Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph (96 page)

The most famous stories about their meeting came from a letter of Bettina's written years later. Beethoven had played piano for Goethe and felt disappointed at the old man's moved but quiet response. To Goethe he said, “‘Once years ago I played well in Berlin and expected great applause, but the only response from this oh-so-cultured audience was to wave handkerchiefs wet with tears. That was all wasted on a rude enthusiast like me.'” Artists want applause, he told Goethe, the longer and louder, the better. As in Berlin, with you I felt as if “‘I had merely a romantic, not an artistic audience before me. But I accept it gladly from you, Goethe.'” But, Bettina reported, he did not accept it gladly. “‘You must know yourself how good it feels to be applauded by intelligent hands; if you do not recognize me and esteem me as a peer, who shall do so? By which pack of beggars shall I permit myself to be understood?'”

“Thus did he push Goethe into a corner,” Bettina added after relating that moment. This is Bettina writing at a distance in time: whether reporting, gilding, or inventing is always the question with her. But the story rings true. Beethoven could not keep his mouth shut. And he needed Goethe more than Goethe needed him. He put his fellow titan on the spot, criticized not Goethe's lack of response but his way of responding—like a shallow and sentimental Romantic. This sounds more like Beethoven than like Bettina, the arch-Romantic. But that is not the most famous part of her report.

She painted a scene of the two walking in Teplitz and encountering the empress and a collection of archdukes. She said Beethoven had already lectured Goethe about his deference to the nobility: “‘Nonsense, that's not the way . . . you must plainly make them understand what they have in having you or they will never find out . . . [They] can make a court councillor . . . but not a Goethe or a Beethoven.'” (Goethe in fact took pride in being a court official.) In Teplitz when the royal party reached them, Goethe stepped aside, took off his hat, and bowed his head in deference. Beethoven strode through the crowd, tipping his hat curtly. The party of nobles stepped aside to make room and greeted him. “‘Well,'” he said to Goethe when the party had left, “‘I've waited for you because I honor and respect you as you deserve, but you did those yonder too much honor.'” Afterward, Bettina reported, Beethoven came running to her and Arnim and gleefully reported the story. She in turn told Goethe's patron the duke of Weimar, who teased his resident genius about it.
²⁷

This incident may have transpired just as Bettina related it, or not. In any case, once again, she knew her men and had not departed entirely from reality. Something like that happened. Shortly after the meeting, Beethoven wrote Gottfried Härtel, “Goethe delights far too much in the court atmosphere, far more than is becoming to a poet. How can one really say very much about the ridiculous behavior of virtuosi in this respect [kowtowing to the nobility], when poets, who should be regarded as the leading teachers of the nation, forget everything else when confronted with that glitter—.”
²⁸

In some form or other Beethoven had expressed his disappointments to Goethe. For his part, Goethe did not need to be lectured on his politics and behavior by anybody, even a Beethoven, or made fun of by his patron.

In short, Goethe found his fellow demigod to be a pain in the neck. Musically he never went beyond Haydn and Mozart. They give one room to feel for oneself, he said, rather than grabbing one's lapel. It is possible the two men got together when they were both in Karlsbad in the fall. In any case, after this year Goethe saw to it that they never met or exchanged letters again. So it happened that despite Bettina's best efforts, her titans went their ways separately. Later when the young Mendelssohn played the Fifth Symphony at the piano for Goethe, the old man was much agitated: “It's tremendous, quite mad; one could fear the whole house might collapse—imagine the lot of them playing it together!” He is reported to have enjoyed Beethoven's music for
Egmont
, but it seems Goethe never heard a Beethoven symphony from a full orchestra, and never wanted to.
²⁹

 

Part of Beethoven's despair that summer was that his health only declined as he took his daily baths and gulped the waters. (The medical effects of spas in those days were psychological at best, dangerous at worst. The mineral waters might contain lead, radioactivity, arsenic, and the like.) That summer he shuttled between spas, searching for healing and companionship. In Teplitz the year before, he had made the acquaintance of Amalie Sebald, a vivacious singer in her twenties, and they formed a flirtatious but not enduring relationship. Now from Karlsbad in September 1812, in response to some teasing letter of hers, he wrote Amalie in a mingling of banter and frustration: “I a tyrant? A tyrant to you! Only misjudgment of my character can make you say such a thing . . . Since yesterday I have not been feeling very well, and this morning my indisposition became more serious . . . All good wishes, dear A. If the moon seems to me to be brighter this evening than the sun has been during the day, then you will have a visit from a small person—from the smallest of small persons.” In Karlsbad, staying in a guest house with Antonie and Franz Brentano, he began a long siege in bed. He invited Amalie to visit his bedside if she did not find that improper.
³⁰
But mostly Beethoven lay alone in the trance of illness, music and pain and regret competing in his mind.

Before this new bout of debility, he had bestirred himself to play a concert with violin virtuoso Giovanni Battista Polledro. It was a benefit for his often-visited resort of Baden, where more than a hundred houses had been destroyed in a fire. Their concert brought in nearly 1,000 florins for relief of the homeless. Among other pieces the two played one of Beethoven's violin sonatas, and Beethoven improvised. He did not like the results, reporting it glumly as “a poor concert for the poor.”
³¹

His musical trials did not end there. In the summer of 1810, he had sent off fifty-three British Isles folk songs, arranged for voice, piano, violin, and cello, to publisher George Thomson in Edinburgh. He received a report from Thomson: “What delightful little
conversations
between the violin and violoncello. In a word, I am completely charmed by all of them.” But not so charmed as not to demand that some of them be redone and simplified, to make them easier for the young Scottish ladies he hoped would buy them. When Haydn worked for Thomson, he reported, he “invited me to indicate to him frankly everything that would not please
the national taste
in the ritornellos and accompaniments.” “Permit me to request,” Thomson concludes, “that . . . you make the piano part completely simple, easy to read at sight, and easy to play.” (In one accompaniment Beethoven had written a stretch of sixteenths in the right hand with triplets in the left—three against four, completely impractical for amateurs of modest ability.)
³²
He instructs Beethoven how to write the arrangements, asking for more imitation between violin and cello and an independent violin line rather than one doubling the voice.
³³

There began a long exchange of mutual frustration. No one had ever subjected Beethoven to these kinds of nitpicking demands, but he kept his temper and tried to address Thomson's relentless refrains: Thomson couldn't provide Beethoven texts for the songs because he was commissioning new ones from poets (as he had done from Robert Burns);
³⁴
Haydn did not ask for so much money; Haydn never expected more money for requested revisions. “In our country there is not one pianist in a hundred who would like the ritornellos and accompaniments that I wish you [to] revise.”
³⁵

Exasperated, Beethoven wrote back that he would not revise the accompaniments, “being convinced that any partial alteration changes the character of the composition.” Even in this piecework he was concerned with the total effect, and he called them “compositions” instead of “arrangements.” Rather than revising, he would do completely new versions of the same tunes, but he expected to be paid for them: “I regret that you will suffer the loss; but you can scarcely put the blame on me, since it ought to have been your affair to advise me more explicitly of the taste of your country and small skill of your players.” To provide a positive note, he wrote that two of the songs Thomson sent “pleased me very much,” and he had done those settings “
con amore
.”
³⁶
He had asked Thomson for 4 gold ducats (at that point about 30 florins) for each song. If, as Thomson retorted, Viennese court composer Kozeluch was happy to receive only 2 ducats for each setting, Beethoven observed sardonically, “I must congratulate you and also the English and Scottish audiences if they like [Kozeluch's settings]. I consider myself twice as good in this genre as Mr Kozeluch,” so he should be paid twice as much.
³⁷
Thomson stuck to 3 ducats per item. Meanwhile because international postage was disrupted by the raging Napoleonic Wars, the songs had to be mailed back and forth in multiple copies sent by different routes. One package Beethoven posted via Malta took two years to arrive in Scotland.
³⁸

Thomson did relent here and there, especially regarding Beethoven's plea for texts. “I cannot understand,” Beethoven wrote, “how you who are a connoisseur cannot realize that I would produce completely different compositions if I had the text to hand, and the songs can never become perfect products if you do not send me the text.”
³⁹
Thomson later sent some words or at least summaries of the songs' topics: “
Duncan Gray:
A shepherd loving a village coquette is repulsed and becomes disdainful in turn; but the village girl repents of her folly, is pardoned, and they marry . . .
Auld Lang Syne:
A meeting of friends after several years of separation, recalling with delight the innocent pastimes of their youth,” and so on.
⁴⁰
With these descriptions and/or evocative song titles in hand, Beethoven could indulge in some expressive and pictorial touches, such as the turning of the mill wheel in
The Miller of Dee
and the evocation of a funeral march in
Fair Fidele's Grassy Tomb
.
⁴¹
His response to the title of
The Elfin Fairies
, however, was so subtly and freshly evocative that Thomson responded with dismay that this and some other settings were “too recherché, too bizarre,—in fact such as I dare not offer to the public.”
⁴²

Whether more for
amore
or for money, Beethoven submitted to Thomson's hectoring and continued his piecework until 1820, setting around 125 folk songs in all, in total time amounting to one of the largest bodies of work in his life.
⁴³
Thomson found less to complain about in the later settings, but his entreaties for simplicity never stopped. In fact Beethoven's settings tend to the plain, though never less than polished and individual. It is not that there are no gems in Beethoven's folk-song settings, only that there are surprisingly few.

Yet he found working with these tunes pleasant and profitable beyond the steady source of income. As a melodist Beethoven had never been as fluent and fertile as, say, Mozart. As has been noted before, part of the reason was that he insisted his instrumental and, to a degree, even vocal themes must submit to the motifs and the master plan of a piece. Now he steeped himself in tunes not his own, like found objects that he only needed to provide with support and atmosphere. Through the years he spent periodically working on the folk songs, the melodic element in his music evolved steadily toward the lyrical. There were more immediate implications in the Seventh Symphony that he finished in April 1812, whose finale resembles a Scottish reel. In the end it would be Thomson who broke off the project because, as he had preached for all those years, the settings were too much for his eternal young ladies. And Thomson never made a penny from Beethoven's arrangements.
⁴⁴

 

The aftermath of his last romantic failure saw another pattern returning for Beethoven: as fate heaped misfortune on him, he heaped on more by his own actions. In October, he rose from his sickbed and took a coach to Linz, where brother Nikolaus Johann lived, enjoying his wealth gained from selling medicines to the French army. In childhood, after the death of their mother and the collapse of their father, Ludwig had taken the role of his brothers' keeper. Since then he had never budged from that role, or rather from what he considered the sacred obligation to keep his siblings on the straight and narrow.

In Linz, Johann gave Ludwig a large, pleasant room with a view of the Danube. The local paper rhapsodized, “Now we have had the long wished for pleasure of having within our metropolis for several days the Orpheus and great musical poet of our time, Herr L. van Beethoven.” There was charming and memorable music making. Beethoven improvised for dinner guests, then managed to knock over a table of plates. He befriended the
Kapellmeister
of Linz Cathedral and at his request wrote three equali for four trombones, modeled on traditional funeral pieces.
⁴⁵
He finished the score of the Eighth Symphony.

But Ludwig was there on a mission. To his consternation he had learned that Johann was bedding his nominal housekeeper, Therese Obermeyer, who came equipped with an illegitimate daughter of five. Years before, over Ludwig's protests, their brother Carl had married the pregnant Johanna, a woman Ludwig considered (with some reason) a thief and a tart. Ludwig saw Johann's live-in mistress (again, with some reason) as a tramp and a gold digger. At thirty-five, the usually mild Johann did not remotely resemble his oldest brother. He was bony and graceless, with a cast in one eye and a turned-up corner to his mouth that gave him a strange, perpetually quizzical air.
⁴⁶
In his newfound prosperity he had found no luck landing a more respectable mate. Ludwig was determined to put an end to this madness of his youngest brother's, whatever it cost. As usual, his meddling cost a great deal.