Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph (73 page)

 

 

With his commission, Count Razumovsky surely got more than he expected, certainly far more than he paid for. He got in many ways the three most original, most idiosyncratic, most expansive and ambitious string quartets ever written to that time—in their brilliance and in their eccentricities the only ones among the hundreds of that era that stand up to Haydn and Mozart. After they settled in, they would prove to be inescapable influences on virtually every future string quartet by every future composer. For Beethoven's part, having cleared his throat with op. 18, with op. 59 he was ready to stand up to his predecessors and models, ready to prove he was their equal on their home ground. In his bargain, Count Razumovsky also commissioned immortality for himself. He became one more of those great and glorious noblemen whom history remembers only for their connection to the commoner Ludwig van (not von) Beethoven.

 

In quality and in quantity, the standard of work Beethoven established in 1806 could hardly be matched by any mortal, including himself. By that standard, 1807 was a calmer year in creative terms, at the same time richer in incident on both sides of the ledger. He and Lichnowsky had more or less made up after their battle royal of the previous year, though they were never as intimate again. In April, Beethoven came near to losing another important friend, this time because of carelessness more than pride.

He had become close to pianist Marie Bigot and her husband Paul Bigot de Morogues, Count Razumovsky's librarian.
³⁴
This couple was not rich and powerful, like his aristocratic patrons, but simply people he liked and appreciated. Marie he admired for her playing, which she had showed off in reading through the water-stained
Appassionata
manuscript at sight. As a performer Marie is recorded as being not only technically brilliant but also imaginative and individual. In 1805, when she first played for Haydn, the old man threw his arms around her and exclaimed, “Oh, my dear child, I did not write this music—it is you who have composed it!” In the same spirit, Beethoven said after listening to her render a sonata of his, “That's not exactly the character I wanted to give this piece, but go right ahead. If it isn't entirely mine, it's something better.”
³⁵
As musicians sometimes say of a conductor or a coach, Beethoven let his performers
play
, gave them the reins if they were artists he respected. When he said to Marie Bigot, “[I]t's something better,” he meant
better for you, because it's yours
.

He much admired Marie's person, beyond her talent. Soon, maybe too soon, Beethoven fell into an affectionate relationship with the Bigots, and with Marie a flirtatious one. “Kiss your wife very often,” he wrote Paul. “I could not blame you for it.” Probably Paul got less and less amused by this sort of thing. That he was more than twenty years older than Marie would not have increased his patience with younger men's attentions to her.
³⁶

Maybe a blowup was inevitable. It was sparked by an invitation. “My dear and much admired Marie!” Beethoven wrote her at the beginning of April. “The weather is so divinely beautiful . . . So I propose to fetch you about noon today and take you for a drive—As Bigot has presumably gone out already, we cannot take him with us, of course . . . Why not seize the moment, seeing that it flies so quickly?”
³⁷
And so on. An anxious Marie declined the invitation and showed the letter to her husband, who was duly outraged.

There was a face-to-face confrontation that Beethoven did not handle well—it seems in fact that he was speechless. What Paul Bigot said is not recorded, but Beethoven's chagrin when he got home produced two of his longest and most convoluted letters of apology. Even if he had no improper designs on Marie, he realized he had stepped over the line. Still, he felt the need to explain himself:

 

I can well believe that my strange behavior has startled you . . . At the same time you would be wrong to think that my behavior was prompted to any extent by my displeasure
at the refusal of my request to Marie
—True enough, I cannot deny it, I felt very much hurt; and the reason why I did not speak to you was in order not
to display my feelings
. . . I am so very fond of you all, and why should I not confess it; indeed you are the
dearest
people I have met since I left my native town . . . I still cannot understand why it would have been improper if Marie and Caroline [her sister] had come out driving with me—But we shall talk about this . . . You cannot conceive the pain it causes me merely to think that I have given you an unpleasant moment.

 

Directly after, in a letter addressed to both Marie and Paul, he has become more embarrassed, but still not abject:

 

Not without experiencing the deepest regret have I been made to realize that the purest and most innocent feelings can often be misunderstood . . . dear M, I never dreamed of reading anything more into your behavior than the gift of your friendship . . . Besides, it is one of my chief principles
never to be in any other relationship than that of friendship with the wife of another man
. . . Possibly once or twice I did indulge with Bigot in some jokes which were not quite refined. But I myself told you that sometimes I am very naughty—I am extremely natural with all my friends and I hate any kind of constraint.

 

He explains at length that there was nothing in the invitation for a ride other than friendship and the beautiful day—probably true enough. And after all, he had included her sister in the invitation. There is the inevitable turning back to how the situation has affected him, to illness, to protests of his goodness:

 

Never, never
will you find me dishonorable. Since my childhood I have learned to love virtue—and everything beautiful and good—Indeed you have hurt me very deeply—but your action will only serve to strengthen our friendship more and more—I am really not very well today and it is difficult for me to see you. Since the performance of the [
Razumovsky
] quartets yesterday my sensitiveness and my imagination have been constantly reminding me that I have made you suffer. I went last night to the ballroom in order to amuse myself . . . and the whole time I was reminded that “the Bigots are so good and are suffering perhaps through your fault” . . . Write me a few lines.
³⁸

 

Beethoven and the Bigots smoothed it over. He would be careful about displays of affection to Marie. But he had coached her in his music, she had become one of his chosen interpreters, and for him that was a matter equally important as a rich patron and far more important than flirting. The previous year's near break with Lichnowsky soon after his own explosion of rage sank
Fidelio
may have, in fact, scared him. He did not want to lose the Bigots as friends, or Marie as an ally. In 1809, the Bigots moved to Paris, where Marie became an important champion. One of her later students was Felix Mendelssohn, and she inculcated that budding talent in the doctrine of Beethoven.

 

As antidotes to the passing storm with the Bigots, to a mysterious string of headaches that went on for months, to the collapse of hopes for yet another concert, all on top of his declining hearing and chronic digestive afflictions, other developments that spring were more to the good. Nikolaus, the fourth Esterházy prince to employ Joseph Haydn (now incapacitated but still nominally court
Kapellmeister
), commissioned a mass from Beethoven to honor the name day of the princess. Haydn had already provided six celebrated masses for that occasion. Beethoven remained vitally interested in sacred music, a field he had yet to conquer, partly because he had yet to find his own path into it. At the same time, he wanted to find an alternative to Haydn's approach and to the generally operatic Viennese mass—which is to say, something other than the style of his own
Christus am Ölberge
. What came of this commission would be one of the real experiments of his life.

In performances of his music in Vienna, Beethoven often presided on the podium and at the keyboard. March 1807 saw two all-Beethoven concerts for an invited audience in Prince Lobkowitz's music room. The programs included the first four symphonies, the Fourth Piano Concerto (which had to wait another year for its public premiere), arias from
Leonore
, and the overture
Coriolan
. By then the first two symphonies were well established and popular, the
Eroica
riding a wave of acclaim. The Fourth Symphony, overture, and concerto were new to Vienna. In its review of the concerts, the
Journal des Luxus und der Moden
declared, “Richness of idea, bold originality and fullness of power, which are the particular merits of Beethoven's music, were very much in evidence to everyone at these concerts; yet many found fault with lack of a noble simplicity and the all too fruitful accumulation of ideas which . . . were not always adequately worked out and blended, thereby creating the effect more often of rough diamonds.”
³⁹

The inexorable necessity and misery of publication at least tended to be more profitable in these years. For Beethoven the central business development of 1807 was centered in the appearance of Muzio Clementi, celebrated piano virtuoso, also piano maker, pedagogue, and publisher. As a pioneering composer for the piano, he had been a formative influence on the young Beethoven, because Clementi was among the best available models for how to write idiomatically for the instrument. Now retired from performing, Clementi lived in England and prowled the Continent looking for music to publish and customers for his pianos. He made several visits to Vienna.

Naturally he was eager to court Beethoven, and Beethoven eager to find a British publisher. Yet an absurd contretemps had developed when Clementi came to town in 1804. Beethoven told brother Carl that he wanted to call on Clementi. Carl insisted that that was beneath his dignity; it must be the publisher who called first. Beethoven agreed. Then gossip started going around that he was snubbing the older man, and Clementi got wind of it, which offended his own sense of pride and propriety. The result was that, despite their pressing mutual interests, the two men never spoke, even on occasions when they were eating at the same long table in the Swan restaurant.
⁴⁰

When Clementi returned to Vienna in 1807, all that was forgotten, as he reported to his partner in London. The letter, written in English, shows Clementi's puckish spirit:

 

I have at last made a complete conquest of that
haughty beauty
Beethoven, who first began at public places to grin and coquet with me, which of course I took care not to discourage; then slid into familiar chat, until meeting him by chance one day in the street.

“Where do you lodge?” says he, “I have not seen you this
long
while!”—upon which I gave him my address.

Two days after, I find on my table his card, brought by himself, from the maid's description of his lovely form. This will do, thought I.

Three days after that, he calls again and finds me at home. Conceive, then the mutual ecstasy of such a meeting! I took pretty good care to improve it to
our house's
advantage . . . In short, I agreed with him to take in manuscript
three quartets
[the
Razumovskys
], a
symphony
[the Fourth], an
overture
[
Coriolan
], a
concerto for the violin
which is beautiful and which, at my request, he will adapt for the pianoforte . . . , and a
concerto for the pianoforte
[the Fourth], for
all
of which we are to pay him one hundred pounds sterling. The property, however, is only for the British Dominions . . . The Symphony and the overture are wonderfully fine, so that I think I have made a very good bargain. What do you think? I have likewise engaged him to compose two sonatas and a Fantasia for the pianoforte.
⁴¹

 

Beethoven cobbled together the promised piano arrangement of the Violin Concerto, at the same time revising the hastily written solo-violin part. Despite an elaborate new first-movement cadenza, the solo part of the piano version is remarkably sketchy. Beethoven packed off the Fourth Piano Concerto, the Fourth Symphony, and
Coriolan
to Clementi as a first installment, but the package got waylaid by the ongoing war and never arrived.
⁴²
Eventually Clementi put out the first British editions of the
Razumovsky
Quartets and the Violin and Fourth Piano Concertos; during 1810–11, he issued ten Beethoven works. Clementi's commission for piano sonatas became opp. 78–79.
⁴³
His conquest of the haughty beauty had been gratifying on both sides.