Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph (101 page)

A new wrangle in his endless series of them was with Maelzel. Because the inventor had originated the idea for
Wellington's Victory
and contributed ideas for the orchestral version, he naturally felt that he had a stake in the music. When Beethoven refused to give him a score for out-of-town performances, Maelzel stole some orchestral parts and put on the piece in Munich. From his point of view, it was a matter of Beethoven's intending to keep all future profits from the orchestral version for himself—as indeed Beethoven did.
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From Beethoven this sort of thing usually brought out the heavy artillery. First he cancelled a newspaper statement that included more thanks to Maelzel.
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Then he went to the courts. To a lawyer in Vienna he sent a massive, point-by-point statement of the kind that was to become a specialty of his. Among other things, it claimed that Maelzel's hearing aids were useless; in fact Beethoven often used one or two of them.
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In the end, the dispute with Maelzel stalled and never came to the dock.

 

The Beethoven vogue in Vienna continued to run high. While juggling his legal wrangles over Maelzel and the stipend, he continued to satisfy the demand. The end of February 1814 saw another successful concert for his own benefit, which like all his concerts (except the ones with Maelzel's help) he produced, financed, rehearsed, and conducted himself. It repeated the Seventh Symphony and
Wellington's Victory
and introduced the Eighth Symphony, op. 93.

Like the Sixth, the Eighth is a sort of vacation, this time into the past: a beautiful, brief, ironic look backward to Haydn and Mozart. Like the Sixth it is in F major, often a high-spirited key for Beethoven. Here is another symphony, like the Second and Fourth, with an operatic atmosphere. It begins with a grandly dancing 3/4 theme that sets up a movement relaxed and good-humored (it was originally a sketch for a piano concerto that he diverted into a symphony).
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If the themes and style recall the eighteenth century, he made the orchestral sound big and rich—on the way toward the sound of his next symphony. In keeping, the forces he arranged for his February 1814 concert were huge: eighteen each at first and second violins, fourteen violas, twelve cellos, seven basses, and winds to match. As usual, about half were paid professionals, the rest amateurs who played for the pleasure of it.

Only part of the humor of the Eighth rests on its surface. Much of it is comedy for connoisseurs. The second theme takes the stage with a dancing gait on an inexplicable C-sharp, leading to a second theme in the (according to tradition) “wrong” key of D major. This is a third down from F, like the kinds of key relations by thirds he wielded in the Seventh, but the game here is quite different. Soon the second theme rights itself into C major, the “proper” key for the second theme in an F-major piece, and the music proceeds with its lacy and ironic little tune. A development mainly given to
fortissimo
blasts of the opening theme on changing harmonies flows smoothly into a much-varied recapitulation and a long, developmental coda in which that errant C-sharp, sometimes masquerading as D-flat, keeps turning up.
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The short second movement is one of the most Mozartian outings he had written in years. Its ticktock tread and its theme conjure up Haydn's
Clock
Symphony and no less the gait and personality of one of Mozart's comic sidekicks—say, Leporello in
Don Giovanni
. That the third movement returns for the first time in a Beethoven symphony to the eighteenth-century minuet is another clue to his intentions. It looks back at the old courtly dance with music robust rather than delicate, freed of frills but still in the kind of trance of nostalgia that marks this symphony: Beethoven, with epics and tragedies behind him, looking over music itself with serene benevolence.

The lighthearted atmosphere carries into the scurrying, capering finale, in form a mingling of sonata and rondo. It includes one of the most elaborate of his jokes (again, a joke for the initiated). Having largely stayed out of sight in the middle movements, the errant C-sharp of the first movement returns as a rude offbeat blat in the basses.
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Here, according to Beethovenian musical logic, is a gesture that must have consequences. The joke is that it has no consequences. It just keeps blundering into the main theme like a drunken uncle at a party. Which is to say, here Beethoven lampoons his own craftsmanship.

Still, the payoff has to come sooner or later. After an unprecedented second development section that continues to ignore the C-sharp, Beethoven convinces us that the piece is coming to a close. About the time the audience are reaching for their coats, the drunken uncle runs amok. The errant blat returns as D-flat, wrenching the music into the key of D-flat; then again as C-sharp, turning the music to C-sharp minor; then again as the dominant of F-sharp minor, forcing the music into a potentially catastrophic clash—because the brasses, still tuned to F major, are picking up their instruments. Just as a horrendous tonal pileup looms, the music simply slips down from F-sharp minor to F major with the entry of the brass. Much of the rest of the music is F-major chords rendered droll by what came before. Here in a comic context is another example of the way Beethoven invests a single element, this time a simple tonic chord, with a significance that resonates with everything that came before.

In its premiere, though, the Eighth did not find much resonance with listeners, especially in the company of the Seventh Symphony and
Wellington's Victory
. Those pieces played into the mood of celebration after decades of war. The audience was not in the mood for subtlety and nostalgia. The new symphony, reported the
Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung
, “did not create a furor”; at the same time, the reviewer called the second movement of the Seventh “the crown of modern instrumental music.” He was generous enough to suggest that if the Eighth were not presented following the more showy Seventh, it might succeed.
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Czerny said that on hearing a report that the Eighth had not been received as well as the Seventh, Beethoven growled, “That's because it's so much better!”
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Did he mean that? He probably meant it when he said it and contradicted it later. As for the audience response, besides the problem of the Eighth being flanked by more splashy works, his audience was apt to be disappointed now when they found Beethoven not being “Beethovenian” enough.

Still, he appreciated applause from whatever quarter. It became a favorite story of his that after the concert when he was walking on the Kahlenberg above Vienna, two young girls gave him some cherries, and when he offered to pay, one of them said, “I'll take nothing from you. We saw you in the
Redoutensaal
when we heard your beautiful music.”
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In the spring of 1814, going furiously at the revision of
Fidelio
for its revival, Beethoven had little time to take note that on March 30 the French Senate, under duress by the allies, voted to dethrone Napoleon and place the Bourbon dynasty back on the throne. The porcine and obtuse Louis XVIII prepared to reclaim his dynasty's glory. Symbolically, the return of the French monarchy was the final negation of the Revolution that had tried to wipe aristocracy from the earth.

The previous autumn's Battle of Leipzig had been the defeat that appeared to finish off Napoleon. Paris was next. On March 31, Tsar Alexander I, dubbed “the Great Liberator” after the Russian campaign, rode with his teeming retinue through the streets of the French capital. First came the tsar's personal regiment, called the Red Cossacks, then royal Prussian hussars and the Russian Imperial Guard.
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Finally Alexander appeared in the uniform of an officer of the guards, heavy gold epaulets across his shoulders, sporting an enormous hat with a cascade of feathers, his feet thrust in stirrups of wrought gold. He waved benevolently to the dazed Parisians as he headed to the house of the turncoat Talleyrand, who in a secret note had exhorted the hesitant allies to march on Paris immediately: “You are groping about like children . . . You are in the position to achieve anything that you wish to achieve.”
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On April 12, Napoleon signed the Treaty of Fontainebleau, which mandated his unconditional abdication and banishment to the island of Elba, twelve miles from the Tuscan coast. There it was granted that he would reign as the sovereign of his own little principality, with extensive property, a division of sixteen hundred troops complete with artillery, and a toy navy of five ships. (He was disgusted when his promised stipend of 2 million francs a year from the restored French throne never appeared.) A few days after signing the treaty, he made a halfhearted attempt at suicide. His Austrian wife Marie Louise was spirited back to Vienna and never saw Napoleon again, despite his constant entreaties in letters. Marie Louise and their son were now held as family prisoners of the Habsburgs at the Schönbrunn Palace in Vienna. The ex-empress felt conflicting loyalties, but she had always done as she was told. Their son Napoléon François Joseph Charles Bonaparte, in his cradle named the king of Rome, would for the rest of his short life be officially a nonexistent person.

Austrian foreign minister Clemens Metternich had bitterly opposed the tsar's Elba plan, declaring that Napoleon would be back leading an army within two years.
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As it transpired, Metternich understood the man better than anyone else. Marie Louise's letters to Napoleon he quietly intercepted and filed away.
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With his usual attention to detail, Metternich picked out a new lover as solace for Marie Louise, from among the military nobility.

On April 11, Beethoven played piano in the premiere of the
Archduke
Trio. Composer Louis Spohr, who had been spending time with Beethoven, recalled it as “not a treat, for, in the first place, the piano was badly out of tune, which Beethoven minded little, since he did not hear it . . . Beethoven's continual melancholy was no longer a riddle to me.”
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Young pianist and composer Ignaz Moscheles, commissioned to do the piano and voice arrangement of
Fidelio
, found the playing “neither clean nor precise, yet I could still notice many traces of a once great virtuosity.”
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On the same day came the first hearing of a singspiel,
Die gute Nachricht
(The Good News), celebrating the fall of Paris. The music was the product of several composers; Beethoven contributed the final chorus, “Germania,” another patriotic potboiler. The text was by playwright George Friedrich Treitschke, still working with Beethoven on the revision of
Fidelio
.

Early one morning Moscheles arrived to consult about his arrangement of the opera. Beethoven was still in bed but jumped up enthusiastically. To go over the music he stepped to the window overlooking the bastion. Soon he noticed that street urchins outside were raising a ruckus. “Those damned boys,” he growled, “what do they want?” Mo­scheles smilingly pointed downward, reminding Beethoven that he was naked. “Yes, yes, you're right,” Beethoven said, and put on a dressing gown. Later, when the arrangement was done, Beethoven found Mo­scheles had written on the last page, “Finished with the help of God.” When the young man got the music back, he found Beethoven had scrawled under that: “O Man, help yourself.” Beethoven did not believe that God directed one's writing hand.

In the middle of March, rehearsals began on the new version of
Fidelio
, still without its new overture and generally in flux. He had never struggled with a work as much as with this overhaul. To change something in one place meant he had to change things elsewhere. As he wrote his collaborator Treitschke, “I could compose something new far more quickly than patch up the old with something new, as I am now doing. For my custom even when I am composing instrumental music is always to keep the whole in view . . . I have to think out the entire work again . . . I assure you, dear T, that this opera will win for me a martyr's crown.”
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There is one of the most trenchant things Beethoven ever said about his creative process:
Always keep the whole in view
. It is one of his laconic asides that speaks volumes. For him a work, from an opera to a symphony to a folk-song arrangement, was an organism of balanced parts, every part related to every other—and that to a degree even in the traditionally loose construction of operas.

Shortly before the
Fidelio
premiere he wrote Treitschke in continuing frustration, “This whole opera business is the most tiresome affair in the world . . . and—there is hardly a number in it which
my present dissatisfaction would not have to patch up here and there
.”
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His focus was still largely on the music rather than the dramatic pace and shape, but with Treitschke's expert help in the theatrical dimension he was determined to speed up the first act, which had always languished. The pacing would never entirely be fixed, but it ended up far tighter than in the first version.

A week before the premiere of the new
Fidelio
, Prince Lichnowsky died of a lingering illness, perhaps venereal. He had been Beethoven's first patron in Vienna and one of his most generous. After their quarrel of 1806, they had never been close again, but Lichnowsky maintained a kind of pathetic loyalty. It was reported that in his last years they had an agreement that the prince could stop in now and then and silently watch Beethoven at work. If the servant did not let him in, he would leave quietly without being admitted to the inner sanctum.
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The premiere of the not quite finished revision of
Fidelio
came on May 23 at the Kärntnertor Theater, where librettist Treitschke worked as a producer and dramatist. Standing in for the unfinished new overture was the old
Ruins of Athens
Overture. It went well, Beethoven conducting. Once again
Kapellmeister
Michael Umlauf sat behind him, ready to step in if there was trouble, because Beethoven could hear very little. The audience applauded stormily and called Beethoven before the curtain again and again.
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A Viennese theatrical journal raved, “We were amazed at
Beethoven
in his entire greatness, and what was more, we were amazed at the master . . . who, before the
Battle of Vittoria
, had belonged to his antagonists. At last, the great genius has for once prevailed and is able to rejoice in his works . . . The music of this opera is a deeply thought-out, purely felt portrait of the most creative imagination, the most undiluted originality, the most divine ascent of the earthly into the incomprehensibly heavenly.”
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Among other things, this review reveals that there was still plenty of lingering anti-Beethoven sentiment in Vienna. To repeat: even paranoids have enemies.