Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph (113 page)

Bernard and Peters were the more literary and imaginative companions of these years. Bernard was given to jotting down drinking songs and the like, including his own improvised poetry. At one point he wrote out a jovial lyric by Lessing that he wanted Beethoven to set, “In Praise of Laziness.” Some of their humor concerned Peters's lively and lusty wife Josephine, a well-known singer in Vienna who presided over a group of friends interested in literature and the arts. Peters observed in the book, “Bernard thinks it's no good that I have a wife and want to be at home; I think he's jealous.”

“He doesn't pay enough attention to his wife,” Bernard responded. “She says I'm her vice-husband, and I always say if Peters dies I'll inherit her.”
⁹

It got more naughty sometimes. After all, there were virtually no women in the circle of people who dined with Beethoven and wrote in his conversation books. In the middle of winter Peters wrote, “Do you want to sleep with my wife? It's so cold.”
¹⁰
This was presumably a joke. Beethoven knew Josephine, had probably accompanied her in private musicales. His reply to the offer was not written down. Beethoven thought well enough of Peters to make him at one point Karl's co-guardian. Oliva left Vienna in 1820 and the others drifted off in some degree, but there were no angry breaks as with many Beethoven acquaintances. One who appears less and less often in Beethoven's correspondence in these years is his old factotum Baron Zmeskall, who was afflicted with chronic gout, so could be of little service.

The first items in the first conversation book were sketches of Beethoven's, one of them putting a bass line under a natural minor scale. His friends were not given to flattery, and his music came up only now and then. Beethoven got reports on new plays and operas opening in town. Here and there word of a hearing remedy appears. Beethoven noted an “
Electro Vibrations
Machine” advertised to cure deafness.
¹¹
Oliva reported a more outlandish cure: “You take fresh horseradish just as it comes from the ground, rub it on cotton, wrap it up and stick it in your ear.” With this remedy, he assured Beethoven, the wife of a foreign count had regained her hearing.
¹²

Each member of the circle had his quirks. Oliva generally noted when a name that came up was Jewish; when Ignaz Moscheles gave a recital, “the Jew played.” At the same time Oliva was not particularly prone to gossip, though he heard one item he knew would please Beethoven concerning Karl's mother: “[Johanna] is lowdown riffraff. Isn't it true that Karl knew she was sleeping with her lover when your brother was lying dead in the house?”
¹³
Meanwhile this was the Metternich era; any person young or old could be a spy working on commission. Oliva warned Beethoven, “Freedom—don't say it so loud . . . Everybody harks and listens.”
¹⁴

In the conversation books of the first years, Karl's hand shows up only occasionally—he probably wrote most of his responses on the slate at home. The boy's words in these days are mild, obedient, usually answering his uncle's questions. “I don't know where the lice are coming from. Anyway it's healthy to have lice.” Already Karl keeps up with issues concerning his fate: “Have you asked Peters to be co-guardian?”
¹⁵
Peters in turn liked Karl and praised him to Beethoven: “Your nephew looks good, beautiful eyes, he's graceful, expressive physiognomy, excellent deportment.” Others' testimonies also imply that Karl was an attractive and charming boy, and he had been doing reasonably well at school.

Beethoven wanted to make a great man of his nephew but did not particularly pressure him toward music beyond expecting him to keep up with his piano lessons. In the long run Karl did get around the keyboard a little and showed some sophisticated musical tastes. By his mid-teens he was correct and well spoken in the conversation books—as a writer, far more lucid and correct than his uncle—and he had the clear schoolboy hand Beethoven had possessed in his teens. To that point the impression Karl left to history was of a reasonably personable boy, intelligent but only so much, good at languages, more dutiful than many children his age but not at all ambitious. The tempests swirling around him did not overtly affect Karl for a while. In due course, they would.

 

Beethoven's domestic adviser Nannette Streicher crafted some of the most admired pianos in Vienna, which she signed “Streicher née Stein” to show her pedigree as daughter of the celebrated maker Johann Andreas Stein. Beethoven had preferred Stein pianos in his youth; later he liked Streichers even as he pressed the company to make its instruments stronger and louder.

In early 1818, he received exciting news: the British firm of John Broadwood & Sons was sending him a piano as a gift. During his travels around the Continent, Thomas Broadwood, the current head of the firm, had met Beethoven. Broadwood recalled that he “was kind enough to play to me, but he was so deaf and so unwell.”
¹⁶
The gift was a splendid six-octave, two-pedal instrument with a mahogany case. In a time of incessant experiment and evolution in design, Broadwoods were in the forefront of the art, but then and later, every piano from a given factory was different. This one had been tried out and signed by distinguished musicians including Muzio Clementi, John Cramer, and Beethoven's pupil Ferdinand Ries. Above the keys lay the Latin inscription
Hoc Instrumentum est Thomæ Broadwood (Londini) donum, propter Ingenium illustrissimi Beethoven
.

This Broadwood had to have been strongly made, to have survived its journey. On its way from London to Vienna it was sent to Trieste by boat, then carried 360 miles over the Alps on primitive roads.
¹⁷
When it arrived at the Streicher showroom in Vienna Beethoven was summering in Mödling. Concerned about its British action, heavier and with a bigger key dip than Viennese instruments, the Streichers had local pianist and Beethoven protégé Ignaz Moscheles try it out. He found it very hard to play. But the visiting British composer Cipriani Potter declared it top-notch, so it was sent on to Beethoven in Mödling.
¹⁸

Potter was used to the British action; the Streichers worried that Beethoven was not going to be comfortable with it. Years before, he had tried to have the touch of his French Érard lightened, with little success. But he was delighted with the Broadwood. For one thing it was British, and he was an Anglophile hoping to enhance his reputation in that country. Most importantly, it was louder than Viennese instruments. He wrote the maker a delighted letter in French:

 

My very dear friend Broadwood—I have never felt a greater pleasure than in your honor's notification of the arrival of this piano, with which you are honoring me as a present. I shall look upon it as an altar upon which I shall place the most beautiful offerings of my spirit to the divine Apollo. As soon as I receive your excellent instrument, I shall immediately send you the fruits of the first moments of inspiration I gather from it, as a souvenir for you from me, my very dear Broadwood; and I hope that they will be worthy of your instrument. My dear sir, accept my warmest consideration, from your friend and very humble servant—Ludwig van Beethoven.
¹⁹

 

Before long he had some sort of metal chamber attached above the strings to amplify the sound. Potter told him the piano needed to be tuned. “That's what they all say,” Beethoven growled. “They would like to tune it and spoil it, but they shall not touch it.” Only when a tuner sent from Broadwood showed up did Beethoven allow it to be regulated and tuned—but like most of his pianos, even when he could hear them, this one would be habitually out of tune. When it arrived he had begun sketching a new piano sonata he intended to dedicate to Archduke Rudolph. Just as in the decade before his Érard had helped inspire the
Waldstein
and
Appassionata
, perhaps the Broadwood, the most robust piano in build and sound he had ever encountered, helped take him in the direction of writing the most massive piano sonata of his life.

Cipriani Potter became another in the string of foreigners who turned up at Beethoven's door and found themselves warmly received. Potter had hoped for composition lessons. As usual, Beethoven declined; he sent the young composer to his old string-quartet mentor Aloys Förster. Having looked over Potter's music, Förster told Potter that he didn't need teachers anymore. Potter relayed to him Beethoven's response to that: “Tell Förster he's an old flatterer.” The quip got a laugh from the old man.

Beethoven invited the Englishman to join his rambles in the Vienna woods. To Ries in London Beethoven reported, “Botter [
sic
] visited me several times, he seems to be a good man and has talent for composition—I hope and wish that your prosperity may grow daily; unfortunately I cannot say that of myself. My unlucky connection with this Archduke has brought me to the verge of beggary. I cannot endure the sight of want.”
²⁰
The very generous Rudolph may have been leaning on Beethoven to give donations to the poor.

Potter was treated to the usual harangues. Still, if Beethoven complained incessantly, most of the time he did it with a certain entertaining gusto. They mostly conversed in Italian, in which Potter reported Beethoven to be fluent. Their time together seems to have been jolly, yet in this same period Beethoven reported to Zmeskall, “
Owing to a
chill I am now feeling very much worse . . . I now know what it feels like to move daily nearer to my grave.”
²¹
The next day, he thanked Zmeskall for the gift of a Maelzel chronometer: “We must see whether with its help one can measure all eternity.”
²²

Potter noted Beethoven's Anglophilia and his determination to visit England. Among other things he wanted to see the Houses of Parliament. “You have heads on your shoulders in England,” he told Potter; England, that is to say, was not a reactionary monarchy like Austria. There were the inevitable questions from the young musician. Potter asked about the new crop of virtuosos, among them Ignaz Moscheles, who had done the piano arrangement of
Fidelio
. Now Beethoven dismissed him: “Don't ever talk to me again about mere passage players.” He declared the Englishman John Cramer—who he knew disliked his music—to be the finest pianist he ever heard. Outside yourself, Potter asked, whom do you call the greatest living composer? As usual, Beethoven answered Cherubini. And the ancestors? Once he had put Mozart first, Beethoven said, but now it was Handel.
²³

With the occasional socializing, Beethoven spent a productive, even relatively pleasant summer of 1818 in Mödling. He arrived in June in good spirits and feeling well, as shown in an outsize response he wrote his friend Vincenz Hauschka, a director of the new Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde. It was by way of agreeing to the society's offer of a commission for an oratorio, something the two had already discussed:

 

Most Excellent Leading Member of the Club of the Enemies of Music [a pun: Gesellschaft der Musikfeinde] of the Austrian Imperial State! [Below he writes a Handelesque fugue subject to the text
Ich bin bereit!
—“I am ready!”] The only subject I have is a
sacred
one. But you want a heroic subject. Well, that will suit me too. But I think for such a
mass
of people [also a pun] it would be very appropriate to mix in a little sacred stuff. [He writes a fugue subject on “Amen.”] Herr von Bernard would suit me [as librettist] quite well. But you must also pay him . . . Now all good wishes, most excellent little Hauschka. I wish you open bowels and the handsomest of close-stools. As for me, I am rambling about in the mountains, ravines, and valleys here with a piece of music paper . . . In order to gain some leisure for a great work I must always scrawl a good deal beforehand for money so that I can stay alive while I am composing the great work. Let me add that my health has greatly improved and that if the matter is urgent I can easily contrive to serve you.
²⁴

 

He finishes the letter with a line of music combining
Ich bin bereit
and
Amen
in counterpoint.

The subject settled on for his friend Bernard's libretto was
Der Sieg des Kreuzes
(The Triumph of the Cross). It took Bernard years to finish the libretto,
²⁵
after which Beethoven never got around to writing the oratorio. It is hard to imagine that that piously creaky subject would ever have inspired him. In June he received from the Gesellschaft an advance of 400 florins—in devalued paper currency—for the oratorio. The polite fiction that he was actually working on it was sustained for years.

The “scrawling” he refers to in the letter to Hauschka is more piecework for Thomson in Scotland. “My songs with your ritornellos and accompaniments do not sell!” Thomson wrote Beethoven this summer. A friend of his in London had advised the publisher, “Although a great and sublime artist, Beethoven is
not understood
, and his arrangement of your songs is
much too difficult
for the public.” In practice, Thomson had Beethoven's arrangements played over by his daughter Annie. If she found them too hard, he concluded they were too much for any young lady.
²⁶
“Tell me, my dear sir,” Thomson entreated, “is it not possible for you to demonstrate the enchanting power of your art in a simpler form?”
²⁷
Yet he was willing to commission a new experiment, some sets of folk-song variations that Beethoven produced, and some easy quartets and trios that never came to pass.

Shortly after his rambunctious letter to Hauschka, Beethoven wrote an enormous one to Nannette Streicher telling her he'd chucked out the servants for colluding with Karl and even with his mother, who had bribed them with sugar, coffee, and cash. And so forth and so on, in page after page detailing with grim satisfaction the servants' “horrible treachery.” (Yet Beethoven rather liked “elephantine” young Peppi and her cooking.) When Karl was not forthcoming about all the plots and treasons, “I pounced on him . . . I often give him a good shaking, but not without a valid reason.”