Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph (51 page)

 

An
Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung
note on Beethoven at the end of 1802 shows how much the critics there had moved to accommodate him. It is also a meditation insightful enough in regard to musical form in general and to Beethoven's sense of it to suggest that it came from editor Friedrich Rochlitz, who had studied Kantian philosophy and would have kept up with Schiller's recent contributions to aesthetics:

 

An artist like [Beethoven] can really do nothing better than remain faithful to himself. This character and manner have been stated in these pages so precisely, and the composer already has such a respectable public throughout the entire musical world, that little remains for the advertiser of new works to say than, they are there . . . For, in the end, what is the result if one praises or censures individual things in works of art? . . . In art, as it should be, details do not remotely make up the total work. They can constitute an interesting product, but they never constitute a complete work, which must exist in the meaning of the total work.
¹⁹

 

This echoes Schiller's treatise
On the Aesthetic Education of Man:
“In a truly successful work of art the contents should affect nothing, the form everything; for only through the form is the whole man affected . . . Herein, then, resides the real secret of the master in any art:
that he can make his form consume his material
.”
²⁰
Schiller did not apply this conception to music particularly, but it defines the effect of much music by Beethoven, Haydn, and Mozart, particularly their works in what the future would name
sonata form
. Haydn often presented material that appeared plain and unpromising; it was the totality of the work, the whole of the form, that gave the material vitality and meaning. This was perhaps one of the deepest lessons Beethoven learned from Haydn, whether it had come directly from his teacher or from studying his music. Now, in the leading musical journal of the time, Beethoven read that he embodied this sense of form.

In another journal, the
Musikalisches Taschenbuch
of 1803, Bee­thoven likely read another article that surveyed the current state of the symphony as a genre. The symphonies universally called the greatest up to that time were first Haydn's, then Mozart's—even though neither of those men saw symphonies as his most significant work. For Mozart his main focus had been operas; for Haydn the late oratorios and masses. After his symphonies conquered London, Haydn never wrote another one, even as he was called the father of the genre. Yet the critic of the
Taschenbuch
wrote,

 

Symphonies are the triumph of this art. Unlimited and free, the artist can conjure up an entire world of feelings in them. Dancing merriment, exultant joy, the sweet yearning of love and profound pain, gentle peace and mischievous caprice, playful jest and frightful gravity pour forth and touch the sympathetic strings of the heart, feeling, and fantasy . . . Also, these gigantic works of art are subject to the necessary conditions of the mutual determination of content and form and of unity in diversity . . .
Mozart
and
Haydn
have produced works of art in this genre of instrumental music that deserve great admiration. Their great, inexhaustible genius, their profundity and universality, their free, bold, vigorous spirits are expressed more purely therein. Mozart's symphonies are colossal masses of rock, wild and abundant, surrounding a gentle, laughing valley; Haydn's are Chinese gardens, created by cheerful humor and mischievous caprice . . .
Beethoven
, a novice in art who is, however, already approaching the great masters, has in particular made the great field of instrumental music his own. He unites Mozart's universality and wild, abundant boldness and Haydn's humoristic caprice; all his compositions have abundance and unity.
²¹

 

There was more inspiration. Back in Bonn, Christian Neefe had given his student J. G. Sulzer's
Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Künste
. Now Beethoven returned to it. He read again these meditations on the symphony:

 

The allegros of all the best . . . symphonies contain profound and clever ideas, a somewhat free treatment of the parts, an apparent disorder in the melody and harmony, strongly marked themes of different types, robust melodies and unison passages . . . free imitations of a theme (often in fugal style), sudden modulations and digressions from one key to another that are all the more striking the more distant their relation, distinct gradations of loud and soft, and especially the crescendo . . . Such an allegro is to the symphony what a Pindaric ode is to poetry; it elevates the soul of the listener.
²²

 

Reading these words as a teenager, Beethoven could hardly have imagined where these ideas could take him, how music could become like elevated poetry. Now he could imagine. Planning a third symphony but diverted in early 1803 by his impending concert and opera project, these perorations could have seemed like a call to produce the symphony he had already conceived and to make it as bold, as free, as mischievous and frightful and elevated as he wanted. As for unity within diversity, which is the primacy of form over content, he struggled for greater unity and at the same time for greater diversity than any composer had aspired to before. He could only have felt the time was right. After the darkest night of the soul he had experienced in Heiligenstadt, the world of music seemed to be holding out its arms and beckoning him to the future.

 

As of early 1803, lying between Beethoven and his New Path was the April 5 benefit concert, the program constituting premieres of the Second Symphony and the Third Piano Concerto, another airing of the First Symphony, and the oratorio
Christus am Ölberge
that he had somehow to finish in February and March.

Inevitably, by the time April arrived things were frantic. In Vienna in those days, assembling orchestras and choruses and rehearsing them was a catch-as-catch-can affair, the available forces a mélange of professionals and amateurs. In this case, as often, the single rehearsal for Beethoven's concert started the morning of the performance day. They began at 8 a.m. The vocal soloists would have studied their parts and the chorus probably rehearsed ahead, but there was a long struggle to get the pieces ready. After hours of coping with the
Christus
oratorio, the First and Second Symphonies, and the Third Concerto, most of the music new to the players, the troops were exhausted by what Ries recalled as a “dreadful” ordeal. Prince Karl Lichnowsky hovered over the rehearsal, in midafternoon producing great baskets of bread and butter, cold meat, and wine for everybody. This restored spirits and the rehearsal went forward, even including the prince's request for another run-through of the oratorio. When rehearsal ended shortly before the doors opened for the 6 p.m. concert, the singers and players had been rehearsing for nearly ten hours.

A day or so before the concert Ries had arrived at Beethoven's flat at dawn to assist him and found him in bed scribbling on sheets of paper. “What is it?” Ries asked. “Trombones,” Beethoven said. The trombones played from those parts in the premiere of
Christus
.
²³
Beethoven had doubled and tripled the usual ticket prices but still got a full house for a long and variegated program. The performers trudged through the two symphonies and the concerto, Beethoven soloing, and only after some hour and a half started the eventful
Christus
, itself more than an hour long.

Based on later response, the music was decently represented and no audience or later critical outrage reported. There was, in fact, as in Beethoven's previous concert in Vienna, nothing terribly provocative on this program, though the big new symphony in D major had to have been a challenge on first hearing. The First Symphony had by then become an audience favorite. The Third Piano Concerto is audibly in Mozart's orbit and safely in his shadow (but with prophecies of concertos to come).

The Second Symphony is an extravagantly comic piece, but there had been one private joke in the course of the program. Beethoven had not had time to write down the piano part of the Third Concerto before the concert—only the orchestral parts. So the solo music existed only in his head, to be fleshed out with improvisation en route. No one in those days publicly played from memory. Beethoven arrived onstage, took his bow, sat down at the piano, and placed a sheaf of music on the stand. Young conductor Ignaz von Seyfried, who had helped out through the marathon rehearsal, was the designated page-turner. When Beethoven opened the solo part, Seyfried discovered that the pages were largely full of empty measures, with only a few “Egyptian hieroglyphs” to remind the composer of passages. Seyfried spent the concerto riveted in fear, watching Beethoven for his nodded cues to turn the pages of invisible music. At dinner afterward Beethoven had a large helping of laughter over Seyfried's anxiety.
²⁴

Reports of the audience response varied, likewise the review in the local
Zeitung für die Elegante Welt:
“The pieces performed consisted of two symphonies of which the first [the by-then-popular C Major] had more worth than the second [the new D Major] because . . . in the second [there was] a striving for novel and striking effects . . . It goes without saying that neither was lacking striking and brilliant qualities of beauty. Less successful was the next concerto, in C minor, which Mr. v B., who otherwise is known as a first-rate fortepianist, also performed not to the complete satisfaction of the public.” Besides the unenthusiastic welcome for the Third Concerto, this was one of the most critical reviews a Beethoven keyboard performance had ever received. Whether his skills were on the wane at that point can't be said. What can be said is that thereafter he never again played the C Minor Concerto in public, or any other concerto except the premiere of his G Major, No. 4.

The reviewer of the concert went on to declare that
Christus am Ölberge
“was good and contains a few first-rate passages . . . A number of ideas from Haydn's
Creation
seem to have found their way into the final chorus.” Beethoven would not have been pleased about that comparison, though it was manifestly true. The last chorus was not the only bit of Haydn lifted for the oratorio, and Mozart had been plundered as well. The reviewer sardonically quoted some lines from the weakest among the oratorio's weak suits, its libretto: “‘We have seen him. / Go toward that mountain, / Just take a left, / He must be quite near!' And the rest is also written in this poetic spirit.”
²⁵

Beethoven later claimed that
Christus
was thrown together in some two weeks, on a text hurried out by a local opera librettist, Franz Huber. (Earlier, Huber's anticlericalism and enthusiasm for the French Revolution got him in trouble with the police—and probably earned him Beethoven's approval.)
²⁶
Huber seems to have written the libretto on Beethoven's scenario and with the composer at his elbow. The story is centered unusually not on the crucifixion but on Christ's anguish in the Garden of Gethsemane. It is likely that after his Heiligenstadt crisis of the previous autumn, Beethoven felt a personal relationship to the suffering he was depicting, starting with Christ's first words: “Jehovah! Thou my father! O send me consolation and strength and steadfastness.” His first aria ends, “Take this cup of sorrow from me.”
²⁷

Regardless of how much of his own cup of sorrows Beethoven poured into the libretto of
Christus
, the result showed more professionalism than inspiration. To compose an hour-long work for major forces at headlong speed generally involves compromises, shortcuts, having to make do with the first ideas that come to mind. (Handel, Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven succeeded splendidly at that sometimes, but not always.) Though
Christus
has its striking moments and is nothing but skillful, it was then and would remain one of the most misconceived, inauthentic, undigested large works Beethoven ever wrote.

The conventionality of most of the music is matched by the boilerplate pieties of the text: “Woe to those who dishonor the blood that flowed for them. The curse of the Judge will strike them; damnation is their lot.” Beethoven was not conventionally religious, not a churchgoer, not interested in judgment and damnation. As to the music, in his haste he made a fundamental decision that put the work on the wrong foot, where it remained: he cast much of it in the kind of eighteenth-century operatic style he had studied with Salieri, with ample and not always apt contributions from Haydn and Mozart.

It begins well enough. The long introduction in his high-tragic key of E-flat minor is an effective stretch of scene setting that calls to mind the opening of another of the oratorio's predecessors—the
Joseph
Cantata from Bonn. Then Jesus Christ, a bravura tenor, takes the stage. His first recitative and C-minor aria depicting his anguish at imminent crucifixion are the sort of thing one would expect from an operatic hero lamenting frustrated love or lost honor, complete with high-range pyrotechnics. At a reference to “the world that burst forth from chaos” at God's command, there is a C-major blaze of light straight from Chaos in Haydn's
Creation
. A seraph (coloratura soprano) appears to succor Christ in his sorrow. She and the Son of God have a duet that resembles all too much a pair of lovers commiserating—say, cousins of Pamina and Tamino in the fraught stretches of
Die Zauberflöte
. There are fugues. There are fervent
Heils
. In the choruses of soldiers coming to arrest Christ, there are unfortunate echoes of the “Turkish” choruses in Mozart's
Abduction from the Seraglio
. At the conclusion there is a solemn hallelujah chorus owing more to Haydn than Handel.