Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph (18 page)

Beethoven and Anton Reicha became close. Reicha recalled, “Like Orestes and Pylades, we were constant companions during fourteen years of our youth.”
¹⁸
If Reicha was not as gifted as Beethoven and was destined to be frustrated in his dreams of fame as a composer, he was still a talented and ambitious musician. The two became young artists together, talking music and politics and aesthetics, sharing adventures in and out of the
Kapelle
.

Making use of his early training in strings, as his father had intended, Beethoven joined the viola section of the court orchestra.
¹⁹
From his position in the center of the string section, he absorbed the orchestral and operatic repertoire from the inside and learned the art of scoring for orchestra in the most practical way. In the course of performances in theater and concert and dance rooms and in the chapel, he also developed a feeling for musical genres: the functional and stylistic differences between a symphony and an overture, between incidental music for plays and scores for singspiels and operas and ballets, between sacred and secular music, between the traditions of opera seria and opera buffa. During 1789 and 1790, the court opera mounted productions of Mozart's
The Abduction from the Seraglio
,
The Marriage of Figaro
, and
Don Giovanni
.
²⁰

Of the musicians in the orchestra, then numbering thirty-one and rising, many, including Anton Reicha and Beethoven, went on to fame of one kind and another, Reicha more as a musical theorist. The cousins Andreas (violin) and Bernhard (cello) Romberg found solid success as soloists and composers, Bernhard also as a cello pedagogue.
²¹
Old Beethoven family friend and
Kapelle
concertmaster Franz Ries was a widely respected violinist and might have had a solo career if he had not preferred to stay in his hometown. Horn player Nikolaus Simrock founded a historic music publishing house. In his teens, Beethoven gained a great depth of experience among first-rate musicians and a first-rate orchestra, comparable to what had been available to Haydn and Mozart in their formative years.
²²

Now there was a good deal besides music in his life. Along with most of the creative and cultured people of Bonn, Beethoven frequented the wine house, bookshop, and rooming house Zum Zehrgarten, run by widow Anna Maria Koch in her house on the market square. By the late 1880s her place had become the epicenter of the town's endless talk of philosophy, science, music, politics, literature, and drama, plus a generous helping of local gossip. The popularity of the Zehrgarten owed much to the daughter of the house, Barbara Koch, called Babette, the belle of Bonn, who made the Aufklärung atmosphere still more attractive. University professor and philosopher Bartholomäus Fischenich, one of many of Babette's admirers, boarded in the Zehr­garten: “In that house I spent a lovely part of my life and many happy hours. It was once the center of all intellectual and social pleasures in Bonn.”
²³

Beethoven numbered among Babette's admirers, who for that matter included many of the professors, officials, musicians, and students in town. Though Babette was musical, she appears to have been too busy with business and beaux to reciprocate Beethoven's interest; he was a face in a crowd. The conviviality of the Zehrgarten regulars is seen in a day in summer 1789 when “the whole table from Koch's house” went on an excursion to the Elector's palace, the Augustusburg, and its French gardens at Brühl.

In May of that year, Anton Reicha, Beethoven, and Karl Kügelgen, one of the painter twins whom the Elector supported but admitted he did not understand, enrolled in the university. There is no record what if any classes or other school activities Beethoven attended. He resisted Franz Wegeler's attempts to sign him up for lectures on Immanuel Kant, the philosopher of the day.
²⁴
For Beethoven, enrolling in the university was probably a gesture in the direction of broader education rather than a commitment to it. In his new responsibilities at court and in his private attention to his art as well as his social life, he was an extraordinarily busy eighteen-year-old. Beethoven was entering the heart of his
Bildung
.
²⁵
By his teens, he was impressing the adults around him by the force of his spirit as well as by his music.

 

Europe itself entered a creative and catastrophic era of
Bildung
in 1789. After a decade of revolutionary fever, the long-anticipated day of wrath against the old order arrived on the fourteenth of July, when an armed mob of Parisians stormed the dungeon fortress of the Bastille, which had become a symbol of the tyranny of the ancien régime. In August the new National Assembly published the Declaration of the Rights of Man, proclaiming that not just French men but people everywhere had a natural right to liberty, property, security, happiness, equality, opportunity, and freedom from oppression.
²⁶

The shock wave flew around Europe, and the reverberations amplified as the French Revolution took shape. For devotees of Enlightenment, there was a dazzling sense of
It has happened!
, the tide of ­humanity turning once and for all in the direction of reason and freedom, of
liberté, egalité, fraternité
. Edmund Burke wrote in England in 1790 that the Revolution “is the first example of a government based on principles and a coherent and consistent system.”
²⁷
America had mounted the first Enlightenment revolution and fashioned the first rational and representative government. But America was far away. This was here and now. For the first time in Europe, a government was going to be created on practical and egalitarian principles, an answer to the thrones that had ruled because they had always ruled, and for no better reason.

The French Revolution aspired to wipe away the past and replace it with a future fashioned by and for the people. Wrote one contemporary in 1798, “If suddenly . . . the Alps would collapse from the Montblanc to Istria, if all of England would be swallowed by oceans . . . such a revolution in the physical world could not be greater, nor would the familiar shape of Europe suffer more from change, than the Revolution . . . brought to the political world.”

There was joy unto ecstasy in Freemason lodges and Lesegesellschafts all over Germany. Philosophers Kant and Herder, writers Schiller and Klopstock, and a chorus of other German artists and thinkers were quick to hail the Revolution. Klopstock cried to Germans, “France free—and you hesitate? Are silent?” To many in that intoxicating early period, it seemed that the Elysium of brotherhood and happiness that Schiller had prophesied in his “An die Freude” was taking shape. The French National Assembly declared Schiller and Klopstock, along with Americans George Washington and Thomas Paine, honorary French citizens. Goethe, skeptical of chaos, held back his approval: “Sudden action is for the masses, thus they command respect. In judgment they are pitiful.”
²⁸

 

Inevitably the response of the Austro-German ruling class was muted. Even so, many progressive nobles and clergy and bureaucrats applauded the unfolding events in France. In Germany and Austria there had already been a movement to curtail the unbounded powers of the nobility and end feudalism. Besides, German princes might conclude that a blow against the proud and powerful French throne was to Germany's advantage. Or so it appeared at the time.

In Vienna, a reaction to reform and revolution was gaining strength. Yet the reality was that if most progressive Germans approved the Revolution at first, they were still largely not radicals, not Jacobins, not haters of princes and nobles. In German lands, there would be no active revolt against their own ancient regimes and marginal agitation in that direction, though some of that agitation would be heard, ringingly, in Bonn. Most German Aufklärers still wanted not an end to princes but better ones: benevolent despots, like Joseph II in Vienna.

The revolutionary enthusiasm of many German artists and thinkers ended with the fall of the guillotine on Louis XVI and his Austrian queen, Marie Antoinette. The Jacobin-inspired Terror that ensued galvanized reactionaries. From that point in the courts of Vienna and elsewhere commenced a relentless campaign to crush anything smacking not only of Jacobinism but also of Josephinism or republicanism.

 

Beethoven's circle was among those electrified by the advent of the French Revolution, but between his duties in the viola section of the court orchestra, his piano performing and practice, the increasing helplessness of his father, and the overseeing of his brothers, he had little leisure to ponder France and the future of Europe.

It was past time for Johann van Beethoven to retire. His voice had been shot for years, and he had fallen into a sad and public soddenness. When Johann was a child he had watched the bottle master his mother. Now his sons watched him lose the same battle, if indeed Johann put up a fight at all. There were the usual scenes, the ordinary tears. The children appeared at the tavern at night to pull at his coattails: “Papächen, Papächen, come home.” There were nights when Johann collapsed on the street and Ludwig wept and pleaded with the police not to arrest him, then had to drag his reeking and ranting father back to the house.

 

Around November 1789, Ludwig petitioned the Elector to retire his father and pay him Johann's salary so he as oldest son could feed and clothe his family and pay off his father's debts.
²⁹
When the decree came back it had a provision to send Johann away, as once his mother had been sent away to oblivion:

 

Because His Serene Electoral Highness has graciously granted the request submitted by the supplicant and has henceforth entirely dispensed with the further services of his father, who is to withdraw to a country village in the electorate of Cologne, it is most indulgently commanded that in the future he be paid, in accordance with his wish, only 100 Reichsthalers of the annual salary that he has received until now . . . that the other 100 Thalers be paid to his supplicating son in addition to the salary that he already enjoys, as well as three measures of grain annually, for the upbringing of his brothers.
³⁰

 

With this decree, the humiliation of Johann van Beethoven was nearly complete. His son of eighteen was now the recognized breadwinner and head of the family; by the decree, it would be Ludwig handing Johann half of his pension. They both knew what most of that would be spent on. It seems to have been understood, though, that the order to exile Johann from Bonn was for the moment a threat, something to hold over him if he were not cooperative with the court and his son.

Before Ludwig could present the decree to the court official and receive his pay, Johann pleaded to let him collect the salary so he would not have to endure the shame. Johann pledged to hand over to his son the ordained half of every salary payment. Ludwig agreed and, perhaps to the surprise of both, Johann lived up to that promise. Now, with half his father's pay added to his salary as organist, Ludwig was making the equivalent of 300 florins a year, a living slim but workable for the upkeep of himself and his brothers. He added to it with earnings from lessons and performances. And his father did not have to beg him for wine money.

If Beethoven did not issue many ambitious pieces in the several years before 1790, he still sketched ideas on paper and improvised constantly. Then as later, improvisation was not only his main road to fame but his prime creative engine. He was building a fund of ideas and techniques on which a career would be founded. Since his occasional Trio for Piano and Winds of 1786, he had apparently finished little: perhaps two preludes (later op. 39) and a piano concerto in B-flat major eventually, much worked over, to become Concerto No. 2. He was still Neefe's assistant as court organist and one of the four violists in the orchestra, performing a steady diet of orchestral works and operas. By that year the number of vocal and instrumental musicians employed by the court
Kapelle
had expanded to forty-nine.
³¹

What revived the teenage Beethoven as a composer was urgent news that arrived in Bonn on February 24, 1790: four days earlier, Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II, older brother and inspiration of Elector Maximilian Franz, had died in Vienna. One of the most progressive leaders of the age, the model of an enlightened despot, Joseph died exhausted and embittered, despairing of the reforms that had become a movement bearing his name: Josephinism.

His mother, Empress Maria Theresa, had undertaken modest reforms and among her sixteen children gave birth to a quartet of future crowned heads: Joseph, Marie Antoinette, Maximilian Franz, and Joseph's successor, Leopold. When Joseph came into sole possession of the throne after his mother's death in 1780, he issued a blizzard of decrees, finally totaling six thousand in his ten-year reign. Most were issued in the name of reason and progress; many earned him more enemies than admirers. He expanded the University of Vienna and established the German National Theater in the palace's Burgtheater (both endeavors were echoed in Bonn). He issued the Code of Civil Law. He liberated the serfs, decreed Jewish emancipation, and, with the Edict of Toleration, allowed free practice of religion. He mounted initiatives to improve public health, abolished the death penalty and torture (the regime of his mother, Maria Theresa, had published an illustrated manual of torture techniques for officials).
³²
Whereas his mother had tried to stamp out Masonry, Joseph had Freemasons as advisers. He was vitally interested in the arts, including music, and if he had not appreciated and championed Mozart as much as he might have, he had still allowed and perhaps even encouraged the court production of Mozart's
The Marriage of Figaro
, based on a notorious Beaumarchais play that, under the cloak of a sex comedy, amounts to an indictment of aristocratic tyranny.