Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph (17 page)

Two months later, after the first shocks had receded, Beethoven wrote to his new friend Joseph von Schaden in Augsburg. Written in a neat schoolboy hand, this letter is the first personal correspondence of his that survives. He begins politely and properly, and then sorrow takes over:

 

Most nobly born and especially beloved Friend!

I can easily imagine what you must think of me. That you have well founded reasons not to think favorably of me I cannot deny. However, before apologizing I will first mention the reasons . . . I must confess that as soon as I left Augsburg my good spirits and my health too began to decline. For the nearer I came to my native town, the more frequently did I receive from my father letters urging me to travel more quickly than usual, because my mother was not in very good health. So I made as much haste as I could, the more so as I myself began to feel ill . . . I found my mother still alive, but in the most wretched condition. She was suffering from consumption and in the end she died about seven weeks ago after enduring great pain and agony. She was such a good, kind mother to me and indeed my best friend. Oh! who was happier than I, when I could still utter the sweet name of mother and it was heard and answered; and to whom can I say it now? To the dumb likenesses of her which my imagination fashions for me? Since my return to Bonn I have as yet enjoyed very few happy hours. For the whole time I have been plagued with asthma; and I am inclined to fear that this malady may even turn to consumption. Furthermore, I have been suffering from melancholia, which in my case is almost as great a torture as my illness . . . I shall hope for your forgiveness for my long silence. It was extraordinarily kind and friendly of you to lend me three carolins when I was at Augsburg. But I must beg you to bear with me a little longer, for my journey has cost me a good deal and I cannot hope for any compensation here . . . Fortune does not favor me here at Bonn.
²⁴

 

That does not sound like a letter of a boy of sixteen, even a grieving one, but like that of an older man with a devastating burden on his shoulders. And the letter sounds themes that will be reprised, with variations, for the rest of Beethoven's life. He mentions no one but himself and his mother, depicting her suffering largely in terms of its effect on him. He responds to her decline and death with illness and depression of his own. He calls his town indifferent and useless to him. He is alone with his suffering, overwhelmed by melancholy. (Before long, melancholy, “La Malinconia,” would become a powerful theme in his work. Christian Neefe had taught him to observe human feelings as subjects for his work—starting with his own feelings.) At least in the long chronicle of Beethoven's illness and anguish that begins with this letter, there would be no further mention of asthma. It was as if his mother's choking had, for the moment, stolen his own breath.

Elector Max Franz remembered Beethoven's excursion to Vienna very well. He remembered that it produced more debts than results. If that abortive journey did not represent the hoped-for turn in the young musician's fortunes, however, they were about to turn anyway, decisively and at home.

7

I
N EARLY
1788, a new figure arrived at the Bonn court: a young nobleman, handsome and charming, very greatly promising. Count Ferdinand Ernst Joseph Gabriel Waldstein was of an old and influential Bohemian lineage. The year before, he had joined the Order of Teutonic Knights, and he came to Bonn at the summons of Max Franz, who, like his predecessors, was Grand Master of the order. By his first summer in Bonn, at age twenty-six, Waldstein had been knighted and was serving as a trusted envoy and companion of the Elector.
¹

A connoisseur, a capable amateur pianist, and an occasional composer, Waldstein joined the ranks of aristocratic musical
Schwärmers
in Bonn. He would have come to town relishing how liberal politically and also how musical was his new post. He looked over the local talent, perhaps hoping to discover a protégé in whom to invest attention and money. In any case, he was quick to find Bonn's leading prodigy and to take him up.

Beethoven's childhood friend Franz Wegeler would call Waldstein the teenager's “first, and in every respect most important, Maecenas.”
²
Probably he was not the first: when, at around age seventeen, Beethoven first met Waldstein, he already had admirers among the nobility and the bureaucratic middle class. But in Bonn he never had a socially more exalted, musically more sophisticated, more generous and influential champion and mentor than Waldstein.

It was the beginning of Beethoven's lifetime of association not only with well-placed music lovers but also with the higher nobility, of the kind who could open golden doors to him. His ascent would be charted by the status of the people who lionized him. For years he accomplished that rise without kowtowing unduly to the nobility or even acknowledging their admiration, and often despite their annoyance at his lack of deference and his manners of an unlicked bear—the legacy of an early childhood where he was taught music, not grooming and graces. In his childhood nearly everything but music and the love of his mother had been shabby, grueling, and ordinary.

On the whole, Beethoven ascended in the world not because he courted the great but because of his gifts, combined with an indefinable aura of inner grace and a relentless ambition to learn and to rise in every sense of the term. Waldstein understood this protégé and helped the boy become what nature had fitted him to be. The brilliant and sociable Waldstein rose as well, for a while, serving for ten years in the British army, then becoming Commander of the Teutonic Order at Virnsberg. Later, in Vienna, he served as exchequer to the emperor.
³
He began his career young, at the top of his form. Then, after a couple of decades of glory in high posts, his recklessness and his passion for gold speculation mastered him. In the end Waldstein lost everything he had: the affection of the Elector to a political quarrel, his wife to death, his fortune, his houses, the respect of his peers. The destiny of Waldstein was to die wretchedly in Vienna a few years before Beethoven, long out of touch with the man who he had once prophesied was to inherit the genius of Mozart.
⁴

When he took up the teenage Beethoven, Waldstein was in his prime, generous with funds and influence, a Freemason with close ties to liberal aristocratic and Masonic circles in Vienna. With gentle irony, Waldstein called the happiness of humankind “my favorite chimera.”
⁵
He began to slip Beethoven small sums, letting the proud teenager believe they were gratuities from the Elector. He encouraged the youth not only in his performing and composing but also in his improvising.
⁶

There was nothing unusual in a performer taking up improvisation. For centuries, many composers had been instrumental virtuosos as well, and in both capacities they were expected to extemporize. A visitor to Venice in the early eighteenth century recalled with awe the violin improvisations of Antonio Vivaldi; J. S. Bach's improvisations were celebrated in his time, his admirers including Frederick the Great. In his Vienna years, Beethoven's extempore playing would be compared to memories of Mozart's. Here as otherwise, his conception of his apprenticeship in music had to do with first mastering, then personalizing the traditional skills and techniques of being a composer: figured bass, instrumentation, vocal setting, counterpoint. But the leading edge in establishing his reputation would be improvisation.

As he settled into Bonn, Count Waldstein naturally gravitated to the circle of Helene von Breuning, who had been serving not only as a patron of Beethoven but also as a substitute mother. At Helene's big house on the Münsterplatz, Beethoven was still teaching piano to her daughter Lorchen and youngest son Lenz. Meanwhile, he served as Helene's showpiece among the cultured circle who gravitated to her. A silhouette of the Breuning family made by a local artist has Lorchen pouring tea for her mother as the latter reads a book; her son Christoph also reads, while Lenz plays violin and Stephan toys with a bird in a cage; also in the picture stands Helene's brother-in-law, Canon Lorenz von Breuning, a prominent name among progressive clergymen in Bonn.
⁷
All the children would be close to Beethoven in his teens, and Stephan survived just long enough to tend to his friend on his deathbed. The silhouettist of the Breunings also did a likeness of their protégé Beethoven at about sixteen, his first portrait.
⁸
It shows a fleshy profile, his father's blunt nose, a thin wig with a ribbon-tied pigtail.

Later Beethoven called the Breunings “the guardian angels of my youth.” Even before Maria van Beethoven died, Ludwig spent many nights in the house on Münsterplatz. He submitted to Helene's efforts to mitigate his stubbornness and his hot temper, to civilize and socialize him.
⁹
Franz Wegeler, who brought him into the Breuning circle, wrote that Beethoven's youthful exuberance first bloomed in that lively and sophisticated atmosphere.
¹⁰
Beethoven was not a gracious companion and never would be, but he was no longer the sullen and taciturn child he had been. He could be funny and sociable, and he turned his relentless will to learn and to raise himself in every dimension.

Performing regularly at the Breunings for a salon of knowledgeable and admiring listeners, Beethoven played Haydn and Mozart and Bach, his own pieces, improvisations. Often he was asked to improvise a character portrait of one of the Breuning circle.
¹¹
That came naturally to him; Christian Neefe had taught him that music was modeled not only on forms but also on passions and characters. Young Beethoven joined in the ongoing dialogue over the Good, the True, and the ­Beautiful. He read books he heard spoken of in the house: Homer and Plutarch and Shakespeare, the current German poems of Klopstock, and works of the young Goethe and Schiller. He soaked up the Aufklärung ferment that was a constant presence.
¹²

In childhood, Ludwig's father had loomed over him; in his early teens, Christian Neefe was his mentor and champion. Beethoven and Neefe still worked together daily at court, but his mentors and champions now were Waldstein and the Breunings and the cultured young intellectuals his age and older who befriended him when he emerged from his childhood shell.

 

Now Beethoven was old enough to fall in love, too, though he would be constrained in his romantic affairs by a puritan idealistic streak about women, maybe absorbed in part from the antifeminist doctrines of the Freemasons and Illuminati around him.
¹³
He and Stephan von Breuning shared their first love, for a music-loving, delicately blond girl from Cologne named Jeanette d'Honrath, who frequented the Breunings. This presumably decorous passion ran its course with no visible scars.
¹⁴
Sooner or later, Beethoven likely fell in love with his student Lorchen von Breuning; that ended with a quarrel before he left Bonn. (Lorchen finally married his friend Franz Wegeler.)

It was Helene von Breuning who gave a name to Ludwig's tendency to drift off into his thoughts and become oblivious to everything and everybody. His landlord's daughter Cäcilie Fischer recalled that once she spoke to Ludwig and, staring into space, he did not seem to hear her. When Cäcilie demanded a reply, he came to and explained, “I was just occupied with such a lovely, deep thought, I couldn't bear to be disturbed.”
¹⁵
When the like happened around Helene, she would say, “He has his
raptus
again today.”
¹⁶

The
raptus
became a little legend in his circle. It was not different in kind from that of other artists, most of whom create in something on the order of a trance. But Beethoven's trance was profound, a withdrawal into his mind that echoed his steady physical isolation from the world. Alone in rooms, alone in nature, alone in his
raptus
, Beethoven was happiest and always would be. For his friends, the
raptus
was most familiar when he improvised, falling into the music that flowed from his fingers as if he were falling into a dream.

 

In June 1788, Count Waldstein petitioned the court to increase Ludwig's salary. The family was still living on Wenzelgasse, where Maria van Beethoven had died, followed four months later by her last child, Maria Anna. Ludwig was receiving 150 florins as assistant organist, father Johann 300 florins plus three measures of grain. Without the rudder and goad of his wife, Johann was drinking heavily, losing much of the vivacity and joie de vivre that had once made him so many friends. He was rearing Ludwig's brother Carl as a musician, though this son had no notable talent. Probably Ludwig gave him lessons, though that may have been a fraught situation: Carl was even more hotheaded than Ludwig. Mild-tempered brother Nikolaus Johann was apprenticed to an apothecary.

The more Johann van Beethoven's fortunes and spirits fell, the more Ludwig at seventeen and eighteen had to take over as head of the family, overseer of his younger brothers and finally of his father. Ludwig got in the habit of managing his brothers' lives. From that point he essentially never lost the conviction that it was his duty to shepherd them. Count Waldstein's petition to the court for a raise in pay for Ludwig, despite the latter's mounting burdens and responsibilities, was turned down.

 

With the university under way, the Elector turned his attention to reviving the court theater and to expanding and deepening his
Kapelle
. The National Theater was reopened, with a stronger focus on musical productions; that made Bonn an important center for opera in German lands. Christian Neefe served as theater pianist and stage manager of the reconstituted theater. Directing the orchestra, and soon the opera and concert and chapel ensembles as well, was Bohemian-born cellist Joseph Reicha, who had arrived in Bonn in 1785 to work in the
Kapelle
. He oversaw a record expansion of the orchestra.
¹⁷
With him he brought his young nephew flutist and violinist Anton Reicha, who wanted to be a composer. Anton studied with his uncle and then with Neefe.