Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph (34 page)

Bernadotte's service in Vienna would last only a couple of months, up to the point when he ordered the tricolor to be flown over his hotel. It was a deliberate provocation, and the results followed suit. A stone-throwing mob of Viennese gathered while Bernadotte grasped his sword and cried, “What's this rabble up to? I'll kill at least six of you!” He was saved by Viennese cavalry, while the crowd burned the French flag in the Schottenplatz. Napoleon wrote one of his generals, declaring that if the Viennese government was involved, such behavior might leave him “only one course of action, and that would be to blot out a number of Europe powers, or to blot out the house of Austria itself.”
³⁹
But Napoleon had already declared Bernadotte to be somewhere between hotheaded and crazy, and ordered him back to Paris.
⁴⁰

Bernadotte was a connoisseur of music and had in his entourage the famous French violinist and composer Rodolphe Kreutzer. Prince Moritz Lichnowsky introduced the general and the violinist to Beethoven.
⁴¹
The three struck up a friendship, Beethoven soaking up Bernadotte's stories of Napoleon and armies and battles. Naturally they talked music too, and Kreutzer had something interesting to show Beethoven: a published collection of works written for revolutionary
fêtes
by composers including F. J. Gossec, E. N. Méhul, and Kreutzer himself.

This music was aimed for broad appeal, some of it part of outdoor celebrations that might include thousands of performers and tens of thousands of listeners. Given that this was music of revolution and struggle, funeral marches were a favored genre. The style was straightforward and powerful, with clear lines and no counterpoint, often martial in tone, with much use of wind instruments. It enfolded elements of folk and military music, the straightforward operatic music of Gluck, and the sober, simple, nobly humanistic music Mozart wrote for Masonic ceremonies and for the enlightened brotherhood in
Die Zauberflöte
.
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The central element was strong, memorable melody designed to be grasped and sung by the people. It was massive music to elicit mass emotions, art as communal ritual.

For the Festival of the Supreme Being, part of the Revolution's campaign to replace the church with a state religion, Robespierre had wanted not only the chorus of twenty-four hundred but every citizen present to join in singing Gossec's
Hymn to the Supreme Being
. He sent music teachers all over France to impart the words and melody to as many people as possible: “Father of the Universe,” went the deistic text of Marie-Joseph Chénier, “Your temple is on the mountain, in the heavens, on the waves. / You have no past, you have no future; / And living not in time, you fill the entire universe, / which cannot contain you.”
⁴³

In a way no government had done before, the French Revolution placed music near the center of public life as an essential element of education, morality, enlightenment, and propaganda. During the Revolution, the spine-chilling melody and words of
La Marseillaise
(“Let impure blood water our furrows,” and so on) had been a galvanizing force, a virtual weapon. Poring over the music for
fêtes
with Rodolphe Kreutzer and General Bernadotte, Beethoven found not only a monumental humanistic style but something like an ethos of music—an ethos exalted but secular, epic in its ambitions: music as revolutionary ritual, part of the remaking of humanity. Here joined together were art, life, progress, history. “The basis of all human institutions is morality,” wrote Chénier, “and the fine arts are essentially moral because they make the individual devoted to them better and happier. If this is true for all the arts, how much more evident is it in the case of music.”

A train of thought began to take shape in Beethoven's mind and eventually in his work. By 1798, the first parts of a great puzzle were falling into place for him. The parts included the enlightened and revolutionary ideals of his childhood in Bonn, the French Revolution, the rise of Napoleon, the new idea of revolutionary and national anthems, Haydn's masses reflecting the historical moment, and the collection of revolutionary music shown to him in Vienna by Kreutzer and Bernadotte. These things would contribute to solving a looming crisis in Beethoven's work: How and in what terms could he get past the plateau where he was languishing? How could he lift his art to a new level, to the territory of scope and ambition where he had always expected it to live? How could he step out of the role of entertainer and into the stream of history?

13

B
Y THE END
of 1797, Beethoven had gone through a serious illness, what may have been typhus. That would have meant weeks of pain, fever, coughing, stupor, even delirium. The disease is a terrific shock to the body and nervous system, in those days often a killer. And it can affect the hearing.

But he remained basically robust and, when he was not prostrate, apparently indefatigable. Once back on his feet, he leaped back into composing and performing. He finished some smaller pieces—light variations on Mozart's “La ci darem la mano” from
Don Giovanni
, and an easy piano sonata, later op. 49. A symphony in C major and a long-planned piano concerto in C minor were simmering. In a rush, he completed what became four opus numbers: three string trios; three piano sonatas op. 10; a clarinet trio; and violin sonatas op. 12. The patterns of relative boldness and cautiousness in these pieces are complex. Collectively, they may have cleared the decks for a bombshell of a piano sonata that he called
Pathétique
.

Earlier in 1797, he had finished the
Grande Sonate
, op. 7, in E-flat major, dedicated to a piano student, the teenage countess Babette Keglevics. She lived across the street from Beethoven and recalled that he would show up for her morning lessons in a peaked sleeping cap, dressing gown, and slippers. Later she got the dedication of his variations on a Salieri theme; the First Piano Concerto; and, after she had married the musical prince Innocenz d'Erba-Odescalchi, the important op. 34 Variations. If that were not enough to indicate Beethoven's feelings toward her, there was the character of op. 7. The longest piano sonata he would write until his later years, it is rich in texture and innovative in its pianism. Its turbulent emotions earned it the nickname
Die Verliebte
, “The Beloved.” The soulful dissonances and eloquent silences of its second movement foreshadow his slow movements long into the future. In these years, Beethoven remained more often prophetic in slow music than in fast.

Before undertaking the perilous journey of writing string quartets that were going to be competing with those of Haydn and Mozart, Beethoven studied writing for strings by way of the less fraught ensemble of string trio. As op. 3, he had published a light and lively six-movement Trio in E-flat, in the spirit of eighteenth-century divertimentos in general and Mozart's great E-flat Divertimento in particular. Beethoven's op. 8 Serenade for String Trio in D major, finished early in 1797, was another multimovement divertimento. The glory of op. 8 is a movement in which a quasi-aria of tragic cast alternates with a scherzo. This juxtaposition of comic and tragic was much on Beethoven's mind in those days.

In duration, the three string trios of op. 9 are all shorter than op. 8 but manifestly more serious. All are four-movement pieces whose ambition is on the order of the op. 1 Piano Trios. Though Mozart had written splendid string trios, there was no extensive and intimidating repertoire Beethoven had to bow to. So as in the cello sonatas, his op. 9 Trios are all fresh, looking toward his mature voice. He wrote them fast and fearlessly.

Trio No. 1 in G major is lively and ingratiating, a touch bold if not yet “Beethovenian,” at times gently poignant; No. 2 in D major is more sober, stylistically more current than forward-looking; No. 3 is an intense piece in C minor, a key Beethoven was defining in a way unique to himself.
¹
This C-minor outing echoes the raging C-minor piano trio of op. 1—less demonic but still driven and dynamic, though its finale turns up in a good-humored, entirely undemonic C minor.

When he sent the op. 9 Trios to their dedicatee, Count Johann Georg von Browne-Camus, he called them “la meilleure de [mes] oeuvres” and declared the count, for the moment, “the foremost Maecenas of my muse.” Browne came from an old Irish family. An acquaintance described him as “one of the strangest of men, on the one hand full of excellent talents and splendid qualities of heart and mind, and on the other full of weaknesses and depravity.” He was headed eventually for a mental breakdown and a sojourn in an institution, but he and his wife would be steady supporters of Beethoven and repeated dedicatees.
²
The countess received the dedication of the op. 10 Piano Sonatas.

Publication of op. 9 was announced in June 1798. By that point, with five string trios under his belt, Beethoven had taken a metaphorical deep breath and was well into sketches of a string quartet in D major. Prince Lobkowitz had commissioned a set of six quartets each from Beethoven and Haydn. As Beethoven started to work on the second quartet, he sketched on a random collection of loose sheets. Such sheets formed an unwieldy pile of material dating back some dozen years, which he ferried around with him from flat to flat. Now he bought himself a sketchbook made of stitched-together sheets of printed music paper, and began working in it.

From then on, these books, sometimes purchased and sometimes sewn together from loose sheets by himself, contained most of his jottings and drafts. At first they were large, for working at home. Later he also made smaller books that could fit in his coat pocket, for sketching during his daily walks and rambles. The sketchbooks may have helped to give him more focus. Now a work in progress was something he could hold in his hand, leaf through.
³
They became indispensable companions through the day. In that first one, he worked on a broad spectrum of pieces: a piano sonata in E major, eventually op. 14, no. 1; the string quartet in D major, eventually the third of the Lobkowitz set; revisions of the B-flat piano concerto. He also did the first work on the Septet op. 20 and the eventual first of the Lobkowitz quartets, in F major.

 

In the middle of these multilayered projects, in 1798, Beethoven acquired a friend closer than any he had found since Bonn. Karl Friedrich Amenda came from Courland, then part of western Russia. Born a year after Beethoven, he had been something of a violin prodigy, but felt a call to the ministry and got his degree in theology. Amenda arrived in Vienna in the spring of 1798, worked a while for Prince Lobkowitz, and eventually found a job teaching music to the children, with her second husband, of Mozart's widow Constanze. Amenda's time in Vienna was a testament to his amiable and earnest character; despite his severely pockmarked face, people were drawn to him.

Amenda was one of the people who in those years were already seized by Beethoven's music. Several times when he spotted his hero in a restaurant, Amenda tried to make conversation, but he could not break through Beethoven's reserve. One day he was playing first violin in a quartet at Constanze Mozart's house, and a hand kept appearing to turn his pages. At the end of the piece he looked up from the music to discover that his page-turner was Beethoven. The next day, at a dinner party, the host declared, “What have you done? You've captured Beethoven's heart! Beethoven requests that you rejoice him with your company.” The next morning, Amenda hurried to his hero's flat; after a warm greeting, Beethoven suggested they play through some violin and piano music. They went on for hours, probably reading through new Beethoven and old Mozart pieces. (Beethoven was working on op. 12, his first set of violin sonatas.) Finally Amenda left, but Beethoven followed him home; there were more hours of music making, then back to Beethoven's flat for the same, well into the night.

The two men became inseparable, seen around town together so much that when one appeared alone on the street, passersby would shout, “Where's the other one?” In Amenda, Beethoven found an idealist of his own stripe, an able violinist, a
Schwärmer
for music and literature and philosophy and aesthetics, voluble in the high-Enlightenment talk Beethoven had missed since his Bonn days. Here was somebody he could embrace and admire, who admired him in return and understood him as a man and an artist.

They made music and had fun. Once, Amenda declined to believe Beethoven's modest description of his own violin playing and demanded to hear him play the solo part in one of his sonatas. After a few bars of intolerable sawing, Amenda cried, “Have mercy—stop!” and they both broke up laughing. Another time, after Beethoven had improvised at the piano for Amenda alone, his friend said it was sad that such glorious music should be lost to the world. “There you're mistaken,” Beethoven said, and played the whole thing again, note for note.
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The quality of their relationship, and of Amenda's insight, is found in a fervent letter he wrote Beethoven the next year, after the death of his brother called him back to Courland. For address, Amenda uses the intimate
du
, “thou,” reserved for close friends, an intimacy always mutually and ceremonially agreed to.

 

My Beethoven,

I still approach you with the same heartfelt love and esteem that the value of your heart and of your talent irresistibly and eternally demand of me . . . Friend! grant to very many other friends of music the good fortune of becoming acquainted with you better. You are responsible not only to yourself and to them, but indeed to the general progress of your art . . . Outside of Vienna, believe me, the musical public is still too backward . . . to be able to evaluate your beautiful compositions according to their worth. You yourself must play for them, and compose for them pieces of all sorts according to their prevailing comprehension; [you] must educate them to your level, as you have done with me and others in Vienna.
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