Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph (22 page)

Dear Beethoven!

You are now going to Vienna in fulfillment of your long-frustrated wishes. Mozart's genius still mourns and is weeping over the death of its pupil. In the inexhaustible Haydn, it had found refuge but no occupation; through him it wishes to form a union with another. Through uninterrupted diligence you shall receive
Mozart's spirit from Haydn's hands
.

Your true friend,

Waldstein
²⁷

 

These few words say a great deal. Unlike most of his friends in the
Stammbuch
, Waldstein uses the formal
Sie
address, appropriate for an aristocrat addressing a commoner however well regarded. His conception of genius is that of the eighteenth century: a metaphor for a transcendent spirit that moves among and inhabits great creators, genius as a spirit one
possesses
, rather than the coming Romantic cult of genius as something one
is
in one's very being, which elevates a person to the state of a demigod.
²⁸
Waldstein depicts the genius of Mozart as in mourning, surviving in the old Haydn but waiting to be handed off to a new young avatar.

History would remember Waldstein's prophecy because, on the whole, it came to pass. Except Beethoven would not claim Mozart's genius quite as anybody expected him to. His genius would turn out to be to take the lessons of the past and make them into something boldly and singularly new: it could be called a revolution, but it was better an
evolution
from within tradition rather than against it. Now Mozart was dead. In part, Beethoven's coming career as a composer would be predicated on having no real rival in his own generation.

His youth was over now, everything focused on the future. Beethoven never found another circle of friends and mentors and admirers like the ones he had in Bonn—cultured, serious but lively, liberal unto radical, given to high-flown discourse—who understood and admired him but also saw him in terms of equality as well as fraternity. The effect of that loss on his creative life can be summarized briefly: little to none. Beethoven craved companionship, love, stimulation intellectual and spiritual, but other than people to play and publish and listen to his music, for most of his life he would never truly
need
anybody. He was to spend the rest of his years in Vienna, in a city and among a people he despised as fickle and frivolous. That also would have little or no discernible effect on his music.

On the evening of November 1, 1792, as Widow Koch noted in the
Stammbuch
, the Zehrgarten saw Beethoven's farewell party. At 6 o'clock the next morning he loaded his effects into the coach and the driver cracked his whip. Ahead of him was the prospect of more than a week of wretched roads, some of them filled with marching armies.

He said goodbye to his brothers and to his father, who wrote no poems of farewell and who had been living for years in the shadow of his son. He had given the boy his first training, had spent years patiently showing him off to patrons at court and among the gentry. If Johann's efforts had not made Ludwig the phenomenon Mozart had been, still they had effectively launched him.

Beethoven was already far beyond his father's reach, Johann too weary and bleary to reach for much beyond what was at hand. His son did not love him, wanted only to get away from him, now that his brothers could more or less fend for themselves. But it was well. As Johann watched his son disappear in the coach to Vienna, he knew he had accomplished one great thing in his life that could never be lost to him. That and the bottle were his solace. “My Ludwig!” Johann van Beethoven would crow to whoever was listening. “He is my only joy now, he has become so accomplished in music and composition that everyone looks on him with wonder. My Ludwig! My Ludwig! Someday he will become a great man in the world. You who are here today, remember what I have said!”
²⁹

 

Other than a few possessions and a pile of manuscripts and sketches, what did Beethoven carry with him from Bonn to Vienna? He carried the musical talent he had inherited from his family and also the family temper, explosive and aggressive. For well and for ill, he would meet all challenges and challengers with attack—sometimes followed, as was his mother's style, by heartfelt apology. He had the family love of wine but the force of will to keep it at bay. His phenomenal discipline was his own. Then and later, he considered himself responsible for his younger brothers.

When he left Bonn, Beethoven was nearly twenty-two and as much pianist as composer. It was evident to him and to many others that he was one of the finest virtuosos alive, and he was an improviser of tremendous power. He had not written a great deal of music compared to what Mozart had done by that age, and his output in the next few years would be spotty. Still, he had taken tremendous strides as a composer, nearly every major effort leaping beyond the last. He knew that as well as anyone. Since his childhood, people had told him he was extraordinary, and he never had reason to doubt it.

So he carried to Vienna an ineradicable sense of his gift, the conviction that someday he would have momentous things to say in music and that people would listen to him. They always had. Yet he seemed in no hurry to find what he had to say, feeling that eventually it would be there. Likewise there is no sign that he ever worried about his performances, ever had to contend with nerves. He appeared to be devoid of doubts about himself. He was capable of self-criticism, in fact ruthlessly self-critical, but his terms were his own.

Part of his gift was the
raptus
, that ability to withdraw into an inner world that took him beyond everything and everybody around him, and also took him beyond the legion of afflictions that assailed him. Improvising at the keyboard and otherwise, he found solitude even in company. Solitude his steadiest and most welcome companion.

 

Beethoven's worldly ambitions matched his gift. But if he was determined to rise in the world, he also believed, as Christian Neefe and his other mentors had taught him, that it was his sacred duty, not only to God but to the world, to place his gift at the service of humanity. His duty was to take in the whole of life and embody it in music, then to give that music back to its source so humanity might better know who and what it is. In his last, wretched decade, he would write this consolation: “God, who knows and understands my deepest self, you know how I fulfill my sacred duties presented by mankind, God, and nature.” There was his personal trinity. In return for performing his duty to humanity, he expected applause, fame, a good living, and that relatively new ambition for a mere musician: immortality for his work and his name. It was a legitimate bargain and he largely achieved it. But the applause and fame and the livelihood were not enough, never enough.

He left Bonn believing that his capacities made him the equal of anyone, one of the world's elite. He looked at the aristocracy not just as his equals but also as his patrons and his natural milieu. The aristocracy he had known had largely been musical, liberal, approving, and generous. When it came to religion, his attitudes were open, evolving, emotional rather than rational. If not a conventional Enlightenment deist, he was still no churchgoer or conventional Catholic. Already in youth he had come to feel closer to the divine in nature than in church or scripture. For the rest of his life he would have little to do with churches and priests. He preferred to deal with God directly, man to man. If he believed in eternal life, he did not unequivocally speak of it. Like most progressives of his time, he had no use for dogma concerning religion, art, or anything else. Dogma was a variety of tyranny, and as an Aufklärer he despised tyranny.

Humanity, as the philosophers of the day taught him, had to find its own way upward, as individuals and as a species.
Freedom
was the vehicle. As someday he would put it, “Man, help yourself!” and, “Only art and science can raise man to the level of gods.” As far as the record shows, the day of his baptism may have been the last time before his deathbed that he was subjected to the ancient shibboleths, submitted to the old spells. In the end he would return on his own terms to the Latin rite by way of a titanic musical mass, his own credo, and turn to God as consolation and companion.

He had been taught that the path to greatness starts inside, with the cultivation of morality, duty, discipline, and courage. The Masons and the Illuminati said that the rise of humankind to Elysium begins by remaking oneself and then goes out into the world. So personal virtue, rather than skill and technique, was the true foundation of any worthy endeavor. In practice, however, he was obsessed with his craft and always would be, although the effort to sustain his moral convictions would require him constantly to believe that he was more virtuous than he actually was. When he arrived in Vienna he was not a complete man or musician, and he knew that perfectly well.

 

Beethoven left Bonn with a sense that revolution was under way in the world—in motion both figuratively, within the human spirit, and literally, in new societies and marching armies. His art would be called revolutionary, but for himself he never expressed any such intention. He wanted to make art better, thereby humanity better. While absorbing ideas and influences from around Europe and beyond, he would remain true to his heritage in the forms and genres of the Viennese masters: Mozart his prime model, Haydn his mentor and rival.

These were his foundations. Though in the course of his life Beethoven grew and changed as much as any creator ever has, he never slipped off those foundations in the Bonn Aufklärung. What they added up to was this: when young Beethoven left Bonn, he already had ideals and ambitions about being a composer that no one had ever had before, and he knew beyond doubt that he had the gifts to realize those ideals and ambitions.

 

There was one more thing Beethoven carried inside that would never leave him: the source of a lifetime of illness and physical misery, and the ruin of his most precious faculty, his hearing. This physical and mental suffering would mount a sustained assault on his sense of discipline and duty, his gigantic ambition.

There was little medical science worthy of the name in those days, so the reasons for Beethoven's physical trials may never be known for certain. One possibility is that from cooking utensils, or from adulterated wine, or from spa waters or some other source he may have ingested a great deal of lead. If so, it came to rest in his bones and slowly leaked out, ravaging his digestive tract. In his teens he was already familiar with the lacerating seizures of stomach pain and diarrhea that would never leave him, exacerbating his incipient tendencies to paranoia and misanthropy. He served humankind but never understood people, and though he yearned with all his heart for love and companionship, year after year he could bear humanity less and less in the flesh.

His own flesh became a fearful and relentless enemy. “Already,” he wrote at age thirty, “I have cursed my Creator and my existence.” If the main source of his misery was not lead poisoning, it was something else, or a combination of assaults with similar effects of chronic and painful illness, on top of which would be laid a progression of passing illnesses. So as Beethoven left Bonn with confident and entirely justified hopes for glory, he was destined both for triumph and for anguish.

 

After he left in December 1792, University of Bonn professor and Kant scholar Bartholomäus Ludwig Fischenich wrote Charlotte, wife of his friend Friedrich Schiller:

 

I am enclosing with this a setting of the “Feuerfarbe” on which I would like to have your opinion. It is by a young man of this place whose musical talents are universally praised and whom the Elector has sent to Haydn in Vienna. He proposes also to compose Schiller's “Freude” . . . I expect something perfect, for as far as I know him he is wholly devoted to the great and sublime. Haydn has written here that he would put him at grand operas and soon be obliged to quit composing. Ordinarily he does not trouble himself with such trifles as the enclosed, which he wrote at the request of a lady.
³⁰

 

In October of the next year a notice appeared in the
Berliner Musik-Zeitung:
“Ludwig van Beethoven, assistant court organist and now unquestionably one of the foremost pianoforte players, went to Vienna at the expense of our Elector to Haydn in order to perfect himself under his direction more fully in the art of composition.” It cites a letter from Beethoven to his teacher saying, “I thank you for your counsel very often given me in the course of my progress in my divine art. If I ever become a great man, yours will be some of the credit.” The notice was placed by Christian Neefe.
³¹

Some two weeks after Beethoven arrived in Vienna, Elector Maximilian Franz and his court fled Bonn for the second time as the French overran the Rhine and occupied Mainz. Following a French retreat, Max Franz would return again in the spring, but the Electorate of Cologne, more than five hundred years old, and the Bonn Beethoven knew were nearing their last days. The Aufklärung ideals that had brought Bonn to its splendid brief flowering led to little in the world except in the individual lives they had shaped. In history the most significant of those individuals would be Beethoven.

9

“G
ERMANY,” WROTE A
British visitor in the eighteenth century, “claims the pre-eminence for badness of roads & the most tormenting construction of vehicles.”
¹
Heading southeast toward Vienna with oboist Georg Liebisch from the Bonn
Kapelle
, Beethoven tracked his journey of December 1792 in a notebook where he kept minute accounts of their expenditures. When they parted, their joint expenses had been a frugal 35 florins.