Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph (21 page)

When they reached Mergentheim, the musicians and actors of the Bonn court were featured in a round of evening entertainments whose pleasures must have been exhausting. One week's listing shows the kind of marathon entertainment schedule courts were given to on holiday: a ball on Monday night, singspiel Tuesday, big concert Wednesday, comedy Thursday, operetta Saturday.
¹⁶
In Mergentheim, the orchestra made an attempt to perform one of Beethoven's
Imperial
Cantatas, probably the
Joseph
, but it was no-go. “We had all manner of protests over the difficult places,” recalled Nikolaus Simrock, “and [Beethoven] asserted that each player must be able to perform his part correctly; we proved we couldn't, simply because all the figures were completely unusual.”
¹⁷
For another joke during the trip, some musicians arranged for a waitress in a pub to flirt with Beethoven. Outraged, he boxed her ears.

Among those admiring the Bonn
Kapelle
was amateur musician and writer Karl Ludwig Junker, chaplain at nearby Kirchberg. He traveled to Mergentheim to hear the Bonn musicians and wrote an account for a musical journal. “Here I was also an eyewitness to the esteem and respect in which this Kapelle stands with the Elector,” Junker wrote. He described an after-dinner orchestral concert, one of the time's marathon evenings of music. The seven major works started with a Mozart symphony, included a single and a double cello concerto from the Rombergs, and ended with a symphony by the
Kapellmeister
of Wallenstein.

Junker rhapsodized over the orchestra's playing: “It was not possible to attain a higher degree of exactness . . . the members of the Kapelle, almost without exception, are in their best years, glowing with health, men of culture and fine personal appearance. They form truly a fine sight, when one adds the splendid uniform in which the elector has clothed them—red, and richly trimmed with gold.” Junker noted that the orchestra members were jammed together in the small room and sweated mightily as they played, but “one saw no unhappy faces among them.” He was surprised by the liberal temper of the court of the Elector of Cologne: “Before this one was apt to think of Cologne as a land of darkness, in which the Aufklärung had not found a foothold. One gets a quite different sense when one enters the Court of the Elector. Especially among the orchestra players I found quite enlightened, sound-thinking men.”
¹⁸

The one Bonn musician Junker singled out with particular warmth and admiration was Beethoven. This sophisticated dilettante would tell history a good deal about Beethoven as a virtuoso of age twenty. That the young man's pride and his rough edges were scarcely showing to this new acquaintance indicates what a fine mood Beethoven was enjoying on that visit, how pleased at what people were making of him. Junker understood the singular quality of Beethoven's playing, the result of years of not only practicing the pianoforte but also thinking about how it should be played, as distinct from a harpsichord or a clavichord:

 

I heard also one of the greatest of pianists—the dear, good Bethofen . . . true, he did not perform in public, probably the instrument here was not to his mind. It is one of Spath's make, and at Bonn he plays upon one by Steiner. But . . . I heard him extemporize in private; yes, I was even invited to propose a theme for him to vary. The greatness of this amiable, light-hearted man, as a virtuoso, may in my opinion be safely estimated from his almost inexhaustible wealth of ideas, the altogether characteristic style of expression in his playing, and the great execution which he displays . . . Even the members of this remarkable orchestra are, without exception, his admirers, and all ears when he plays. Yet he is exceedingly modest and free from all pretension. He, however, acknowledged to me, that, upon the journeys which the Elector had enabled him to make, he had seldom found in the playing of the most distinguished virtuosi that excellence which he supposed he had a right to expect. His style of treating his instrument is so different from that usually adopted, that it impresses one with the idea, that by a path of his own discovery he has attained that height of excellence whereon he now stands.
¹⁹

 

In December 1791, just after his twenty-first birthday, Beethoven was back playing his viola in the orchestra pit of the court theater, at the beginning of the fourth season since Max Franz had revived the opera. As history transpired, it turned out to be the last opera season in Bonn. Again, part of the repertoire was the biggest success of Mozart's life, the exotic singspiel
The Abduction from the Seraglio
.
²⁰
Surely musicians mounted a memorial for Mozart, who had died in Vienna at age thirty-five on December 5. Hearing the news in London, Haydn was inconsolable.

The hit of the opera season was Dittersdorf's mellifluous
Das rote Käppchen
, or
Little Red Riding Hood
. Beethoven wrote two jovial sets of variations on tunes from the opera, one for keyboard and the other for piano trio. Around the same time came a piano trio in E-flat, with his first known movement called “scherzo.”
²¹

In Vienna Leopold II died after a short reign and was succeeded by his son Franz II, twenty-four, who appointed conservative to reactionary advisers and a cabinet that began to dismantle Joseph's reforms in earnest and to turn Austria into a police state. On April 20, France declared war on Austria, Prussia, and Sardinia. For the next twenty-three years, Austria and its allies would alternate between fighting the French and licking their wounds while preparing for the next war.

With armies on the march and travel uncertain, in July 1792, Joseph Haydn stopped in Bonn on the way back from his eighteen-month sojourn in England. His success had been monumental; he returned home a far wealthier man than he had left. His music, including the six new symphonies Salomon commissioned, had been featured in some two-dozen grand concerts and any number of smaller performances, and he had been awarded an honorary doctorate by Oxford University. He had gained a collection of new friends and thousands of admirers, and the particular admiration of a handsome widow. He luxuriated in his new life: “Oh, my dear gracious lady!” he wrote a friend from London. “The realization that I am no longer a bond-servant makes ample amend for all my toils.”

During the visit Haydn had worked himself nearly to exhaustion, but in the end the only thing that truly sullied his triumph and his pleasure in it was the blow of Mozart's passing. Haydn wrote to their mutual friend and fellow Freemason Johann Michael Puchberg, “For some time I was beside myself about his death and could not believe that Providence would so soon claim the life of such an indispensable man.”
²²
What Haydn would not have calculated but was nonetheless true was that in Vienna, Europe's capital of music, after Mozart's death there was no longer an apparent heir to his legacy. As Haydn approached his sixtieth birthday, the position of Mozart's musical heir, the new indispensable man, lay open.

During Haydn's brief second sojourn in Bonn, the
Kapelle
orchestra members invited him to breakfast in nearby Godesberg. For some time the village had been known for its mineral waters, and the Elector was busy turning it into a spa. Among the first efforts in that direction was to build a theater and beside it a middle-sized but elegant building in subdued classical style called La Redoute, the Ballroom. Already in the theater and the still-unfinished Redoute there were plays, performances by the
Kapelle
orchestra and theater troupe, and balls twice a week featuring ladies boated in on the Rhine. The Redoute was where the orchestra's gala breakfast for Haydn was held. There came the definitive meeting between Haydn and Beethoven.
²³

Beethoven played and did what an aspiring young composer does: put some scores before the master. Mainly it seems to have been the
Joseph
Cantata. It is unlikely that Beethoven yet knew the story of Haydn's triumph in England, but the young man knew quite well that he was in the presence of the reigning composer in the world, in person old and old-fashioned but vigorous, kindly, and without pretension. Haydn had been no child prodigy and was never a virtuoso performer, but he knew a prodigy when he saw one. He was powerfully impressed with what he heard from the young man. Perhaps, among other things, in the opening of the
Joseph
Cantata he saw a tragic voice in music beyond anything conceived in a long time, and an imagination capable of conjuring powerful expression out of sheer instrumental color, from a leap from low to high, from silence.

Noting the dramatic style of the cantata, Haydn seems to have concluded that this young man should be writing operas—more or less the king of genres at that time.
²⁴
For much of his career, Haydn had considered opera his main métier, until the advent of Mozart revealed to Haydn his limitations as a composer for the stage. Nor was vocal music in general going to be Beethoven's true forte.

All that understanding lay in the future. The immediate matter of the meeting was for Beethoven to ask for lessons. The old man agreed. Beethoven was ready to finish his apprenticeship, and the Elector encouraged artistic youths to complete their studies out of town, to get a more cosmopolitan perspective. There were consultations, an appeal to the Elector for permission, and soon Beethoven had been granted leave to go to Vienna to study with Haydn. After acquiring his final polish there as an employee of the Elector, he was expected to return to Bonn, perhaps eventually to become court
Kapellmeister
like the first Ludwig van Beethoven. What would intervene in that plan was, for once, not the younger Beethoven's recalcitrance but history: history in the streets, history at your door.

 

What happened among Beethoven, his family and friends in the next weeks transpired virtually under the gun. In April 1792, France declared war on the Habsburg Empire; the Legislative Assembly vowed “aid and fraternity to all peoples wishing to recover their liberty.” Meanwhile a Prussian invasion of France, with the intention of restoring Louis XVI to the throne and thereby striking a blow at the Revolution, was stopped by the French in September at the Battle of Valmy. Everyone understood what that meant: the Revolution would go forward, and the king of France and his family might be doomed. Goethe was present at Valmy. Riding onto the front with French shells howling around him, for a moment he believed he saw the earth turn red. At the end of the day Goethe declared to a group of officers, “From this place, and from this day forth begins a new era in the history of the world, and you can all say you were present at its birth.”
²⁵

In late October, Max Franz and his retinue, fearful of the French approach in the Rhineland, vacated Bonn for several weeks. With hostile armies close and anxiety in the air, Beethoven prepared to leave for Vienna. His circle at the Zehrgarten wrote their farewells to Ludwig in a
Stammbuch
, an album assembled by his friends Matthias Koch and Johann Martin Degenhart. One of them likely drew the portentous picture on the first page, a moldering gravestone topped by an urn in a wild and tumbled forest. The inscription on the stone reads, “My friends,” and at the bottom is written “Ludwig Beethoven”: no
van
among friends.

Stammbuch
means “stem-book,” not only a record of friendship but also a testament to a person's roots. The farewells in the
Stammbuch
are earnest and serious, most of the men using the familiar form of address
du
, the women the more proper
Sie
. Most of the handwriting is in the exquisitely neat form taught to boys and girls in school, which Beethoven also possessed in those days. The entries are largely in verse, some original and so more personal, some quoted from poets including Klopstock and Schiller (there are three quotations from
Don Carlos
). There are no passionate declarations of eternal friendship and nothing approaching levity. A few amount to curt aphorisms: “Investigate and choose.”

Lorchen von Breuning had sent Beethoven warm birthday cards in the last years, which he would preserve. But now Lorchen penned only a few distant and ambiguous lines from Herder: “Friendship with one who is good / Grows like the evening shadows / Until the sun of life sets.” He and Lorchen had quarreled. She and Christoph von Breuning signed the book, but, surprisingly, their mother, Helene, and brother Stephan did not, though they were the two people in the family closest to Beethoven. Widow Koch contributed, along with two of her children, but not the adored Babette. There is nothing from Christian Neefe and nothing from the
Kapelle
members, which is all not as surprising as the missing name of Franz Wegeler, his oldest friend.
²⁶

The verse farewell of Johann Martin Degenhart provides a sense of how the circle looked at the improvisations of their most musical member—with understanding, awe, and a touch of fear:

 

Sometimes, as you coax love, anger, and subtle jokes,

Mighty Master of Music!

You coax passions and caprice from the string,

With truth and accuracy,

Such as the devil himself would treasure.

 

The inscription that history would most remember is from Count Waldstein, written in a bold hand on a page facing his silhouette perched on a pedestal. Like the others more about music than friendship, it is not a poem but a prose prophecy by a man who knew music, knew about Beethoven's abortive encounter with Mozart in Vienna, and knew what kind of potential this protégé had in him: