Beethoven

by Suchet, John

  Beethoven realised – even if he would not admit it to himself – that he was losing Karl

  This is a fascinating little detail. We know Beethoven took violin lessons from Ries’s father Franz as a teenager in Bonn, but evidently did not reach a very high standard, and I am not aware of any other evidence of him playing violin in later years. The small audience must have looked on bewitched, to see the great composer, now profoundly deaf, in effect conducting his string quartet, even playing a passage.

  Probably because of this interrupted first performance, the decision was made to play the quartet a second time – the full forty-five minutes – presumably without interruption. Smart tantalisingly reported only that those present paid Beethoven ‘the greatest attention’, as you would expect them to do.

  After the audience had departed, Schlesinger ordered a meal and wine to be served in the private room for the small gathering of himself, Beethoven, Karl, and the musicians. Beethoven took out a conversation book, put it on the table, and almost all contributed to it – unusually, it includes a written comment by Beethoven himself. Thanks again to Schlesinger, the conversation book has survived, and it gives fascinating insight into a post-performance meal involving a great composer and his colleagues.

  The remarks mostly are flippant comments by a group of men relaxing, and all the more intriguing for that. Schuppanzigh, who had played first violin, is frequently referred to as Falstaff, on account of his girth. Holz, whose name means ‘wood’ in German, which Beethoven punned on frequently in notes and letters, is called ‘the wooden friend’.

  The Italian double-bass virtuoso, Domenico Dragonetti, who had so impressed Beethoven many years earlier, apparently refused to attend the first performance of the Ninth Symphony in London, and receives a sound pasting from Holz: ‘Dragonetti demanded too much money for his participation, and said Beethoven had written the entire Symphony just for him.’

  One can imagine Beethoven reading this and laughing out loud at Dragonetti’s presumption. The great Italian composer Cherubini – a very tall man, it seems – ‘has so much regard for a certain Beethoven, that if one mentions his name, Cherubini grows even taller out of respect –’ Beethoven is certain to have chuckled again.

  The music publisher Tobias Haslinger (who was not present) is teased for having a name similar to the title of Handel’s oratorio Il Ritorno di Tobia. Schlesinger says, ‘I told Tobias today, Beethoven will immortalise you and the Paternostergässl [the street where the publishing house was located].’

  Beethoven at this point reached forward for a pencil, and scribbled, ‘Tobias confided in me today that you are also giving the Quartet to [the publisher] Steiner.’

  It is not long before the men’s writing becomes a little slapdash, and their words no doubt slurred, as the wine takes hold, and no surprise that a group of men becoming drunk start to talk in ribald terms about women.

  SCHUPPANZIGH: I asked Czerny whether he had never fallen into a hole without hurting himself.

  HOLZ: Also comical, like Falstaff.

  SCHUPPANZIGH: A slovenly fellow. A whore-monger ... He is saying that Mozart drooled over [Barbara] Auernhammer’s bosom, because she was the most delightful sweetie he could find.

  Beethoven’s reaction is not recorded. I can see much male laughter and joshing, the language becoming even cruder, for that reason not written down, and the great composer joining in the laughter as he drank more wine.

  IF THAT IS how it was, it was a fleeting moment of joviality for Beethoven. He had a major domestic problem, one of his own making. Before leaving for Baden back in May, Beethoven had given notice on his Vienna flat, and done nothing about finding new lodgings. He left his brother Johann to clear his things out. He received the newspaper in Baden, and despite being fully occupied with the string quartets, found time to scour the columns for a vacant apartment. Whenever he found one, he summoned the hapless Karl down to Baden, gave him the details – or sent the details to him in Vienna – and told him to go and look, and let him know if it was suitable.

  He found an apartment in the Ungargasse, told Karl to tip the caretaker to hold it for him, but it seems it came to nothing. He dispatched Karl to look at other apartments. There was evidently one that took Beethoven’s fancy, over which Karl had evidently failed to act, because Beethoven sent him a note saying, ‘The apartment was in the newspaper again on Tuesday. Was there really nothing you could have done, not even through someone else?’

  To describe Beethoven’s lifestyle as peripatetic is something of an understatement. In thirty-five years in Vienna he moved over thirty times, rarely staying at one address for more than a few months. If you include his lengthy summer stays away from Vienna, he had well over seventy addresses in all.

  There were, certainly, instances of him being expelled from a lodging because of complaints from other residents about his habit of working through the night, pounding on the piano keys to try to hear his music, banging on the apartment walls. He had to leave one apartment after getting in a stonemason to knock a hole in a wall and install a window to give him a decent view, without permission from his landlord. Other residents demanded to know why they couldn’t do the same. More often, though, he simply became restless and wanted a change of environment.

  So when he vacated his apartment in May, nobody was surprised. Karl, though, clearly resented the constant summonses to Baden, and being given the onerous task of finding new lodgings for his uncle.

  An apartment was found, possibly the one referred to by Beethoven in his petulant note to Karl. It was a four-room apartment with servants’ quarters on the second floor of a large building that was once home to an order of Benedictine monks from Spain. It stood outside the Bastei and the largest room had two windows looking out across the green Glacis towards the city wall.

  The apartment had one unexpected bonus. It was directly opposite another apartment block, the ‘Rothes Haus’ (‘Red House’), where his old friend Stephan von Breuning lived, and where, many years before, Beethoven had briefly lived with him, an arrangement that had ended with the heated argument that had led to their estrangement.

  Stephan lived there now with his wife and two children, and one day in August 1825, when Beethoven was in Vienna for the performance of his string quartet Op. 132, purely by chance – in an incident reminiscent of his reconciliation with his brother Carl some time before – Beethoven was walking along a street just outside the Bastei, head down, and probably quite literally bumped into Stephan and his young son Gerhard.

  Gerhard, whose memoirs2 written many years later provide a unique and intimate insight into Beethoven’s last years, recounts that a joyful reunion took place, and good relations were once more finally restored between the two men whose friendship dated back to their childhood years.

  Beethoven moved into the apartment in the Schwarzspanierhaus (‘House of the Black-Robed Spaniard’) in mid-October 1825. No one could have foreseen it, but it was to be his final home, and the place of his death.

  HIS ACTUAL DEMISE might not have been foreseeable, but there was no disguising his worsening, even pitiful, condition. His behaviour, too, although always eccentric, was now seriously worrying.

  Karl resisted being seen out in the street with his uncle, who would wave his arms wildly while talking unnecessarily loudly, who couldn’t hear what was said to him and insisted on being shouted at, whose clothes were inappropriate to the season – heavy coat in summer, lightly dressed in winter – and in need of repair. Street urchins would follow, and taunt him.

  Stephan’s wife related that Beethoven’s animated gestures, his loud voice, his ringing laugh, and his indifference to whoever might be near by, made her ashamed to be seen out with him because people would take him for a madman.

  Beethoven clearly took a liking to Constanze von Breuning, because he frequently invited her in for a coffee. She always politely declined, because – according to her son – she found his domestic habits rather unappealing. He had a
habit of spitting; his clothes were dirty, and his behaviour extravagant. He was aware he was not overly attractive to the opposite sex, because he told her he longed for domestic happiness and greatly regretted that he had never found a wife.

  Constanze had reason, even, to take exception to Beethoven’s inappropriate behaviour. On one occasion she left the Rothes Haus for the rather long walk to take the waters at the Kaiserbad on the Danube. Beethoven – who might well have been watching through the windows on the back of his apartment – joined her, and insisted on accompanying her for the whole way.

  She spent about an hour in the bathhouse, and was rather surprised to find Beethoven waiting for her outside to accompany her home. This would have been difficult for her, given Beethoven’s eccentric and extravagant behaviour, if he had been an unknown individual, but it is true to say that he was the most famous man in Vienna. Important personages, musicians, admirers came from all over Europe in the hope of meeting him. One even came especially from Quebec. Beethoven was world famous. It is likely Constanze’s walk to the baths and home again was constantly interrupted, to her embarrassment.

  If his behaviour was becoming increasingly bizarre, his physical condition now shocked those who knew him. He was clearly unwell. His stomach was distended and his ankles swollen. He was, in late 1825, approaching his fifty-fifth birthday. Friends remarked that he suddenly looked much older and his complexion had become permanently sallow. We can assume that his old foes – indigestion, colic, irregular bowels – were causing him increasingly acute problems.

  Though the disease was not understood at the time, and with the caveat that post-diagnosis, particularly at an interval of two centuries, is dangerous, it is probably true to say that Beethoven was suffering from terminal cirrhosis of the liver.

  The person closest to him, who might be expected to care for him and tend to his needs, was his nephew, his ‘son’, Karl. But Beethoven had by now thoroughly alienated the young man, aged nineteen by the end of 1825.

  It was nearly a decade since Karl had lost his father and the nightmare of the prolonged court case had begun. Ever since, he had witnessed the conflict between his uncle and his mother. He had been a pawn in their custody struggle. He had suffered physically with a hernia, and there were even reports of violence in the aftermath of his operation. Wearing a truss and in considerable pain, he had been forced by Beethoven to take a strenuous walk with him in the Helenenthal outside Baden.

  Exhausted, bleeding from his wound, he had taken to his bed, where Beethoven had continued to berate him. He snapped, lashed out, cutting Beethoven’s face.

  Beethoven’s physical condition now shocked those who knew him

  When he had run away to his mother, Beethoven had called the police to have him returned. He was suffering frostbite at the time. In living with his uncle, in his early teens, he had had to survive in the domestic chaos that was Beethoven’s life. One can only imagine what mealtimes were like, or when they were. Beethoven might have employed a cook, but none lasted long.

  It was as if Beethoven refused to allow Karl to make a single decision for himself, not least over the matter of wanting to join the army. Karl had no desire to enrol in the university, no wish to go to business school, no ambition to learn music. He wanted to be a soldier. But Beethoven was not having it.

  There was no let up. Summoned to Baden time and again, his life interfered with and his schedule disrupted, ordered to find lodgings; he was being used more and more by Beethoven to run his domestic affairs. His professional affairs too. Possibly as a further inducement to Karl to follow a musical career, or more likely simply because he was mistrustful of anyone outside immediate family, Beethoven asked Karl to write to publishers, copy musical parts, buy him essential equipment such as manuscript paper, quill pens and pencils.

  If Karl had been ten years older, and his life free of tension, he might have relished living in the same apartment as the world’s greatest composer, assisting him in practical matters. Instead he was turning into a bitter, pathetic, resentful young man. It is not an exaggeration to say Beethoven was destroying the person he loved most in the world.

  We know now, at a distance of two hundred years, that Beethoven at this time was composing his greatest works, that this was no ordinary composer, this was one of the greatest creative geniuses who ever lived. It can be argued that allowances could be made for his behaviour.

  But Karl did not see it that way. And things were about to get a great deal worse.

  Beethoven wanted to know exactly what Karl was up to. He knew Karl was clandestinely seeing his mother, and he probably realised he was powerless to stop it. But what else was Karl spending his time doing? Beethoven had a weapon: he held the purse strings. He frequently gave Karl money – in fact he had gone out of his way to ensure legally that his estate in its entirety would go solely to Karl after his death. He wanted the boy to live comfortably, but to live according to his, Beethoven’s, precepts.

  So he took action. He asked his young friend, the violinist Karl Holz, who was only seven years older than Karl, to spy on him, and report back. Holz, it seems, not only saw nothing wrong in this, but pursued his instructions with some relish. We can, in this instance, be grateful for Beethoven’s deafness, which necessitated the use of conversation books, for giving us a glimpse into these surreptitious activities.

  Holz reported back to Beethoven:

  I have lured [Karl] into going to a beer house with me, because I [wanted] to see if he drinks too much, but that does not appear to be the case. Now I will invite [him] at some point to play billiards, then I will be able to see immediately from how good he is whether he has been practising a lot –

  Holz, being that little bit older, took it upon himself to offer Karl a little moral advice:

  I told him also that he is not supposed to go too often into the Josephstadt [suburb]3 –

  His reason is that he goes because it doesn’t cost him anything.

  I also told him that his uncle would be more inclined to give him money if [he] went to some concerts in the Burg[theater] a few times each month and listened to some classic pieces –

  I told him also that I would speak with you about this. He didn’t want that.

  That last entry is particularly revelatory. If Karl had had any doubt that Holz had been put up to these social activities – drinking, playing billiards – by his uncle, he did not doubt it any longer. Holz had admitted it. He didn’t want that. The fact that Karl does not want Beethoven to know whatever it was that Holz was referring to, shows the strain, and guilt Karl was living under.

  He had been a pre-teen when all this had started. He was about to become an adult, and there had been no let up.

  Karl had had enough. He made a fateful decision.

  1 None of the Late Quartets (nor any of the final three piano sonatas) were given names, and their opus numbers are non-sequential, due to their publication dates. The order of composition was Op. 127, Op. 132, Op. 130, Op. 133 (Grosse Fuge), Op. 131, Op. 135.

  2 Aus dem Schwarzspanierhaus (From the House of the Black-Robed Spaniard).

  3 A red light district of Vienna.

  Chapter

  SEVENTEEN

  Two Pistols and Gunpowder

  PROBLEMS WERE ONCE AGAIN mounting for Beethoven – over and above any issues with Karl. His health was deteriorating. It is truer to say that ill-health was constant, with occasional improvements, than that he kept falling ill. It was, as before, his usual complaints of indigestion and irregular bowels – severe diarrhoea would be followed by acute constipation. There was also a recurrence of the eye problems that had first surfaced nearly three years earlier, causing him to sit in a darkened room by day and put a bandage over his eyes at night. This time an eye lotion was prescribed. He complained, too, of back pain. There was also the swelling of his stomach and ankles, which was now very apparent and showed no signs of abating.

  Dr Braunhofer once more came onto the scene, and made his fam
iliar recommendations of no coffee or wine, advised Beethoven to eat as much soup as he could, and prescribed small doses of quinine. Beethoven’s health was poor enough for his friends to insist he stay indoors, follow the doctor’s advice, and try to take things a little more easily.

  Utterly extraordinary as it is to report (I know, I am repeating myself, but this is Beethoven), his appalling health did not stunt his creativity. That – again – is the smallest understatement. As his health plummeted, he began work on a new string quartet, which was to become Op. 131, and which musicologists today rate as the greatest of them all. He was to continue work on this quartet throughout the turbulent months that were to follow.

  Propitiously, in March his health did seem to improve slightly, at just the time his String Quartet in B flat, Op. 130, was being rehearsed for its first performance. Schuppanzigh was back in favour, and led the quartet in the inaugural performance on 21 March 1826.

  It was a qualified success, but very qualified. The second and fourth movements were liked enough to be repeated, but the final movement left the audience in a state of shock. This is the piece known today as the Grosse Fuge (Great Fugue). It is a massive fugue of 741 bars, which can take anything up to twenty minutes in performance, and leaves players and listeners drained.1

  After the first performance, opinion was divided. There were those that said the movement was simply too long, too mighty, for what had gone before. They said the piece was substantial enough to be published separately, as a work in itself. Others – mostly Beethoven’s friends – leapt to its defence, arguing it had been misunderstood and would be accepted after more hearings.

  The publisher Matthias Artaria bravely approached Beethoven, and suggested he publish the Grosse Fuge separately, in a version for piano four hands, and that Beethoven compose a new final movement for the quartet.