Wildly surging emotions may betray my heart, yet my heart is good.
Ludwig van Beethoven
Ludwig van Beethoven
Born - December 16, 1770
Died - March 26, 1827
Youth in Bonn: 1770 - 92
He was born on December 16, 1770. Bonn was the seat of the prince archbishop elector of Cologne, one of those Rhineland principalities which, before Napoleon "secularized" them, were ruled by catholic archbishops engagingly secular and inclined to support well-behaved artists. A considerable part of Bonn's 9,560 population was dependant upon the electoral establishment. Beethoven's grandfather was a bass singer in the Elector's choir; his father, Johann van Beethoven, was a tenor there. The family of Dutch stock had come from a village near Louvain. The Dutch 'van' indicated place of origin, and did not, like the German 'von' or the French 'de', indicate titled and propertied nobility. Grandfather and father were inclined to excessive drinking, and something of this passed down to the composer.
In the year 1767 Johann van Beethoven married the young widow Maria Magdelena Keverich Laym, daughter of a cook in Ehrensbreitstein. She developed into a mother much beloved by her famous son for her soft heart and easy ways. She gave her husband seven children, four of whom died in infancy. The survivors were the brothers Ludwig, Casper Karl (1774-1815), and Nilolaus Johann (1776-1848).
The father's salary of three hundred florins as " Electoral Court tenorist" was apparently his sole income. The family lived in a poor quarter of Bonn, and young Beethoven's surroundings and associations were not of a kind to make him a gentleman; he remained a roughhewn rebel to the end. Hoping to improve the family income by developing a son into a child prodigy, Beethoven's father induced or compelled the four year old boy to practice at the clavier or on the violin many hours in the day, occasionally at night. Apparently the boy had no spontaneous urge to music, and according to witnesses he had to be urged on by severe discipline that sometimes brought him to tears. The torture succeeded, and the boy came to love the art that cost him so many painful hours.
At the age of eight, with another pupil, he was displayed in a public concert, March 26, 1778, with financial results unrecorded. In any case the father was encouraged to engage teachers who could lead Ludwig into the higher subleties of music.
Aside from this he received little formal education. We hear of his attending a school where he learned enough Latin to salt some of his letters with humorous Latin inventions. He picked up enough French to write it intelligibly. He never learned to spell correctly in any language, and seldom bothered to punctuate. But he read some good books, ranging Scott's novels to Persian poetry, and copied into his notebooks morsels of wisdom from his reading. His only sport was his fingers. He loved to improvise, and in that game only Abt Vogler could match him.
In 1784 Maria Theresa's youngest son, Maxmilian Francis, was appointed elector of Cologne, and took up his residence in Bonn. He was a kindly man, enthusiastic about food and music; he became "the fattest man in Europe," but also he brought together an orchestra of 31 pieces. Beethoven, age fourteen, played the viola in that ensemble, and was also listed as "deputy court organist," with a salary of 150 gulden ($750?) per year. A report to the elector in 1785 described him as "of good capability,. . . of good quiet behavior, and poor."
Despite some evidence of sexual ventures --
* The post-mortem examination of Beethoven revealed various internal disorders, most probably the result of syphlitic affections at an early period of his life.*
Despite some evidence of sexual ventures, the good behavior and growing competence of the youth led to his receiving from the Elector (1787) permission and funds for a trip to Vienna for instruction in musical composition. Soon after his arrival he was received by Mozart, who heard him play, and praised him with disappointing moderation, apparently thinking that the piece had been long rehearsed. Suspecting this suspicion, Beethoven asked Mozart to give him, on the piano, a theme for variations. Mozart was astonished at the youths fertility of invention and sureness of touch, and said to his friends, " Keep your eyes on him; someday he will give the world something to talk about"; but this story has too familiar an air. Mozart appears to have given the boy some lessons, but the death of Mozart's father, Leopold (May 28, 1787), and news that Beethoven's mother was dying, cut this relationship short. Ludwig hurried back to Bonn and was at his mother's bedside when she died (July 17) .
The father, whose tenor voice had long since decayed, wrote to the Elector, describing his extreme poverty, and appealing for help. No answer is recorded, but another singer in the choir came to the rescue. In 1788 Ludwig himself added to the family income by giving piano lessons to Eleonore von Breuning and her brother Lorenz. Their widowed, wealthy, cultured mother received the young teacher into full equality with her children, and friendships so formed helped in some measure to smooth the sharp corners of Beethoven's character.
Helpful too, was the kindness of Count Ferdinand von Waldstein (1762-1823), himself a good musician, and a close friend of the Elector. Learning of Beethoven's poverty, he sent him occasional gifts of money, pretending that they were from the Elector. Beethoven later dedicated to him the piano sonata (Opus 53 in C Major ) that bears his name.
Ludwig needed help more than ever now, for his despondent father had surrendered to alchohol, and had been with difficulty rescued from arrest as a public nuisance. In 1789 Beethoven, not yet nineteen, took upon himself the responsibilities for his younger brothers, and became legal head of the family. A decree of the Elector ( November 20 ) ordered that the services of Johann van Beethoven should be dispensed with, and that half of his annual salary of two hundred reichsthalers should be paid him, and the other half to his eldest son. Beethoven continued to earn a small sum as chief pianist and second organist in the Elector's orchestra.
In 1790, flush with a triumph in London, Franz Joseph Haydn stooped at Bonn on his way home to Vienna. Beethoven presented to him a cantata that he had recently composed; Haydn praised it. Probably some word of it reached the Elector's ear; he listened favorably to suggestions that he allow the youth to go to Vienna for study with Haydn, and to continue for some months to receive his salary as a musician on the Elector's staff. Probably Count von Waldstein had won this boon for his young friend. He wrote in Ludwig's album a farewell note: " Dear Beethoven, you are traveling to Vienna in fulfillment of your long cherished wish. The genius of Mozart ( who died December 5, 1791 ) is still weeping and bewailing. . . Labor assidiously and receive Mozart's spirit from the hands of Haydn. Your true friend Waldstein."
Beethoven left Bonn, father, family, and friends on or about November 1, 1792. Soon afterward French Revolutionary troops occupied Bonn, and the Elector fled to Mainz. Beethoven never saw Bonn again.
Progress And Tragedy: 1792 - 1802
Arrived in Vienna, he found the city alive with musicians competing for patrons, audiences, and publishers, looking askance at every newcomer, and finding no disarming beauty in the youth from Bonn. He was short, stocky, dark complexioned. Anthony Esterhazy called him "the Moor", pockmarked, front upper teeth overlapping the lower, nose broad and flat, eyes deepset and challenging, and head " like a bullet," wearing a wig and a van. He was not designed for popularity, with either the public or his competitors, but he was rarely without a rescuing friend.
Soon came news that his father had died ( December 18, 1792 ). Some difficulty having developed about Beethoven's share in his father's small annuity, he petitioned the Elector for its continuance: the Elector responded by doubling it, and adding : " He is further to receive three measurements of grain. . . for the education of Beethoven's brothers" ( Karl and Johann, who had moved to Vienna) . Beethoven, grateful, made some good resolutions. In a friend's album, May 22, 1793, he wrote, using the words of Shiller's Don Carlos: " I am not wicked - Hot blood is my fault - my crime is that I am young. . . Even though wildly surging emotions may betray my heart, yet my heart is good. He resolved " to do good wherever possible, to love liberty above all else, never to deny the truth, even before the throne.
He kept his expenditures to a stoic minimum: for December, 1792, fourteen florins ($35) for rent; six florins for rent of a piano; "eating, each time 12 kreuzer" (six cents); meals with wine, 6 and one half florins ( $16.25 ?? ). Another memorandom lists " Haidn " at various as costing two groschen ( a few cents ); apparently Haydn was asking little for his lessons. For a while the student accepted correction humbly. But as the lessons continued, Haydn found it impossible to accept Beethoven's reported deviations from orthodox rules of composition. Toward the end of 1793 Beethoven quit his aging master, and went three times a week to study counterpoint with a man more famous as a teacher than as composer, Johann Georg Albrechtsberger. Concurrently, three times a week, he studied violin with Ignaz Shupanzigh. In 1795, having taken all that he felt need of from Albrechtsberger, he applied to Antonio Salieri, then director of the Vienna Opera, for instruction in composition for the voice. Salieri charged nothing to poor pupils; Beethoven presented himself as such, and was accepted. All four of these teachers found him a difficult disciple, bursting with ideas of his own, and resenting the formalism of the music theory offered him. We can imagine the shudders generated in "Papa Haydn" ( who lived till 1809 ) by the irregularities and sonorities of Beethovens compositions.
Despite - perhaps because of - his deviations from traveled roads, Beethoven's performances won him, by 1794, a reputation as the most interesting pianist in Vienna. The pianoforte had won its battle with the harpsichord; Johann Christian Bach in 1768 had begun performing solos on it in England; Mozart adopted it, Haydn followed suite in 1780, Muzio Clementi was composing concertos definitely designed for the piano and its new flexibility between staccato and sostenuto. Beethoven made full use of the piano's powers and his own, especially in his improvisations, where no printed notation hampered his style. Ferdinand Ries, pupil of both Haydn and Beethoven, later declared: "No artist that I ever heard came at all near the heights that Beethoven attained in this branch of playing. The wealth of ideas which forced themselves on him, the caprices to which he surrendered himself, the variety of treatment, the difficulties, were inexhaustable".
It was as a pianist that the patrons of music first appreciated him. At an evening concert in the home of Baron van Swieten, after the program had been completed, the host ( biographer Shindler relates ) "detained Beethoven and persauaded him to add a few fugues of Bach as an evening blessing." Prince Karl Lichnowsky- the leading amatuer musician in Vienna- so liked Beethoven that he regularly engaged him for his Friday musicales, and for a time entertained him as a house guest. Beethoven, however, could not adjust himself to the Prince's meal hours, and preferred a nearby hotel. The most enthusiastic of the composer's titled patrons was Prince Lobkowitz, an excellent violinist, who spent nearly all his income on music and musicians. For years he helped Beethoven, despite quarrels, and he took in good spirit Beethoven's insistance on being treated as a social equal. The ladies of these helpful nobles enjoyed his proud independence, and took lessons and scoldings from him, and allowed the poor bachelor to make love to them, in letters. They and their lords accepted his dedications, and rewarded him moderately.
So far his fame was only as a pianist, and, as such, it reached Prague and Berlin, to which he made visits as a virtuoso in 1796. But meanwhile he composed. On October 21, 1795, he published, as opus I, THREE GRAND TRIOS, about which Johann Cramer, after playing them, announced, "This is the man who is to console us for the loss of Mozart." Stimulated by such praise Beethoven wrote in his notebook: "Courage! Despite all bodily weaknesses my spirit shall rule. . . This year must determine the complete man. Nothing must remain undone."
In 1797, Napoleon, unseen, first came into Beethoven's life. The young general, having driven the Austrians from Lombardy, had led his army over the Alps, and was nearing Vienna. The surprised capital extemporized defense as well as it could with guns and hymns; now Haydn wrote Austria's national anthem and Beethoven produced music for a war song - " Ein grosses deutsches Volk sind wir." These spirited compositions were later to be worth many regiments, but did not move Napoleon, who exacted a humiliating peace.
A year later general Bernodotte came to Vienna as the new French ambassador, and shocked the citizens by raising from his balcony the French Revolutionary tricolor flag. Beethoven, who had frankly expressed republican ideas, openly declared his admiration of Bonaparte, and was often seen at the ambassadors receptions. Apparently it was Bernadotte who suggested to Beethoven the idea of a compostion honoring Napoleon.
Seeking to tap nearer services, Ludwig in 1799 dedicated his Opus 13, " Grande Sonate Pathetique," to Prince Lichnowsky, in gratitude for favors received. . . or hoped for. The Prince responded (1800) by putting 600 gulden at Beethoven's disposal " until I obtain a suitable appointment." This sonata began simply, as if in humble filiation from Mozart; then it proceeded to a difficult intricacy that would later seem simple beside the almost agressive complexity and power of the Hammerclavier Sonatas or the "Appasionata." Still easy on eyes and hands were the "First Symphony (1800) and the " Moonlight Sonata " in C sharp minor (1801). Beethoven did not give the latter piece its famous name, but called it "Sonata quasi Fantasia." Apparently he had no intention of making it a love song. It is true that he dedicated it to the Countess Giulia Guicciardi, who was among the untouchable goddesses of his reveries. It had been written for another occasion, quite unrelated to this divinity.
To the year 1802 belongs one of the strangest and most appealing documents in the history of music. This secret " Heiligenstadt Testament- which was not seen by others till found in Beethoven's papers after his death- is intelligible only through a frank confrontation of his character. There had been many pleasannt qualities in it in his youth- a buoyancy of spirit, a fund of humor, a devotion to study, a readiness to help; and many of his Bonn friends- his teacher Christian Gootlob Neefe, his pupil Eleonore von Breuning, his patron Count von Waldstein- remained devoted to him despite his growing bitterness toward life. In Vienna, however, he alienated one friend after another until he was almost left alone. When they heard that he was dying they came back, and did what they could to ease his pains.
His early environment scared him lastly; he could never forget, and never forgive, the toilsome, anxious poverty, or humiliation of seeing his father surrender to failure and drink. He himself, as the years saddened him, yielded more and more to the amnesia of wine. In Vienna, his stature (five feet five inches) invited wit, and his face was no fortune; his hair thick, disheveled, bristling; his heavy beard spreading up to his sunken eyes, and sometimes allowed to grow to half an inch before shaving. "Oh God !" he cried in 1819, "what a plague it is on one when he has so fatal a face as mine"!
These physical disadvantages were probably a spur to achievement, but after the first few years in Vienna, they discouraged care of his dress, his body, his rooms, or his manners. " I am untidy fellow," he wrote (April 22, 1801); perhaps the only touch of genious which I possess is that my things are not always in very good order." He earned enough to keep servants, but he soon quarreled with them, and seldom kept them long. He was brusque with the lowly; with the highborn he was sometimes obsequious, often proud, even arrogant. He was merciless in assessing his rivals, and was rewarded by their almost unanimous dislike. He was severe with his pupils, but taught some of them without charge.
He was a misanthrope, judging every man basically base, but fondly forgiving his troublesome nephew Carl, and loving every pretty pupil. He gave to nature the unquestioning affection that he could not offer to mankind. He frequently fell into meloncholy moods, but almost as frequently had spells of raucous jollity, with or without wine. He had an often inconsiderate sense of humor, punned at every oportunity, and invented sometimes offensive nicknames for his friends. He could laugh more readily than he could smile.
He tried, through worried years, to conceal from the world the affliction that imbittered his life. In a letter of June 29, 1801, he revealed it to a friend of his youth, Franz Wegeler:
For the last three years my hearing has become weaker and weaker. The trouble is supposed to have been caused by the condition of my abdomen, which. . . was wretched even before I left Bonn, but became worse in Vienna, where I have been constantly afflicted by diarrhea, and have been suffering in consequence from an extraordinary disability. . . Such was my condition until autumn
of last year, and sometimes I gave way to despair.
I must confess that I led a wretched life. For almost two years I have ceased to attend any social functions, just because I find it impossible to say to people: I am deaf. If I had any other profession I might be able to cope with my infirmity; but in my profession it is a terrible calamity. Heaven alone knows what is to become of me. Already I have cursed my creator and my existance. . . I beg you not to say anything about my condition to anyone, not even to Lorchen ( Eleonore von Breuning ).
Apparently in hopes of profiting from its sulfur baths, Beethoven spent part of 1802 in Heiliggenstadt, a small village near Gottingen. Wandering in nearby woods, he saw, at a short distance, a shepherd playing a pipe. As he heard no sound, he realized that now only the louder sounds of an orchestra would reach him. He had already began to conduct as well as perform and compose; and the implications of this peasant's unheard pipe threw him into despair. He went to his room and composed, on October 6, 1802, what is known as the " Heilgenstadt Testament," a spiritual will and "apologia pro vita sua". Though he captioned it "For my brothers Carl and ----
Beethoven," he carefully conceiled the document from all eyes but his own. It is here transcribed in its essential lines:
O ye men who think and say that I am malevolent, stubborn, or misanthropic, how greatly do ye wrong me, you who do not know the secret cause of my seeming so. From childhood my heart and mind were disposed to the gentle feeling of good will, I was even ever eager to accomplish great deeds, but reflect now, that for six years I have been in a hopeless case, aggravated by senseless physicians, . . . finally compelled to face the prospect of a lasting malady. . . Born with an ardent and lively temperment, even susceptable to the diversions of society, I was compelled early to isolate myself, to live in loneliness, when I at times tried to forget all this, O how harshly was I repulsed by the doubly sad experience of my bad hearing, and yet it was impossible for me to say to men speak louder, shout, for I am deaf. Ah how could I possibly admit an infirmity in the one sense
which should have been more perfect in me than in others. . . O I cannot do it, therefore forgive me when you see me draw back when I would gladly mingle with you. . . What a humiliation when one stood beside me and heard a flute in the distance and I heard nothing. . . Such incedents brought me to the verge of despair; but little more and I would have put an end to my life - only art it was that withheld me, ah, it seemed impossible to leave the world until I had produced all that I felt called upon to produce. . . O Divine One thou lookest into my inmost soul, and thou knowest it, thou knowest that love of man and desire to do good lives therein. O men, when someday you read these words, reflect that ye did me wrong. . . You my brothers Carl and ------ as soon as I am dead if Dr. Schmid is still alive ask him in my name to describe my malady and attach this document to the history of my illness so that so far as possible at least the world may become reconciled with me after my death. At the same time I declare you two to be the heirs of my small fortune. . . It is my wish that your lives may be better and freer care than I have had, recommend virtue to your children, it alone can give you happiness, not money, I speak from experience, it was virtue that upheld me in my misery, to it, next to my art I owe the fact that I did not end my life by suicide - Farewell and love each other. . . with joy I hasten toward death.
In the margin he wrote: " To be executed and read at my death."
It was not a suicide note; it was both hopeless and resolute. Beethoven proposed to accept and transcend his hardship, and to bring to other ears than his own all the music that lay silent within him. Almost at once- still in Heilgenstadt in November, 1802 - he composed his Second Symphony
in D, wherein there is no note of complaint or grief. Only one year after his cry from the depths, he composed his Third Symphony, the Eroica, and entered with it his second and most creative period.
The Heroic Years - 1803 - 09
The learned musicologists divide Beethoven's productive career into thre periods: 1792-1802; 1803-1816; 1817-1824. In the first he worked tentatively in the simple and placid style of Mozart and Haydn. In the second period he made greater demands upon the performers in tempo, dexterity, and force. He explored contrasts of mood from tenderness to power; he gave rein to his inventiveness in variation, and to his flair for improvisation, but he subjected these to the logic of affiliation and development. He changed the sex of the sonata and the symphony from feminine sentiment and delicacy to masculine assertiveness and will. As if to signalize the change, Beethoven now replaced the minuet in the third movement with a scherzo frolicking with notes, laughing in the face of fate. Now he found in music an answer to misfortune: he could absorb himself in the creation of music that would make the death of his body a passing incedent in an extended life. "When I am playing and composing, my affliction. . . hampers me least." He could no longer hear his melodies with his physical ears, but he could hear them with his eyes, with the musician's secret ability to transfer imagined tones into spots and lines of ink, and then to hear them, soundless, from the printed pages.
Almost all the works of this period became classics, appearing through succeding generations in orchesteral repertoires. The "Kreutzer Sonata," Opus 47, composed in 1803 for violinist George Bridgetower, was dedicated to Rodolphe Kreutzer, teacher of the violin in the Paris Conservatory of Music. Beethoven had met him in Vienna in 1798. Kreutzer judged the piece alien to his style or mood, and seems never to have played it publicly.
Beethoven ranked as the best of his symphonies the Eroica, composed in 1803-04. Half the world knows the story about its original dedication to Napoleon. Despite his titled friends and judicious dedications, Beethoven remained to the end of his life a resolute republican; and he applauded the seizure and reconstitution of the French government by Bonaparte in 1799-1800 as a move toward responsible rule. In 1802, however he expressed his regret that Napoleon had signed a concordat with the Church. " Now, " he wrote, "everything is going back to the old track." As to the dedication, let an eyewitness, Ferdinand Ries, tell the tale :
In this symphony Beethoven had Bonaparte in his mind, but as he was when he was First Consul. Beethoven esteemed him greatly at the time, and likened him to the greatest Roman consuls. I as well as several of his more intimate friends saw a copy of the Eroica score lying upon his table, with the word "Bounaparte" at the extreme top of the title page, and at the extreme bottom"Luigi van Beethoven" but not another word. . . I was the first to bring him the intelligence that Bonaparte had proclaimed himself emperor, whereupon he flew into a rage, and cried out, " Is then he to nothing more than an ordinary human being? Now he will trample on all the rights of man, and indulge only his ambition. He will exalt himself above all others, become a tyrant." Beethoven went to the table, took hold of the title page by the top, tore it into, and threw it on the floor. The first page was rewritten and only then did the symphony receive the title "Sinfonia eroica".
When the symphony was published (1805) it bore the title Sinfonia eroica per festeggiare il sovvenira d'un gran uomo- " Heroic symphony to celebrate the memory of a great man."
It received its first public performance April 7, 1805, in the Theatre-ander-Wien. Beethoven conducted despite his defective hearing. His style of conducting accorded with his character- excitable, demanding, " most extravagant". At a pianissimo he would crouch down so as to be hidden by the desk; and then, as the crescendo increased, would gradually rise, beating all the time, until at the fortissimo he would spring into the air, with his arms extended as if wishing to float on the clouds. The Symphony was criticised for "strange modulations and violent transitions, . . . undesirable originality, and excessive length; the critic advised Beethoven to go back to his earlier and simpler style. Beethoven winced and growled, and worked on.
Giving another hostage to fortune, he tried his hand at opera; on November 20, 1805, he conducted the premiere of Leonore. But Napolean's troops had occupied Vienna on November 13; the Emperor Francis and the leading nobles had fled; the citizens were in no mood for opera; the performance was a resounding failure despite the applause of the French officers in the scanty audience. Beethoven was told that his opera was too long, and clumsily arranged. He shortened and revised it, and offered it a second time on March 29, 1806; again it failed. Eight years later, when the city teemed with the Congress of Vienna, the opera, renamed Fidelio, was given a third trial, and achieved a moderate success. Beethoven's mode of composition had become attuned to instruments with greater range and flexibility than the human voice; the singers, however anxious to break new barriers, simply could not sing some soaring passages, and at last they rebelled. The opera is occasionally staged today, borne on the wings of the composer's fame, and with revisions that he can no longer revise.
From that difficult and unrewarding experience he passed to one masterpiece after another. In 1805, he presented the Piano Concerto in G, No. 4, Opus 58, second only to the fifth in the affection of virtuosos. He celebrated the year 1806 with the Sonata in F Minor, Opus 57, later christened "Appasionata," and added three quartets, Opus 59, dedicated to Count Andreas Razumovsky, Russian ambassador at Vienna. In March 1807, Beethoven's friends, probably to console him for the failure of his opera, organized a benefit concert for him, there he conducted Symphonies No. One,Two,and Three (the Eroica), and his new Symphony No. 4 in B Flat, Opus 60. We are now told how the audience bore up under this surfeit.
In 1806 Prince Miklos Nicolaus Esterhazy commissioned Beethoven to compose a Mass for the name day of his wife. Beethoven went to the Esterhazy chateau at Eisenstadt in Hungary, and presented there his Mass in C, Opus 86, on September 13, 1807. After the performance the Prince asked him, "But, my dear Beethoven, what is this that you have done again? " Beethoven interpreted the question as expressing dissatisfaction, and he left the chateau before his invitation had run out.
He signalized 1808 with two symphonies, now known throughout the world: Symphony No. 5 in C Minor, and the Sixth or Pastoral Symphony in F. They appear to have been composed concurrently through several years, in alterations of mood between the brooding of the fifth and the gaiety of the Sixth; fitly they received their premiere together on December 22, 1808. Frequent repetitions have lessened their charm, even for old music lovers; we are no longer moved by "Fate knocking at the door," or birds warbling in the trees; but perhaps the fading of our enchantment is due to the lack of the musical education that might have equipped us to follow with appreciation and pleasure the logic of thematic contrasts and developments, the cooperation of counterpoint, the playful rivalry of differently instruments, the dialogue of winds and strings, the mood of each movement, the structure and direction of the whole. Minds are differently molded- some to feelings, some to ideas: it must have been as hard for Hegel to understand Beethoven as for Beethoven - or anyone- to understand Hegel.
In 1808-09 he composed the Piano Concerto No 5 in E Flat, Opus 73, known as the "Emperor". Of all of his works this is the most lovable, the most enduring beautiful, the one of which we never tire; however often we have heard it, we are moved beyond words by its sparkling vivacity, its gay inventiveness, its inexhaustible fountains of feeling and delight. In this concerto a man rising triumphantly out of apparant disaster wrote an ode to joy far more convincing than the stentorian chorus of the Ninth Symphony.
Perhaps the happiness of the Emperor Concerto and the Pastoral Symphony reflected Beethoven's increasing prosperity. In 1804 he had been engaged as piano teacher by Archduke Rudolf, youngest son of the Emperor Francis; so began a friendship that often helped the increasingly discreet republican. In 1808 he received a flattering offer from Jerome Bonaparte, king of Westphalia, to come and serve as Kapellmeister in the royal choir and orchestra at Cassel. Beethoven agreed to fill the post at six hundred gold ducats per year; apparently he still had some faith in his dying ears. When word spread that he was negotiating with Cassel, his friends protested against what they called disloyalty to Vienna; he answered that he had toiled there for sixteen years without receiving a secure position. On February 26, 1809, the Archduke sent him a formal agreement by which, in return for Beethoven's remaining in Vienna, he would be guaranteed an annual sum of 4,000 florins, of which Rudolf would pay 1,500, Prince Lobkowitz 700, and Count Kinsky 1,800. In addition Beethoven might keep whatever he earned. He accepted and stayed. In that year 1809 Papa Haydn died, and Beethoven inherited his crown.
The Lover
Having achieved economic stability, he returned to his lifelong quest for a wife. He was a warmly sexual man. Presumably he found a variety of outlets, but he had long felt the need for a permanent companionship. In Bonn, according to his friend Wegeler, he was, "always loving." In 1801 he mentioned to Wegeler " a dear sweet girl who loves me of whom I love." This is generally supposed to have been his seventeen-year-old pupil Countess Giulia Guicciardi; however she married Count Gallenberg. In 1805 Beethoven centered his hopes upon the widowed Countess Josephine von Deym, to whom he sent a passionate declaration:
Here I give you a solemn promise that in a short time I shall stand before you more worthy of myself and of you - Oh, if only you would attach some value to this - I mean to founding my happiness by means of your love. . . Oh, beloved Josephine, it is no desire, for the other sex that draws me near to you, it is just you, your whole self, with all your individual qualities - this has compelled my regard - this has bound all my feelings - all my emotional power - to you. . . You make me hope that your heart will long beat for me - Mine can only - cease - to beat for you - when it no longer beats.
Apparantly the lady turned to other prospects. Two years later Beethoven was still appealing to be admitted to her presence; she did not reply.
In March, 1807, he paid such devout attentions to Mme Mary Bigot that her husband protested. Beethoven sent " Dear Maria, dear Bigot," a letter of apology, declaring: " It is one of my chief principles never to be in any other relationship with the wife of another man than that of friendship."
On March 14, 1809, expecting to be in Freiburg, he wrote to Baron von Gleichenstein:
Now you can help me to look for a wife. Indeed, you might find some beautiful girl at F - who would perhaps now and then grant a sigh to my harmonies. . . If you do find one, please form the connection in advance. - But she must be beautiful, for it is impossible for me to love anything that is not beautiful - or else I should have to love myself.
But this was presumably one of Beethoven's jokes.
More serious was his affair with Therese Malfatti. She was another of his pupils, daughter of a distinguished physician. A letter to her of May 8, 1810, has some of the air of an accepted lover. On May 2, Beethoven had sent an urgent request to Wegeler, then at Coblenz, to go to Bonn and locate and send him the composer's baptismal certificate, for " I have been said to be older than I am." Wegeler complied. Beethoven made no acknowledgement, and in July Stephen von Breuning wrote to Wegeler: " I believe his marraige project has fallen through, and for this reason he no longer feels the lively desire to thank you for your trouble." Till his fortieth year he insisted that he had been born in 1772. The baptismal certificate gave his birth as 1770.
After his death three letters were found in a locked drawer which are among the most tender and fervent love letters in history. They were never sent. As they name no name, no year, and no address, they remain a mystery that has produced its own literature. The first letter , " dated July 6, in the morning," tells of Beethoven's hectic three-day trip from Vienna to a woman in an unstated place in Hungary. Some phrases:
My angel, my all, my very self. . . Can our love endure except through sacrifices - except through not demanding everything - can you change it that you are not wholly mine, I not wholly thine. Oh, God ! Look out into the beauties of nature, and comfort yourself with that which must be - love demands everything. . . We shall soon surely see each other. . . My heart is full of many things to say to you - ah, there are moments when I feel that speech is nothing after all - cheer up - remain my true, my only treasure, my all as I am yours. . .
The second and much briefer letter is dated "Evening, Monday, July 6," and ends: "Oh God ! so near so far ! Is our love not truly a celestial edifice - firm as heaven's vault."
The Third Letter:
Though still in bed my thoughts go out to you, Meine Usterbliche Geliebte ( my immortal beloved) , now and then joyfully, then sadly, waiting to learn whether or not fate will hear us.
I can live only wholly with you, or not at all - yes I am resolved to wander so long away from you until I can fly to your arms and say that I am really at home, send my soul enwrapped in you into the land of spirits. . . Oh God, why is it necessary to part from life. . . in W(ien Vienna) is now a wretched life - your love makes me at once the happiest and unhappiest of men - at my age I need a steady quiet life. . . Be calm, only by a calm consideration of our existance can we achieve our purpose to live together - be calm - love me - today - yesterday - what tearful longings for you - My life - my all - farewell - Oh, continue to love me - never misjudge the most faithful heart of your beloved L.
Ever thine, ever mine, ever for each other.
Who was she? No one knows. The pundits are divided, chiefly between the Countess Guicciardi- Gallenberg and the Countess Therese von Brunswig; nothing short of a countess would do. Apparently the lady was married; if so, Beethoven, in wooing her, was forgetting the excellent principle he had professed to the bigots. However, the letters were not sent; no harm was done; and music may have profited.
Beethoven And Goethe: 1809-12
In 1809 Austria was again at war with France. In May French cannonballs were dropping on Vienna; court and nobility fled; Beethoven sought refuge in a cellar. The city surrendered, the victors taxed the commonalty a tenth of a year's income, the well - to - do a third. Beethoven paid, but, from a safe distance, shook his fist at a patrolling Gaul, and cried, "If I, as a general, knew as much about strategy as I, the composer, know about counterpoint, I'd give you something to do.
Otherwise, the period from 1809 to 1815 shows Beethoven in relatively good spirits. In those years he often visited the home of Franz Brentano, prosperous merchant and patron of art and music, who sometimes helped Ludwig with a loan. Franz's wife, Antonie, was at times confined to her room with illness; more than once, during such spells, Beethoven came in quietly, played the piano, then left without a word, having spoken to her in his own language. On one such occasion he was surprised, as he played, by hands placed on his shoulders. Turning, he found a young women ( then twenty-five), pretty, her eyes glowing with pleasure over his playing - even over his singing, to his own music, Goethe's famous lyric about Italy, "Kennst du das Land." She was Elizabeth - "Bettina"- Brentano, sister to Franz, and to the Clemens Brentano whom we shall meet a famous German author. She herself was later to produce a number of successful books presenting autobiography and fiction in a now inextricable mixture. She is our only authority for the story just told, and for the later episode in which, at a party in Franz's home, she heard Beethoven discourse not only profoundly, but with an order and elegance not generally ascribed to him, though sometimes appearing in his letters. On May 28, 1810, she wrote enthusiastically about him to Goethe, whom she knew not merely through neighborly relations with his family in Frankfurt, but through a visit with him in Weimar. Some excerps from this famous letter:
When I saw him of whom I shall now speak to you, I forget the whole world. . . It is Beethoven of whom I now wish to tell you, and who made me forget the world and you. . . He stalks far ahead of the culture of mankind. Shall we ever overtake him? I doubt it, but grant that he may live until the . . . enigma laying in his soul is fully developed , . . . then surely he will place the key to his heavenly knowledge in our hands.
He himslf said, " When I open my eyes I must sigh, for what I see is contrary to my religion, and I must despise the world which does not know that music is a higher revelation than wisdom and philosophy, the wine which inspires one to new generative processes, and I am the Bacchus who presses out this glorious wine for mankind and makes them spiritually drunken. . . I have no fear for my music - it can meet no evil fate. Those who understand it must be freed by it from all the miseries which the others drag about with them.
"Music is the mediator between intellectual and sensuous life. I should like to talk to Goethe about this - would he understand me? Speak to Goethe about me; tell him to hear my symphonies and he will say that I am right in saying that music is the one incorporeal entrance into the highest world of knowledge."
Bettina transmitted to Goethe these raptures of Beethoven, and added: " Rejoice me now with a speedy answer, which shall show Beethoven that you appreciate him." Goethe replied on June 6, 1810:
Your letter, heartily beloved child, reached me at a happy time. You have been at great pains to picture for me a great and beautiful nature in its achievements and its striving. . . I feel no desire to contradict what I can grasp of your hurried explosion; on the contrary I should prefer for the present to admit an agreement between my nature and that which is recognizable in these manifold utterances. The ordinary human mind might, perhaps, find contradictions in it; but before that which is uttered by one possessed of such a demon, an ordinary layman must stand in reverence. . .
Give Beethoven my heartiest greetings, and tell him that I would willingly make sacrifices to have his acquaintance. . . You may be able to persuade him to make a journey to Karlsbad, Whither I go nearby every year, and would have the greatest leisure to listen to him and learn from him.
Beethoven was unable to get to Karlsbad, but the two supreme artists of their time met at Teplitz ( a wandering place in Bohemia ) in July , 1812 . Goethe visited Beethoven's lodgings there, and gave a first impression in a letter to his wife: " A more self-centered, energetic, sincere artist I never saw. I can understand right well how singular must be his attitude toward the world." On July 21 and 23 he spent the evenings with Beethoven, who, he reported, "played delightfully."
Familiar the story how, on their walks together, . . .
there came towards them the whole court, the empress of Austria and the dukes. Beethoven said:
"Keep hold of my arm, they must make room for us, not we for them."Goethe was of a different opinion, and the situation became ackward for him; he let go of Beethoven's arm and took a stand at the side with his hat off, while Beethoven with folded arm walked right through the dukes and only tilted his hat slightly while the dukes stepped aside to make room for him, and all greated him pleasantly; on the other side he stopped and waited for Goethe, who had permitted the company to pass by him where he stood with bowed head. "Well," Beethoven said, "I've waited for you because I honor you and respect you as you deserve, but you did those yander too much honor."
This was Beethoven's account, according to Bettina, who adds : "Afterward Beethoven came running to us and told us everything." We do not have Goethe's account. Perhaps we should be skeptical, too, about the story - variously and inconsistantly related - that when Goethe expressed vexation at interruptions of their conversation by greetings from passersby, Beethoven answered him, "Do not let them trouble your Excellency; perhaps the greetings are attended for me."
Dubious as they sound, both stories harmonize with authentic expressions in which the two geniuses
summarized their meetings. On August 9 Beethoven wrote to his Leipzig publishers, Breitkopf and Hartel: " Goethe is too fond of the atmosphere of the court, more so than is becoming to a poet."
On September 2 Goethe wrote to Carl Zelter:
I made Beethoven's acquaintance in Teplitz. His talent amazed me. Unfortunately he is an utterly untamed personality, not altogether in the wrong in holding the world to be detestable, but who does not make it anymore enjoyable either for himself or for others by his attitude. He is very excusable, on the other hand, and much to be pitied, as his hearing is leaving him, which, perhaps,
mars the musical part of his nature less than the social. He is of a laconic nature, and will become doubly so because of this lack.
The Last Victories : 1811 - 24
Wherever he went he composed. In 1811 he gave final form to Opus 97 in B Flat, a trio for piano, violin and voiloncello, and dedicated it to the Archduke Rudolf-whence its name. It is one of the brightest, clearest, cleanest works, least confused by profusion, almost satuesque in its organic form. His last appearance as a performer was at the piano in a presentation of this classic in April, 1814. He was now so deaf that he had lost the proper adjustment of hand and pedal pressure to musical intent; some of the fortissimi drowned out the strings, while some pianissimi were inaudable.
In May, 1812, while Napoleon was massing a half million men for death in Russia, Beethoven issued his Seventh Symphony, which, less often performed, seems now to wear better than the Fifth or Sixth. Here is a somber dirge for lost greatness and shattered hopes, and here too, is tenderness for fading but cherished loves, and a quest for understanding and peace. As its funeral march was an unwitting 1812 Overture to Napoleon's disaster in Moscow, so its premiere, on December 8, 1813, was contemporary with the collapse of Napolean's power in Germany and Spain. The enthusiastic reception of this symphony gladdened for a time the aging pessimist, who continued to produce masterpieces that for him had to be like those on Keat's Grecian urn, "ditties of no tone.
The Eigth Symphony, was written in October, 1812, first performed on February 27, 1814, was not so well received; the master had relaxed, and had decided to be playful. It did not quite accord with the mood of a nation watching its ill fate daily hanging on the fortunes of war. But now we may delight in the jolly, prancing sherzando, whose persistant punctuation apparently made fun of a recent invention, the metronome.
The most successful of Beethoven's compositions was Die Schlacht von Vittoris offered in Vienna on December 8, 1813, to celebrate the battle in which Wellington had definitely destroyed French power in Spain. The news brought tardy satisfaction to the Austrian capital, which had been repeatedly humiliated by the apparently invincible Corsican. Now for the first time Beethoven became really famous in his adopted city. The music, we are told, hardly deserved its triumph; die Schlacht war Schlacht. Its subject and success made Beethoven popular with the dignitaries who, in 1814, attended the congress of Vienna. The composer forgivably took the opportunity to organize a benefit concert for himself; the imperial court, resplendent with victory, offered him the use of its spacious Redouttensaal. Beethoven sent personal invitations to the notables of the congress; six thousand persons attended; and Beethoven was enabled to hide a substantial sum to cushion his future and his nephews.
On November 11, 1815, his brother Karl died, after bequeathing a small sum to Ludwig, and appointing him co-guardian, with the widow, of an eight year old son, Karl. From 1815 to 1826 Beethoven carried on, in letters and the courts, a searing contest with widow Theresa for control of Karl's movements, education and soul. Theresa had brought Karl senior a dowry and a house, but had lapsed into adultery; she confessed to her husband, who forgave her. Beethoven never forgave her and considered her unfit to guide Karl's development. We shall not follow that quarrel in its wearing length and sordid details. In 1826 Karl, torn between mother and uncle, tried to kill himself. Beethoven finally acknowledged the failure of his loving rigor. Karl recovered, joined the army, and took care of himself reasonably well.
With the year of 1817 Beethoven passed into the final period of his creative life. Long a revolutionist in private politics, he now made open war against classic norms, welcomed the romantic movement into music, and gave to the sonata and the symphony a looser structure that subordinated the old rules to a rampant freedom of emotional and personal expression. Something of the wild spirit that had spoken in France through Rousseau and the revolution, in Germany through Sterm and Drang, in young Goethe's Werters Leiden and young Shiller's Die Rauber, then in the poems of Tieck and Novalis, in the prose of the Schlegels, in the philosophies of Fichte and Schelling - something of all this came down to Beethoven, and found rich soil in his natural emotionalism and individualistic pride. An old system of law, convention, and restraint collapsed in art as in politics, leaving the resolute individual free to express or embody his feelings and desires in a joyful bursting of old rules, bonds, and forms. Beethoven mocked the masses as asses, the nobles as impostors, their conventions and courtesies as irrelevant to artistic creation; he refused to be imprisoned in molds fashioned by the dead, even by such melodious dead as Bach and Handel, Haydn, Mozart and Gluck. He made his own revolution, even his own Terror, and made his Ode to Joy a declaration of independence even in expectation of death.
The three Hammerklavier Sonatas formed a bridge between the second period and the third. Even their name was a revolt. Some angry Teutons, tired of Italian domination in the language and income of music, had proposed using German, instead of Italian words for musical notations and instruments. So the majestic pianoforte should disregard that Italian word for low and strong, and be called HammerKlavier, since the tones were produced by little hammers striking strings. Beethoven readily accepted the idea, and wrote Sigmund Steiner, manufacturer of musical instruments, on January 13, 1817: " Instead of Pianoforte, Hammerklavier - which settles the matter once and for all.
The most remarkable of the Hammerklavier Sonatas is the second, Opus 106 in B Flat, written in 1818-19 as a "Grosse Sonata fur das Hammerklavier". Beethoven told Czerny that it was to remain his greatest piece for the piano, and his judgement has been confirmed by pianists in every succeeding generation. It seems to express a somber resignation to old age, illness, and a darkening solitude, and yet it is a triumph of art over despair.
It was in further rejection of such despondency the Beethoven wrote the Ninth Symphony. He begun work on it in 1818, concurrently with the "Missa solemnis" which was to be performed at the installation of Archduke Rudolf as archbishop of Olmutz. The mass was finished first, in 1823, three years too late for the installation.
Anxious to add to the little hoard that he had accumulated as a refuge against old age and as a bequest to nephew Karl, Beethoven conceived the notion of selling subscriptions for pre-publication, copies of his mass. He sent invitations to this affect to the sovereigns of Europe, asking from each of them 50 ducats in gold. Acceptances came in slowly, but by 1825 ten had come: from the rulers of Russia, Prussia, France, Saxony, Tuscany, the princess Golitzyn and Radziwell, and the Caecilia Association of Frankfurt.
The Missa solemnis is generally held to have justified its long gestation and the strange bartering of its finished form. There is no trace in it of the occasional blasphemies that interrupted his inherited Catholic faith. Each moment of the liturgy is interpreted with concordant music, and through it all is an audible of the dying man's desperate faith, written by him in the manuscript score at the outset of the Credo: " God above all - God has never deserted me." The music is too powerful to be an expression of Christian humility; but the dedicated concentration on each part and phrase, and the sustained majesty of the whole, make the Missa solemnis the fit and final offering of a great flawed spirit to an incomprehensible God.
In February, 1824, he completed the Ninth Symphony. Here is the struggle to express his final philosophy - the joyful acceptance of man's fate - broke through all the trammels of classic order, and the impetuous monarch let the pride of its power carry him to massive exultations that sacrificed the old god order to the young god liberty. In the profusion of shattered alters the themes that should have stood out as pillars to the edifice disappeared from all but esoteric view; the phrases seemed unduly insistant and repeated; an occasional moment of tenderness or calm was overwhelmed by a sudden fortissimo flung as if in rage at a mad and unresponsive world. . . Not so, a great scholar replies; there is, in this apparent embarrassment of riches, " an extreme simplicity of form, underlying an elaboration of detail which may at first seem bewildering until we realize that it is purely the working out, to its logical conclusions, of some ideas as simple and natural as the form itself."
Perhaps the master deliberately abandoned the classic effort to give lasting form to mortal beauty
or veiled silence. He confessed his surrender, and frolicked in the unregulated wealth of his imagination and the lavished recources of his art. In the end he recaptured some flair of youthful defiance, and enshrined in music that ode of Schiller's which was not really to mere joy, but rather to joyful war against despotism and humanity-
Fronting kings in manly spirit,
Though it cost us wealth and blood !
Crowns to naught save noblest merit;
Death to all the Liar's brood !
With his culmanating masterpieces now complete, Beethoven longed for an opportunity to present them to the public. But Rossini had so captivated Austria in 1823, and Viennese audiences were now so enamored of Italian melody, that no local impresario dared risk a fortune on two compositions so difficult as the Missa solemnis and the Choral Symphony. A Berlin producer offered to present them; Beethoven was about to agree, when a combination of music lovers, led by the Lichnowsky family, alarmed at the thought of Vienna's outstanding composer being forced to go to a rival capital for the premiere of his latest and most prestigious works, agreed to underwrite their production at the Karntnerthor Theatre. After hard bargaing on all sides the concert was given
on May 7, 1824, before a crowded house, and with a stoic program: an overture (" The Consecration of the House"), four parts of the Missa solemnis, and the Ninth Symphony with a stentorian German chorus to crown it all. The singers, unable to reach the high notes prescribed omitted them. The mass was received solemnly, the symphony with enthusiastic acclaim. Beethoven, who had been standing on the platform with his back to the audience, did not hear the applause, and had to be turned around to see it.
Comoedia Finita : 1824 - 27
He quarreled with Schindler and other friends about the small share (420 florins) they gave him of the 2,200 taken at the concert; he charged them with cheating him; they left him solitary now, except for the occasional presence of his nephew, whose attempt at suicide (1826) topped the inspired bear's cup of grief. It was in those years that he wrote the last five of his sixteen quartets.
The spark of these labors had come in 1823 from the offer of Prince Nikolai Golitsyn to pay "any sum demanded" for one, two, or three quartets to be dedicated to him. Beethoven agreed, for fifty ducats each. Those three ( Opus 127, 130, and 132 ), and Opp. 131 and 135, constitute the terminal quartets whose mysterious strangeness has ensured their fame. Opus 130 was privately played in 1826, to the avowed delight of the listeners, except that the performers found the fourth movement beyond their powers; Beethoven wrote a simpler finale. The rejected movement is now offered as "Grosse Fugue," Opus 133, which a Beethoven scholar bravely interprets as expressing the composer's final philosophy: Life and reality are composed of inseperable opposites - good and evil, joy and sorrow, health and sickness, birth and death; and wisdom will adjust itself to them as the inescapable essence of life. Most highly praised of the five, and considered by Beethoven to be his greatest quartet, is Opus 131 in C Sharp Minor, finished on August 7, 1826; here, we are told,
" the mystical vision is most perfectly sustained." Heard again recently, it seemed to be a long wierd wail, the pitiful moaning of a mortally wounded animal. The last of the five, Opus 135, states a motto for its final movement: Muss es sein? (Must it be?), and gives the answer: Es muss sein.
On December 2, 1826, racked by a tearing cough, Beethoven asked for a doctor. Two of his former physicians refused to come. A third, Dr. Wawruch, came, and diagnosed phneumonia. Beethoven took to his bed. His brother Yohann came to watch over him. Nephew Karl, with Beethoven's blessing, left at the call of the army. On January 11, Dr. Wawruch was joined by Dr. Malfatti. He prescribed frozen punch to help the patient sleep; Beethoven relished the liquor in it, and " abused the prescription." Dropsy and jaundice developed; urine collected in Beethoven's body instead of being excreted; twice he was tapped to release the fluid; he compared himself to a geyser.
Resolved to make no sense of the bank shares- totaling ten thousand florins- which he had hidden for Karl, and faced by rapidly rising expenses, Beethoven wrote, on March 6, 1827, to Sir George Smart of London:
What is to become of me? What am I to live on until I have recovered my lost strength and can earn my living by means of my pen?. . . I beg you to exert all your influence to induce the Philharmonic Society to carry out their former decision to give a concert for my benefit. My strength is not equal to saying anything more.
The society sent him a hundred pounds as an advance on the receipts of the proposed concert.
By March 16 the physicians agreed that Beethoven had not long to live. They and brother Johann asked his consent to summoning a priest."I wish it," he answered. His occasional bouts with God had been forgiven; letter of March 14 shows him ready to accept whatever " God in his divine wisdom" might decree. On March 23 he received the last sacrament, apparently in a docile mood; his brother later reported that the dying man had said to him, " I thank you for this last service." Soon after the ceremony Beethoven said to Schindler, " Comoedia finita est"- referring apparantly not to the religious service but to life itself; the phrase was used in the classic Roman theatre to announce the end of the play.
He died on March 26, 1827, after three months of suffering. A few moments before his death a lightning flash illuminated the room, followed by a sharp clap of thunder. Aroused, Beethoven raised his right arm and shook his clenched fist, apparently at the storm. Soon thereafter his agony ended. We shall never know what that last gesture meant.
His funeral was attended by 30,000 people. The tombstone bore only the name Beethoven and his dates of birth and death.
Closing Note : Listen to his Symphony No. 7
Useful Links
Live Classical Radio
Classical Music Archives
History of Classical Music
Classical Music In Depth
Classical Artists Worldwide
Classical Sheet Music
Classical Guitar Sheet Music
London Symphony Orchestra
The Symphony - An Interactive Guide
The Worldwide Arts Portal