by Suchet, John
Another ripple of expectant laughter, maybe even a gasp of anticipation, as Umlauf – unseen by Beethoven – made a sign of the cross over the players.
Beethoven took his place in front of the musicians, raised his arms and brought them down. To the side of him, and slightly behind, Umlauf made sure he had their attention, raised his arms and he too brought them down.
The audience fell silent as the mysterious opening chords sounded, a floating cloud of sound, a sound world they had not heard before, yielding to huge affirmative chords from the whole orchestra. They watched, and listened, as Beethoven flailed with his arms to the sounds in his head, and Umlauf directed the musicians who were playing as if their lives depended on it.
The audience fell silent as the mysterious opening chords sounded, a floating cloud of sound ...
The second movement took them completely by surprise, with its driving rhythm and totally unexpected solo section for timpani, rarely before accorded more than an accompanying role. The constantly repeated theme that emerges halfway through the movement is surely a foretaste of what is to come. By now the audience – sophisticated musically, even if not belonging to the aristocracy – knew they were experiencing something extraordinary.
The end of the second movement, quietly disintegrating before that theme is heard once more, but cut off this time, yielding to a series of final affirmative chords, brought them to their feet. The audience needed release, they needed to breathe. They leapt to their feet, shouting and applauding.
Beethoven continued to conduct the orchestra in his head. Umlauf turned to see the audience on its feet, shouts of Encore! Encore! reverberating around the hall. He made a judgement. He raised his arms for the third movement. The gentle chords from the wind calmed them, yielding to a theme of sublime gentleness on strings.
At the end of the third movement, Umlauf led swiftly into the huge discord that began the final movement, before cellos and basses gave their portentous sound to a hint of the great theme that was to come.
The bass singer was soon on his feet, and the words ‘O Freunde, nicht diese Töne!’ rang out over the audience.
Umlauf, knowing now he and the musicians were creating something extraordinary, drove the pace on, players and singers performing as if somehow knowing this was a defining moment in the history of music.
Suddenly, it all stops, total silence. A small beat on bass drum and deep wind. Syncopated dotted rhythm. Martial music. Tenor summons all forces.
In unison, in harmony, faultlessly, the music drives to its conclusion. Umlauf held it all perfectly together, singers, chorus and orchestra giving the performance of their lives.
Again, just before the end, a tremendous slowing down, almost to a stop, before full forces drive to the final flourish.
Umlauf brought his arms down for the final great chord. It was over. The audience erupted, rose to their feet, cheered and shouted, handkerchiefs and hats waved in the air. Beethoven! Beethoven! Beethoven!
Umlauf looked to his side. Beethoven, oblivious to what was happening, continued to wave his arms, conducting the orchestra he was hearing in his head. Karoline Unger, the contralto who had so berated him in rehearsal, stepped forward. Gently she touched Beethoven on the shoulder, nodded encouragingly at the bewildered face, and turned him to face the cheering audience.
At that moment Beethoven knew the gift he had given to the world.
1 Some years after Beethoven’s death the piano was presented to his great admirer Franz Liszt, who is reported never to have played it, judging himself unfit to touch the keys played by Beethoven. Later Liszt presented it to the Hungarian National Museum in Budapest, where it stands, fully restored, today.
2 This deathbed wish was granted, and further honoured when both bodies were exhumed and moved to the Musicians’ Quarter in Vienna’s Zentralfriedhof, where they lie just a few feet from each other today.
3 The music publisher Anton Diabelli, an accomplished amateur pianist, had composed a simple waltz, and asked fifty composers to compose a single variation on it. Beethoven at first refused, considering it demeaning, but eventually wrote thirty-three variations, creating his greatest set of piano variations.
4 The Philharmonic Society of London.
5 The three overtures were Die Ruinen von Athen (The Ruins of Athens), Zur Namensfeier (Name Day), and König Stephan (King Stephen).
Chapter
SIXTEEN
‘I Want to be a Soldier’
BEETHOVEN’S CREATIVE process was in full drive. Within a few weeks of the triumphant premier of his Ninth Symphony, he began serious work on the Galitzin commission for three string quartets.
This would have been remarkable if he were a much younger man in good health with no domestic problems to distract him. On all counts this was untrue of Beethoven. First, the aftermath of the Kärntnertor concert should have been a time to pause, take stock, thank the team who had worked so hard to make it possible. Instead Beethoven accused them of cheating him.
He summoned them to a lunch at the Zum wilden Mann (‘At the Sign of the Wild Man’) restaurant in the Prater, and openly accused them of withholding receipts from him. They defended themselves, pointing out that in a highly unusual arrangement Beethoven’s brother Johann and nephew Karl had actually been in charge of financial arrangements for the concert at his insistence – Johann overseeing expenses and payments, and Karl collecting audited receipts from the box office.
Beethoven persisted, insisting he had been informed by an ‘entirely credible source’ that he had been cheated out of money that was justly owed to him. His guests knew there was no reasoning with him, made their excuses and left.
Just a few weeks after this Karl, a little short of his eighteenth birthday, dropped a bombshell on his uncle. He was about to complete his first year as a student at the University of Vienna, studying philosophy and languages. He knew how badly he was doing, so badly that he was certain to have to repeat the year’s studies. He decided on a radical change of direction.
Clearly bracing himself for the storm he knew he was about to unleash, Karl wrote first in a conversation book how he would not do anything without his uncle’s consent, then scribbled a lengthy preamble admitting his new choice of career was rather strange, ‘not a common one’. Then the single word: Soldier.
Beethoven predictably exploded. Karl was the sole Beethoven of the next generation; he was an artist, and to him was accorded the highest privilege of bearing the name Beethoven. A couple of years earlier, Beethoven had instructed his pupil Czerny to give Karl piano lessons, and Czerny had reported back that the boy had no musical talent whatsoever. This did not deter Beethoven from the unshakeable conviction that Karl’s destiny was as an artist. For the time being, though, Karl had no choice but to remain at university, but the seed had been sown. Almost inevitably it was not long before Beethoven fell ill again.
Extraordinarily, unbelievably, none of this hampered Beethoven’s creativity, and by early the following year he had completed the first of the string quartets, Op. 127. Just as the three Piano Sonatas, opp. 109, 110, 111, had taken the piano sonata into new territory, the Ninth had redefined the symphony, Beethoven was now doing the same with the string quartet.
Neither he, nor anyone, had ever composed a string quartet comparable to Op. 127. The second movement was the longest he had written for string quartet. The demands on all players, particularly first violin, are extraordinary. All four players are required to play to the most exacting standards imaginable. The first violin has to execute leaps across the strings, perform demi-semiquaver runs, and stop almost off the fingerboard on the top E string. Key signatures change in mid-movement – no fewer than four times in the Adagio – with accidentals scattered like so much confetti.
A date for the first performance was set for 6 March 1825, on earlier assurances from Beethoven that the quartet would be ready in good time. It was not, of course, leaving the musicians less than two weeks’ rehearsal for the most dif
ficult piece of music they had ever been confronted with.
Shades, again, of the Ninth Symphony, but this time there was to be no happy outcome. The performance was a failure. Beethoven, now completely deaf, did not attend. His brother Johann, known as a musical ignoramus, did, and reported back to Beethoven that it was all the fault of the quartet leader, his old friend Ignaz Schuppanzigh. Johann said Schuppanzigh was tired from too much rehearsing, did not like the quartet anyway, and would rather not have been performing it.
The truth was that Schuppanzigh had been driven to his wits’ end by Beethoven’s delay in completing the piece, had indeed over-rehearsed to the point of fatigue, and would rather the date of the performance had been postponed.
Beethoven summoned his friend and blamed him entirely for the failure. Schuppanzigh stood his ground, probably intentionally angering Beethoven even more by telling him he could easily master the technical demands of the piece, but was having trouble arriving at its spirit.
It was no surprise that when the quartet was performed for a second time two weeks later, it was with a different first violinist. This time the performance was a triumph, and was repeated several times in the following days.
HOW DID BEETHOVEN react to all this tension? In the way he had done so often, with increasing frequency. He fell ill once again. This time, though, it was far more severe than before. He was suffering from his usual bad digestion and diarrhoea. He also complained of catarrh and frequent nose bleeds. Most ominously of all, he was spitting up blood.
His doctor, Anton Braunhofer – successor to the successor of Dr Malfatti, both sacked – warned Beethoven that his condition was severe, and that he risked inflammation of the bowels and ‘inflammatory attacks’ if he did not strictly follow his advice, which was to consume no wine, coffee, spirits, or spices of any kind. He gave him a medicine to swallow as well.
He was strict with his obviously restive patient, writing in a conversation book:
I can assure you that all will turn out well, but you must be patient for a while yet. An illness cannot be cured in a day. I won’t bother you much longer with medicine, but you will have to stick strictly to my dietary prescriptions, which won’t cause you to starve.
It was summer, and Braunhofer’s advice to Beethoven to leave the city concurred with his own desire to get away, and so he left once again for Baden. To begin with, the change of air did him good. Within a few days of arriving he wrote Braunhofer a letter describing his severe symptoms, but in the form of a humorous dialogue between a patient and his doctor.
As further evidence of his good humour, he added to the letter a small sixteen-bar canon, which he said he had written on a walk in the Helenenthal (Valley of Helen, west of Baden), on the ‘second Anton’s bridge’.
It is a beguiling image: the great composer in obviously bad health, but never too ill to pull a scrap of manuscript paper from his pocket and, perhaps leaning on a railing watching the stream rushing underneath the bridge, compose a piece of music.
The good humour, predictably, did not last. The weather was unseasonably cold. Beethoven complained in a note to Karl that it was so cold he could hardly move his fingers to write, adding that it was ‘practically impossible to produce anything in this cold and utterly dismal climate’.
The obvious target was Braunhofer, whose remedies were showing no signs of working. He even blamed Braunhofer for not warning him to avoid asparagus, which gave him diarrhoea after he ate it at an inn in Baden. Beethoven took his health into his own hands. He began to drink wine again – white wine diluted with water to begin with, then straight wine – and coffee (instead of chocolate which Braunhofer had recommended as a substitute). He wrote to Karl that Braunhofer was ‘narrow-minded and a fool with it’.
As a further sign of mental strain – or rather a continuing refusal to accept reality – in letters to Karl, he addressed him as ‘Dear Son!’ and signed the letter ‘Your faithful father’. Karl had now left university and enrolled in a business school, with Beethoven’s permission, probably as an attempt to induce him to forget a military career.
He visited Beethoven several times in Baden, but entries in conversation books show that his uncle’s hold over him – Beethoven’s refusal to countenance his wishes, his constant demands to know how Karl was spending his time, his continued refusal to allow Karl to see his mother, his belief that he really was Karl’s father – was beginning to wear Karl down in a serious way. He was becoming something of a ticking time-bomb.
AND YET, AND YET ... once again none of this was hindering Beethoven’s creative process. Even before the unsuccessful first performance of the string quartet Op. 127, Beethoven had begun work on its successor, which would become Op. 132.1 Now, in mid-May 1825, convalescing in Baden, he was about to write one of the most extraordinary of all his string quartet movements.
As if in final proof that Braunhofer was a fool, Beethoven’s health suddenly took a turn for the better. The fact that he was now ignoring Braunhofer’s advice, as well as having lost (probably purposefully) the medicine prescribed, was proof it had nothing to do with medical advice. No, it was divine intervention.
There are not many instances of Beethoven showing a religious side, but in his final years on occasion a degree of spirituality emerged. Now he put that to good use. He decided to compose the third movement of the string quartet as a personal offering of gratitude to God for his recovery from what he clearly believed was a life-threatening illness.
At the top of the movement he wrote: Heiliger Dankgesang eines Genesenen an die Gottheit, in der lydischen Tonart (‘Sacred Song of Thanksgiving to the Deity from a Convalescent, in the Lydian Mode’).
The Lydian Mode was an ancient musical form used in medieval church services, and in the first thirty bars of the movement Beethoven has the four strings play solid chords in perfect imitation of a church organ. It creates a most remarkable sound, and stands alone in all Beethoven’s compositions for string quartet. It then gives way to a lively section marked Neue Kraft fühlend (‘Feeling new strength’). Beethoven is describing his illness and recovery in music.
BUT MATTERS with Karl were beginning to deteriorate. Word reached Beethoven – we don’t know from whom – that Karl was disobeying the court order and secretly seeing his mother. Beethoven wrote to him from Baden, at exactly the time he was composing the Heiliger Dankgesang:
Until now it was only conjecture, though someone has indeed assured me that you have been seeing your mother in secret – Am I to experience once more this most abominable ingratitude?
And again, ten days later, still bitter:
– God is my witness, I dream only of being completely removed from you and that wretched brother and this horrible family who have been thrust upon me – May God grant my wishes. For I can no longer trust you.
Unfortunately your father
or, better still, not your father
As soon as he had completed Op. 132, he began work on the third string quartet, Op. 130, and as with the Heiliger Dankgesang, once again his personal problems found their way directly into his composition. This time it was not his health, but his agony over his nephew Karl’s behaviour.
The fifth (of six!) movements is as extraordinary in its way as the Heiliger Dankgesang. Beethoven called it Cavatina, a word usually applied to a simple, melodious, expressive air. In this case that is something of an understatement.
The first violin takes the melody, beginning with a deep B flat on the low G string, rising a sixth. It is a lift, marked sotto voce, which seems to take the soul with it. After a development, the first violin then falls a sixth. It is heartrending. When you believe Beethoven cannot increase the intensity any more, he writes pianissimo quavers for three strings, and then the first violin ... weeps. I do not know any other way to describe it.
Beethoven wrote ‘Beklemmt’ over the first violin part. It is difficult to convey the meaning with a single word. It means oppressed, anguished, tortured, overcome by grief and
heartache. It is a unique passage in all Beethoven. The first violin climbs, in quavers and semiquavers, off the beat, almost every note an accidental, interspersed with rests, sighs, then falls an octave, exactly as you do when you sob, catch your breath, then weep. The first violin climbs again, with demi-semiquavers, before another fall, more sobs. The passage lasts for just six bars, before the opening theme, with its rising sixth, resumes.
It is small wonder Beethoven’s friend Karl Holz, a violinist, said the Cavatina cost Beethoven tears in its writing, and Beethoven himself confessed that nothing he had written had so moved him and that just to hear it in his head brought him to tears.
There can, in my mind, be no doubt of the inspiration for this extraordinary writing. Beethoven realised – even if he would not admit it to himself – that he was losing Karl.
BEETHOVEN BROKE OFF writing Op. 130 to return to Vienna to attend the first performance of the earlier quartet, Op. 132. Thanks to the presence of the English conductor Sir George Smart, we have a vivid account of what happened. And thanks to the Berlin music publisher Moritz Schlesinger, who arranged the performance, we have an equally vivid account of the merriment that followed.
Schlesinger was staying in the hotel Zum wilden Mann in the Kärntnerstrasse, and it was in an upstairs room that the four musicians, along with Beethoven, Karl, Schlesinger, Smart, and a prestigious gathering of academics, assembled.
It seems the quartet was performed twice. Smart reports that the room was hot and crowded, Beethoven took off his coat, and directed the performers. He could not hear, because of his deafness, but his eye told him that one staccato passage was incorrectly played. Beethoven took the violin from Karl Holz, who was second violin, and demonstrated how he wanted it played – but played it a quarter-tone flat!