wanted to leave, go somewhere new, start again. But the question was how to do it, and where to go. He could not in his wildest imagination have come even close to predicting from where possible salvation would come.
But, before that, he decided to get away just as far as a small village north of Vienna that he had visited before. He stayed in a different house this time, but once again the peace of Heiligenstadt was exactly what his jagged nerves needed. To say that the bucolic calm of fields and pastures, the birdcalls of summer, the gently rippling stream, a sudden summer storm, then blue skies again, inspired him creatively, would be only the slightest of understatements.
Inspiring too were the inns and taverns of the villages dotted among the foothills of the Vienna Woods, such as Grinzing, Nussdorf, Unterdöbling, many with their resident groups of musicians playing the stomping dances of the country folk. In one such tavern there was a band of seven musicians. Beethoven watched, entranced, as the musicians, drinks at their elbows, would frequently fall asleep, reawaken at just the right moment, play a few notes in the right key – if their instrument hadn’t dropped to the floor – then fall asleep again.
For hour after hour he strode the open fields and wooded lower slopes of the Vienna Woods, sitting by the stream, allowing the summer rain to refresh him, always sketchbook and pencils in his pocket.
By the time he returned to Vienna he had created one of his great masterpieces, the only orchestral or instrumental work he ever composed in which he told us exactly what the music represented, what feelings it should inspire, what events it portrayed. The music is stress-free; it reflects the ordered calm of nature. The babbling stream ripples over stones and along grassy banks, the birdcalls of summer are there – nightingale, quail, cuckoo – the country folk gather for a rustic dance, the drunken second bassoon repeatedly falls asleep, waking just in time for his few notes, the dark clouds gather, unleashing a summer storm, and finally the shepherds give thanks for the return of blue skies. You can almost smell the wet grass.
‘Awakening of happy feelings on arrival in the country’, Beethoven labelled the first movement, and that set the tone for the whole. His Sixth Symphony could not have been more of a contrast to the one that preceded it. ‘No one can love the country as much as I do,’ he wrote in a letter a couple of years later. This symphony was his evocation of what he loved. He called it the ‘Pastoral’.
NO SOONER DID Beethoven arrive back in Vienna than the gloom descended on him again. No word of a benefit concert, and so no opportunity to present his new works to the public. His thoughts turned once again to leaving Vienna, going somewhere new, starting afresh. With perfect timing, an exquisite opportunity presented itself.
Beethoven was offered the job of Kapellmeister at Kassel, capital of the Kingdom of Westphalia, on an annual salary of 600 ducats. Or as Beethoven himself put it in a letter to a friend, ‘I am to be paid handsomely – I have been asked to state how many ducats I should like to have ...’
What had happened was that the High Chamberlain at the Westphalian court, Count Friedrich Ludwig Waldburg-Capustigall, either by letter or in person, conveyed the offer of the job of Kapellmeister to Beethoven on behalf of His Majesty King Jérôme of Westphalia. Or to put it another way, the universally derided and despised youngest brother of Napoleon Bonaparte, who had been stuck on the throne of a fictitious kingdom his brother had carved from the states of north-east Germany and called Westphalia, wanted to bring a bit of culture to his court and someone had mentioned the name ‘Beethoven’ to him.
Whichever view you take – and Beethoven took the former – it was highly flatter
ing, and the financial incentive seriously attractive. The duties, as spelled out by the Count, were light in the extreme: Beethoven was to play occasionally for the King, and conduct his infrequent concerts. Beyond that there were no obligations. He was to have a carriage permanently at his disposal. A further plus was that this was Germany. Kassel was around 160 miles from Bonn. Beethoven, in a sense, would be going home.
He sent word that he would accept, and a contract was prepared. What do you think happened then? The long-awaited benefit concert suddenly materialised. As if out of nowhere. Hartl told Beethoven he could have the Theater an der Wien for a benefit concert on 22 December 1808.
This symphony was his evocation of what he loved. He called it the ‘Pastoral’
There was a catch. On the same night, the long-programmed concert to raise funds for the Musicians’ Widows and Orphans Fund would take place in the prestigious Burgtheater. The city’s best orchestral players had long since been hired. To make matters worse, the organisers of the charity concert, in league with Vienna’s senior musician, Kapellmeister Salieri, threatened any Burgtheater musician who agreed to play for Beethoven with the sack.4
It was thus a motley selection of musicians, who well knew the reputation of the man they would be working with, who gathered for rehearsals at the Theater an der Wien. Not for the first time in Beethoven’s life, a musical disaster threatened.
A musical disaster was what happened, yet this was to be the single most important concert of Beethoven’s life. Just the kind of paradox with which Beethoven’s life is replete.
THE REHEARSALS went about as badly as it is possible for rehearsals to go, even by the standards of Leonore. The orchestral players, no doubt with the experience of Leonore, not to mention other encounters with Beethoven, decided to lay down ground rules. Beethoven would not be allowed to attend rehearsals, and furthermore should not conduct at the concert. Only section leaders would agree to talk to him, and if any disputes arose on which he was not prepared to give way, the players would walk out.