Beethoven Variations Page 7

  In 1808, he was offered a salary outside Vienna as Music Director at Kassel. In December, he held a benefit concert in the Theater an der Wien: the public premieres of the Fifth and Sixth (Pastoral) Symphonies, parts of the Mass in C, and himself playing his Fourth Piano Concerto. It lasted over four and a half hours, the hall was freezing cold, the audience tittered at the birdcalls in the Pastoral. This concert heralded the end of his performing career. He was too deaf to play. In January 1809, he accepted the Kassel offer.

  Alarmed, his friends arranged a better deal with rich Viennese patrons. Beethoven would stay in Vienna composing whatever he liked, paid by an annuity from three noblemen: Prince Lobkowitz, Prince Kinsky and the twenty-one-year-old Archduke Rudolph, whom Beethoven was now teaching piano and composition.

  So 1809 started well. Though too deaf to play his viola in tune, he wrote in a sketchbook, ‘Quartets every week’. But in April, Austria declared war on France. Napoleon defeated an Austrian army, marched towards Vienna and established a base camp at Linz, where Beethoven’s youngest brother Johann had an apothecary’s shop. (Beethoven was now the only brother without property; Carl’s wife had a house in Vienna.) Johann supplied the French army and its wounded soldiers with medicine. He became one of the richest men in Linz – and the most hated, for collaborating with the enemy.

  Before Napoleon attacked, the Emperor’s family left Vienna. Beethoven wrote a ‘farewell’ piano piece for Archduke Rudolph. He said it was the first movement of a sonata and he would write the rest when Rudolph returned. He often complained about the time he spent teaching Rudolph composition, but he valued Rudolph’s musicianship (he asked him to play the piano in premieres of important pieces) and Rudolph’s astonishing music library. He must have felt that of all his patrons, Rudolph best understood his work.

  Over the first three downward notes of this piece, he wrote the word Le-be-wohl, ‘Farewell’. He wrote an ‘Absence’ movement later, and a third, ‘Return’, when Rudolph came back. When the whole sonata was published, he scolded the publisher for titling it Les Adieux rather than Lebewohl.

  During the siege, 10–13 May, a cannonball landed in Haydn’s courtyard. The old man was unharmed but shocked. Beethoven, meanwhile, fled to his brother Carl’s cellar. When Vienna surrendered, French troops entered and occupied the city. On 31 May, Haydn died.

  Beethoven spent most of the occupation copying theory exercises for teaching Rudolph composition. Then he re-used his Lebewohl theme in a single string quartet, the Harp. It sounds like a tribute to his old teacher, who invented the string quartet. You could hear its plucked strings as angels’ harps, accompanying Haydn to heaven. It could be Beethoven’s reflection on the classical tradition Haydn embodied. Or just a farewell, ending with a simple cadence.

  After occupying Vienna, Napoleon finally defeated the Austrian army in a bloody battle on the other side of the Danube. In October, he signed a peace treaty and departed, leaving Beethoven, like everyone, much poorer. Food was pricier; the currency devalued fivefold.

  In April 1810, Beethoven fell in love with Therese Malfatti, daughter of a rich merchant. He was introduced to her by an amateur cellist, Baron Gleichenstein, who helped him with practical affairs and was courting Therese’s sister. Beethoven had dedicated Cello Sonata Opus 69 to Gleichenstein, to thank him for arranging his annuity. Now, excited by this double courtship, he tried to smarten up, was delighted when the Malfatti family dog followed him home, and wrote Therese a bagatelle.

  He arrived one evening apparently planning to play this piece for her and propose. But, so the story goes, he drank too much to do either. When Therese died, the piece was found among her things. No one knows why Beethoven wrote Für Elise on it, rather than Für Therese. It became one of the most popular piano pieces anywhere: in the 1990s, its melody was the most downloaded ringtone in the world.

  Gleichenstein was ordered to tell Beethoven he was not welcome at the Malfatti house. ‘Your news,’ wrote Beethoven, ‘has plunged me from the heights of sublime ecstasy down into the depth. For you, poor B, no happiness can come from outside. You must create everything for yourself, in your own heart.’ He wrote another stand-alone string quartet, Quartetto Serioso, Opus 95, full of anger, anguish, defiance and a kind of jokey despair. Like the Appassionata Sonata and Florestan’s dungeon aria, it is in the dark key of F minor. It was not a commission, he clearly had to write it, said it was never to be performed in public, and dedicated it to his chamber music friend Zmeskall. He also set three Goethe poems of tragic love.

  Some of the desolation he was grappling with in 1811 comes over in a scribble in one of his sketchbooks: ‘Cotton in my ears at the piano takes away the horrible ringing in my ears.’ But professionally he was becoming a legend. Hoffmann hailed his Fifth Symphony as the beginning of Romantic music; he was commissioned to write music for Goethe’s play Egmont, and met a friend of Goethe’s, Bettina Brentano.

  He also met Bettina’s half-brother, Franz Brentano, and Franz’s wife, Antonie. In autumn 1811, he began to visit Antonie regularly. The Brentanos normally lived in Frankfurt, but her father had died in Vienna and she was clearing his house. When she was ill, Beethoven comforted her by playing the piano. He wrote a song called ‘For the Beloved’, and gave her the score when she asked.

  In June 1812, he wrote an Allegretto for Piano Trio for Antonie’s ten-year-old daughter, dedicating it ‘To my little friend Maximiliane Brentano, to encourage her in piano playing’. In late June, he left Vienna to take the waters at the spa of Teplitz and stopped en route in Prague, to collect part of his annuity.

  He had been to Prague before, for concerts. In 1796, he had a violin repaired there. The sign of the luthier’s craft, three violins for three generations of violin-makers, still marks the door he took it through. In 1798, he premiered his First Piano Concerto there. But this was a private visit. He arrived on 1 July, and two days later the Brentanos also turned up, bound for Karlsbad. That night, 3 July 1812, Beethoven failed to keep a business appointment. His apology note does not say why. Hotel registers, coach passenger lists and police records show he left Prague on 4 July and arrived next day in Teplitz.

  From Teplitz, on Monday 6 July, he wrote a letter to a woman he addressed as his ‘immortal beloved’. ‘My journey was dreadful!’ he wrote. ‘They warned me not to travel by night and tried to frighten me but that only spurred me on – I was wrong! The coach broke down…Yet I felt the pleasure I always feel when I successfully overcome a difficulty.’

  The letter is an emotional roller-coaster. At one moment, they have to live together; at the next, they have to part. But it does imply they spent at least part of a night together. It was found with the Heiligenstadt Testament when Beethoven died. He probably never sent it. For two centuries, scholars have tried to identify the woman. Many German-speaking scholars think she was Josephine Brunsvik. Most English-speaking scholars believe she was Antonie Brentano.

  Antonie was definitely in Prague at the right time. But she was married, her husband was a friend of Beethoven’s, and Beethoven was very high-minded. If Antonie was his ‘Immortal Beloved’, how did he square his morals with his love?

  We shall never know, but this moment was his second supreme crisis. The difference between this and his crisis of facing deafness, ten years before, lies in his work. In 1802, the new form his creativity would take was already stirring. In 1812, he had reached the end of his ‘heroic’ style but did not see where to go next. It would be a long, hard path.

  You Must Not Be Human

  He stayed on at Teplitz and started a diary. Loss and loneliness had to have a vent. He also did something he had longed to do: met Goethe. They talked for a week but it did not go smoothly. Beethoven disliked Goethe’s deference to nobility; Goethe found Beethoven uncouth. ‘An utterly untamed personality,’ he wrote. ‘I have never seen an artist more concentrated, energetic and intense.
I can quite understand that his relationship to the world must be a strange one. He is not altogether in the wrong for finding the world detestable, but that does not make it more enjoyable for himself or others.’

  Then Beethoven went to Karlsbad, staying in the same guest house as the Brentanos. We do not know what happened: they returned to Frankfurt but remained friends with him, and in October Beethoven dashed off to Linz, to try to prevent another brother marrying. All his life, his family was entwined with his crises of loss. Each time he left Bonn for Vienna, he lost a parent. Each time he lost a woman he deeply loved, one of his brothers married a woman he was already sleeping with and Beethoven did all he could to stop him. Each time, he called the woman ‘immoral’.

  The woman concerned this time was Therese, Johann’s housekeeper, who had an illegitimate daughter from a previous relationship. Beethoven stayed with them two months, tried to get rid of her, even made the Linz police order her to leave town. The brothers came to blows, Johann married Therese and later blamed Ludwig for his unhappy marriage.

  While in Linz, Beethoven finished his Eighth Symphony. It is strangely light-hearted considering the turmoil he was in, though the manuscript is full of crossings out and scratchings that almost tear the paper.

  He also made friends with Franz Glöggl, Music Director of Linz Cathedral. He asked to hear a Linz musical speciality, played at funerals and on All Souls’ Day: an Equale, in which instruments in the same family – trombones – played equally important parts. He then wrote Glöggl three new ones. ‘Beethoven wrote me some mourning pieces for trombones. He wrote them in my room,’ Glöggl wrote to Robert Schumann in 1838. A quartet for equal voices from the same family of instruments would have appealed to Beethoven’s democratic instincts and his interest in quartets even in – perhaps especially in – the midst of a family row.

  His Equals for Four Trombones, performed on 2 November, foreshadow in miniature some sonorities in the Missa Solemnis, Ninth Symphony and late quartets. They were played at his own funeral – and later, in England, at the funerals of Gladstone and Edward VII, where people praised their ‘weird simplicity and exquisite pathos’. They were his first musical expression, perhaps, of his loss. Back in Vienna he wrote another: his last violin sonata, Opus 96. Then he entered the bleakest, most barren era of his life. Sustained, his diary suggests, by a sense of God experienced von inner, ‘from within’.

  Through most of his forties he was unhappy and isolated. Words like paranoid, alcoholic, depressed, psychotic, creep into biographies. He was a composer who was not really composing. In 1813 friends discovered him in Baden, ‘so negligent of his person as to appear positively filthy, in a deplorable state. No decent coat or whole shirt.’ At some point he tried to starve himself to death. Underneath, he was searching for another new path.

  If he did visit brothels, it was probably during this period. The evidence is ambivalent but notes from him to Zmeskall, 1813–16, say things like, ‘I am always ready for it, the time I prefer most of all is about half past three in the afternoon,’ and ‘Keep away from rotten fortresses [which seems to have been their code for prostitutes], an attack from them is deadly.’

  The year 1813 was also the beginning of Napoleon’s downfall. The English defeated French forces in Spain and an inventor persuaded Beethoven to write music for a celebratory piece involving an automatic playing-machine. He wrote the Battle Symphony (or Wellington’s Victory), a crudely populist parody of his heroic style. It was his artistic nadir. He knew it. He told a critic, ‘What I shit is better than anything you could think up.’

  But in the same concert as the Battle Symphony, the Seventh Symphony was premiered and wildly applauded. The Kärntnertortheater asked him to revive his opera. He revised it again, and it opened in May 1814 in the version we now know as Fidelio, and was at last the success it ought to have been. It was repeated the following year during the Congress of Vienna. He had never been so fêted. Nor so creatively at sea.

  In 1815, brother Carl told Beethoven he was dying and had nominated him joint guardian with his wife Johanna of his nine-year-old son Karl. Beethoven demanded sole guardianship and when Carl died was outraged to discover that the will appointed Johanna the guardian, himself only associate guardian.

  ‘God permit my wife and brother to be harmonious for the sake of my child’s welfare,’ Carl had written in his will, but for the next five years Beethoven fought Johanna in the courts for custody of her son. He wrote long letters to a tribunal saying she was immoral; he nicknamed her Queen of the Night, after the mother in The Magic Flute.

  He knew he was being cruel. Old friends were shocked. He told himself he was rescuing Karl. As, perhaps, he would have liked to have been rescued from his own father. He got sole custody in 1816, placed Karl in a boarding school and visited at weekends. When Karl got low marks at school, Beethoven punished him with coldness. Karl had a hernia operation: Beethoven did not attend. He made his pupil Carl Czerny teach Karl piano though Czerny said he had no talent. He swung between tortured tenderness (‘my beloved Karl’) and telling the schoolmaster to beat him if he did not work. Jealous that Karl went on loving his mother, he forbade Karl to see her; Karl disobeyed.

  He was also still mourning his lost love. He copied into his diary advice about endurance through suffering, from the ancient Sanskrit drama Shakuntala (a German translation had just come out), in which a faithful wife loses the ring her husband gave her and wanders the world to find him – as Beethoven felt he was doomed to wander, without love.

  He had always written single songs. ‘Adelaide’ was a popular hit before he was thirty; he had given Josephine ‘To Hope’, and Antonie ‘To the Beloved’. But in April 1816, as if a distant love was that much more inspiring, he wrote An die ferne Geliebte (To the Distant Beloved): a whole song-cycle, the first in Western music.

  He called it a ‘song-ring’, Liederkreis. The songs run into each other like thoughts. The theme of the first reappears as the end of the last, closing the ring, Kreis, a token of love. The lyrics interweave the nature he loved with the image of unattainable love: the singer imagines the wind wafting his songs through woods and valleys to his beloved. When she sings these songs, they will join two loving hearts: separation will be overcome.

  What was really overcome was creative aridity. Maybe writing this was emotional closure, or maybe his next style, gestating through four years of misery, was simply ready to go. From November 1816, beginning with the Piano Sonata Opus 101 (as if he was going back to his teenage self, improvising on the piano), he wrote himself into a new and astonishing creativity.

  For much of 1817 he was ill; then he wrote the Hammerklavier Sonata. He worried about money: ‘I have enough boards for one more window shutter,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘What do blankets cost?’ But he stopped writing a diary, as if he no longer needed it now he was composing.

  He gave up trying to hear what people said, and began carrying notebooks for them to write in. His Conversation Books also contain shopping lists and necessities: ‘Blotting sand. Russian night candles. Coffee cup for housekeeper. Ink. Spices. Pottery shaving mug. Shit shovel. What do people wear now instead of an undershirt?’

  These were the domestic minutiae against which his late style – introspective, cosmic, radical – evolved. He was experimenting with fragmentation, new possibilities of variation, and ancient polyphonic textures. ‘A new and really poetic element must be introduced into the old traditional forms,’ he wrote as he prepared to weld this polyphonic lyricism into the sparer textures of a string quartet.

  But his late style evolved in a legal and emotional firestorm. All love focused on Karl. ‘I am his true father,’ he wrote in his diary. Johanna petitioned the tribunal for guardianship and was rejected, but in December 1818 Karl ran away to her. Beethoven asked police to bring him back and wept as he returned Karl to school. ‘He’s ashamed of me,’ he said.


  Johanna petitioned again, saying Karl wanted to get away from Beethoven. The tribunal now interviewed everyone and Beethoven let slip that he and Karl’s father were not aristocrats: the Flemish van in their name was not, like German von, a mark of nobility. This tribunal, set up for aristocratic disputes only, passed the case to a lower court, which transferred guardianship to Johanna and a municipal employee.

  Meanwhile, in August 1819, brother Johann bought a big estate west of Vienna and wrote to Beethoven signing himself, ‘Your brother Johann, landowner’. Beethoven was now in debt, increasingly ill with rheumatic fever, ‘gout in the chest’, jaundice and a painful liver, and wore a body belt ‘owing to the sensitive condition of my abdomen’. He wrote back to Johann signing himself, ‘Your brother Ludwig, brain owner’, tried to buy a house himself, and failed.

  He kept appealing to the court. Finally, in 1820, when Karl was fourteen, he used a personal testimonial from Archduke Rudolph and got sole custody.

  In 1821 he was arrested as a tramp in Baden. ‘I am Beethoven!’ he said. Of course you are, said the Baden constable and threw him in jail. He made such a fuss the policeman disturbed the commissioner at dinner, Beethoven was recognised, set free and apologised to. One wonders if he remembered arguing his father out of jail.

  Meanwhile, four commissions led to his last great works. In 1817, the Philharmonic Society of London asked for two symphonies. He began writing the Ninth Symphony, bringing a choir and soloists into the last movement to sing Schiller’s ‘Ode to Joy’, which he had wanted to set since his teenage years with the Illuminati.