Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph (63 page)

A. We are forbidden to be disobedient to our superiors, to injure them, or to speak ill of them.
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This is, of course, the definition of tyranny worldly and spiritual. Yet while Napoleon had only briefly been a Jacobin, was a dictator in every sense, and had essentially put aside the French republic, there were still progressive elements in his agenda. In spring of 1804, his regime issued the Code Napoleon, a set of civil laws that enshrined some foundations of the Revolution: personal liberty, freedom of conscience, and property rights. The ancient nobility and class privileges were abolished and the government declared to be entirely secular. The influence of the code would be immense and lasting.
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Yet beside its progressive clauses were ones reflecting Napoleon's hatred of democracy. The code suppressed the rights of women and gave precedence to landowners and to employers at the expense of employees. Napoleon held to Enlightenment beliefs in science and reason, but he had nothing but contempt for popular will or parliamentary debate. In those respects he stood not so far from German Aufklärers, including Beethoven (also no believer in democracy, even if he admired parliaments).

So with Beethoven and many others over the next decades, the habit of dropping and taking up Napoleon continued. In more practical terms, after a couple of years of the French fighting only the British, the rapprochement with Austria was crumbling and a new coalition against France on the horizon, so in any case it was no longer safe to premiere a symphony called
Bonaparte
. The renewal of war, meanwhile, scuttled Beethoven's “irrevocable” plans for a French tour or relocation. For such reasons, the world would know the Third Symphony as
Eroica
. But as Beethoven wrote his publisher, it is really
Bonaparte
.

 

Around the middle of 1804, Beethoven worked on two new piano sonatas and an orchestral work. The first sonata is on the order of what gardeners call a “sport”: a surprising deviation of type in a species. He laid out the Piano Sonata in F Major, op. 54, in two droll and inexplicable movements. The first begins with a lazily lilting tune that repeats a couple of times before pounding triplets erupt and clatter along
forte
for two pages, after which the lazy friend returns. Their connection is sealed in a coda that marries the two contradictory ideas. The finale takes shape as a mostly monothematic
moto perpetuo
that threads a virtuosic course through dazzling changes of texture and key. To later times, op. 54 would be remembered as the valley between the summits of
Waldstein
and op. 57, the
Appassionata
. Beethoven began the latter in 1804 as well, interrupting work on
Leonore
, which for the moment had no performance possibilities.
³⁷

A second curious manifestation of that period was the Triple Concerto op. 56 for orchestra and a trio of violin, cello, and piano, dedicated to Prince Lobkowitz. Beethoven called it a
Konzertant
, relating it to the genre of
symphonie
concertante
fashionable in France. So for him it likely amounted to another salute and calling card to the French, to prepare his journey. That in turn might explain, if anything does, the singular and sometimes backward-looking style of the music. Some of it looks back as far as the Baroque concerto grosso for multiple soloists—though a piano trio was an unusual, perhaps unprecedented, solo group.
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In effect, Beethoven here returned to a pattern of the years before the New Path, producing a stylistic experiment that had no progeny in his work. Gorgeous but peculiar, expensive and impractical to perform, the Triple Concerto would never really catch on. Beethoven himself scarcely promoted it, though he was quick to sell it—the 1807 publication came out, as far as history knows, before the piece was premiered.

Despite distractions including lingering illness in the middle of 1804, Beethoven's ideas still ran strong. But life was ganging up on him. He had to have been on edge, and that goes partway to explaining a nasty row between him and Stephan von Breuning in early July. Tensions had been brewing between the roommates for a while; what touched it off was practically nothing. Beethoven learned that the caretaker of the building had not gotten proper notice that he had vacated the other flat to move in with Stephan, so Beethoven was still liable for the rent. Over dinner the visiting Carl van Beethoven, provoking as usual, blamed the oversight on Breuning. Ludwig tried to defuse the situation by jokingly blaming it on Ries, but Breuning boiled over, jumped up, and shouted that he would send for the caretaker on the spot. Beethoven was having none of that. He also shot up, sending his chair flying, and bolted the house. Soon he bolted all the way to Baden.
³⁹

A hail of recriminations followed. Breuning wrote a conciliatory note, but Beethoven was having none of that either. He wrote Ries, “As Breuning by his behavior has not scrupled to present to you and the caretaker my character from an aspect in which I appear to be a wretched, pitiable, and petty-minded fellow, I am asking you . . . to give my answer verbally to B . . . I have nothing more to say to Breu­ning—His thoughts and actions—prove that there should never have been a friendly relationship between us and will certainly never be again.” A few days later he wrote to Ries again:

 

My sudden rage was merely an explosion resulting from several previous unpleasant incidents with him. I have the gift of being able to conceal and control my sensitivity about very many things. But if I happen to be irritated at a time when I am more liable to fly into a temper than usual, then I erupt more violently than anyone else. Breuning certainly has excellent qualities . . . yet his greatest and most serious faults are those which he fancies he detects in other people. He is inclined to be petty, a trait which since my childhood I have despised . . . And now our friendship is at an end! I have found only two friends in the world with whom, I may say I have never had a misunderstanding. But what fine men! One is dead, the other is still alive.
⁴⁰

 

The two friends he meant were the long-departed Amenda and the late Lorenz von Breuning, Stephan's brother. (He forgot to number Stephan's brother-in-law Franz Wegeler among the friends he had never seriously fought with.) In any case, a couple of months later Beethoven and Stephan met by chance on the street and fell into each other's arms. Beethoven sent him an ivory miniature of himself and a rhapsodic letter of reconciliation:

 

Behind this painting my dear good St, let us
conceal
forever what
passed between us
for a time—I know that I have wounded
your heart;
but the emotion within me, which you must certainly have detected, has punished me sufficiently for doing so. It was not
malice
which was surging in me against you, no, because in that case I would no longer have been worthy of your friendship. It was passion, both
in your heart
and
in mine
.—But distrust of you began to stir in me—People interfered between us—people who are far from being worthy of
you
or of
me
[probably Carl van Beethoven was the “people”] . . . You know, of course, that I always meant to give [the enclosed portrait] to someone. To whom could I give it indeed with a warmer heart than to you, faithful, good and noble Steffen—Forgive me if I hurt you. I myself suffered just as much. When I no longer saw you beside me, for such a long time, only then did I realize fully how dear you were to
my
heart, how dear you always will be.
⁴¹

 

The old friendship returned to its course, for a time. Stephan remained a close and critical student of his friend. In November, Stephan wrote Wegeler,

 

He who has been my friend from youth is often largely to blame that I am compelled to neglect the absent ones. You cannot conceive, my dear Wegeler, what an indescribable, I might say fearful effect the loss of hearing has had upon him. Think of the feeling of being unhappy in one of such violent temperament; in addition, reservedness, mistrust (often toward his best friends), and in many things indecision! For the greater part . . . intercourse with him is a real exertion, at which one can hardly trust oneself . . . I took him into my rooms. He had hardly come before he became severely, almost dangerously ill, and this was followed by a prolonged intermittent fever. Worry and the care of him took quite a lot out of me. Now he is completely well again. He lives on the ramparts . . . and since I am running my own household, he eats with me every day.
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Beethoven was not as well as Stephan thought. By that point, still beset by fevers, he had spent most of the summer in Oberdöbling. In the fall he moved into a large, grand apartment building called the Pasqualati House, on the Mölkerbastei. From the fourth floor he had a view over the eponymous Mölker bastion, across the broad green Glacis to the Vienna suburbs and the mountains beyond. Ries had found the place for him.
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Lichnowsky lived a few houses away. Beethoven would keep that apartment for years as he continued his restless roaming.

 

Apparently that summer saw the first private
Eroica
readings at Prince Lobkowitz's palace.
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The orchestra of twenty-five to thirty and the listeners were crowded into the narrow music room with gray marble walls and golden-painted ceiling, twenty-four by fifty-four feet, intended mainly for chamber music.
⁴⁵
The orchestra sat on a low podium behind a balustrade. The invited guests lounged on red-upholstered benches, sat in adjoining rooms, strolled around as they listened to the players stumble through the strangest music any of them had ever heard. At the rehearsals it was noticed that Beethoven sometimes had trouble hearing the wind parts.
⁴⁶

Ries was present and recalled that the first reading of the symphony went “appallingly.” It may have been this occasion when Beethoven began conducting one of the hemiola passages, superimposed on the three-beat meter in a two-beat pattern that confused the orchestra so much that they had to start the movement over again. It did not help when the orchestra came to the first movement's peculiar retransition, when a solo horn seems to come in with the theme early, over the wrong chord, and Ries exclaimed to Beethoven, “That damned horn player! Can't he count!—It sounds terrible!” Ries said Beethoven looked close to hitting him, and “he was a long time in forgiving me.”
⁴⁷

Before the Third Symphony, symphonies and concertos had largely been considered public and in some degree popularistic pieces written to be put together in a hurry, sometimes more or less sight-read in performance. Haydn and Mozart had written tremendous works under those constraints. Beethoven was in the process of changing that pattern. Gradually, through reading after reading, this unprecedented music sank into the players' minds and fingers. Other works were read over—the Triple Concerto, a piece by Salieri—while the listening connoisseurs murmured and stroked their chins. In the Third Symphony, so much was being put before them for the first time: difficulties of playing, difficulties of understanding for the audience. It seemed as if this piece demanded new kinds of musicians and listeners, new kinds of criticism and poetry and philosophy. And this symphony seemed in some way the embodiment of the revolutionary spirit, coded in instrumental music and so lying beyond the clutches of the ubiquitous Viennese censors. The private readings went on in various Lobkowitz palaces, Beethoven in no hurry to put the symphony before the public until the players knew it thoroughly. In any case, the prince owned the piece exclusively for six months.

Meanwhile, that August there was another turnover of regime at the Theater an der Wien, Schikaneder being reinstated and Beethoven's contract with him likewise. Beethoven moved back into the theater, still paying rent for his new flat at the Pasqualati House, and went at
Leonore
with renewed vigor aided by his recovery—not a lasting one—from months of debilitating illness. As if he did not already have enough trouble that year, he had also fallen in love.

 

As a virtuoso of passionate cast, Beethoven naturally attracted female attention. Wegeler and Breuning both left testimony to his “success” with women, his “conquests.” What they meant by success and conquest was left unsaid. Bachelors in those days tended to visit brothels and Beethoven likely did, but there is no record of that in these years, or of who his conquests were, or what they amounted to. As has been noted before, it was a discreet age on matters sexual and romantic.

One speculation is that when women were drawn to Beethoven because they were aroused by his music, he responded but did not take them seriously. His ideas about women were puritanical, but his instincts robust. Ries remembered that “Beethoven very much enjoyed looking at women; lovely, youthful faces particularly pleased him. If we passed a girl who could boast her share of charms, he would turn around, look at her sharply through his glass, then laugh or grin when he realized I was watching him. He was very frequently in love, but usually only for a short time.”

Ries's definition of “love” is more flexible than Beethoven's. His real loves were few; the rest were passing. One day in Baden, Ries stumbled into a situation that gives a portrait of Beethoven's style with amours of the moment. Ries appeared for a lesson and found his master sitting on the sofa with an attractive young woman. Embarrassed, he turned to leave, but Beethoven cried, “Sit down and play for a while!” Ries did as ordered, facing away from the pair and playing bits of Beethoven pieced together with his own transitions. Suddenly Beethoven called out, “Ries, play something romantic!” Then, “Something melancholy!” Then, “Something passionate!” Finally Beethoven jumped up and theatrically exclaimed, “Why, those are all things I've written!” This, hoping the young lady would be impressed. Instead, she seemed offended by something and left abruptly.