by L. L. Holt
Despite an intense dislike, perhaps even loathing of teaching, Luis was persuaded to indulge his benefactor, the Countess Anna Brunsvik, by taking on her two daughters as piano students. As it turned out, the young ladies, Therese who was about 24, and Josephine, 20, were beautiful and cultured as well as talented. That spring, composition and daily walks with Amenda both came to a screeching standstill: Luis was lost in the charms of two highly alluring ladies of high status, once again triggering the fantasy that the “van” in his name signified royalty, and that, perhaps, he might indeed have been the unacknowledged love child of the King of Prussia.
He visited the two sisters at The Golden Gryphon every day at 1 o’clock sharp for an hour-long lesson that soon lengthened into two, three, sometimes four hours or more. Luis was smitten, and they seemed to dote on him, devouring every word he spoke, tolerating his peculiar, un-Viennese appearance, from his swarthy complexion and untamed hair, down to his unconventional but warm leggings made of shaggy black goat hair. What giggles transpired behind his back, he mercifully did not know. All he saw were wealthy proto-countesses drinking in his every word, and performing for him like prize peacocks at his every command and whim.
The intense studies, which overshadowed every other occupation of his life and gave the bored girls something to do and later to gossip about, had two positive outcomes. First, it enabled Luis to develop his original technique for playing and teaching the piano, which involved playing with bent fingers, almost claw-like hands, perched over the keys, rather than the flat-handed approach which had prevailed. This allowed a powerful attack, a song-like legato, both indispensible in the performance of Luis’s own music.
Second, despite the frivolity, the banter, the heavy-handed joking that caused the young women to titter behind their hands, it also helped Luis develop a teaching style which would benefit many other students in the years ahead (such as Carl Czerny and Ferdinand Ries).
The Prince reached out to Amenda, and Amenda reached out to Albrechtsberger and Schenk, and other friends and teachers, but no one could devise a diversion to extract Luis from his obsessive attachment to the gifted Brunsvik sisters, which was doing absolutely nothing to advance his compositional technique and output, nor sustain his reputation as a recitalist.
His life seemed a series of unplanned detours. Indeed, the pleasures of the year—the stimulating rapport with Salieri, the full-time occupation of entertaining the Brunsvik sisters, and a piano duel with a good-natured musician named Wölffl— all were transitory interludes in a life that was soon to be shaken to the core.
Chapter 14
The Brunsvik sisters had moved on. In fact, Josephine was married that spring to a Count she did not love, while Therese remained with her mother. Luis was once again alone, and, looking up one morning, realized Amenda was missing from his life.
Amenda! Where was the beloved friend, the fellow musician who shared the birth of so many of his recent works, the noble colleague who shared his passion for immortal works of literature and wisdom?
“Amenda, Amenda, where have you been?” cried Luis to no one in particular, and without jacket or hat, bounded down the stairs and briskly walked to Amenda’s flat. Their talk at the Schoenbrunn came back to him, he could almost hear the words ringing within his head. The follies of the past few weeks nearly filled him with shame, though he really did enjoy them at the time. He walked faster, the early June sun warming his face, until he arrived at his friend’s apartment. How wonderful when we join our domestic arrangements, he thought, looking up at the window where he half expected to see the tall silhouette of Karl playing the violin. Ever mine…ever thine…
The door opened and a disheveled Mylich appeared, none too happy to see his friend’s idol. “Sir, we haven’t seen or heard of you in some time,” he said, with a yawn. It was definitely too early for a guitarist to be up and about.
“I must see Amenda! Let me in,” said Luis impatiently, almost shoving Mylich aside.
“Sir, wait,” he said, grabbing Luis’s arm. “He’s not here, he had to meet his uncle.”
“Why, is something wrong?” Luis spun around. “What is it?”
Mylich sighed. While recognizing the greatness of his guest, and admiring him as a musician and composer, Mylich had often reflected of late how his good friend from childhood had all but been abandoned by a beloved companion. Luis could see it in Mylich’s eyes.
“I’ve been busy, very busy,” he mumbled. “Tell me, where is he, what is wrong?”
“You know that Karl is the second son of his family,” Mylich said cautiously.
“Yes, yes, what of it?” Luis was becoming impatient.
“Well, it’s his older brother. He has passed away, in an accident.”
“Oh!” Luis put out an arm to brace himself against the doorframe. “Oh, poor Karl! I am so sorry! How horrible!”
Mylich waited a moment. “He is very upset, yes. Perhaps you should leave him alone during this time…”
“Alone! I can do no such thing!” exclaimed Luis. “I need him! He must see me, where did you say he is?”
“I didn’t,” said Mylich, developing a cold tone. He noticed how Luis said he needed Karl, but did not suggest that it was Karl who may have needed comforting. “Sir,” said Mylich, “I am not sure where he is, he was vague on that score. But he should return in a few days. I suspect he will have to travel home.”
“Home!” Luis was beside himself. “To Latvia?”
Mylich nodded. “Sir,” he said, “I really need to leave you now. Why don’t you write a note to Karl and send it here by post. He will be sure to see it first thing when he returns.”
Luis hardly knew what to do. His brain was pulled in several different directions, his feet didn’t know whether to run back home, or take him to one of his teachers or patrons. No, the latter would not do, since what he needed now was a friend, someone he could confide in, and his two best friends in the world—the late Lorenz von Breuning and the soon-to-depart Karl Amenda—were conspicuously unavailable. There was no one. No one to talk to, from whom to seek advice or consolation or reassurance. He walked briskly to the park, but unable to find solace even in nature, moved on to a coffee shop to sharpen his wits. Back at the flat, the caffeine made his normally undecipherable scrawl even less intelligible, but he wrote the note, and began searching through his papers for music that would memorialize the occasion.
A week later, there was a rap at his door, and the servant admitted Karl. He looked care-worn, but in his rush to embrace him, Luis saw only the tender glow of inner beauty, peacefulness, and affection. The two men stood in this embrace for some time, Luis with his head against Karl’s chest, as though at the same time feeling and listening to his heartbeat. The servant rolled her eyes, and left the room muttering to herself, thinking once again of finding a new position. Luis took Karl’s hand and led him to a divan, pushed some papers and dirty clothes onto the floor, knocking over a wine flask with his foot, and then the two men sat.
“You’ve heard,” said Karl, in his kind, melodious voice.
Luis grimaced and shook his head. “Is there any way around this?” he asked. “Surely, the funeral is past.”
Karl was silent for a moment. “It is not about the funeral,” he said. “John was the first-born son. Now, that role has fallen to me. In the hierarchy of the family, it is time for me to come home and take my place.”
Luis nodded in understanding. He himself was the first-born son and since a young age had accepted that responsibility fully and enthusiastically. For this new era was not only the age of feeling and romance, it was also the age of nobility and heroism, and one needed to be honorable within one’s own family before one could pretend to lead in the larger world.
“I know,” he said softly, with a note of resignation. Resignation: that was a new concept to him, but one that appeared time and again in the writings of the Stoic masters whose ancient words he had taken to heart.
Karl paused again
for some moments. “It will not be a short-term absence,” he said. “I fear…or rather, know…that the time of my wandering must end. I need to assume my work in my community, support and lead my family, take on the duties of pastor for which I was educated. In time,” he added, more softly, “I will marry, a pastor must. All this will be a memory, a dream.
“However,” he turned Luis’s face toward his own, “my dearest beloved, I don’t know how I can leave you.” Tears shone in his pale blue eyes, and Luis tightened his grip on both his hands.
Luis was unable to contain the emotion that swept through him. “We are one Soul within two bodies,” he said. “How can that Soul be divided? We will always be together through time, through space…”
“I wish it were so, I wish to God it were so,” said Karl, his hands falling into the strong grip of his friend. “Silent love,” he said, and Luis’s brow furrowed.
“What do you mean?” he asked.
“I was thinking of Boehme, the Protestant mystic. He was my favorite writer when I was at Jena. I never really cared for Luther, you know. Boehme said, ‘Heaven is nothing other than a revelation of the Eternal One, where everything works and wills in silent love.’”
Luis said nothing, but the impact of these words touched his heart and mind profoundly. It was so different from the declarations of priests and princes and generals, the huge Bureaucracy of Meaning that tried to tell people how to act, think, feel, what societies they could or could not belong to; how to live, die, even compose. Certainly, Luis had encountered some supernatural presence—call it God if you must—within music throughout his entire life. He remembered watching the hills from River Street in Bonn and the ecstasy of Nature during his childhood years, and the feeling of both mastery and utter surrender he experienced when improvising brilliantly before a large audience.
“That is your gift to me,” said Luis. “I, too, have a gift for you, something similar. Let me package it up and send it to you, for you must be on your way.”
Before Karl left, Luis said, “I must know for certain that some time in the future—even if it is the very distant future—we will meet again.”
“I cannot say…” murmured Amenda, “my life is so uncertain now, there will be so many changes…”
“A dozen years, then!” cried Luis, clapping his hands on his friend’s arms. “Hopefully sooner, but assuredly, if we are both alive, we can add this distant date to our calendars and build our lives toward that reunion if no other.”
Karl nodded, improbable though the idea was. “Fine, but it seems too long. The world is too unsettled a place.”
“It will not be the first time, I am certain! We will meet many times again, and perhaps I can persuade you to bring your ministry to Vienna!” said Luis with a wink. But Karl’s smile was sad.
“Summer, then, July…1812…but where?”
“Karlsbad,” quipped Luis, “in your honor.” Karl nodded, and the two exchanged a Masonic-type handshake, and embraced one final time.
“I will live for that day,” said Luis, as Karl, out of ear-shot, walked briskly down Petersplatz, and turned a corner. How would he know that both would in fact live to and beyond that date, but they would not meet again on that day or ever again?
In a few weeks, already on his long journey home, Karl received a package from Luis. It contained a copy of the Quartet in F (op. 18, no. 1). The note read,
“Dear Amenda! take this quartet as a small memento of our friendship, (and) whenever you play it recall the days which we passed together and the sincere affection felt for you then and which will always be felt by, your warm and true friend…
“Farewell, dear A., and give me news, soon, of your stays en route and also when you have arrived back in your homeland.” Luis’s sketchbook revealed that the second movement, haunting and heartbreaking in its tenderness, unlike any expression of pathos and yearning yet captured in music, was meant to convey the feelings expressed in the tomb scene of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. It was as though he knew that the greatest love would end, but not in silence.
Chapter 15
In the final months of the year, Luis threw himself into his work. The great Septet, more variations, the publication of two of the Piano Sonatas. How could Mozart have composed his three greatest symphonies in a single summer! The man must have been bewitched. In actuality, it was just a matter of the diverse ways in which the brains of creative people work. For Luis, composing was more than inspiration alone: it required an architect’s attention to foundations and structure, to create a framework within which inspiration could be released on an unprecedented scale.
And during this time, and the months to follow in the new century, Luis transformed the idea of the four-movement symphony pioneered by Haydn. Under Luis’s masterful hand the symphony as a whole became like a cohesive novel in four connected chapters, sweeping toward an astonishing conclusion.
To achieve this transformation, he had to dissect and rearrange section after section, taking the finale from the first movement, moving it to the end of the fourth, and rebuilding the structure brick by brick, chapter by chapter, depending on which metaphor you choose to apply. And on top of that, he started the work in a foreign key, something that had not been done before. He smiled: that would set the critics on their ear!
There were more concerts and recitals through the end of the year and into the new, and Luis wisely dedicated a work to the wife of the court theater director, increasing his chances of snagging a coveted reservation at the Burgtheater in the spring. And snag it he did for on April 2, Luis had the theater to himself for the mounting of his first grand public concert.
The program included works by Mozart and Haydn, but featured the premier of the First Symphony, whose opening chords in a foreign key brought gasps from the large audience, as well as one of his piano concertos and some freeform improvisation. While the critics carped about the orchestra’s playing, perhaps they were too dumbfounded to find the words to describe the miraculous transformation of symphonic form developed by the still young composer.
In addition to his success as a pianist and composer, Luis’s star was on the rise in terms of income. His patron, Prince Lichnowsky, gave him a generous annuity so he could focus on his compositions. In addition, other patrons eagerly commissioned works and paid handsomely for dedications (though not all dedications were “bought”).
Shortly after the public concert, Luis met the great hornist Punto, an international superstar on his instrument, who was traveling through Vienna. Born in Bohemia, the son of a serf, Punto made a stunning reputation for himself as a musician and a bit of a wastrel. The composer promised the spirited musician a new sonata, and a date and venue for its premier had been set. However, between the public concert and other obligations, Luis did not have a chance to begin composing the sonata until the day before it was to be premiered. For a man who took nearly four years to compose a symphony, this was rushing it a bit, but he worked through the night, and Punto and he debuted the work as scheduled, to great acclaim. “I will never do that again,” swore Luis, mopping his brow, after the recital. But, of course, he did.
Despite the rough start, Punto and Luis hit it off, and Luis was quite knowledgeable about the horn as an instrument, thanks to his association as a young man with Simrock, the Bonn hornist, publisher, and Illuminati brother. They agreed to take the sonata on the road the following month. But in the meantime, a new wrinkle emerged in the life of musical Vienna, this time involving Luis’s growing faction of enemies.
Daniel Steibelt had been spreading rumors about Luis. Acknowledged as a major pianist of the era, Steibelt was a tall, proud dandy with an aggressive Prussian air. He also had a reputation for underhanded dealings and manipulating people and rules to his own advantage. He arrived in Vienna one afternoon, and some say it was for one reason only: to challenge “that hack Beethoven” to a piano competition.
Though a bit overworked, basking in the afterglow of his first publi
c concert, and the successful completion and performance of the Horn Sonata, Luis had seldom felt better. In this spirit, he accepted an invitation to play on the same program as Steibelt at the home of Count von Fries. Each musician performed an original work, to the satisfaction of a large assortment of guests, including those in each composer’s camp. Luis played the piano in a performance of his own Clarinet Trio (Opus 11), and there were no exchanges of fire at this first meeting.
The second meeting, a week later, was an entirely different story. This was a true competition, divided into three rounds, providing plenty of fireworks for an even larger audience. After Steibelt had competently played the piano part in one of his quintets, he did something especially snarky. He took a theme from a recent work by Luis and then wove a series of what he thought were superior variations on the purloined tune. In the context of the time, this was a slap in the face to Beethoven, and Luis felt it physically as though it were an actual blow.
Throughout the variations, accompanied by coos of approval in the rival camp, Luis sat silently, his arms across his chest, jaw tight, muscles taut, eyes blazing as they almost burned holes in the Prussian’s natty serge. After the performance and roars of applause (from one section of the audience) were over, Luis just sat there, still glaring.