Beethoven

by Suchet, John

  What is fact is that at 6 p.m. on 26 March 1827 – at the age of fifty-six years and three months, and exactly forty-nine years to the hour and the day since he had first walked out to perform in public – the greatest composer the world had known died.

  1 Despite protestations from around the world, the building was pulled down in early 1904, after a small ceremony held on 15 November 1903 in the rooms once occupied by Beethoven.

  2 The door has been preserved, and is today in the museum that occupies the apartment that Beethoven lived in longer than anywhere else, in the Pasqualatihaus on the Mölkerbastei.

  3 Currently in the Beethoven Haus in Bonn, its keyboard protected by a perspex cover. It was last used for a recording of the Piano Sonata in A flat, Op. 110, and the Bagatelles, Op. 126, by the Austrian pianist Jörg Demus in 1967 – ‘the last time its voice was heard’, as I was told when I visited.

  4 Now in the Hungarian National Museum in Budapest.

  5 Several pages of the relevant conversation book are missing, presumably removed and destroyed by Schindler as too intrusive for public knowledge.

  6 The same Gerhard von Breuning who left an invaluable record of Beethoven’s final years in his book Aus dem Schwarzspanierhaus, and would in adult life become a distinguished physician.

  7 Today Jihlava in the Czech Republic.

  8 While we may trust Wawruch on medical matters, he is not so reliable when it comes to music. Beethoven never worked on such an oratorio – but Handel did, and given Beethoven had the forty-volume set of Handel’s works, it is likely Wawruch confused the two.

  9 There is no corroborative evidence that this meeting took place. If it did, it would be the only meeting – as far as we know – between the two great composers.

  Chapter

  TWENTY

  The Last Master

  THE DAY AFTER BEETHOVEN’S death, with his body still on the deathbed, Stephan von Breuning, Johann van Beethoven, and Anton Schindler carried out a comprehensive search of the apartment to try to find the seven bank shares Beethoven had left in his Will to Karl. They could not be found. Johann was angry, and suggested either that they had never existed or that Stephan and Schindler had hidden them. Breuning was distressed at this insinuation, and left.

  He returned later, and asked Karl Holz to come as well. He asked Holz if Beethoven had a secret hiding place where he kept valuable documents. Holz said yes, there was a secret drawer in the writing desk. He went to it, and pulled out a protruding nail. The secret drawer fell out. Inside it were the bank shares, the letter to the Immortal Beloved, and no doubt to everybody’s surprise a miniature portrait of Josephine Brunsvik.1

  Later that day a post-mortem was performed by the pathologist Dr Johann Wagner. He made an incision across the front of Beethoven’s forehead, lifted the top of his skull, and sawed out the temporal bones and auditory nerves. These were placed in a sealed jar of preserving fluid, which was held in the coroner’s office for many years, before disappearing.

  On examination of the auditory nerves, Dr. Wagner found them to be ‘shrivelled and lacking nerve impulses, with the arteries dilated to the size of a crow quill and covered in cartilage’.

  Dr Wagner found Beethoven’s liver to be ‘shrunk up to half its proper volume, of a leathery consistence and greenish-blue colour, beset with knots the size of a bean on its tuberculated surface as well as in its substance. All its vessels were very much narrowed and bloodless.’ In the cavity of the abdomen he found four quarts of an opaque greyish-brown liquid. The stomach and bowels were greatly distended with air, and both kidneys contained a thick brown fluid. The body in general was ‘much emaciated’.

  With all the danger inherent in attempting to make a diagnosis two centuries after the event, a modern reading of Dr Wagner’s meticulous and carefully worded post-mortem report suggests the cause of Beethoven’s death was alcohol-induced cirrhosis of the liver.

  The following day there was a steady stream of visitors to the death chamber, many of whom cut off a lock of Beethoven’s hair as a keepsake. Gerhard von Breuning, lamenting that his father had not allowed him to do this for himself until the body was ready to be placed into the coffin, found that by then there was no hair left to cut off, though that is likely to be an exaggeration.

  Beethoven had remained unshaven during his final illness, and his beard had grown thick. A barber was brought in to shave his face, telling those present that he would dispose of the razor as it was customary not to re-use a razor that had shaved a corpse.

  The weather was warm and springlike on 29 March 1827, encouraging those who might have been in any doubt to come out and witness the elaborate ceremonial. There was plenty of opportunity to do so. The funeral procession would wind its way northwest out of the city to the small village of Währing, after stopping for a Funeral Mass at the Church of the Holy Trinity. Vienna had never seen a funeral of such extended pomp and grandeur, not even for a Holy Roman Emperor.

  The church was a mere five hundred paces from the Schwarzspanierhaus, but it took the procession more than an hour and a half to cover the short distance. As the cortege processed, a brass band played the funeral march from Beethoven’s Piano Sonata Op. 26. On the steps of the church there was such a crush that soldiers had to keep order. Official mourners, risking exclusion, had to point to the crepe bands on their hats to gain entry.

  The interior of the church was bathed in candlelight, all three altars, wall brackets and chandeliers flickering. Ignaz Seyfried had arranged two of the Trombone Equali that Beethoven had written on that fraught visit to his brother Johann in Linz, for voices, and these were now sung, accompanied by trombones. This was followed by the Funeral Mass.

  The cortege then resumed its slow processional progress northwest out of the city. The route was on a steady upward incline, causing the four horses to take the strain, and bringing laboured breathing to musicians, pallbearers and crowds. It passed along the Währing stream and into the small parish church.

  There, once again, the Equali were played and sung. After another Funeral Mass the coffin left the church, carried this time on the shoulders of a bearer party, and followed by the chief mourners, augmented by schoolchildren and the poor from the local almshouse. Bells rang out.

  There was a downward slope to the small cemetery, and at the entrance gates the bearers laid the coffin down.

  This was an unscheduled change of plan. The leading playwright of the day, Franz Grillparzer, had written a funeral oration to be declaimed at Beethoven’s graveside by the foremost tragedian of the day, Heinrich Anschütz, as the coffin was lowered.2 However, strict religious law forbade the declamation of any text that was not sacred on consecrated ground. And so Anschütz read the oration over the coffin at the gates.

  Grillparzer described Beethoven, amidst lengthy and florid language, as ‘The Last Master, the tuneful heir of Bach and Handel, Mozart and Haydn’s immortal fame ... He was an artist, but a man as well ... Thus he was, thus he died, thus he will live to the end of time.’

  The coffin was shouldered again, and carried to the open grave that abutted the outer wall of the small cemetery. The pallbearers stood around the grave with lighted torches. The coffin was lowered, and three garlands of laurel leaves were placed onto it. The priests consecrated the grave and gave Beethoven a final blessing. The pallbearers each threw a handful of earth onto the coffin, and then extinguished their torches.

  LITTLE OF THE dignity that characterised his funeral was accorded to the great composer in the months following his death. In early April, in the same room in which he died, his personal effects were auctioned. According to Gerhard von Breuning, who attended with his father, ‘a miserable collection of old-clothes dealers had found their way in, and the articles that came under the hammer were tugged this way and that, the pieces of furniture pushed and thumped, everything disarranged and soiled’.

  On 5 November, Beethoven’s musical effects, including sketches in his own hand, autographs of printed wor
ks, original manuscripts and copied parts, were auctioned in rooms in the Kohlmarkt. The total intake was 1140 florins and 18 kreuzer. Beethoven’s total estate, including cash, bank shares and personal effects, was valued at 9885 florins and 13 kreuzer (approximately £1000, or slightly under, in today’s money).

  Just over a year and a half after Beethoven’s death, Franz Schubert – one of those pallbearers who had accompanied the coffin and stood at the graveside with lighted torch – was buried alongside the man he admired so much.

  In October 1863, the bodies of both Beethoven and Schubert were exhumed, their skeletons cleaned and reburied in lead coffins.

  During this process, Beethoven’s skull was given to Gerhard von Breuning – by now a qualified doctor – for safekeeping. He kept it on the table by his bed, ‘proudly watching over that head from whose mouth, in years gone by, I had so often heard the living word!’

  Before reburial a team of physicians compared Beethoven’s skull with Schubert’s, noting that Beethoven’s was ‘compact and thick’, whereas Schubert’s was ‘fine and feminine’.

  In June 1888, when the decision was made to close the cemetery at Währing, the bodies of Beethoven and Schubert were again exhumed and removed to the recently opened Zentralfriedhof, Vienna’s main cemetery to the south of the city, where they lie today still side by side in the musicians’ quarter.3

  IT IS PERHAPS fitting that the wreaths placed on Beethoven’s coffin were made of laurel leaves – since ancient time the symbol of achievement and success, of mystical powers and immortality. The legends surrounding this greatest of artists began with that raised fist on his deathbed, and continue to this day.

  Most enduring is the image we have come to know of the leonine head, fixed and determined gaze, a huge sculpted figure in stone or bronze, determination in eyes and pose. In short, an image befitting the music.

  In the years following his death, there was a campaign to have a monument to him erected in his home town, Bonn. Largely due to the efforts – and financial contribution – of Franz Liszt, this was finally achieved in August 1845.

  A massive bronze statue, designed by an almost unknown sculptor, Ernst Julius Hähnel, showed Beethoven, one leg in front of the other, both feet planted firmly on the ground, holding a pen in his lowered right hand and a notebook in his left, standing upright and staring ahead, brow knitted and features concentrating, abundantly thick hair framing his head.

  The statue was placed at the top end of the Münsterplatz, where it stands today, a little way in front of the house of Count von Fürstenburg, where the boy Beethoven used to go to give piano lessons, when he was not having a ‘raptus’.4 A balcony was erected in front of the house for the guests of honour to witness the unveiling.

  All Bonn turned out for the event. The small town on the Rhine had never seen anything like it. The guests of honour were no lesser figures than Queen Victoria and Prince Albert of Britain, King Friedrich Wilhelm and Queen Elizabeth of Prussia, and Archduke Friedrich of Austria.

  The ceremony began with a speech from the Music Director at the university of Bonn, at the end of which, to the beating of drums, ringing of bells, firing of cannon, the statue was unveiled – and found to be facing down the square, its back to the guests of honour. Embarrassment all round.

  Beethoven’s music continues to resonate with each new generation. The opening motif of the Fifth Symphony was used as a single drumbeat in clandestine BBC broadcasts to the Free French under Nazi occupation. When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, the first concert to be given in unified Berlin was the music of Beethoven. The European Union chose the theme of the final movement of the Ninth Symphony as its anthem.

  Beethoven’s music will, quite simply, endure for ever and all time. Hence the dedication of this book.

  1 The Heiligenstadt Testament, which must have been secreted in the same drawer for many years, was found among Beethoven’s papers.

  2 Both Grillparzer and Anschütz had been known to Beethoven personally.

  3 Währing is today a suburb of Vienna. The former cemetery is a small park, with tennis courts, named Schubertpark. The original graves with headstones of the two composers are still there.

  4 The building is now the post office headquarters.

  POSTSCRIPT

  Karl van Beethoven, although he must have been kept informed of his uncle’s demise and would certainly have been allowed compassionate leave to attend the funeral, did not do so. He left the army in 1832 and married in the same year. He had four daughters and a son, whom he named Ludwig. That son had a son, who died childless. Karl died at the age of fifty-two of liver disease.

  Johann van Beethoven lived prosperously on the proceeds of his pharmacy business for the rest of his life. He frequently attended concert performances of his brother’s music, always sitting in the front row, according to Gerhard von Breuning, ‘all got up in a blue frock-coat with white vest, loudly shrieking Bravos from his big mouth at the end of every piece, beating his bony white-gloved hands together importantly’. He was, wrote Gerhard with some malice, ‘as preposterous after his brother’s death as he had been contemptible during his brother’s life’. Johann died at the age of seventy-one.

  Johanna van Beethoven outlived her husband by more than fifty years, and her brother-in-law, with whom she had such a volatile relationship, by forty-one years. She died in some poverty at the age of eighty-two. I am not aware that she ever, either in writing or interview, uttered a hostile opinion or critical word about Beethoven.

  Stephan von Breuning, Beethoven’s lifelong and most loyal friend, already in poor health in 1826, never recovered it, and died barely two months after Beethoven at the age of fifty-two. His son, Dr Gerhard von Breuning, attributed his father’s early death to the trauma of caring for Beethoven in his final illness, and the distress of overseeing the disposal of his effects.

  Ferdinand Ries, who made his home in London and did so much to further Beethoven’s reputation in Britain, accumulated considerable wealth from composition and teaching, but lost much of it when the London bank in which he had invested failed. He moved with his family to Germany, but died after a short illness at the age of fifty-three.

  Franz and Eleonore Wegeler returned to Bonn from Koblenz in 1837, and sat with Helene von Breuning reminiscing about the young Beethoven they had known, although ‘Frau Breuning had to be largely left out of these discussions, her mind having become feeble with age’. She was eighty-seven at the time. Wegeler was eighty-three when he died; Eleonore died at seventy.

  Antonie Brentano, candidate for the Immortal Beloved, had eleven grandchildren and thirteen great-grandchildren. At the age of forty-six she began to note down the names of her friends who had died. The first entry read: Beethoven, 26 March 1827. She died at the age of eighty-eight.

  Archduke Rudolph, Beethoven’s greatest patron and a composer in his own right, suffered a fatal stroke when he was only forty-three. In accordance with his wishes, his heart was removed from his body and placed in a niche in the walls of the Cathedral of St Wenceslas in Olmütz. His body lies with other members of the Habsburg dynasty in the family crypt in Vienna.

  THIS BOOK, as I said in the Preface, is for lovers of Beethoven’s music rather than academics, and so I have not crowded the narrative with source references. The musicologists know where the source material is.

  For those who want to read further, the essential biography remains Thayer’s Life of Beethoven, revised and edited by Elliott Forbes. It is a weighty tome, and there is a lot in it that the average reader might want to skip, but it is the biography which all subsequent biographers acknowledge, since it is the result of interviews carried out by Thayer with people who actually knew Beethoven.

  Two contemporary books providing unique and first-hand insights are Remembering Beethoven by Franz Wegeler and Ferdinand Ries, and From the House of the Black-Robed Spaniard by Gerhard von Breuning.

  The American musicologists Maynard Solomon and Lewis Lockwood have both
written comprehensive biographies of Beethoven, though some of Solomon’s theories – particularly with regard to identifying the Immortal Beloved – have been superceded, and Lock-wood openly acknowledges that in his portrait the music looms larger than the life.

  The Beethoven Compendium, A Guide to Beethoven’s Life and Music, edited by the British musicologist Professor Barry Cooper of Manchester University, is an invaluable guide to all aspects of Beethoven’s life, music, and the times in which he lived. Similarly, Professor Cooper’s Beethoven, in the Master Musicians series, is a comprehensive and accessible account of the life, seemlessly integrating the music, though a knowledge of music and ability to read it is useful.

  There are hundreds of books, if not thousands, but you would be hard-pressed to find one which does not contain musical examples, notes on staves. My belief that there are many lovers of Beethoven’s music who cannot read a note of music, and have no desire to do so, was a spur to writing this book.

  As with books, there are hundreds, if not thousands, of recordings of his works. I am regularly asked, in person or in letters or emails to Classic FM, to recommend recordings. It is, of course, impossible. It depends on how you like your Beethoven. Authentic or modern instruments? Chamber ensemble or full symphony orchestra? Rigid adherence or flexible approach?

  I have dozens of recordings of a single work. I suspect most people will want just one. Pick from these:

  Symphonies: Toscanini for hard driving speeds, Furtwängler for more flexibility. Riccardo Chailly and the Leipzig Gewandhaus for the modern symphony orchestra in all its glory. Emmanuel Krivine and La Chambre Philharmonique for authentic chamber-sized ensemble. Nikolaus Harnoncourt and the Chamber Orchestra of Europe.