Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph (112 page)

If op. 101 helped Beethoven to define a new path, it did not immediately lift him out of the most fallow period of his career. He was too busy, to distracted, too ill, too overwhelmed for sustained work.

 

Another musical effort of this year was the result of his continuing interest in using Maelzel's metronome to set tempos. (He and the inventor had reconciled, Maelzel hoping for a profitable venture together in England—one more scheme that never came to pass.) Earlier Beethoven had written to Viennese conductor and composer Ignaz Franz the kind of considered technical treatise he was still entirely capable of. This one was about tempo:

 

I am heartily delighted to know that you hold the same views as I do about our tempo indications which originated in the barbarous ages of music. For, to take one example, what can be more absurd than Allegro, which really signifies
merry
, and how far removed [in expressive terms] we often are from the idea of that tempo. So much so that the piece itself means the
very opposite of the indication
. . . But the words describing the character of the composition [such as
con fuoco, giocoso
] are a different matter. We cannot give these up . . .
these certainly refer to the spirit of the composition
—As for me, I have long been thinking of abandoning those absurd descriptive terms, Allegro, Andante, Adagio, Presto; and Maelzel's metronome affords us the best opportunity of doing so. I now give you
my word
that I shall
never again
use them in any of my new compositions—
⁸²

 

At the end of 1817, the
Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung
published Beethoven's complete metronome markings for symphonies 1–8. At the same time he decreed that the A Major Piano Sonata should be designated not for the fortepiano but rather for the
Hammerklavier
, one of the German words for the piano (the more common name was
Flügel
, “wing,” for the open lid). He began using German rather than Italian expressive terms—with a random sprinkling of the usual Italian ones. As a German, he wanted to use German rather than Italian terms, and he believed the metronome marks would be far more useful and precise than the vague traditional Italian indications like “Allegro.” In fact, Beethoven did not stick with German terms in his music; before long he went back to the old Italian ones.

The relatively few metronome marks he issued—in the symphonies, the early and middle quartets, a few other pieces including the
Hammerklavier
Sonata—became a historic sticking point. Some of those tempos work, many of them are too fast, and some of them, mainly in the Ninth Symphony, are outlandish. A notorious example is the first movement of the
Hammerklavier
, whose pulse is given at 138.
⁸³
What happened? Should performers attempt to observe Beethoven's tempo marks religiously for all times and places?

No. The ones that seem strangely fast are in fact too fast, and the reason is Beethoven's deafness. By and large, he could hear music now only in his head, and even the finest musician does not precisely hear acoustics and the physical weight of sound in the inner ear. The sounds in a musician's inner ear are literally lighter than air, weightless. They do not involve bows and lips and lungs physically putting air in motion. Also one cannot predict the physical resonance of rooms, each of which is different and each of which inflects the tempo of a performance. For that reason the tempos in one's head are usually too fast—say, two to four metronome clicks too fast. If Beethoven's given tempos are adjusted downward an average of two to four clicks, that will usually be a good starting place—except for the ones, as in the Ninth, that are just inexplicable.
⁸⁴

One example can stand for many—his 1817 metronome marks for the Sixth Symphony. For the first movement he gave half note = 66, which makes the quarter note 132, which is absurd. This tempo is not a matter of pleasant thoughts on arriving in the country; it is a brisk jog. In this case even four metronome clicks slower is still brisk, though at least imaginable. His second-movement tempo of dotted quarter = 50 is workable, though most conductors take it two or three clicks slower. His scherzo tempo, dotted half = 108, is likewise reasonable; most take it one or two clicks slower. His dotted quarter = 60 for the last movement is actually a notch slower than many performances. There is, in short, no detectable consistency in Beethoven's tempo markings.

At the same time, with his usual common sense regarding his craft, he also understood the limitations of metronome markings and tempered his initial enthusiasm. There are reports that in his performances he tended to speed up in crescendos, slow down in soft passages, and revert to the main tempo at structurally important points.
⁸⁵
He wrote on a manuscript, “100 according to Mälzel, but this must be considered applicable only to the first bars, for sentiment also has its tempo and cannot be completely expressed by this number.”
⁸⁶
So in performance he believed in a nuanced, flexible tempo—the opposite of the metronomic tendencies of the next century. As Beethoven acknowledged, tempo is a matter of a performer's sensibility and musicality. One cannot put a metronome mark on feelings—or on the acoustics of every room.

As soon as Beethoven finished the A Major Piano Sonata he set out on another one in B-flat major, as expansive as the earlier one was intimate. He intended to make it his greatest sonata. If in the sorrows and tumults of the last years he had doubted whether he could find his stride again, he was no longer daunted by the intention of composing his “greatest” anything.

His creativity faced more grueling challenges than it ever had before. His body had been his first enemy. That was the most fundamental betrayal, the one that colored everything else. His friends saw how deafness affected his social being, soured him, stoked his paranoia and his rage. To have seized on Karl as his salvation when he was physically and mentally at his lowest ebb heaped on him another set of troubles. Even though he had plenty of real enemies (few of them able to do him harm anymore), he found them everywhere now, even among his friends.

Now his human incapacities, the worst of himself—his solipsism, suspicion, hotheadedness, and misanthropy—became his worst enemies, whether he was dealing with servants, with Karl, or with Karl's teachers. He was terrible at dealing with people in general, except publishers and lackeys, and terrible at dealing with the rest of life outside music. Now, starting with a young boy and his mother, he had no choice but to deal with people all the time, had to cope with the lives and needs of other people whom he could not begin to understand. He did it all badly.

His music and his
raptus
were his only escape, even though in his extremity he had taken to praying to God for help in a way he had not before. His prayers were not answered. In the time of the Heiligenstadt crisis he had seized his art like a drowning man. That had saved him, because then he saw in front of him a new path promising to take him to marvelous places. Now another creative path revealed itself, away from the heroic and toward at once the spiritual and the immediate, the quotidian and the childlike. As his miseries piled up unabated, the trajectories of his music and his life diverged more than ever. The courage demanded of him in order to work, which had seemed a crushing burden in 1802, was going to have to be stronger than ever. But his work was beginning to flow again, and his work fueled his courage.

He had always reached for
more
. Despite the most galling obstructions, by 1820 the tide of his creativity was rising and nothing could stem it. Now his work was going to enfold wider and deeper divides than ever: more seriously internal and more exuberantly external, a new transcendence and a new immediacy. In his music a more pervasive use of motifs underlay an atmosphere of improvisation. Narrative and drama were giving way to a sense of poetic fantasy. And given what Beethoven was enduring in his daily life, what he was going to achieve in the music of his last years would, to ordinary understanding, seem impossible, unbelievable.

28

I
N JANUARY
1818, Beethoven's plan to bring Karl home to live with him was finally realized. The servant problem had receded to a degree, in that Nanni and Peppi were still with him and submitting to his little disciplines: “Fräulein N has been quite different since I threw those half dozen books at her head.” More to the point, he wrote his domestic adviser Nannette Streicher, “
If you happen to meet those Giannatasios at Czerny's, pretend to know nothing whatever about what is being done about my Karl . . . For those people might still like to
interfere even more; and I don't want those commonplace people either for my Karl or for myself.”
¹

Giannatasio had made an effort to keep Karl at the school by lowering the fee, but Beethoven was adamant, and Fanny Giannatasio crushed: “We shall have to part from the boy, and, with his departure, one of the links which bind us to our beloved friend, Beethoven, who has lately caused us a good deal of trouble . . . I did not recognize at first why this gives me such intense pain. I know now that it was the manner in which it was done, the cold and formal, but extremely polite letter, without one particle of affection or interest for us expressed in it.”
²

Beethoven did have some legitimate reason to be concerned about his ward's treatment at the school; in winter Karl's room had been so cold that he developed chilblains on his feet. But despite his astonishing words to Nannette, in a better moment Beethoven had written the Giannatasios, “Please accept my most sincere thanks for the zeal, integrity, and honesty with which you undertook the education of my nephew.”
³
To Nannette he wrote delightedly, “Karl is arriving tomorrow, and I was mistaken in thinking that perhaps he would prefer to stay
there
. He is in good spirits and much livelier than he used to be; and every moment he shows his love and affection for me.”
⁴

Karl entered a situation that for a child was difficult from the ground up, because his guardian could hardly hear him speak. Beethoven's hearing still came and went, but overall it had declined to the point that he could only with difficulty make out music or even conversation shouted into an ear trumpet. Now others were going to have to write down their part of the dialogue. At home with Karl and the servants he used a slate and chalk. Outside the house he began to carry, in addition to his pocket music sketchbooks, notebooks of blank pages for conversation. As with his sketchbooks he never threw these conversation books away, and many survived. So from then on, history could eavesdrop on much of Beethoven's daily discourse—rather, other people's part of it, since he largely spoke his responses. Of the entries he wrote in the books, most were items for himself: musical sketches, marketing schemes, shopping lists, addresses, book recommendations. There were also rants concerning the government, the courts, and other things not safe to speak aloud in a police state.

In the first years of the conversation books the bulk of the encounters are with three friends, none of them aristocrats. Karl Joseph Bernard, as of 1819 editor in chief of the
Wiener Zeitung
, was a well-known and powerful man in Vienna; for Beethoven he had revised the text of the Congress of Vienna cantata,
Der glorreiche Augenblick
.
⁵
Karl Peters was an amateur painter and worked as a tutor to the Lobkowitz family, who had bestowed on him the coveted title, in that title-loving society, of
Hofrat
, privy councillor. Bookkeeper and amateur pianist Franz Oliva had been a factotum of Beethoven's since around 1810, in and out of his good graces and in and out of Vienna.
⁶
These men were all in their thirties, they had earned Beethoven's trust, they were able to advise and entertain him. For all his independence, Beethoven was sometimes too ready to take suggestions from anybody and everybody. Anton Schindler, his hanger-on of these years, once said that Beethoven was like “a ball thrown from one hand to the other—all his life the prey of conflicting advice.”
⁷

As the conversation books show, Bernard, Peters, and Oliva regularly dined with Beethoven in restaurants and inns. On his editor friend Beethoven bestowed the nickname “Bernard non sanctus,” “unholy Bernard,” to distinguish him from the church's St. Bernard. All three friends had pressing family and professional lives of their own, but they were prepared to give Beethoven a good deal of their time. All the same, they were no sycophants. The tone of their responses to Beethoven suggests they related on a relatively equal plane, even if none was on a
du
basis with him. One observer of his circle, probably at a restaurant, wrote, “Those about him contributed little, merely laughing or nodding their approval. He philosophized, or one might even say politicized, after his own fashion.”
⁸
But there was more give-and-take than that. Based on his companions' responses in the conversation books, Beethoven did not always dispense sermons and rants but also joined in the ebb and flow of talk, except that responses to him had to be written down, and there was no question that he was the center of this particular circle. The others were the ones doing the favors.

In the first years the conversations were largely quotidian, ranging from the practical to the bawdy. The dominant theme was Karl and the legal processes that roiled around him. “As long as you are guardian and K is here,” Bernard wrote, “not only will you have the same troubles as before, but will always have to struggle with his mother's intrigues.” Bernard polished Beethoven's legal papers. Knowing that these were not his own strong suits, Beethoven relied on Bernard's judgment, his skill with words, his common sense. Oliva tended to advise on practical matters, from buying a heating stove to rentals, banks, investments, and interest.