Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph (139 page)

Marx took his cue about revealing what was noble and true in art. His article on the symphonies was only a middle stage in his journey with Beethoven. He would spend the rest of his career exploring and expanding his conceptions, which at once cinched Beethoven's triumph and put him into some tightly constrained and, for the future of music, constraining boxes: Beethoven as not just an inspiration to the future but the model of models, a virtually unattainable ideal.
⁵

 

Beethoven's concerns in these years were no longer his critics, good or bad, but rather the newest piece; a few friends (most of them serving in some degree as his lackeys); his ward Karl; illness; his disgusting servants; and money. Other than these things, there was little left in his life. Now alongside the notes in his sketches were long trains of sums added up—he still could not do multiplication. After promising the
Missa solemnis
to a row of publishers, in July 1824 he sold it and the Ninth Symphony to Schott and Sons for 1,000 and 600 florins, respectively.
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At that point the Viennese publisher Diabelli still thought his house was in the running to get the mass.
⁷
Four months earlier, Beethoven had offered the Ninth to Moritz Schlesinger and to Schott on the same day.
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He also heavily courted Probst, a new publisher for him, but after too many broken promises and pages-long excuses, Probst dropped out of the running. Beethoven was disgusted with his longtime Viennese house Steiner, mainly because he had long owed the publisher money and Steiner had been so contemptible as to press him about it. He paid the last 150 florins of his debt to Steiner in July 1824, and wrote Schott, “Steiner . . . is an
out and out miser
and
a rogue of a fellow;
that
Tobias
[Haslinger] is inclined to be
weak
and
accommodating
, yet I
need
him for
several things
.”
⁹

His letters to Tobias Haslinger himself (he was soon to take over the Steiner firm) had always been funny and affectionate. His hypocrisy in the letter to Schott lies probably not in that he was using Haslinger and had no respect for him but rather in that he was running down the competition to his now-preferred publisher, Schott, and downplaying his continuing involvement with Steiner and Haslinger. Even if he had turned to other houses, there was no complete break with Steiner. He still frequented Steiner's store on Paternostergasse; the publisher still did him favors and bid on pieces.

Beethoven innocently embarrassed himself to Haslinger directly, however, over an intricate piece of whimsy he wrote to Schott in the beginning of 1825. Here is Beethoven in what he called his “unbuttoned” mood. After another snipe at a rival publisher with whom he was involved (“Schlesinger is not to be trusted, for he filches wherever he can”), he concluded, in a flight of fancy subtle enough that it has to be annotated:

 

Here are a couple of canons for your journal [
Caecilia
] . . . as a supplement to a romantic biography of Tobias Haslinger of Vienna, consisting of three parts. Part 1—Tobias appears as the apprentice of the famous Kapellmeister Fux [author of the excruciating counterpoint study
Gradus ad Parnassum
] . . . and he is holding the ladder to the latter's Gradus ad Parnassum. Then, as he feels inclined to indulge in practical jokes, Tobias by rattling and shaking the ladder makes many a person who has already climbed rather high up [in the craft of counterpoint] suddenly break his neck and so forth. He then says goodbye to this earth of ours but again comes to light in Albrechtsberger's time [this is Beethoven's old counterpoint teacher and Fux disciple].

Part 2. Fux's Nota cambiata [a musical ornament] which has now appeared is soon discussed with A[lbrechtsberger], the appoggiaturas [another ornament] are meticulously analyzed, the art of creating musical skeletons is dealt with exhaustively and so forth [a dig at Albrechtsberger's pedantry]. Tobias then envelops himself like a caterpillar, undergoes another evolution and reappears in this world for the third time.

Part 3. The scarcely grown wings now enable him to fly to the little Paternostergaße [home of Tobias's firm] and he becomes the Kapellmeister of the little Paternostergaße. Having passed through the school of appoggiaturas, all that he retains is the
bills of exchange
[a pun on
Wechselnote
, which means “appoggiatura,” and
Wechsel
, “bill of exchange”]. Thus he . . . finally becomes a member of several homemade
learned
societies and so forth.
¹⁰

 

This little fantasy shows that by this point Beethoven had acquired a good sense of what “Romantic” meant, enough so as to lampoon its tendency to the arcane and fantastic: Tobias twice dies and is reborn, and cocoons himself like a butterfly. Here particularly is the influence of a high-Romantic source, E. T. A. Hoffmann, whose stories were given to such magical metamorphoses. It appeared that Beethoven had been reading Hoffmann's tales. The clue to that connection is one of the canons Beethoven sent to Schott, the text of which involves a pun on the writer's name: “Hoffmann! You are no hope-man.”
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Beethoven's immediate creative concerns after the premiere of the Ninth Symphony were two sets of piano bagatelles and the quartets for Galitzin. The piano pieces were the eleven of op. 119, pulled together between 1820 and 1822, and the six of op. 126. The first set had been intended to bring in money to help pay his debt to brother Johann. When the London edition of op. 119 was pirated by Moritz Schlesinger in Paris and then by another publisher in Vienna, Beethoven was left with no fees from European publication. In May and June 1824, he wrote the set of op. 126 to get the money for his brother.

The op. 33 Bagatelles had been popularistic pieces, each a delightful individual. As is noted about that set, here as much as anywhere begins the tradition of Romantic character pieces for piano. (By the time of Beethoven's op. 119, one of the other founders of that tradition, Franz Schubert, was already in his prime.) These pieces also played their part in the allied Romantic passion for fragments: small thoughts that are part of an implied larger picture. Examples in the next generation include Chopin's preludes. In a historical perspective, with the op. 119 Bagatelles it becomes far more imaginable that in another seven years the young Robert Schumann would publish
Papillons
, his wild, autobiographical collection of parti-colored miniatures evoking a masked ball.

The op. 119 Bagatelles are a more or less random assemblage, all of them tuneful, most under a minute and a half long, no. 9 lasting less than forty seconds. Five of them had been published before, donated as a favor to friend Friedrich Starke for his piano-pedagogy book. Some came from drafts going back as far as the 1790s.
¹²
They are arranged in terms of musical contrasts and a variety of keys, but really they are freestanding pieces, aimed more at the pleasure of an individual player than at public performance (which would have been unlikely in this period anyway). Most have a topic familiar to the time: no. 1 is a wistful dance, no. 5 a driving piece in Gypsy style, no. 9 an exquisite little waltz, and so on. All in all they constitute an echo of the kinds of pieces Beethoven could improvise on the spot, and likely began as improvisations that he touched up on the page.

Op. 126 is a different matter, what he called on the manuscript a
Ciclus von Kleinigkeiten
, a cycle of little things. They range from around a minute and a half to more than four minutes. He wrote publisher Schott that they were “probably the best I've written” of these kinds of pieces. No less than the others were these variegated, freestanding in effect. But the six still have the mark of a concentrated effort, and some of the atmosphere of the late music. The keys progress by thirds: G–g–E-flat–b–G–E-flat. No. 1 has the sublime and artless tunefulness of some of his late piano movements. No. 2 combines dashing bursts of toccata with cantabile phrases—the late propensity for juxtaposing high contrasts. No. 3 in E-flat major is a poignant stretch of cantabile that might have served as the basis of a slow movement in a late sonata. No. 4 begins as a Presto furioso in tone but has stretches of folkish musette. The set finishes with a flowing, introverted Quasi allegretto and a finale that begins and ends with a dashing Presto but is otherwise a kind of meditation in folk style. This set of small gems constitutes Beethoven's last opus for piano.

 

As each of the quartets for Prince Galitzin was finished, Beethoven bestirred himself to get it premiered and then to sell it. By now he was confirmed in his habit of promising works to more than one publisher, trying to keep all of them on the hook. Meanwhile he continued to promise the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde its commissioned oratorio
The Triumph of the Cross
, which he never got around to. His letters to the society's cellist and concert organizer Vincenz Hauschka were invariably in his unbuttoned mood, and they use the intimate
du:
“While hailing you as the most powerful Intendant of all singing and growling clubs, the Imperial and Royal Violoncello in Chief, the Imperial and royal Inspector of all Imperial and Royal Hunts, and also the deacon of my most gracious lord, without domicile, without a roof over his head . . . I wish you this and that, from which you may select the best.”
¹³

While Beethoven was finishing the first of the
Galitzins
, the Quartet in E-flat Major, op. 127, Ignaz Schuppanzigh claimed the premiere of the quartet for his scheduled concert of January 25, 1825. Given the go-ahead, the violinist immediately placed a notice in the paper. With that, he hoped to forestall Beethoven's usual game of having second thoughts and giving it to somebody else—which Beethoven promptly did. He promised it to Joseph Linke, Schuppanzigh's cellist, for a benefit concert. There was a tense exchange between Beethoven and ­Schuppanzigh in a conversation book. “The affair with the quartet is accursed,” Schuppanzigh began. He insisted he didn't want to fight with Linke over the premiere, but he still wanted the quartet: “I wouldn't say anything if it were not already in the newspaper.”
¹⁴

In the end, Schuppanzigh got his way. Beethoven treated Linke as he was doing with his stable of disappointed publishers, promising the cellist a future work, the premiere of the coming A Minor Quartet (Linke was duly annoyed over the whole matter). Then the E-flat Quartet was not ready in time for Schuppanzigh's January concert, and he had to substitute the op. 95
Serioso
.

Schuppanzigh's next scheduled concert was on March 6. It appears that he got the music for the E-flat Quartet only two weeks before the date, so there was great anxiety on all sides. Beethoven needed strong premieres, and from op. 18 onward he had usually gotten them from Schuppanzigh. Meanwhile, for a performer at this point a new Beethoven quartet was a more loaded matter than it had been with the ones of a decade before. Now each premiere threatened to be a historic moment, therefore to have something to do with one's reputation not only in the present but potentially in the future. The E-flat Quartet, Beethoven's first since the
Serioso
of 1810, was as novel and difficult as any he had written. For performers and listeners it demanded whole new categories of understanding.

In hopes of inspiring the troops, Beethoven assembled the quartet players and asked them to sign a document of intent, joking in tone but serious in substance, concerning the premiere: “Best ones! Each one is herewith given his part and is bound by oath and indeed pledged on his honor to do his best, to distinguish himself and to vie each with the other in excellence.” It was signed by everyone present, Linke with the ironic note, “The grand master's accursed violoncello,” second violin Karl Holz “the last, but only in signing,” and Anton Schindler “secretarius.”

There the jokes ended. Everyone's fears were confirmed. The premiere by Schuppanzigh's quartet was a scrambling affair, and Beethoven and everybody else blamed the violinist. The worst humiliation was that Beethoven used his brother Johann's critique of the performance to berate Schuppanzigh, when everybody knew Johann was a musical ignoramus.
¹⁵
Schuppanzigh protested as best he could, saying that he had needed more time to absorb the spirit of the music—a spirit as new to the medium as the
Razumovskys
had been.

Instead of waiting for a second try from Schuppanzigh, Beethoven recruited violinist Joseph Böhm to step in as first violin in a performance, with the same men in the other chairs. He hoped Böhm would be more diligent than Schuppanzigh, and indeed Böhm was. Beethoven attended their rehearsals, not hearing anything but following the players with his eyes and listening in his head. At one point, as they reached the ending Böhm felt that an indicated slowing of tempo was not working, so he signaled to keep the tempo steady to the end. Beethoven crouched in a corner, watching. When they finished he said only, “Let it remain so.” Böhm's performance was received with stormy applause. Beethoven's old helper Baron Zmeskall reported, rather gleefully, to Therese Brunsvik: “Schuppanzigh received the disgrace and Böhm the victory.”
¹⁶
The group repeated the quartet twice more that same March and again in April. Steiner, Beethoven's longtime principal publisher, now in disfavor, offered Beethoven 270 florins for it. Beethoven gave it to Schott.
¹⁷

He was already at work on the next quartet for Galitzin. His labors and his general concentration were materially helped by the declining amount of time Cardinal Rudolph had to devote to music. After years of lessons that had taken up several days of the week when Rudolph was in town, Beethoven apparently gave his old patron the last lesson in December 1824.
¹⁸
Rudolph continued paying his part of Beethoven's annuity.