Beethoven Variations Read online

  In 1789, the French Revolution began. Like other Enlightenment idealists, eighteen-year-old Beethoven supported it. Though he grew up wearing the court orchestra’s uniform and later depended on moneyed patrons, he was always fiercely against inherited privilege. In February 1790, the Emperor died. Beethoven was commissioned to write two cantatas: a funeral cantata for the old Emperor, a coronation cantata for the new one.

  The following year, the Elector ferried his orchestra and actors up the Rhine for a month of concerts. A soprano on that tour (who met Beethoven a few years later in Vienna) told her niece he proposed to her but was ‘half-crazy and too ugly’. Beethoven, however, remembered the trip as a ‘source of loveliest visions’ and the ‘seal’ he was given then, in fun, was found among his things when he died.

  In December 1791, in Vienna, Mozart died. Beethoven had lost his chance of studying with the composer he most revered, but Haydn travelled through Bonn in July and Beethoven showed him his cantatas. Haydn was impressed: Waldstein encouraged the Elector to let Beethoven go to Vienna again, this time to study with Haydn. At twenty-one, on All Souls’ Day, 2 November 1792, with a French army heading towards Bonn, Beethoven left town and never returned.

  Virtuoso

  In Vienna, Beethoven began studying with Haydn, though he took lessons from other composers too. The day after his twenty-second birthday, his father died in Bonn. Busy making his name as a pianist, he stayed where he was and left his brothers to clear up after his father’s death.

  He was invited to move into the mansion of a great music patron, Prince Lichnowsky. After a few years he found living there oppressive and moved out, but carried on playing at Lichnowsky’s private salons, and in those of another rich patron, Prince Lobkowitz.

  In January 1794, Haydn left for London. Like fizz released from a bottle, Beethoven wrote three piano trios, his first numbered publication, as well as two piano concertos and three sonatas. He also started his First Symphony.

  In March 1795, Lichnowsky arranged for Beethoven to hold his first public concert in Vienna’s Burgtheater. Beethoven was twenty-four. His stomach hurt, a problem that would always plague him before concerts. Two days before, he was still writing the concerto he intended to play; copyists finished orchestral parts the morning of the concert. All his life he would write up to the wire. But the concert was a success, and Mozart’s widow asked him to play a Mozart concerto in public. He had arrived.

  Haydn returned in August and criticised the third, the most original, of the new piano trios. Beethoven stopped lessons with Haydn but dedicated to him his Piano Sonatas Opus 2, and on his deathbed was delighted to be gifted a picture of the house where Haydn was born. ‘Such a little place,’ he said, ‘for such a great man.’

  Napoleon captured Bonn, and some of Beethoven’s old friends migrated to Vienna. So did his brothers. They were now using their middle names. Caspar, a mediocre musician, was now Carl. Nikolaus, a pharmacist, was now Johann, their father’s name. Carl got a clerk’s job in a government Finance Department but for some years worked also as Beethoven’s agent. Publishers disliked him. When Carl sold to one publisher a piece Beethoven had promised to another, the brothers came to blows. Beethoven idealised the bonds of family, but his relations with his brothers were always fraught.

  Beethoven wrote a popular song, ‘Adelaide’, and went on a European concert tour. Somewhere around 1796, the story goes, he stripped off after a long walk and stood sweating in a draught, which set off a bout of illness that began, unperceived at first, to affect his ears.

  He kept playing quartets, the form which Haydn invented and Mozart made more dramatic. He often played with a myopic cellist, Baron Zmeskall, who worked in the Hungarian Chancellery and smuggled him quills to write with from the office. When Beethoven too had to wear glasses to read music, he wrote for Zmeskall Duet for Viola and Cello with Two Obbligato Eyeglasses, a playful piece that shows him thinking hard about string chamber music: the two voices are equal. In 1798, he wrote the Opus 9 String Trios my father introduced us to as children; and then Prince Lobkowitz commissioned him to write six quartets. Beethoven soon finished the first, Opus 18, No. 1, and gave a copy to his violinist friend Karl Amenda.

  But he took his time with these quartets. He studied those of Mozart. He had grown up playing viola, but his virtuoso instrument was the piano. Three years later he asked Amenda not to lend out the draft he had given him, as he had re-done it. Amenda said the sorrowful Adagio reminded him of lovers saying goodbye. Beethoven was pleased: he said he’d been thinking of the tomb scene in Romeo and Juliet. But that scene is hardly lovers saying goodbye: Juliet is dead and only Romeo’s feelings matter. The pain is that of a young man alone and bereft in the dark – as Beethoven, through the three years he worked on these quartets, was alone with the dark secret of his deafness.

  But he did go to doctors. In November 1801, he wrote to Wegeler of ‘blistering plasters’ placed on both arms. They were meant to draw out ‘toxins’ that blocked his ear ducts. ‘A most unpleasant cure. I am deprived of the free use of my arms, to say nothing of the pain. I cannot deny that the humming with which my deafness began has become somewhat weaker, especially in the left ear. My hearing, however, has not in the least improved.’

  Often, now, he couldn’t hear musical notes, or what people said. Brain research on jazz musicians shows that while improvising they shut down their frontal lobe, the censor which inhibits expression, and switch on the medial prefrontal cortex, which releases imagination. Beethoven, the great improviser, must have done that too, but now he could not always hear the sounds he produced. How would that affect things? All six Opus 18 quartets express vivid emotions – joy, sadness, fear, playfulness – but the last is on a new, more tragic plane. He named its final movement ‘La Malinconia’, and marked it, ‘To be played with the utmost delicacy.’ Its anguish, quick changes of mood and unstable harmonies foreshadow the late quartets and must reflect his terror at what was happening.

  But he was also discovering that writing for four voices in the same tonal family, a structure strong enough to contain instability, disagreement, ricochets of feeling, all the stuff that goes on in a family, was the perfect form to express internal conflict and resolution – all the stuff that goes on in a psyche.

  While he was writing the quartets, Lichnowsky started paying him an annual allowance and gave him four valuable seventeenth-century instruments: two violins, a viola and a cello. In April 1800, Beethoven put on his first ‘benefit’ concert, fundraising for himself: a public concert showcasing the First Symphony and instantly popular Septet. In the audience was his future patron, the Emperor’s youngest brother Archduke Rudolph, a keen boy of twelve.

  His professional life was flourishing. He was commissioned to write the music for a successful ballet, The Creatures of Prometheus. But in the summer of 1801 he wrote a piano sonata he called Sonata quasi una fantasia (later known as the Moonlight Sonata because it reminded a German poet of moonlight on Lake Lucerne), whose turmoil may express his despair at going deaf. Then he fell in love with an eighteen-year-old countess, Julie Guicciardi, whom he met through her cousins, his pupils Therese and Josephine Brunsvik. He taught Julie piano, dedicated the Moonlight Sonata to her and possibly proposed. But she preferred a count, whom she married the following year. She remembered Beethoven as ‘noble and refined in feeling but very ugly’.

  A young pianist, Ferdinand Ries, son of a violinist who helped the Beethoven family when their mother died, arrived in Vienna from Bonn. He became Beethoven’s devoted assistant, and later wrote remembrances of him. ‘He was a thoroughly kind person at heart,’ Ries said, ‘but his temper and irritability got him into trouble.’

  In May 1802, Beethoven despaired of doctors’ attempts to cure his deafness. He followed the one sensible bit of medical advice he received, to ‘rest his ears’ outside Vienna, and rented rooms in a bakery in Hei
ligenstadt, a spa village an hour’s wagon-drive out of town. This bakery is now a museum in a leafy suburb. It contains an old wooden bakery sign, the croissant, reflecting the story that Vienna’s bakers saved the city in the Turkish siege and created a pastry memorialising the crescent on the Turkish flag. Perhaps the smell made Beethoven feel at home. His grandfather was a baker’s son; the house where he grew up had been a bakery too.

  This museum also displays, however, the desperate methods Beethoven used, as he grew deafer, to try to hear music. Placing a stick between your forehead and a piano, for instance, does work, a little: the cranial bone transmits soundwaves to the inner ear, hair cells on the cochlea convert them into electronic signals, and the auditory nerve is supposed to conduct these to the brain.

  But we know from the record of Beethoven’s autopsy that his auditory nerve was withering. He hadn’t a chance, and Heiligenstadt was where he had to face it. He stayed six months, hoping his ears would recover. Eventually he had to accept that they would not.

  Pieces he wrote there, like the Tempest Sonata, Opus 31, reflect his anguish, but also show a new style developing. His Fifteen Variations and Fugue in E-flat are known as the Eroica Variations because he used their theme later in the Eroica Symphony, which announced his new ‘heroic’ style. But he created that theme for his Prometheus ballet music and they could just as well be called the Prometheus Variations.

  Prometheus was a Romantic symbol of creativity through revolution. Fire, which he stole from the gods, was also creativity itself – a divine prerogative. His revolution was to give it to human beings and suffer for it. Contemporary painters portrayed his punishment in vivid detail: chained to a rock with an eagle eating his liver.

  The Eroica Variations were revolutionary too. When writing a ‘theme and variations’, the convention was to state the theme first, but Beethoven began with variations. Even more unusual, variations in the bass. He was working from the ground up, as Prometheus created human beings from clay, as small flames flicker into fire. He wrote to the publishers Breitkopf & Härtel, ‘I have written variation works in a truly new manner. Usually I only hear others mention when I have new ideas, since I never know it myself, but this time I have to reassure you that the manner is entirely new.’

  These pieces suggest his heroic style evolved partly out of his genius for variation. And also that behind the Eroica Symphony stands not just Napoleon, but the ancient Greek hero of creativity, defiance and suffering. As if Prometheus lit the fuse for his blaze of creativity ahead. After returning to Vienna, Beethoven dramatised another lonely hero suffering on humanity’s behalf. The late eighteenth century sometimes identified Prometheus with Christ, and Beethoven’s Gethsemane oratorio, Christ on the Mount of Olives, premiered in April 1803.

  But before he left Heiligenstadt, he wrote a document now called the Heiligenstadt Testament. It was discovered in his desk after he died, and begins, For my brothers Carl and…Beethoven, as if he could not bear to write ‘Johann’, his father’s name. It is partly a will, telling his brothers to be kind to each other, leaving them his precious string instruments, but reads like an open letter to all humanity, including us, his future listeners, the audience he knew he was writing for. It describes his agony at going deaf and says he thought of killing himself but has decided to live for his art.

  This crisis of despair and decision collided with a chrysalis moment, a breaking of style. In his childhood he developed extraordinary resilience, and ways of protecting his music no matter what. What he had to protect and nurture now were the seeds of the Eroica. His first rush of creativity had been driven by tension between his classical roots and a restless search for new modes of expression. His style now changed dramatically. In a very short time, he was tackling new forms, and approaching old ones in new ways. Having rejected suicide, he embarked on the most creative period of his life.

  Hero

  In January 1803, he began living with his brother Carl at the Theater an der Wien, as resident composer. He was under contract to write an opera, but began with his revolutionary Third Symphony. At first he called this the Bonaparte Symphony, dedicating it to Napoleon who seemed to embody his democratic ideals. But in May 1804 Napoleon was crowned Emperor of France. Beethoven, furious and disillusioned, scratched out Napoleon’s name. It is now known as the Eroica.

  He also wrote his one opera, whose imagery and themes – good and evil, light and dark, the rescue of a prisoner – reflect his love for Mozart’s Magic Flute, but which was to have a troubled history. First performed in 1805, revised but withdrawn in 1806 (Beethoven quarrelled with the theatre manager), and published as Leonore, then revised again ten years later as Fidelio. It opened in November 1805, just after Napoleon walked into Vienna unopposed. The Viennese stayed indoors; the audience was mostly French soldiers. Then, in December, Napoleon decimated the Austrian army at Austerlitz, dissolved the Holy Roman Empire, annexed parts of Austria, and turned German states like Bonn, formerly under Austrian rule, into the Confederation of the Rhine, governed by France.

  In 1804, the husband of Countess Josephine Brunsvik, Beethoven’s ex-pupil, died. Beethoven, a family friend, now fell in love with her. Her family worried: noblewomen who married commoners lost custody of their children. Beethoven’s piano pieces Andante Favori and Appassionata Sonata throb with love for her, but drafts of her replies to his letters suggest she refused a physical relationship and when he dedicated the song ‘To Hope’ to her, she was angry that people saw the dedication: she wanted the relationship kept quiet.

  Soon Josephine was not at home when he called. ‘I went to your home twice – but could not have the happiness of seeing you,’ he wrote. ‘It hurts me – maybe your feelings changed – I no longer wish to be subjected to rejection by your servants – be frank – I deserve it – even if I suffer – is it true you do not want to see me any more?’

  Josephine died in 1821, the year of his last piano sonata, Opus 111, in which some people hear ‘her’ theme from Andante Favori. Some scholars think she was the ‘Immortal Beloved’ addressed in his love letter of 1812. But in 1806, when he is thirty-five, what matters is that this is the fourth woman we know of, and probably the most important, to reject him.

  In May 1806, brother Carl compounded Beethoven’s heartbreak by marrying his own pregnant girlfriend, Johanna. Beethoven called Johanna immoral (she once accused a servant of stealing something she had stolen herself) and tried in vain to stop the wedding. Their son Karl was born in September.

  The depth of feeling in what he was writing now must reflect many painful emotions: anguish over Josephine and his worsening deafness but also horror at the suffering he saw everywhere after Austerlitz. Yet these works are also full of confidence, excitement, ways of shifting sorrow into joy.

  They include his second set of string quartets, Opus 59, commissioned by Vienna’s Russian Ambassador, Count Razumovsky. Beethoven wrote them in six months; they seem to have strengthened his sense that the string quartet was a form in which he could express intense feeling with particular intimacy. ‘I’m thinking of devoting myself entirely to this type of composition,’ he told the publisher.

  In late summer 1806, depressed by his loss of Josephine, the failure of his opera and Carl’s marriage, he stayed with Lichnowsky in his Silesian castle. One night, Lichnowsky invited the leaders of the occupying French army to dine and ordered Beethoven to play for them. Beethoven refused. There was a very public row; Beethoven rushed back to Vienna with the manuscript of the Appassionata Sonata and sketchbooks for the Opus 59 quartets, and smashed a bust of Lichnowsky which the prince had given him. He lost his allowance and relations with Lichnowsky never really recovered, though later the remorseful prince, almost bankrupted by the war, used to climb the four flights to Beethoven’s rooms, sit outside and listen to him play. Beethoven never let him in.

  In September 1807, Beethoven was commissioned by H
aydn’s old patron Prince Esterházy to write a mass. He said he felt trepidation, not a word he often used. He was entering his old teacher’s territory: the mass would be performed at Eisenstadt, where Haydn had lived as court composer. Sketches show he studied Haydn’s masses closely. He wrote a Mass in C, which the prince hated and privately called ‘ridiculous, detestable’. He showed his dislike publicly, it was the worst humiliation of Beethoven’s career and he left Esterházy at once.

  But the response to this mass of the more discerning Viennese critic E. T. A. Hoffmann sums up exactly what Beethoven – post-Josephine, and increasingly deaf – must have felt while writing it; and also the way that though Beethoven the man often despaired, his music always turns sorrow into consolation, finding redemption in even the most tragic themes. The Agnus Dei, said Hoffmann, expresses ‘an inner hurt which does not tear the heart but is good for it; and dissolves to unearthly delight, like sorrow from another world.’

  Beethoven rented a flat in a building where his Bonn friend Stephan von Breuning, now a civil servant in Vienna, also lived. Their friendship went up and down. ‘You wouldn’t believe what terrible effects the decline of hearing has had on him,’ Stephan wrote to Wegeler in 1804. ‘Withdrawn, distrustful, often of his best friends, irresolute.’ But Stephan, always loyal, suggested Beethoven move into his own flat to save money. Beethoven did, but failed to give notice to their landlord, who asked for his deposit back. The friends quarrelled and Beethoven moved out. They made it up, but Beethoven transferred his belongings to a fourth-floor apartment on the bastion, now another Beethoven Museum: the Pasqualatihaus, where he lived on and off for eight years.

  This apartment had a view of the green belt round the city walls (dismantled in the mid-nineteenth century to make way for the Ringstrasse) but Beethoven wanted to see the Vienna woods too and knocked a hole through the wall. His landlord, Baron Pasqualati, was furious and Beethoven had to leave. But he returned two years later, and this was where he lived longest; where he wrote, among other works, the Fifth and Seventh Symphonies, the Archduke Trio, and the final version of his opera.