Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph (14 page)

In practice, the Illuminati amounted to a sort of activist left wing of the Freemasons. A certain number of Freemasons were drawn to the order; illustrious Illuminati included possibly Goethe and, by some reports, Mozart.
¹⁵
Friedrich Schiller was suspicious of the secrecy and moralistic flummery of the Illuminati. All the same, in Dresden Schiller was close to the Illuminatus Christian Gottfried Körner, and the order's intoxicating dream of the brotherhood of humanity creating an Elysium on earth appears to have inflected “An die Freude.”
¹⁶

Education was a prime concern of the order. Every member was expected to recruit promising youths between fifteen and twenty years of age and inculcate them in Illuminist ideals.
¹⁷
Neefe was relentlessly devoted to duty, so for a while he would have groomed Beethoven for the order, though the boy was too young to join a lodge. The goals of the Aufklärung and Illuminati were imparted with homilies and maxims, like Neefe's own published homilies. Some of the maxims advised a youth to keep his distance from women romantically, to view them with the purest ideals but not expect them to be intellectual equals. Neefe wrote in an article, “They don't think much, the female souls . . . To think is virile.”
¹⁸
These attitudes pointed Beethoven toward the prudish and idealistic, as opposed to realistic, attitude toward women that he showed throughout his life.

In 1781, an Illuminati lodge formed in Bonn, called the Minervalkirche Stagira, the Minerval Church of Stagira (named for the birthplace of Sophocles). Neefe was a founding member, along with his actor friend Grossmann.
¹⁹
Members from the court
Kapelle
were horn player Nikolaus Simrock and Beethoven's violin teacher and court concertmaster, Franz Anton Ries, along with a collection of progressive civil servants and artists including J. F. Abshoven, publisher of the town
Intelligenzblatt
, and Bonifaz Oberthür, later the first rector of the University of Bonn. So the lodge was woven into the artistic and intellectual leadership of the town. The Minerval Church met at the house of widow Anna Maria Koch in the market square, where she kept a wine bar and rented rooms.
²⁰
Widow Koch eventually added a bookstore; under the name of Zehrgarten, her establishment became the nexus of Aufklärers in Bonn. All these currents swirled around the young Beethoven as they swirled around the whole town.

Neefe received his order name, “Glaucus,” from the Greek word for “brightly shining.” At meetings, members heard lectures on books, philosophy, science.
²¹
Neefe had to write an autobiographical piece subjecting his own character and ideals to a rigorous examination. There was a list of one hundred questions he must answer. They began, “What do you wish to be the purpose of the Order?” Neefe replied: “Thorough and particular connection of men with God, Nature, and themselves. Especially: The implementation of the Rights of Man.”

The hyperbolic style of the Illuminati and the order's ultra-Aufklärung agenda seemed a perfect fit for Neefe the
Schwärmer
, who believed that true artists were likewise a cadre of the elect. Brother Glaucus had a precipitous rise in the order. In only four weeks, he attained an advanced grade. Two years later, in 1783, he became prefect of the Stagira lodge.
²²
He was involved in creating and writing for the lodge's weekly journal,
Contributions to the Spread of Useful Knowledge
, which carried articles on everything from Eastern religions to husbandry. “Morality,” declared the journal, “is the science of the happiness of every single individual . . . Politics, however, has the happiness of a whole nation, even . . . of all nations as its object; it is accordingly the science of citizenship.”
²³
For Illuminati, as for all Aufklärers,
science
was the great shibboleth.

The year 1785 turned out to be critical for Neefe in a number of directions. In February, after a trial of his playing before new Elector Max Franz, he was restored to his full salary as court organist, Beethoven remaining his assistant.
²⁴
Max Franz was agreeable to Neefe's idea that religious services at court should be based more on German choral music, accompanied by smaller instrumental forces, a change from the former Italian orientation of court music.
²⁵

That year Neefe also published his collection of prose sketches, modestly called
Dilettanterien
, which open a window into his personality, his ideals, his teaching. Widely read around Germany, the book was made up mostly of homely reflections with Masonic and Illuminist overtones, such as his response to seeing a broken bottle on the street: “Think of so many other frustrated designs and collapsed hopes of men, of friendships ruined, riches lost, courtiers fallen, empires vanished, or on the becoming and passing of nature, or on the vanity of all things . . . And then turn your gaze upwards!”

In the
Dilettanterien
, Neefe also addresses matters technical and aesthetic relating to his profession, including his article “Characteristics of Instrumental Music”:

 

Sulzer, one of our greatest philosophers, and probably the greatest aesthetic thinker of our time, complains about the carelessness of the endeavor to make instrumental music more important . . . There is more to [composing] than the art of putting one note after another according to the rules of thorough bass and singing . . . which any village schoolmaster can easily learn. A fiery imagination, a deep penetration into the sanctuary of harmony that is only granted to a few initiates, fervent inner feeling, insight into the nature and capacities of the various instruments, an understanding of the whole substance of music, an ability to develop that substance according to forms and models, a meticulous acquaintance with the various characters [of men], with the physical and moral aspects of mankind, with the passions . . . [are required] if music is to be no empty cling-clang, no sounding brass or tinkling cymbal . . . One observes the nuances of feelings, or the point where one passion changes into another . . . The mob of listeners the composer doesn't need to worry about; they never know what they want, and never truly understand anything . . . Woe to the composer who heeds such men! He will deny his talent . . . and must compose minuets, polonaises, and Turkish marches. And then—good night Talent, Genius, and Art! The great composer doesn't get drawn into the mob. He goes calmly and unimpeded on his way to musical eloquence. It is enough for him that here and there unnoticed in some corner a better educated listener can be found who understands his language.
²⁶

 

Neefe preached this idealistic
Schwärmerei
about art and the initiated few to his pupil Beethoven, along with the broader Aufklärung ideals of reason, freedom, duty to humankind, the pursuit of happiness. Neefe also preached a relentless sense of duty to one's talent:
what gifts you possess are owed to humanity
. And, as an Illuminatus, he proclaimed the imperative of morality and how it must shape one's life and work:
to be a good artist, you must first be a good man
.

In his essay on instrumental music, the man Neefe calls one of the greatest philosophers was Johann Georg Sulzer, whose
Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Künste
(General Theory of the Fine Arts) was one of the celebrated treatises concerning aesthetics in the German Aufklärung. Sulzer's ideas are as idealistic as Neefe's but more concrete, less rhapsodic. Whether or not Neefe gave Beethoven his book, he taught from it in important ways. Many of Sulzer's ideas read like a prophecy of Beethoven's mature music in its conceptions, its technique, its methods. In adulthood, he owned a copy of Sulzer and consulted it. Sulzer wrote,

 

The most important service the fine arts can offer to man consists without doubt in the well-ordered dominating desires that it can implant, by which the ethical character of man and his moral work is determined. [To the end, Beethoven called himself a servant of humanity.]

Every individual part of a work that is conceptually ill-suited to the whole, that possesses no relation with the other parts and thus stands in opposition to the unity, is an imperfection and blemish . . . There has to be a thread drawing together the many different things so that they are not arbitrarily joined, but rather have a natural connection to one another. Variety must appear as the constantly varied effects of a single cause. [Beethoven's sketchbooks are an illustration of this search for unity within variety.]

In any sketch . . . one's complete attention must always be focused upon the whole so that one can see how every section fits in. [Later Beethoven said, “It is my habit . . . always to keep the whole in view.”]

The most important forms in which beauty ascends to the sublime, are those in which beauty is united with both functionality and a moral essence, where the matter conveys an impression of spiritual power, where the soul becomes visible, so to speak. [Later Beethoven said, “Only art and science can raise man to the level of the divine.”]

A musical composition written for many instruments, or one to be performed outside or in a large hall should not be so elaborated as a trio. [Beethoven had a strong sense of the differing styles of orchestral and chamber music.]

The composer would do well to imagine some person, or a situation or passion, and exert his fantasy to the point where he can believe that this person is ready to speak . . . He must never forget that music that expresses no kind of passion or sentiment in a comprehensible language is nothing but sheer noise. [Later Beethoven said that all his music was written with some idea, story, or image in mind.]

The main theme is commonly termed the
thema
. Mattheson justly compared it to the Biblical verses upon which a sermon is based, and which must contain in a few words all that will be developed more fully in the course of the sermon . . . The main theme is always the most important element. [This is a definition of Beethoven's procedure in his mature music: Everything flows from
das Thema
.]
²⁷

 

Through Neefe, the ideals of both Freemasons and Illuminati reached his pupil, and to some degree these ideals stayed with Beethoven to his last symphony and his last days. But these influences did not play out in predictable ways. Contra Neefe, he composed, for example, plenty of minuets, polonaises, Turkish marches, and the like, the sort of commercial items his teacher deplored. Anyway, neither as a teenager nor later did Beethoven uncritically accept anyone else's ideas about his art. Everything had to be transformed into his own terms. Though he sympathized with Freemasons and benefited from their network, there is no record he ever belonged to a lodge. Joining groups of any kind was not his style. Yet even as he resisted authority, he also had a German respect for authority, for precedent, for the scholarly and theoretical.

In other words, when all was said and done, Beethoven was not only incapable of taking any path but his own, he was incapable of
understanding
any path but his own. If this is true of most teenagers, he never moved beyond that stage. At the same time, there was a fruitful paradox in Beethoven's relations to the world. For all his fierce independence and his obliviousness unto scorn regarding much of the life around him, from his youth on, musically and otherwise, he still took in everything significant he encountered and made use of it. Most of what he did as an artist was based on models in the past; but he had to make those models his own.
²⁸

Beethoven learned and grew extraordinarily through the course of his life and music, but his bedrock remained the intellectual and spiritual atmosphere of Aufklärung Bonn, and part of that comprised the teachings musical and otherwise of Christian Neefe. Among the elements that inflected Beethoven's sense of his mission was the Illuminist (and
Zauberflötean
) sense of a cadre of the enlightened, initiates into the Mysteries and covert leaders of humanity in the direction of Elysium. The boundless optimism of the Aufklärung applied to music as well: the arts were to have a higher development, both in their creation and in the perception of them, and so would be part of the progress of humanity toward the light. Musically and otherwise, Neefe was a patient teacher. In contrast to Beethoven's first teacher, his father, Neefe was encouraging rather than bullying, firm and frank, but he allowed his pupil to find his own ways and means. Neefe preached his social and spiritual ideals gently, likewise his teaching of composition.

As Neefe had written, he knew he had on his hands a student of Mozartian dimensions. Even if Neefe possessed a higher opinion of his own talents than history would, he had to have understood how far this boy's gifts stretched beyond his own. At the same time, Neefe had enough experience to understand that talent is not enough, that in the end few prodigies amount to much. There must also be an unusual adaptability, a drive to learn, toughness, courage, tenacity, ambition, fire in the belly, none of which can be taught, all of which Beethoven possessed boundlessly. Neefe suggested, guided, critiqued, shaped, but he also gave the boy rein to follow where his gifts led him. By 1785, they led Beethoven to three works of remarkable maturity and skill.

 

The idea for the three Piano Quartets WoO (works without opus) 36—in E-flat major and minor, D major, and C major—smacks of an assignment a teacher gives a student: use particular works of a master as models for pieces of your own; follow the models as you like, but keep close to them as a formal, expressive, tonal, and gestural scaffolding. Whether the idea was assigned by Neefe or by himself, and without having much practice in composition since writing the
Electoral
Sonatas, in these quartets Beethoven made another exponential leap in his apprenticeship.