by L. L. Holt
His heart still heavy, Luis left his country retreat within days of writing this tortured document. While return to the city did improve his mood, a cloud of resignation and submission—themes he had underlined in the wisdom literature he valued so highly—hung over his defeated spirit. Gradually, he confided in those closest to him (his brother Carl, sometime later his brother Nicolas, and eventually some of his friends in the music business, such as Reicha, learned the erstwhile secret (patrons were to find out through gossip and innuendo). While Luis could still hear conversations and music, they were more difficult and promised a terrifying world of total silence in the years ahead.
The change of venue, however, had a positive effect on Luis’s imagination. Perhaps the sharp, contrasting moods of the autumnal village and the bustling city in full artistic throttle stimulated his creative process. Luis began to enter more phrases into his sketchbook, including some ideas for a Third Symphony, something new, perhaps heroic in nature. And squabbles with publishers, some precipitated through the proactive involvement of his secretary/brother, gave him an outlet for blowing off steam. Talks developed about the composition of an opera about a courageous noble-minded heroine named Leonore (a name not so distant from Eleanor). There was even an oratorio in the works.
Spring brought Luis what was probably his greatest triumphs to date. A benefit concert was in fact mounted in April, premiering his Second Symphony, the Third Piano Concerto, Christ on the Mount of Olives, with the already premiered First Symphony tossed in for good measure. Luis’s proceeds for this one concert equaled more than twice the annual salary of a middle-class professional at the time.
Shortly thereafter, one of the great touring virtuosos of Europe arrived in Vienna: the violinist George Bridgetower. As a young prodigy, Bridgetower had performed before Thomas Jefferson when he was visiting Paris, and throughout the European nations. Most recently he had astonished audiences in London, including many who had toasted Haydn on his two tours of England. Bridgetower was not only a technician and interpreter without rival, he also brought a personal charm, good looks, and charisma to his performances which endeared him to listeners in this most Romantic of eras. Adding to the interest in this performer was another factor: Bridgetower was black.
The violinist’s mother was born in the duchy of Swabia, not far from Bavaria, but his father hailed from the West Indies and was employed in the court of Prince Esterhazy, long Haydn’s patron. What thoughts crossed Bridgetower’s mind as he entered Vienna in a carriage for the first time, surely being aware of the posthumous fate of another black celebrity, Angelo Soliman, in that very town.
It was his friend Ignaz Schuppenzigh, the violinist, who first alerted Luis to the arrival of Bridgetower. A gruff, solid-looking man with no interest in fashion, but a flair for networking, Schup knew both men would want to meet each other. Since they were not both pianists, the odds were against displays of competition and rivalry. At any rate, something good could come of this, he was sure. Schup made arrangements at the theater for the two men to meet in an informal but musical setting. Coffee, port, and pastries were set out, and Schup made sure he alone was witness to the proceedings.
Male musicians at the top of their game seldom greet each other as equals or fellow masters. More likely, there is a cagey sizing up of the other, the donning of protective armor, and making sure one’s lance is sharp and ready at hand. So it was that the two men shook hands, nodded, and sat at a table with wary eyes, while Schup intercepted the server and poured them each a cup of strong coffee.
It was Bridgetower who first broke the silence.
“Beethoven,” he said, leaning back and lighting a small cigarette, “I’m pleased to meet you. Your reputation extends throughout London, where I’ve been for several years. I’ve seen your first quartets, and even played one of your violin sonatas in recital. Very adventurous!”
Luis nodded, pleased by the accolades. He searched Bridgetower’s face, seeing a man who was both handsome and accomplished, with graceful manners and a worldly air.
“Your reputation, too, precedes you,” Luis acknowledged. “I am looking forward to hearing you tonight.” The men continued with some polite, if strained, banter, but Schup was disappointed that no conversational gambit was catching fire.
“Well,” said Luis, “look here! I brought some music!”
Bridgetower’s eyes lit up. “Is it new?”
“You bet it’s new!” said Luis, pushing the coffee to the side, splashing the tablecloth. “Here, take a look at this!” He ran a thick finger under several passages, as Bridgetower’s forehead crinkled with pleasure. He reached under his chair and pulled out his violin case, removing the fine instrument (a Guarnieri), and holding it like a guitar, as the two men reviewed the passage. Bridgetower threw back his head and laughed.
“Beethoven, you fox!” he roared, “What they say about you is true. No one would change keys that many times in the opening volley!” Luis slapped Bridgetower on his back, and looked around for a piano.
“Aha, here we go, come on!” The two men scrambled like school boys over to the instrument. Schup located a music stand and quickly brought it over to the violinist, while Luis handed over his score. “I can do this from memory, not to worry,” he assured his new friend.
Schup sat down across the room, ignored but glad to be so, and observed the unfolding of a new friendship and possibly a new revenue stream at his morning concert series. The two men played, and such music! A violinist of note himself, Schup was abashed at Bridgetower’s effortless bowing and lyricism, the complex low notes, the high tones that seemed to fly off the soundboard like small, invisible birds. Sight-reading from manuscript, especially Luis’s scrawl, was almost impossible, and yet, he and Luis were of a single mind and heart.
After their get-acquainted serenade, Bridgetower carefully placed his instrument back in its velvet-lined case, then fiercely embraced his partner-in-music.
“You are unsurpassed, George!” exclaimed Luis. “I’ve never heard such playing!” Though in fact, he heard only the lower tones.
“And you! Magnificent!” exclaimed Bridgetower, laughing. “You must write something for me. Should it be a commission?”
“No, no, no, just a tribute from one artist to another,” insisted Luis, who found he could understand more when he observed the lips of the speaker. This was the best he had felt since long before he went to the country the previous spring. See, he said to his inner demons, see what a little appreciation can do!
“I have some notes for a new violin sonata, undoubtedly my finest,” said Luis, “and the dedication page will bear your name!” The two men chatted, then broke into a session of improvisations and some silly songs, until Luis announced he had better attend to his compositions or they would have nothing worthwhile to play in the future.
The next few weeks offered no rest from the completed benefit concert. In addition to lessons for the boy Czerny and the usual assortment of fetching ladies, Luis had taken the son of his old mentor Franz Ries under his wing. The young Ries, a handsome young man named Ferdinand, was taking lessons in composition as well as piano, and provided yet another comforting link to his early friends in Bonn. But there was so much music to compose. Schup had given him a deadline for late May to complete the sonata for a breakfast concert series at the ungodly hour of 8 a.m. Luis was notorious for working right up to the very last minute, and this episode was to be no different. The ink was still wet on the violinist’s score when Luis arrived just under the wire in a disheveled but upbeat state on the morning of the 24th.
Bridgetower was a little annoyed to be kept waiting, and not to have a clue as to the sonata in advance. Still, sight-reading was one of the ways he could dazzle audiences with his genius, so he elegantly smoothed the pages on his stand, glanced through the score with widening eyes, and finally bent over to murmur one word in Luis’s ear: “Long!” And again, “Love the double stops!”
This was in fact the longest violin
sonata in history (at that time), and the most complex and engaging, the famous sonata in A major (though even the key is open to dispute, since Luis did not clearly indicate a key signature). As audience members rubbed their wakening eyes, the two musicians launched into a spirited performance of the Violin Sonata No. 9, rendered more energetic by the close call of nearly not playing at all.
The audience cheered vigorously, for it was remarkable music, and both musicians were consummate showmen, though Luis kept his hands close to the keyboard as was his style. After rounds of congratulations, and a few stops to chat with a music journalist and a publisher’s agent, the two went back to Luis’s flat to review a few rough places in the score, then out for a late mid-day meal at The Swan.
“Ah,” sighed the violinist, throwing back his head in relief, “that was fantastic. But I’m glad it’s behind us. I’d like to take this on the road, Beethoven. What are you doing in the next few months?”
Luis laughed gruffly. “I’m afraid I can’t leave just yet. Commissions, patrons, problems with publishers, that sort of thing.”
“Too bad,” said Bridgetower, lighting a thin cigarette, “We get along, our performing styles are in sync. Look, we even match!” he noted with a wink, holding his hand next to Luis’s.
“So true, on all scores!” the composer added. He seemed a bit distracted, even glum after the morning’s brilliant start, Bridgetower thought. Perhaps he needs a little diversion to put him in a sweeter mood.
The restaurant was filling up with customers on the pleasant spring afternoon, and Bridgetower cast his eye on a number of good-looking women, several in a party by themselves, another with a man who left to conduct business with a colleague.
“Look over there, Luis,” he said. “Now that is one handsome wench.” Luis looked in the indicated direction, and was surprised to see none other than Anna Milder, already a celebrated soprano at age 17 and a student of Luis’s own teachers, Salieri and Haydn.
“I wouldn’t bother with her,” said Luis uneasily, trying to distract his dining companion. “She’s too young, and from what I hear, can be very loud!” But Luis’s reaction had exactly the opposite effect on George Bridgetower.
“What is it, Luis, is she too much the woman for you? Eh?” Bridgetower turned to continue admiring the young woman, and trying to catch her eye. “Too young? This from the man who was seduced by a 16-year-old Galician?” he added, referring to Luis’s flirtation with Julie Guicciardi.
“She’s too well known around town,” said Luis guardedly. “She is a true artist! You are asking for trouble,” he added. Bridgetower liked seeing Luis squirm; this was a side of the master he had not yet seen, and it was most entertaining.
“I think she likes me,” he said, beaming. “In fact, I think I’m going to go over there and introduce myself!”
“You’ll do nothing of the sort!” shouted Luis, slamming his fist on the table. “I said,” he lowered his voice and pulled his collar a bit higher, “Leave. Her. Alone!”
With this Bridgetower arose, brushed off his lapels and sleeves, looked at Luis, then at the attractive patron, who noticed a tiff at the distant table and was frowning as she tried to recognize the parties, a feat exacerbated by nearsightedness.
“Beethoven, I think you are jealous, I do, I do,” purred the incomparable violinist. “I am going over there right now before her companion returns, and I will bring her back here and introduce her to you!”
With this, Luis flew into a rage, grabbed Bridgetower by both shoulders and pushed him down into the seat, while trying to keep his back to the lovely Anna.
“Let’s go!” he said in no uncertain terms. As his colleague demurred, Luis slammed a plate on the table, reached over and grabbed the score of the violin sonata from Bridgetower’s pocket, and, shaking it, shouted, “Not for you! You are no friend of mine!” and awkwardly dashed from the restaurant, tails flying, fingers crushing the edges of the score. Anna never did know who was making a scene on the other side of the room, and good thing, since she was destined to star in Luis’s opera, Fidelio, a few years later. For his part, Bridgetower simply took a deep breath, accepted the sympathetic glances and expressions of those nearby, settled into his chair, and ordered a brandy.
Luis, on the other hand, was livid, and later, while he had forgotten the reason for the disturbance, did not forget that Bridgetower was the object of his ire. Back in his room, he told Ries to contact another violinist, Rudolf Kreutzer, and let him know that he, not George, would receive the dedication. “Bridgetower is dead!” Luis exclaimed, pushing a stack of sketchbooks and scores to the floor. And though, as it would turn out, the new honoree would not like and would refuse to play the composition, it would be known throughout the ages as the Kreutzer, rather than the Bridgetower, Sonata.
Chapter 20
The squabble in the restaurant was not the reason Luis was on edge. Before he entered The Swan that day, something was already grinding within him, like a succubus gnawing on the marrow of his bones. He couldn’t put his finger on it, but it was there, a relentless, burning, seething, smoldering something not quite ready to catch fire.
He had felt that sensation before in his life, and in truth, it was when he felt most vitally alive, but never quite like this. He dismissed Ries, told Czerny’s father to take the lad home, there would be no lesson that week, or perhaps the next. Carl, who hadn’t been feeling well, knew it was best to leave alone the older brother with the unspecified focus in his eyes. The buzzing sensation moved from his brain into his heart, to his groin, down his arms until his broad flat fingertips vibrated and burned, down his legs into his feet, which grew hot. It was as though the ringing in his ears had taken a sensory turn and flooded his entire nervous system with vibrating fire.
Eventually, he dowsed his head and hands with a pitcher of water. Drying himself on his scarf, he took several of the sketchbooks from the floor, and thumbed through them, in search of something, he did not know what. Looking, looking. The answer was there, he felt it. Some note, some phrase, a rhythmic pattern, a progression.
He closed the books, and sat staring out the window, into the afternoon, the evening, the night. The cook had left his dinner, which grew cold. He poured a glass of claret and eventually, rolled over on the sofa and fell asleep. He dreamed, long, disturbing, sometimes violent dreams, dreams of places he had been as a child, and doors that were closed to him, the great doors of a large church that he could not budge, the elegant door of a court salon with haughty servants blocking his passage, the rough doors to a stable that he could not open, though he heard the neighs of horses near on the other side.
In his dream, he ran down a narrow street that wound and twisted but seemed to lead nowhere, looking back over his shoulder at the unidentified form of someone in hot pursuit. He ran and ran, and found himself suddenly in a forest at the top of a hill, and dawn was breaking, and the brilliant light of a miracle sky—like a Baroque depiction of heaven with rays of sunshine and fluttering birds—flooded his path. His hand now was on a bridle and he was pulling with all his strength at a great black stallion who reared and kicked and snorted, but he would not let go, he could not let go.
As he reached up and grasped the beast’s black mane with his last breath, he jolted awake and let out a loud cry. Luis was panting, and sweat ran down his back. Shaking from the images, so real, so completely consuming, he lit a lantern, and took a sketchbook over to the piano. Finishing the remaining wine in one gulp, he sat on the piano bench, his fingers fell on a series of chords in E flat, then a jarring C# and he began to hammer away at the scraps of sound that would evolve into a new symphony, his most remarkable and controversial to date.
When it was complete and he played it on the piano for Ries, easily the most intelligent and appreciative of his friends and students, the young man had to steady himself as he sank slowly to the chair beside the master. In 50 minutes, easily twice the length of a classical symphony, the work not only broke new ground for mu
sical expression: in a sense, all great music from that moment onward would trace its origin to this single liberating work.
“It is by his own statement the greatest work he has yet written,” Ries soon wrote to the publisher and Bonn friend, Simrock. “Beethoven recently played it to me, and I think that heaven and earth must tremble beneath one’s feet in a performance. He has a great desire to dedicate it to Bonaparte.”
The symphony consisted of four interrelated sections originating from a sweeping, heroic first movement. The second movement offered a solemn funeral march, perhaps symbolic of the hero’s transition to a state of immortality, ending in musical sobs of despair as the orchestra itself seems to unravel and collapse in on itself. The third movement suggested renewal, perhaps even resurrection, followed by a roar of triumph in the fourth movement finale built upon themes used earlier in the Creatures of Prometheus ballet. Bonaparte indeed! And it was audacious for Luis to suggest this dedication, since many of his patrons were staunchly anti-French, and Austria would once again soon be at war with Napoleon’s forces. But was the symphony really “about” Bonaparte after all?
Conceived during the tortured final days at Heiligenstadt the previous year, the work seemed to mirror the turmoil Luis had experienced on every level following the loss of hearing and of love. Was the funeral march and the complete dissolution of the orchestra in those final measures, in fact the expiration of the composer himself? And was he able, through music, to resurrect himself as a new creature, perhaps a creature of Prometheus, who defied the gods to bring light and understanding to humankind? (His ballet, The Creatures of Prometheus, had premiered just three years before.)
As though by miracle, a maelstrom of creative energy swept through the composer. In the following winter came sketches for works which would come to be known as masterpieces of world music for all time: the Fifth and Sixth Symphonies, the Waldstein and Appassionata Piano Sonatas, the Fourth Piano Concerto, and many other works. Tributes and commissions began to pour in, including the gift of a new Erard piano from Paris, complete with four pedals and additional keys (though Luis did not like the instrument’s sluggish “action” and preferred the pianos made by his old friend Streicher). And while the love of a potential marriage partner still eluded him, Luis enjoyed the solicitous attention of his sometime host, the Princess Marie Erdödy of Budapest.