Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph (60 page)

The later Romantic generations of the nineteenth century saw his intensely personal music, and saw it rightly, as a revelation of the individual consciousness and personality: the individual as hero, fundamental to the Romantic vision of the world. To the degree that in his youth Beethoven absorbed the Kantian ideas that were in the air, he learned that freedom is required to become a complete human being and that every free person must think and judge for himself as an individual. That, Kant said, is the essence of Enlightenment. He also said that the world as it is perceived and interpreted by each person is all that is possible for human beings to know. The self is essentially the world. And like the Hero's journey in the
Eroica
, that self is continually in flux, continually becoming.

Christian Neefe and the other Freemasons and Illuminati around Beethoven taught that the foundation of changing the world is first to remake yourself. While the Romantics mythologized the supreme Self, they rejected the Aufklärung delusion that individuals and societies can be perfected. Aufklärers proclaimed the triumphs they believed to be imminent under the rule of a free, rational, enlightened humanity grounded in the rule of enlightened leaders. The Romantics turned away from what Novalis called “the cold voice of Reason” and exalted the passionate, the unattainable, the unimaginable, the sublime, the great and terrible. (Given the reaction and repression that happened after the fall of Napoleon, there was little to exalt anyway but the unattainable.)

Beethoven would be
the
composer for the coming Romantic generation, who resonated with his proclamation of the individual as if it were a democratic revolution in tones. But Beethoven was not a Romantic, not a revolutionist, not a democrat. He was a republican who came of age in the revolutionary 1780s, all for
fraternité
and
liberté
, not remotely for
egalité
.
⁶³
The people as a whole were rabble to him. “Vox populi, vox dei,” he said late in life, “I never believed it.” In practice, the models of
egalité
he grew up with were those of the Freemasons and Illuminati, an equality of middle-class artists and bureaucrats and midlevel aristocracy—the society he lived in most of his life.

It is unanswerable to what degree the sense of humanistic individualism in his mature music, in the heroic style and otherwise, was a conscious matter or simply Beethoven being Beethoven, an individual to the point of solipsism. That was who he was, and his music came out of who he was. But as with any artist of any value, his art was a great deal bigger than he was. No better example of that than the
Eroica
. His individualism, his engagement with the zeitgeist, and his determination to serve humanity (despite his disdain for most of humanity in the flesh) made his music imperative for the Romantic generations—even the egalitarian Romantics. For his time and later, his music breathed a new sense of the individual engaged with the world, like a dancer caught up in the whirling patterns of the
englische
. With the New Path and the
Eroica
he unleashed emotional forces that had been unknown to music, of a raw power and individuality the eighteenth century had never imagined. He became a new kind of composer writing a new kind of music, yet he did it without pulling up his roots in the eighteenth century.

To discover new means of expression is to discover new territories of the human. It seems that such an ideal, not revolution, was what Beethoven considered to be his task, his duty. He had always believed he had it in him to do something like that. The difference now was that he knew how to do it.

 

In October 1803, Ferdinand Ries wrote to publisher Simrock in Bonn, “He wants to sell you the Symphony for 100 gulden. In his own opinion it is the greatest work that he has yet written. Beethoven played it for me recently, and I believe that heaven and earth will tremble when it is performed. He is very much inclined to dedicate it to Bonaparte, but because Lobkowitz wants to have it for half a year and will give 400 gulden, then he will entitle it ‘Bonaparte.'”
⁶⁴

In Beethoven's sketchbook, after the last of the
Bonaparte
pages the creative juices were still running high. In the middle of the symphony sketches he noted down a folk-dance tune that would serve in the scherzo of the Sixth Symphony, along with two sketches trying to capture the sound of a murmuring brook, with a note: “the bigger the brook the deeper the tone.” There was a sketch for the Schikaneder opera
Vestas Feuer;
its melody would end up in
Fidelio
. Bonn had been on his mind through these months. Directly after the
Bonaparte
pages, with no pause for breath, he jotted down ideas for an epochal piano sonata that came to be named for its dedicatee from the Bonn days:
Waldstein
.

18

I
N LATE
1803, Beethoven returned to his cramped quarters as house composer in the Theater an der Wien. There Stephan von Breuning brought to see him a young Rhinelander named Willibrord Joseph Mähler. He was a civil servant of various artistic leanings: amateur singer, poet, songwriter, and portrait painter. Beethoven was generally pleased to make the acquaintance of anyone from his homeland. Even more to his credit, Mähler had been born in Ehrenbreitstein, hometown of Beethoven's mother. When Mähler asked to hear something, Beethoven obliged, playing the variation-finale of the
Bonaparte
Symphony. When he got toward the end of the movement he kept playing, improvising new variations for two hours.

“There was not a measure which was faulty,” Mähler recalled, “or which did not sound original.” As much as the music, he remembered Beethoven at the keyboard, “with his hands so very still; wonderful as his execution was there was no tossing of them to and fro, up and down; they seemed to glide right and left over the keys, the fingers alone doing the work.”
¹
That day Mähler did not see the performer who broke hammers and strings with a power beyond the capacities of his instruments. Beethoven also had a most delicate legato. Carl Czerny noted that he often played his best in slow, soulful music; his “playing of adagio and legato . . . has yet to be excelled.”
²

Given that Mähler was an amiable young man and a native of, as far as Beethoven was concerned, the best place on earth, in the next year he was able to persuade the impatient and fidgety composer to sit still for a portrait. The painting turned out odd and memorable, a companion to the Bonn portrait of old Ludwig, the composer's grandfather. Both paintings are interpretations of the life of a musician. Grandfather Ludwig had himself rendered as an imperious man of importance, turning the pages of a score. Mähler painted Ludwig van Beethoven the younger as an icon of Genius.

In his left hand this icon holds a lyre, symbol of a musician in general and of Apollo the singer in particular. The right hand is extended and splayed in a peculiar way, which the painter described “as if, in a moment of musical enthusiasm, he was beating time.” He had learned that Beethoven was given to startling musical enthusiasms, vocally and physically. He also noted Beethoven's blunt, square hand. For his portrait Beethoven is neatly and fashionably dressed, his hair cut in the French neo-Roman style. The face is impassive, the eyes piercing. This too is well observed: others noted that in public Beethoven's face was often reserved and blank, his feelings visible mainly in the flash of his small brown eyes. In private, over a glass of wine, he might become jolly and teasing. In both public and private he rose easily to fury.

The background of the painting is as telling as the figure. To the left of the picture, Mähler explained, is a temple of Apollo.
³
On the other side, behind Beethoven, looms a dark forest with a dead tree at the top. For the sunlit temple, read the Classical past, both of antiquity and of the eighteenth century that exalted reason and restraint: the rational. For the dark forest, read the wild, the mysterious, the emotional, the Romantic: the irrational. Which is to say that in the first years of the nineteenth century, at the moment Beethoven had embarked on the New Path, this artist already portrayed him as a bridge between Classical and Romantic. If Mähler was not a great painter, he was a keen observer of his subject as a man and as an incipient icon and myth. This would be Beethoven's favorite portrait of himself, the one he kept with him alongside the portrait of his grandfather: two musicians in ideal and in action.

 

As winter came on in 1803, Beethoven involved himself with finalizing the
Bonaparte
Symphony and exploring what it had unleashed, where it pointed on his New Path. The implications unfolded in a scarcely believable rush over the next few years, producing some works in the heroic vein, some not, but all of a phenomenal strength and freshness.

The main project of that year's end was a
Grande Sonate
for piano in C major. It would be dedicated to his Bonn patron and mentor Count Ferdinand Waldstein, at that point away from the Continent serving in the British army. This sonata was the repayment of an old debt for the man who as much as any had helped launch Beethoven, a mentor and patron for the teenager and then a connection to important Viennese patrons. The two must have met after Bonn, but no record remained of it.

So op. 53 came to be called the
Waldstein
. Beethoven wrote it with the inspiration of his new French Érard piano and its four pedals and extended range, its action heavier and its sound bigger than the Viennese pianos he was used to. It had a foot pedal to raise the dampers, rather than the traditional knee lever, making pedal effects more inviting.
⁴
With his usual forcefulness he told an acquaintance that he was “so enchanted with it that he regards all the pianos made here [in Vienna] as rubbish.”
⁵
Perhaps for that reason, this twenty-first of his published piano sonatas would be the one most thoroughly involved to that point with exploring and expanding the instrument, in music of vibrant coloration. The very nature of the piano became the vehicle of a heroic journey that ends in overflowing exaltation.

The
Waldstein
Sonata leaps into life in medias res, with a sense of restless energy that will hardly flag throughout. Above the pounding rhythms are only scraps of motifs; at first the music is like an accompaniment in search of a theme.
⁶
Mainly the effect is of a surging and singularly pianistic dynamism. The C-major opening immediately strays to G major, then drops to B-flat major straying to F, searching for resolution. The main relief from the irresistible drive is the sudden peace of the chorale-like second theme in a radiant E major, which sprouts a babbling variation in triplets. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the movement is that, for all its energy, most of it is soft: crescendos often lead to a
subito piano
marking; the few loud moments are placed in transitional sections or quickly choked off. The movement surges and drives, but most of it is actually
piano
to
pianissimo
. The governing idea is power under restraint, generating a fund of energy that never dissipates and never climaxes. As in the Third Symphony first movement, everything points forward.
⁷

In the
Waldstein
Beethoven invented fresh colors and textures for the piano and at the same time took a fresh look at C major. As the key most in tune on the keyboards of the time, it usually represented the mean, the restrained, a tonality suitable for equanimity or for grandeur, even military pomp, but not for passion or excitement. Now Beethoven made it sonorous and intense, partly by surrounding it with surprising tonalities. The drop to B-flat in the beginning foreshadows a sonata written largely in flat keys. Into that mix of darker flat keys he drops two brilliant sharp ones: the E major of the second theme, which comes around in the recapitulation in an equally breathtaking A major. (Only in a reminiscence in the coda does the second theme find its resolution into C major.)

As a second movement he drafted a long, tranquil, quite beautiful Andante grazioso con moto that he was especially fond of. But when he played the completed sonata for one of his friends (it is not recorded which one), the friend declared the middle movement too long. Beethoven responded angrily. Soon after, he decided the friend was right. He took the long movement out of the
Waldstein
and published it as
Andante favori
(“favorite andante”), because it was a piece he liked to play at soirees.
⁸
With its warmly proto-Romantic tone, it became a favorite of many besides the composer.

With that friend's help, he had realized that the long Andante would have been a critical miscalculation. In the first movement he had deposited a great deal of energy in a kind of savings account, waiting to pay off. A long middle movement would have dissipated that energy. So to replace the Andante he wrote a short, transitional slow movement in F major—a shadowed, minorish major. As counterpoise to the driving and extroverted outer movements, this middle passage is inward, chromatic, searching, full of silences, unfolding like an improvisation. Midway it finds an exquisitely poignant melody, only to see it evaporate. It is a short stretch of reverie and anticipation.

That short slow movement or long introduction segues into the rondo finale, the long-delayed climax that unfolds as one of the most ecstatic of all movements for piano. It begins, again, quietly, in a surging whisper that slowly rises to a series of climaxes that mount higher and higher until it seems they can go no further—then they go further. The climaxes of this movement are physical, like a gust of wind that shocks the listener into a sense of the joyous effervescence of life. With its simple, folklike main theme surrounded by sparkling figuration, Beethoven completes the sonata's process of pushing the expressive and sonorous possibilities of the piano further than they had ever gone, the searching energy of the beginning paying off in the finale with pealing rapture, a resplendent and unprecedented texture of trills and whirling scales.
⁹