Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph (26 page)

Beneath the cordiality, a degree of tension simmered between the two, most of it on Beethoven's side. They were separated by two generations. Beethoven had found a quick success in Vienna, where Haydn had for decades been brushed aside (Joseph II had declared his music “tricks and nonsense”).
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Haydn could accept the younger man's boldness only so far, and that would rankle Beethoven. Meanwhile the older man understood perfectly well the nature of the ego he was dealing with. To a degree, it amused him. Behind Beethoven's back, Haydn took to calling him
die große Mogul
, “the Great Mogul”—in the phrase of a later time, “the Big Shot.” When Beethoven largely stopped coming to call in later years, Haydn would ask visitors, “How's it going with our Big Shot?” More seriously to a devout man, Haydn reportedly declared Beethoven an atheist.
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If it took some years for the Viennese to realize that the heir of Haydn and Mozart had arrived as a composer, it took little time for Beethoven to establish his primacy among pianists. For the better part of his first decade in Vienna he remained, in the eyes of the public and himself, a composer-pianist as Mozart had been, as many composers were. Beethoven had given more of his teens to the keyboard than to composing. (Haydn was a competent pianist and played violin, but he was unusual among composers of the time in being, as he put it, “no magician” on any instrument.) Besides the brilliance of Beethoven's playing in general and the unprecedented fire of his improvising, there were really no serious piano rivals in sight when he arrived in town.

There were, of course, those who imagined themselves to be rivals. One established entertainment in the salons of music fanciers was the piano duel, in which virtuosos would present their repertoire and be handed challenges of sight-reading and improvisation. In 1782, Mozart reported to his father a duel before Joseph II with his rival Muzio Clementi: “After we had stood on ceremony long enough, the Emperor declared that Clementi ought to begin . . . He improvised and then played a sonata. The Emperor then turned to me: ‘
Allons
, fire away.' I improvised and played variations. The Grand Duchess produced some sonatas by Paisiello . . . , of which I had to play the Allegros and Clementi the Andantes and Rondos. We then selected a theme from them and developed it on two pianofortes.”
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On the street sometime around 1793, the father of pianist Carl Czerny ran into Abbé Joseph Gelinek, a leading virtuoso of the city, dressed up and headed for a piano duel at a reception. His opponent was a young foreigner. “I'll fix him,” Gelinek assured the elder Czerny.

The next day Czerny ran into the abbé again and asked how the duel went. Gelinek's response was awestruck. “Yesterday was a day I'll remember! That young fellow must be in league with the devil. I've never heard anybody play like that! I gave him a theme to improvise on, and I assure you I've never heard even Mozart improvise so admirably. Then he played some of his own compositions which are marvelous—really wonderful—and he manages difficulties and effects at the keyboard that we never even dreamed of.”

“I say,” said Czerny the elder, “what's his name?”

“He's a small, ugly, swarthy young fellow, and seems to have a willful disposition . . . His name is Beethoven.”
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Besides improvising, Beethoven had probably played his
Righini
Variations, brilliant and virtuosic in the extreme, his showpiece during his first months in Vienna. It would take little time for the wealthy music fanciers of the town to try to capture him for their music rooms, and little time for Beethoven to capture the most storied and generous of Viennese connoisseurs.

 

Soon after arriving in Vienna, Beethoven had found better lodging than the garret he started in, moving to a less miserable garret at 45 Alstergasse. Before long he was given a comfortable room on the first floor of the house. The owner of the building was Prince Karl Alois Johann Nepomuk Vinzenz Leonhard Lichnowsky, who kept an apartment in the building for his own use. As it happened, if there was any music-fancying prince in Vienna whom Beethoven most needed to know, it was Lichnowsky.

From a recently ennobled Prussian family of music patrons going back generations, Karl Lichnowsky was one of the most important connoisseurs and patrons in the city, spending great swaths of his considerable fortune on his passion. His circle had long amounted to a nexus of Viennese musical life. Liberal-minded, a lover of Voltaire, a competent pianist, Lichnowsky had been a patron, student, and Masonic lodge brother of Mozart—and, like Mozart, possibly an Illuminatus.
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Lichnowsky's wife, Princess Maria Christiane, had once been among the “Three Graces,” sisters called the most beautiful women in Vienna.
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She had also studied with Mozart and was one of the better amateur pianists in the city. Prince Karl's brother Moritz was another Mozart pupil and a fine pianist. Karl was an old friend of Count Waldstein, Beethoven's patron in Bonn, and Christiane was a cousin of Waldstein. Her sister was married to Count Razumovsky, the Russian ambassador to Vienna, another patron who was to play a historic role in Beethoven's life. Christiane's mother, Countess Thun, had been a friend of Mozart; he wrote his father that the countess was “the most charming and most lovable lady I've ever met.”
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For Beethoven, who needed to establish himself in Vienna, the interconnections of people and interests emanating from the Lichnowskys did not end there. Lichnowsky had studied in J. S. Bach's home of Leipzig and developed a taste for the work of the elder Bach; he had a long correspondence with son C. P. E., from whom Lichnowsky obtained the elder Bach's manuscripts in a time when little of the music was in print.
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Every Friday, Karl and Christiane gave a musicale at their palace for friends and cognoscenti, who included Haydn. Beethoven's playing of Bach's
Well-Tempered Clavier
was one of the things that endeared him to the Lichnowsky circle. One day an elderly guest declared that he had once heard J. S. Bach himself play, and Beethoven sounded, the visitor said, just like Bach.
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In short, the first patrons Beethoven acquired in Vienna could hardly have been more cultured, connected, rich, and generous. His quick triumph sprouted mainly from Haydn and the Lichnowskys and their influence. Karl Lichnowsky, rather than Haydn, would be the dedicatee of opus 1. For years Beethoven kept a bust of the prince in his rooms; the princess gave him an elegant desk clock that he kept by him the rest of his life. From that point on, Beethoven moved in aristocratic circles as an admired artist and more or less an equal. There was an abiding irony in that situation. Part of his success came from three letters: the
van
in his name that many of the aristocracy assumed indicated that he came from a noble background.

The Lichnowskys' shared passion for music did not translate into a happy married life. An acquaintance noted that Christiane always looked sad.
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She had a sickly constitution; in a time without anesthetics, both her breasts had been removed in fear of cancer. The main source of her unhappiness was not her health, however, but her husband. In every respect, Karl Lichnowsky was a piece of work. Swaggering and domineering, with a brassy voice, Lichnowsky womanized constantly, which endlessly tormented his wife (even though infidelity was common practice in the Viennese nobility). In her diary, the ever-catty Countess Lulu von Thürheim pitied Christiane and loathed Karl, calling him a “a cynical rake and shameless coward.”
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All the same, Christiane Lichnowsky was a formidable figure in her own right. Thürheim wrote that the countess combined “a good heart and Christian forbearance with violent prejudices.” People whom Christiane didn't like she went out of her way to damage in the elegantly vicious world of Viennese high society.
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In a miserable marriage, music was Christiane's solace. Her admiration for Beethoven was boundless and forgiving. Though only five years older than her protégé, she began, to his annoyance, to mother him. Karl behaved likewise. Beethoven had a standing invitation for lunch at 4 p.m. “I would have to be home by half past three every day,” he complained to his visiting Bonn friend Wegeler, “change into something better, see that I was properly shaved, etc.—I can't stand all that!” So he usually ate at a tavern, whether or not he could afford it. At some point the prince notified his servants that if he and Beethoven rang for them at the same time, they were to answer Beethoven first. Hearing about it, Beethoven went out that day and hired himself a servant.
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Karl's brother Moritz and Christiane Lichnowsky were both more able pianists than Karl; they could actually play Beethoven's keyboard works rather than play at them. Yet Karl steadily reassured Beethoven that he did not have to write down to amateurs.
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It was up to the players to cope with what he gave them. Before long, many did, in a time when some of the best pianists were amateurs, and piano sonatas were played not in public concerts but in private gatherings or alone for the pianist's private pleasure.

The connection of Beethoven to the brothers and Princess Lichnowsky was a virtually ideal patron-and-protégé relationship, but it could endure only up to a point. The abiding threat to their relations was that Beethoven and Prince Karl were both imperious and proud men and not in the habit of keeping their feelings to themselves. Inevitably, there were clashes, and sooner or later one of their shouting matches was likely to lead to a break. Eventually one did, but not before years of fruitful partnership. Karl's brother, the more talented and more amiable Moritz Lichnowsky, remained close to Beethoven to the end.

 

The Lichnowskys' Friday musicales were frequented by leading musicians and connoisseurs, and the level of performing was about as good as could be found anywhere. There Beethoven encountered a broad repertoire of chamber music and connected with more musicians and patrons. One was a brilliant violinist and conductor named ­Ignaz ­Schuppanzigh. As a teenager he was already first violin in a string quartet that played at the Lichnowsky musicales. Schuppanzigh's place in history would be secure twice over. He became a lifelong champion of Beethoven, playing the string quartets, conducting the orchestral music, serving as concertmaster in the premiere of every Beethoven symphony. Meanwhile, with an evolving collection of players, Schuppanzigh established and led the first standing professional string quartet in Europe, which mounted the first public performances.

Before Beethoven and Schuppanzigh, quartets were designed, like all chamber music, to be played privately, mainly by amateurs. By the time Beethoven and Schuppanzigh were done, they left the medium of string quartet in a quite different place, carried on by specialists. Yet their long collaboration never became a real friendship. Through the years they addressed each other as
Er
, in third person, a patronizing form used with children and servants. Beethoven relentlessly teased the portly Schuppanzigh about his girth, gave him the nickname “Falstaff,” after Shakespeare's fat, hard-drinking buffoon. Schuppanzigh was no intellectual companion, and Beethoven was more interested in politics, literature, and ideas than in talking shop. In other words, Beethoven vitally needed Schuppanzigh and at the same time never seemed to regard him as anything but a servant of his will.

An equally enduring and relatively warmer connection that Beethoven made at the Lichnowskys' was Baron Nikolaus Zmeskall von Domanovecz. A lifelong bachelor, described by an acquaintance as “a very precise gentleman with abundant white hair,” Zmeskall served as an official of the Hungarian chancellery. Otherwise he was an amateur cellist good enough to sit in with the Schuppanzigh quartet, said to be a capable composer of quartets himself but shy about publishing them.
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In summer 1793, Zmeskall received the first of Beethoven's wry and affectionate notes summoning him for one task or another. Over the next decades the baron carefully preserved those dozens of notes. With his connections, his cello, his own chamber music soirees, and especially with his deft hand at cutting quill pens, for year after year bustling and efficient Zmeskall felt happy to be at Beethoven's beck and call.

A third patron Beethoven gained through Lichnowsky and/or Haydn was the legendary and formidable Gottfried Freiherr van Swie­ten. His father had been a physician brought from Holland by Empress Maria Theresa to be her personal doctor and to reform the Viennese medical establishment. For his success the family was ennobled by the empress. Son Gottfried became a diplomat and finally librarian for the Viennese court. Swieten lived and held forth in his lavish rooms, one a music room, on the third floor of the court library.
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Another of the crowd of obsessives in the musical landscape of Vienna, another Aufklärer and Freemason, Swieten had a particular obsession with resurrecting old music, forming an aristocratic Society of Associated Cavaliers to produce performances.
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But during that era when most music heard and published was by living composers, “old” music usually meant less than a hundred years old. It had been Swieten who drilled into Mozart, with historic results, the significance of Handel and J. S. Bach. Later he became a friend and patron of Haydn and, with mixed results, Haydn's librettist.

In those days, J. S. Bach's music had something of a cult status among connoisseurs, while Handel's work had never faded in popularity. He was the first composer in Western history who never had to be “rediscovered.” In other words, Handel, who died in 1759, when Haydn was in his twenties and Mozart a toddler, gave the first inkling that there could be such a thing as a permanent repertoire. One of the things that made Beethoven what he became was the understanding, still relatively novel at the time, that one's music could not only bring fame in life but also write one's name on the wall of history.