Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph (147 page)

With that, in effect, the course of Beethoven's art came to rest. What followed were aftereffects and asterisks.

 

Still, in summer 1826, Beethoven had no plans to die and no thoughts of final statements. He had another quartet and a symphony to finish and a string quintet in sketches, and he needed to write the promised alternative finale for the B-flat Major Quartet. Having intended to dedicate the C-sharp Minor to a wealthy music fancier, at the last moment he changed the dedication to Lieutenant-Marshal Baron von Stutterheim, who agreed to accept Karl into his regiment despite the scandal of the suicide attempt.

For some time Beethoven's brother Johann had been trying to coax Ludwig out to his estate Wasserhof, in the little shabby hamlet of Gneixendorf, near Krems. (Beethoven said the name of his brother's village, with its crackling consonants, sounded like a breaking axle.)
³⁹
Ludwig had been testily resisting the idea, knowing he would have to be around Johann's wife and daughter. For her part, wife Therese had not long ago threatened to brain him with an iron poker if he showed up to meddle. But now for Beethoven the idea of getting out of town was suddenly appealing, mainly because it would give Karl time to recover so he would be presentable for the army.

He and Karl left Vienna for Gneixendorf at the end of September 1826. With him he brought the string quartet in F major and the new finale for the B-flat Quartet, both of them nearly finished. Their journey of some fifty miles up the wandering Danube was the longest he had made in many years. It was the first time he had seen the lush landscape of the Wachau Valley since he first traveled to Vienna, in 1792, and then it had been wrapped in winter.

Just before they left, Beethoven hastily put down tempo markings for the Ninth Symphony, he sitting with music and a metronome dictating the numbers to Karl, who transcribed them as best he could, which was not entirely accurately. Publisher Schott did not help when it printed the starting tempo for the finale at dotted half = 66 (already too fast for the bass recitatives) with the first number upside down, 96. That absurd tempo remained in scores for two centuries.
⁴⁰
Before the trip to his brother's, Beethoven also spent three days meticulously correcting a presentation score for Friedrich Wilhelm III, king of Prussia, to whom it was dedicated. Eventually the king wrote a chilly note of thanks and enclosed “a diamond ring as token of my sincere appreciation.” Beethoven had the ring appraised. It turned out to be fake, an unidentifiable reddish stone. He had to be talked out of indignantly sending it back. It is at least possible that the original stone had been stolen en route and the imitation substituted.
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Beethoven had never been more attentive to Karl's needs as after the accident. His efforts included stroking officials to keep his nephew from prosecution. Just before the trip he wrote a magistrate, “Karl will have to spend a few days with me (before he leaves Vienna to join the army). His statements [to the police] are to be ascribed to the outbursts of anger caused by the impression made on him by my reprimands when he was thinking of taking his life. But even after that time he behaved affectionately to me. Rest assured that even in its fallen state humanity is always sacred to me.”
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He intended a week's trip, but they ended up staying in the country for two months, waiting for Karl's wound to heal enough to be hidden by his hair.

When Beethoven arrived at his brother's estate he was ailing with liverish symptoms: legs swollen, fluid accumulating in his abdomen so he had to wear a support around his bulging belly (it was not the first time he had to resort to that).
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Johann gave his brother a suite of three rooms and assigned a servant to him. The center room featured an elaborate mural Johann had commissioned, depicting the Rhine country of their youth.
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The only piano was in the parlor, where Beethoven only occasionally played it.

At the beginning he and Karl and Johann took some walks around the property. Johann owned four hundred acres, most of it leased to tenant farmers. Beethoven and Johann's wife largely avoided one another. Given her propensity for outside amusements, Johann had prevailed on Therese to sign a legal contract agreeing that if she took up with a lover, he could turn her out of the house without notice. This seedy expedient would not have made Beethoven happier. Therese did her best to be conciliatory, even trying to smooth things between Beethoven and Karl. “It seems that Karl has some of your rash blood,” she wrote in a conversation book. “I have not found him angry. It is you that he loves, to the point of veneration.”

Besides walks there were carriage trips to Krems; Johann sometimes had to go to Vienna on business, the fifty miles necessitating a two-day trip in each direction. From old habit the brothers were soon squabbling, partly over Johann's demand that Beethoven shell out a little for his board. At this point Johann, who was having trouble paying off his estate, was pressing his brother to live with him regularly in the warm months—again, for a modest rent.

Meanwhile despite everything, Beethoven had not changed his habit of riding Karl mercilessly. The boy had to fend off the attacks in the conversation books: “But why are you making such a scene today? Will you not let me go for a little now . . . I'll come back later. I only want to go to my room . . . Will you let me go to my room?” When he heard Karl had been playing piano duets with Therese, he accused him of sleeping with her. Further noisy scenes ensued. When Karl was sent to Krems to get writing supplies for his uncle, he would try to sneak in a little billiards. When he could get away from Uncle, the nineteen-year-old was all too obviously enjoying his first vacation in years from books and schoolmasters.

Beethoven finished the F Major Quartet and the alternate finale for the B-flat Quartet, then turned to a String Quintet in C Major. After breakfast he was out of the house, walking through the fields in his usual style, shouting and singing and waving his arms conducting the music in his head, stopping to write in a sketchbook. He returned for lunch and a rest in his room, then went back out until dusk. At one point his antics in the fields scared a team of oxen, which bolted down a hill followed by their driver, a farm boy. When the boy had gotten his team calmed down and back on the road, Beethoven once again turned up waving and shouting and spooked them again. This time the oxen ran all the way home. When the driver asked who this fool was, he was told it was the famous brother of the landowner. “A hell of a brother that is!” the boy exclaimed.
⁴⁵

This was not the only time when Beethoven was mistaken for a tramp or a fool. At one point he accompanied Johann to a conference with an official. The official's clerk noted the shabbily dressed person standing motionless by the door during the long discussion, then noted the low bows the stranger received from the official when the two men left. The clerk, who was a music lover, asked his employer who that imbecile was who received such a bow, and was astounded to learn it was Beethoven.
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Neither work nor business slacked during his sojourn in Gneixendorf. Sending his metronome markings to Schott, he observed, “The district where I am now staying reminds me to a certain extent of the Rhine country which I so ardently desire to revisit.” He offered the coming string quintet to Diabelli and sent the F Major Quartet to Moritz Schlesinger. At the end of November he sent the alternative B-flat finale to Artaria. He wrote wry letters to friends in Vienna.

Then another disaster unfolded. This one was close to the last.

 

Ludwig received a letter from brother Johann, in whose house he was living—though by this point he was eating in his rooms and hardly speaking to the family. The subject of the letter was Karl. Johann brought up the issue on paper in an attempt to forestall the blowup he knew would happen if he presented it to his brother in person. But the blowup was not to be avoided. “I cannot possibly remain quiet any longer about the future destiny of Karl,” Johann began. “He is getting completely away from all activity, and will become so accustomed to this life that he will be brought to work again only with the greatest difficulty, the
longer
he lives here so unproductively. Upon his departure, Breuning gave him only 14 days to recuperate, and now it is 2 months. You see from Breuning's letter that it is absolutely his intention [as now legal guardian] that Karl
shall hasten
to his profession; the longer he is here, the more unfortunate
for him
, because work will come all the harder to him, and therefore we may experience something else bad.”
⁴⁷

Johann had always been the mildest of the brothers, also the least intelligent. But when Ludwig came to him in a fury over the letter, what ensued was a battle worthy of the old set-tos between Ludwig and Carl. The main issue was Ludwig's demand that Johann cut Therese out of his will and leave his considerable fortune to Karl. Johann would not be battered into submission. As for Karl, Johann was clearly right: the boy had recovered from his wound, he was getting lazy, it was time to join his regiment. Meanwhile Beethoven's physical condition was deteriorating. His stomach was bothering him, he had no appetite, his feet were swelling, his diarrhea acting up. He was meanwhile downing a good deal of wine.
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His failing liver, his temper, and his drinking were working together now to bring him down.

For all those reasons on top of the blowup between the brothers, it was clearly time to go back to Vienna, where among other things Beethoven had his doctors. Karl resisted, saying his wound was still too obvious. But Beethoven wore him down, as Karl's entries in the conversation book show: “I beg of you once and for all to leave me alone. If you want to go, good . . . If not, good again . . . But I beg of you once more not to torment me as you are doing; you might regret it, for I can endure much, but too much I cannot endure. You treated your brother in the same way today without cause. You must remember that other people are also human beings . . . These everlastingly unjust reproaches!”
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Beethoven was determined to leave, come what may. Therese was going to Vienna in the comfortable family carriage and likely offered them a ride, but he refused.
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He set Karl to checking coach schedules. There being nothing convenient, he decided they would catch a ride on a milk cart that was headed for Vienna. Perhaps he remembered the time years before, when he had fled from a row with Prince ­Lichnowsky in an open cart in the rain and arrived back in Vienna laughing and healthy. But he had been two decades younger and stronger then. Nevertheless, on December 1, because of his argument with Johann and his hatred of Therese, both rising from his rage and his solipsism, Beethoven and his nephew climbed into the open milk cart in freezing weather. It took him back to Vienna and his deathbed.

Beethoven had only summer clothes with him. He and Karl stopped midway at an inn and got an unheated room in a tavern. In the middle of the night he fell into pleurisy: dry hacking cough, violent thirst, cutting pains in the side. He tried drinking ice water, which brought on pneumonia. In the damp and frosty morning he had to be lifted into the wagon.

Late in the day he arrived at his flat in the Schwarzpanierhaus in alarming shape. Braunhofer his doctor was summoned. He declined to come, pleading distance. The real reason was probably that Braunhofer knew what was coming and did not want to be the physician of record. After two more tries at finding a doctor, Karl Holz secured Andreas Wawruch, one of the most respected doctors in Vienna and a music lover who played the cello. When he arrived, on December 5, Wawruch declared to Beethoven, “I am a great admirer of yours and will do everything possible to help.”
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Beethoven retired to his bed. It was a pattern familiar to him, had happened many times before. He had long known any illness might be his last, but he did not yet know that this would be the one. He never left his bedroom alive. But even in his extremity, Beethoven was the most stubborn and resilient of men. It took death a long time to catch him.

 

Beethoven did not expect the String Quartet in F Major, op. 135, to be his last completed work, but he did intend it to be his last string quartet, at least for as far in the future as he cared to imagine. Even if he did not anticipate how close the end was, he could not have expected to have much time left. He had written five quartets in two and a half years, and they were his only serious efforts in that time. The first three, the
Galitzins
, had traced a steady and deliberate disintegration of conventional norms of structure and logic. The C-sharp Minor had been a reintegration, but on a new plane rather than a return to the past.

The F Major Quartet is a look back, retrospective and essentially comic like the Eighth Symphony but again on a different plane than either Beethoven's past or the Classical past. The tone of this last work, written in a time of trauma when his body was sliding toward collapse, is full of laughter and irony as Haydn and Mozart expressed them, and in the middle lies a soulful song. Its laughter is hard to define, though—not exactly carefree, rather a performance by a clown old and tired, a final smiling doff of the cap, and an ironical exit from the stage.

It begins with a couple of questioning fillips,
piano
, answered by
pianissimo
hiccups. The three-note upswoop of grace notes that mark them all will be a motif. The fillips condense toward a graceful theme, but it is interrupted by a mock-solemn incantation in octaves.
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A couple of bars of transition and we arrive precipitously at the second-theme section. What has been established is a tone wry and quirky, a texture as lucid and open as in Mozart and Haydn—and early Beethoven. If the rapid shifting of ideas in the first couple of lines reminds us that this is late Beethoven, the much longer second-theme section, with its parade of small themelets, adds up to a more sustained, lighthearted, Classical dancing stretch. After a short and unrepeated exposition comes a short development in which earlier ideas are woven together, all of it marked by the tipsy upswoop. The development includes a false recapitulation that leads to more excursions. That the recapitulation is developed and reconfigured might remind us of Haydn; the coda as long as the other sections reminds us this is Beethoven. In it the upswoops find their denouement. The brisk final cadence,
piano
, is without fuss.