Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph (110 page)

 

Lyric melody:
Op. 102, no. 1, in C Major begins with a gentle, songful theme for cello alone.

 

Equality of voices:
The piano enters on an echo of the melody, as if continuing the cello's thought. Nothing lingers of the eighteenth-century idea of a solo sonata as “piano with violin” or “with cello.” In the C Major Sonata the two are like a couple who speak as one.

 

Harmonic suspension:
There is no firm cadence onto C major until the third line, and barely then. Only at the end of the introduction does a prolonged C-major chord settle in.

 

Unconventional harmonic relationships and tonal structure
in new directions:
The quiet and lyrical C-major introduction prepares a driving, slightly demonic Allegro in A minor, a compact sonata-form movement that stays in the minor key to the end.

 

New subtlety in the handling of small motifs:
The opening unaccompanied cello melody in the C Major Sonata serves as a kind of motto; the ensuing themes are based on motivic germs in the first bars: the fall from C down to G, the lift from C up to G in the second bar, and the echoed G–F–D figure between cello and piano. The singing second theme of the Allegro is made from these elements. Here more than before, Beethoven uses motifs as seeds to sprout themes, often within what sounds like a capricious drifting from one idea to another. Thus—

 

Poetic stream of consciousness:
The impression of a clear dramatic narrative has receded, replaced by a sense of music seemingly capable of going anywhere from anywhere, changing direction in a second, the emotional effect powerfully evocative but often mysterious unto magical.

 

New angles on traditional formal patterns, with overt recalls of earlier movements:
Following the first movement comes a swirling Adagio, not exactly a movement or an introduction either. All this is nominally in C major, but actually it sort of condenses in a C-major direction that melts unexpectedly into a varied recall of the opening page, now led by the piano—marked
dolce
, “sweetly.” This recall of the opening barely departs from a C-major chord. Traditionally, long pieces had avoided literal recalls of music from earlier movements; until now Beethoven had shied away from it as well. Years before, the
Pathétique
was taken to task by a critic for its finale theme so clearly recalling a theme in the first movement. Thematic
connections
among movements were smiled on,
recalls
not. Now for Beethoven more or less literal recalls were going to be available as a device. (Eventually critics took to calling these kinds of pieces “cyclic” works.) Another feature of the late music—

 

Familiar forms still in place but often obscured, receding into the background, leaving more of an impression of fantasy and improvisation:
In the C Major Cello Sonata, the second of two short virtual slow movements—or double introduction, or both—leads to the finale proper, a playful Allegro vivace, nominally in sonata form but almost monothematic with its little zipping figure.

 

Intensified contrasts:
In the C Major and in the second work of op. 102, the D Major Cello Sonata, strong contrasts are often juxtaposed with little or no transition. The compact Allegro con brio of the D Major begins with a leaping and dynamic motto in piano, countered by a soaring lyric phrase in cello that seems to take up the piano's idea and lyricize it. Those two contrasting gestures are the central dichotomy of the piece. The dominant tone throughout, though, is ebullient and muscular, with lyrical interludes. In no. 2 of op. 102, the cooperation of cello and piano is as strong as in no. 1, but the terms are different, like two figures in a friendly and equal competition. In the D Major, the first-movement development is short, like that of the C Major, but both of them have a fresh tone; even though they develop material from the exposition, they sound more like an exposition than a development, because the music is made more of melody and counterpoint than of the usual accompanimental figuration.

Next, in the late music—

 

Long-breathed lyricism in slow movements:
The lyrical trend in the D Major flowers in the remarkable second movement, marked Adagio con molto sentimento d'affetto, which sounds like an archaic, tragic aria. (If the mournful slow movement of the Piano Sonata in D Major, op. 10, is “prophetic,” this movement is one of the things it prophesies.) We are close to the sublime slow movements of Beethoven's last years, with their long, time-stopping melodies. Here the music becomes ornamented, rhapsodic, finally slipping into an uncanny atmosphere prophetic of Schubert—his doppelgänger or his weird organ-grinder, in the song cycles.

A new emphasis on counterpoint in general and fugue in particular:
Beethoven is turning away from figuration and clear demarcations of foreground and background, to a texture where all the voices are more nearly equal and melody pervades the texture. The finale of the D Major is an energetic and dashing, also ironic, fugue. Later, Beethoven said that if one were going to write fugues and other old forms in this day and age (which by that point was the Romantic age), they must not be rehashes of Bach and Handel; they needed to have, he said, something more “poetic,” a new kind of expressiveness adapted to the forms and norms of Viennese style. This poetic idea was going to pervade his coming music.

The fugal finale of the D Major is an experiment in that direction. It has a headlong, madcap drive full of rhythmic quirks that foreshadow several of his fugal finales to come. Each of them will be a particular rethinking of the fugue and of how it can be integrated into the late eighteenth-century forms that Beethoven inherited. Classical form, with its clear phrases and sections and thematic contrasts and developments, would seem to be antithetical to fugue, which is a sustained contrapuntal procedure generally based on a single theme. (Fugal moments in the course of a movement in sonata form were common from Haydn on, but whole fugal movements rare.) In other words, in his late music Beethoven will be showing—

 

A new historical awareness and integration of Classical, even Renaissance and Baroque forms and procedures—an integration of past and present:
In shaping a series of individual approaches to that goal, he in turn inflected the direction of music for a century and more.

 

These, then, were the new elements of the late music: unconventional harmonic moves and tonal structures; long periods without harmonic resolution; new angles on traditional formal patterns, sometimes with overt recalls of earlier movements; familiar forms still in place but often obscured; long-breathed lyricism; a new emphasis on counterpoint. With the latter Beethoven returned to the Baroque idea that counterpoint is the heart of music. And when he wrote counterpoint, Bach was usually in the front of his mind.

None of these trends was entirely new for him, but all of them were expanded and intensified until the effect became quite new, more than the sum of its parts. The cello sonatas of op. 102 opened the gates to the late works, a second new path. Call this third phase of his music the Poetic Period.

 

In the autumn of 1816, in the wake of finishing
An die ferne Geliebte
and in the middle of a new piano sonata, Beethoven showed traces of his old rowdy high spirits. He wrote publisher Steiner, using his military designation, “With all my heart I embrace the L[ieutenant] G[eneral] and wish him the rod of a stallion.”
⁵⁷
Responding to a storm of mistakes in the Seventh Symphony engraving, he signed off to Steiner, “May God protect you—May the devil take you—.”
⁵⁸
And to Baron Zmeskall:

 

You must know by now what sort of person
more or less I should like my new servant to be, that is to say, good, orderly behavior, suitable references, married and without any murderous tendencies
, so that my life may be safe. For although the world is full of rascals of all kinds I should like to live a little longer . . . I will soon send you my treatise on the four violoncello strings, worked out very systematically; the first chapter is about
guts
in general—the second chapter deals with
gut strings
—and so forth.

I need not warn you any more to take care not to be wounded near certain fortresses.
⁵⁹

 

The connection of the cello's gut strings (Zmeskall was a cellist), guts in general, and fortresses (prostitutes) is obscure but evocative. By now Beethoven seems to have gotten to some degree into the habit of visiting brothels, like most bachelors of his time. The moral anguish about it found earlier in the
Tagebuch
has disappeared. Now he is more concerned with the “rotten” fortresses—the prostitutes ready to give you venereal diseases. The next summer, Beethoven wrote Zmeskall, “I am always ready for it. The time I prefer most of all is at about half past three or four o'clock in the afternoon.”
⁶⁰

As 1817 arrived, his bad health and his other torments marched on, but at least they evolved. Beethoven was living in a high, narrow house on Sailerstätte. Its back looked out over the walls to the suburb of Landstrasse, where Giannatasio had recently moved his school. Karl having been secreted away in the school's new location, for the moment the Johanna problem receded. Apparently Beethoven also spent some time residing in the hotel Zum Römischen Kaiser.

C. F. Hirsch, grandson of Beethoven's old counterpoint teacher Albrechtsberger, lived near that hotel and his son made Beethoven's acquaintance. Somehow Hirsch persuaded Beethoven to give the boy lessons in harmony, meaning figured bass at the keyboard. Hirsch remembered of the lessons that Beethoven could essentially hear nothing but watched the boy's hands on the keys. Technical mistakes in voice leading threw him into a rage. When he detected a mistake he flushed red, pinched the boy hard, once went so far as to bite him on the shoulder. After the lessons, Beethoven became calm and friendly again. In his own work, after all, he often cursed the notes into place.

Hirsch's recollection of Beethoven's appearance recalls Burney's in the same period: ruddy complexion, hair going gray and standing up from his face, coarse hands with short fingers and close-cut nails. In the house he wore a flowery dressing gown, in the street a dark green or brown overcoat with dark trousers. In cold weather he sported a low top hat, in summer a straw hat. In all weathers he looked slovenly.
⁶¹

During these months he was again feeling kindly toward the Gian­natasios. In the middle of January, Fanny wrote in her diary that he had visited nearly every day for a week. “I am inexpressibly happy that he seems to cling to us. Little incidents often arouse within me bitter, sad feelings that might truly be termed jealous; as, for instance, his significant reply to Nanni's childish question . . . as to whether he loves anyone else besides his ‘absent beloved one.'” Both sisters knew, in other words, about
An die ferne Geliebte
and its connection to Beethoven's own distant beloved. During one visit, father Giannatasio asked Fanny to accompany her sister in the songs. Beethoven ordered Fanny off the piano bench and accompanied Nanni himself. Fanny noted that he missed notes apparently without noticing, and it seemed that he could not hear Nanni at all.
⁶²

At the beginning of summer he and Nanni had a conversation about marriage that Fanny recorded, trying to contain her shock:

 

He is certainly a peculiar man in many things, and his ideas and opinions on [marriage] are still more peculiar. He declares that he does not like the idea of any indissoluble bond being
forced
between people in their personal relations to each other. I think I understand him to mean that man or woman's
liberty
of action ought not to be limited. He would much rather a woman gave him her love, and with her love the highest part of her nature, without . . . being bound to him in the relation of wife to husband. He believes that the liberty of the woman [in that situation] is limited and circumscribed.

He spoke of a friend of his who was very happy, and who had several children, who, nevertheless, held to the opinion that marriage without love was the best for man . . . As far as his experience went, he said that he did not know a single married couple who . . . did not repent the step he or she took in marrying; and that, for himself, he was excessively glad that none of the girls had become his wife whom he had passionately loved in former days.
⁶³

 

This appears a thought-out rather than spur-of-the-moment point of view, but to what degree did he actually mean it? Part of it was surely a rationalization, an attempt to convince himself that his disappointments in love had been after all for the best. In that respect it resembled what he wrote to Countess Erdödy about “joy through suffering.” If he was to find any joy in the life fate had decreed for him, a path through suffering was the only available route. His old defiance had given way to resignation. If no one would marry him, to protect himself he rejected marriage. In the process, probably without realizing it, he echoed what his careworn, disillusioned mother Maria had said long before: “What is marriage but a little joy, then afterward a chain of sorrows.” In those opinions and others, Beethoven appears to have taken for granted the equality of men and women—as usual, more in theory than in practice. But he never treated a woman other than with respect for her feelings and opinions, her autonomy—even when those feelings took her away from him.

This winter of 1817, Fanny Giannatasio was at the height of her infatuation and her sensitivity. In February Beethoven wrote her father a letter about Karl's new boots hurting his feet and about the boy needing more time to practice piano; he announced that he was coming to pick up Karl the next day, to take him to a concert. That letter, not warm but hardly angry, nonetheless put Fanny into a tizzy: “That Beethoven is vexed with us is a very great trial to me, but that he should show it in the way he does adds to its bitterness. It is true that father has not behaved very well to him; still, I think that Beethoven ought not to retort with biting sarcasm, when he knows how much affection and interest we have always had for him. I expect he wrote that letter in one of his misanthropical humors, and I forgive him for it.” Two weeks later Fanny wrote with relief, “He
has
been to us, and we are
friends
again. It has pained me very deeply to be obliged to acknowledge how much Karl has been to blame in all these misunderstandings, and it grieved me still more deeply that we were forced to inform his uncle of several misdemeanors of his, which have angered him beyond measure.”
⁶⁴
Here a new theme entered the saga: the tendency of people around Beethoven to blame Karl for whatever problems arose. The boy was now eleven.