Beethoven

by Suchet, John

  Karl also knew that he had his mother on his side regarding his desire to be a soldier.

  [Given her support] all the less can I deny her wish to be with me, since I am not likely to see her again for some time. There is no reason why this shouldn’t stop you and me from seeing each other as often as you wish.

  Beethoven was seriously outnumbered. Reluctantly, in effect abandoning his long-held ambition for Karl to become a musician, the ‘Beethoven’ of the next generation, he agreed to let Karl join the army.

  Hard to believe, then, that while agonising over his nephew’s future, he was able to turn his mind to loftier matters, namely the dedication of the Ninth Symphony to accompany its publication.

  He had drawn up an astonishingly glittering list of possible dedicatees, with one much lowlier name, indicating possibly that he recognised the extraordinary worth of the work. Potential dedicatees were the King of Prussia, the King of France, Emperor Alexander of Russia ... and his old friend and helper Ferdinand Ries, currently residing in London.

  In April 1823, a full year before the first performance, Beethoven had written to Ries promising him the dedication. A year later, according to an entry in a conversation book, Ries was still a candidate, although joined now by the other more illustrious names. It appears that Beethoven decided on the Russian Emperor, but Alexander inconveniently died in December 1825.

  In the spring of 1826 Beethoven decided finally that the symphony should be dedicated to the King of Prussia. The presentation copy was ready by September, and Beethoven hand wrote the title page containing the dedication – at just the time he was wrestling with the humiliation over Karl’s suicide attempt, visiting him in hospital, fraught with worry over his condition and what to do with him when he was released from hospital.

  There was a cordial exchange of letters between Beethoven and the Prussian monarch, and with his gracious acceptance of the dedication King Friedrich Wilhelm III enclosed a diamond ring ‘as a token of my sincere appreciation’.

  The actual ring that Beethoven received turned out to be set with a stone of ‘reddish’ hue, according to Schindler, which the court jeweller valued at a measly 300 florins. Beethoven was insulted and angry, and wanted to send it straight back. He was dissuaded from doing so. It was never established whether the King had second thoughts, or whether the ring was stolen and substituted either in Berlin or Vienna.

  WHILE KARL was in hospital, Beethoven’s brother Johann had suggested that when Karl had recovered sufficiently, Beethoven should bring him to the spacious, comfortable, quiet country estate he, Johann, had bought in Gneixendorf. Far from being grateful, Beethoven was appalled at the idea of spending any time with the brother he despised, and the woman he had tried to stop his brother marrying. To Johann’s invitation he replied, ‘I will not come. Your brother??????!!!! Ludwig.’

  In late September, just days after Karl left hospital, Johann repeated the invitation, and this time there was a compelling reason to accept. Karl had a large visible scar on his temple where the bullet had torn open his skin. Stephan von Breuning was adamant that Karl could not go for interview with Field Marshal von Stutterheim until the scar was no longer visible, since the Field Marshal had told him he wanted there to be no mention of the affair.

  It was therefore decided that Beethoven would take Karl to Gneixendorf for a short visit. It would allow the scar to heal, give time for his hair to grow long enough to cover it, as well as provide peace and relaxation after the trauma of the preceding weeks. It would also provide Beethoven himself with a much needed escape from the city, and might even have a beneficial effect on his health.

  In the event the visit would last for a little over two months. It was to be fraught from the beginning, and by the time Beethoven returned to Vienna his health had collapsed completely, and he was only months from death.

  1 I once heard a performance of the Grosse Fuge by the Lindsay Quartet at the Wigmore Hall in London. At the end the leader Peter Cropper, his shirt soaked with sweat, stood, and had to steady himself on the chair. His face was grey and he was close to collapse.

  2 Schindler made himself indispensable to Beethoven in the final period of the composer’s life. After Beethoven’s death, Schindler regarded himself as ‘keeper of the flame’. He was Beethoven’s earliest major biographer, but deliberately falsified facts to enhance Beethoven’s image. He forged conversation-book entries to give the impression he had known Beethoven for much longer than he in reality had, and modern scholarship has established that around a hundred and fifty of his entries in the conversation books were made after Beethoven’s death.

  Chapter

  EIGHTEEN

  Frightening the Oxen

  JOHANN VAN BEETHOVEN had led something of a charmed life. He had trained as a pharmacist and it had been his ambition early in life to acquire his own pharmacy, but he lacked the funds to make his dream a reality. In 1808, at the age of thirty-one, he scraped together enough money to buy a pharmacy in Linz, a city on the Danube around a hundred miles west of Vienna. With a down payment that left him practically penniless and a mortgage he could not afford, together with the expenses of the purchase and travel, he was barely able to afford the first payment.

  The business yielded practically nothing, and rent from rooms in the house that he let out was small. Within months Johann was in danger of defaulting. In desperation he sold the iron gratings on the windows, but it was nowhere near enough to keep him going.

  In an extraordinary stroke of luck, events over which he had no control played into his hands. The Continental blockade that Napoleon Bonaparte had imposed on British goods in 1806 caused the value of British merchandise to rise astronomically. It just so happened that all the jars and pots on the shelves of Johann’s pharmacy were made of English tin. He sold them all, replaced them with earthenware, and was able to forestall his financial crisis.

  Then just when things were beginning to look ominous for him once again, a second totally fortuitous chain of events came to his rescue. The French Emperor, exasperated at Austria’s continuing attempts to defeat him on the battlefield, decided to put an end to this precocity once and for all, and invaded Austria. He marched north-east, with the capital Vienna in his sights. This time there was to be no triumphal procession into a subdued city. Vienna, and the Viennese, needed to be taught a lesson. Napoleon established a base at Linz, and it was there that the Revolutionary Army’s quartermasters placed orders for the supply of medical equipment – medicines, bandages, splints, and so on.

  Who won the contract? One Nikolaus Johann van Beethoven. It was the making of him. It brought him wealth beyond his dreams. It also sealed his unpopularity – hatred, even – with his fellow Austrians for collaborating with the enemy, a stigma that was to follow him for the rest of his life. He brushed that off, and began to live the life of a wealthy and successful businessman.

  As wealthy men do he acquired a mistress, and in late 1812 he married her, as we have seen against his elder brother’s violent protestations. He sold the pharmacy in December 1816, buying another on the opposite bank of the Danube. And of crucial importance to our story, in August 1819 he bought a country estate in Gneixendorf.

  Gneixendorf is a village lying on high ground just north of the town of Krems – dominated then as now by a huge medieval monastery – which sits on the banks of the Danube roughly halfway between Vienna and Linz. It was there that Johann, with his wife and her illegitimate daughter, whom he had adopted, lived the life of a country squire, and to where he invited his brother and nephew in late September 1826.

  DELIGHTED, FINALLY, at Ludwig’s acceptance of his invitation, Johann sent a carriage and driver to Vienna, and at nine o’clock on the morning of Thursday, 28 September 1826, Ludwig and Karl left Vienna for the two-day journey to Gneixendorf.

  There is no question that Johann was looking forward to the visit. He gave his brother a small self-contained apartment of three rooms on the first floor of the south-west side of
the house – a sundial on the outside wall testifying to the sunny aspect – and a personal manservant to tend to his needs.

  The rooms consisted of bedroom, salon, and dining room. The salon, between the other two, had a mural of the River Rhine painted on its walls. Johann, homesick for the river on the banks of which he and his brothers had grown up in Bonn, commissioned an artist from his home town to paint the mural to remind him of his youth.1

  He was obviously keen to show off the trappings of success to his brother. He might not have been a musician, but through his business acumen he had acquired considerable wealth. He also no doubt wanted to demonstrate to his brother that any reservations he might have had about the marriage to Therese Obermeyer had been ill founded.

  Seen from Ludwig’s perspective, things were very different. In fact they could hardly have been worse. A figure, if not of fun, certainly of gossip and some derision in Vienna, his extraordinary musical accomplishments – this was little over two years since the premiere of the Ninth Symphony – were in danger of being subsumed by the drama over Karl. He had never got on with his brother Johann, and had contempt for Johann’s wife, and so the prospect of a stay in their house must have filled him with foreboding. The attempted suicide of a close family member would put a strain on the most rational of people, but one can only imagine its effect on Beethoven’s already precarious mental state. His physical condition was pitiful: his stomach was now so swollen that he wore a belt around it to restrain it, and his ankles and feet were swollen to such an extent that he was in constant pain.

  Johann did not help matters by charging his brother a small rent. When it became clear that Beethoven and his nephew were intending to stay well beyond the original two weeks, Johann pointed out that this would incur costs, and it was reasonable to expect a small contribution. Beethoven reacted furiously, but must have had something of a change of heart at one point, because an entry by Johann in a conversation book suggests Beethoven was considering moving in permanently, with Johann actually encouraging him with descriptions of how beautiful Gneixendorf was in spring and summer.

  The manservant, Michael Krenn, was interviewed – along with other residents of Gneixendorf – by Thayer nearly forty years later. These accounts, together with many entries in conversation books, make it possible to build a picture of the fraught two months that Beethoven and Karl spent at Johann’s country estate.

  It seems as if the first few weeks of the stay were actually beneficial to Beethoven. The countryside in late autumn appealed to him, and he took pleasure from long walks. The fresh air might have been responsible for a slight improvement in his eye condition. The daily regime was a relaxed one. Beethoven would get up at half-past five in the morning to work, then join the family for breakfast at seven o’clock, after which, notebook and pencil in pocket, he would take a long walk across the fields. Local people grew used to seeing the famous composer, oblivious to anything around him, striding purposefully, shouting out loud and waving his arms in the air. They described how suddenly, in full stride, he would slow down, then stop, take out his notebook and scribble something down. They knew better than to interrupt him.

  Local people grew used to seeing the famous composer, oblivious to anything around him, striding purposefully

  Beethoven would return to the house for lunch at half-past twelve, then go to his room until around three o’clock. After that he would again take a long walk across the countryside, return for supper at half-past seven, go to his room to write till ten o’clock, then go to bed. There was a piano in his small salon, which he played – although only occasionally, according to Michael – but no one was allowed to go near him when he was in his rooms. There were certainly no recitals, or musical soirées. The atmosphere, at all times, was tense.

  Michael, son of one of the vineyard workers, was clearly frightened out of his wits to be assigned to the famous, eccentric, unpredictable composer. If he was apprehensive about unwittingly upsetting his master, he had good cause to be. And yet, as he was to discover, Beethoven had an unexpected soft side too.

  We do not know what age Michael was, but can assume he was in his mid-teens, because in the early part of the stay at least he reacted with youthful mirth to Beethoven’s eccentricities.

  At first the cook was assigned the task of making Beethoven’s bed each morning and sweeping the floor of the bedroom. But one morning, while she was doing this with Michael also in the room, Beethoven sat at a table, gesticulating with his hands, beating time with his feet, muttering under his breath and singing out loud. She tried to ignore it, but finally could no longer contain herself and burst out laughing. Beethoven saw this, leapt up from the table, and drove her angrily out of the room.

  Michael, equally struggling to restrain his laughter, tried to hurry out of the room too, but Beethoven held him back, gave him a few coins, and told him that, from now on, he should make the bed and clean the floor each day. Beethoven told him to come early to get it done. Michael found he had to knock a long time, and increasingly loudly – no doubt worrying about waking the household – before Beethoven finally opened the door.

  It took the boy a long time to become accustomed to Beethoven sitting at the table, banging, beating, waving his arms and singing, and for some time at least he had to hurry from the room, undetected if possible, and burst into laughter out of sight and safely protected by Beethoven’s deafness.

  On one occasion he panicked when Beethoven returned from a walk and could not find his precious notebook. He set Michael the task of finding it. ‘Michael, hurry up, look everywhere, hunt for my notebook. I must have it back, whatever it takes!’ he quotes Beethoven as saying. One can imagine the boy’s relief when he found it, though he does not tell us where.

  Beethoven – surprisingly, given his unsuccessful record with house servants – seemed to develop a liking for Michael, no doubt enhanced by the realisation of the boy’s usefulness. He soon banned everybody from entering his rooms, with the exception of Michael. He instructed the boy to clean and tidy his rooms while he was out walking. On several occasions Michael found coins on the floor. He would gather them up, and when Beethoven returned hand them to him. Beethoven made Michael show him where he had found them, and then told the boy to keep them. This happened three or four times, but then stopped.2

  Beethoven demonstrated – for him – exceptional loyalty to Michael when the boy’s carelessness landed him in serious trouble. Therese gave him five florins with instructions to go into the village and buy fish and wine. Michael lost (or spent) the money. He returned to the house sullen and quiet. Therese asked him for the fish, and he confessed. Furious, she sacked him on the spot.

  At dinner Beethoven asked where Michael was. Therese told him what had happened. Beethoven flew into a rage with her, gave her the five florins, and demanded she reinstate Michael – which she did.

  After that there was clearly a bond between the composer and his manservant. From that point on, Beethoven refused to sit at the table for any meals with the family. He told Michael to bring his meals up to his apartment, and to prepare breakfast for him in his room. While eating, he would ask Michael to bring him up to date on what had been said around the table. He even let it be known that if he could, he would take Michael back to Vienna with him.

  Beethoven was clearly undergoing some sort of mental collapse. Inside the house, his eccentricities, his unpredictability, were to some extent manageable – in fact, his desire to closet himself in his rooms and bar entry to everyone except Michael might even have been welcomed. But outside the house, his erratic behaviour could hardly go unnoticed.

  Again, nearly forty years later, an elderly resident of Gneixendorf recounted how the first time he had seen Beethoven striding across the fields, arms waving, singing and shouting, he had taken him for a madman. Once he realised who he was, that he was in fact the brother of the estate’s owner, he always greeted him politely, but his salutation was never reciprocated.

  The sa
me man, a farmer, recalled vividly how, before he knew who Beethoven was, he was driving a pair of young oxen from an outhouse towards Johann’s manor house, when Beethoven approached, ‘shouting and waving his arms in wild gesticulations’. He said he gestured to Beethoven to be a little quieter, but was met with a blank look. The oxen took fright, charged down a steep hill, hotly pursued by the farmer who with a Herculean effort managed to restrain them and get them back up the hill.

  The drama was not over. Beethoven was still outside, striding along, shouting and gesticulating. The farmer, angry now, asked him again to be quiet. Again there was no response. The oxen panicked again, and this time charged straight for the house. Fortunately another man, employed on the farm, managed to stop them. Between them the two men calmed the beasts, while Beethoven strode off, oblivious to what had happened.

  The farmer asked the other man if he knew who the fool was who had scared his oxen. On being told he was the landowner’s brother, the farmer replied, ‘Fine brother, that’s all I can say.’

  Two other reported incidents are evidence of Beethoven’s precarious mental state. One day Johann decided to pay a visit to a friend of his, a doctor, who lived with his wife in a neighbouring village. He took his brother with him. Unfortunately the doctor was out on a house call, but his wife, flattered to have Gneixendorf’s chief landowner in the house, poured him a glass of her husband’s best wine and gave him delicacies to eat.

  Outside the house, his erratic behaviour could hardly go unnoticed

  They were chatting convivially when the wife suddenly noticed a morose individual, sitting silently in the darkness on a bench by the stove. Taking the man for Johann’s servant, she reached for a jug of rough open wine, poured a glass, and said, ‘He shall have a drink too.’