Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph (97 page)

The matter came to a head in an ugly scene. Ludwig had demanded that Johann send Therese away. Johann refused and stormed into Beethoven's room in a fury. It came to shouts and punches. Moral and physical persuasion having failed, Ludwig complained to the local bishop, the civil authorities, and the police, finally obtaining a legal order kicking Therese out of town as an immoral woman.
⁴⁷
Johann's defiant response was to make the affair respectable; he married the lady. Thereby Ludwig helped inflict on Johann what turned out a woeful marriage, which in turn Johann blamed Ludwig for getting him into.
⁴⁸
So Ludwig watched both brothers marry women who, if hardly the incarnate evil he considered them to be, were still pieces of work, and that was to have long and bitter ramifications on his and his brothers' well-being.

Around this time, Beethoven heard a worse piece of news. On November 2, Prince Kinsky, the largest contributor to the yearly stipend, who had survived battles in the Napoleonic Wars, had been thrown from his horse and died from his injuries. Kinsky had been forgetful and dilatory in his payments when he was alive; could Beethoven hope for anything from his widow and his estate?

He did not let the issue lie. Less than two months after her husband's death, Princess Kinsky received the first letter from him: “The unhappy event—which has removed His Excellency . . . from our Fatherland, from his dear relations and from so many people whom he magnanimously supported . . . has also affected me in a manner as singular as it is painful. The bitter duty of self-preservation compels me to present to Your Excellency this most humble petition.” Meticulously he reviews the history of the stipend and Kinsky's agreement to raise it to account for inflation.
⁴⁹
It took years and more dogged pleas, but in 1815 the house of Kinsky resumed the payments.

Meanwhile Prince Lobkowitz, on the verge of bankruptcy, had stopped his contributions. Beethoven went after Lobkowitz too, personally and in the courts. The next year he wrote to Joseph von Varena in Graz about “the worries I am having here and the defense of my rights . . . as you know, I have to deal with a princely rogue, Prince Lobkowitz . . . What an occupation for an artist, whose most burning issue is his art! And it is H.R.H. the Archduke Rudolph who has plunged me into all these embarrassing situations—.”
⁵⁰
By then, in his desperation, he was ready to blame Rudolph for his efforts in arranging the stipend in the first place. At the same time he wrote Rudolph with a stunning show of false sympathy, saying that he needed to go to Baden for the cure but was being kept in Vienna “by the Lobkowitz and Kinsky affairs . . . Y.I.H. will have heard of Lobkowitz's misfortunes. He is to be pitied; and to be
so
rich surely does not spell happiness.”
⁵¹

But it was not as simple a matter as selfishness or greed. Beethoven was becoming chronically and irrationally anxious about money, and he had more than his own self-preservation to worry about now. In 1812, brother Caspar fell desperately ill with tuberculosis. From that point on, a good deal of Ludwig's earnings would go to Carl for doctors and family support—though their relations did not necessarily improve in the process and Beethoven still despised Carl's wife Johanna. To Varena, via whom Beethoven had been donating pieces for charity concerts in Graz, and who had offered money for the music, Beethoven wrote, “My circumstances on the whole happen to be the most unfavorable I have ever had to face . . . [I find] myself at the present moment, precisely owing to my great generosity [to Carl], in a position which . . . by reason of its very cause cannot make me feel ashamed.” But he declined any payment from Graz unless “a
wealthy third person
” could be found to cover the costs.
⁵²

There was also his brother's young son Karl to worry about. Brother Carl's tuberculosis was virtually a death sentence, as it had been for their mother. The only question was when. Beethoven formed a determination to get his nephew out of his mother's clutches when Carl died. The next spring, pressured by Ludwig, his illness getting worse, Carl made a legal declaration: “Since I am convinced of the openhearted disposition of my brother Ludwig van Beethoven, I desire that, after my death, he undertake the guardianship of my surviving minor son, Karl Beethoven.”
⁵³
The next spring Carl rallied, and the matter of his son rested.

That spring Beethoven wrote his landlord Baron Pasqualati, “Please just let me know . . . what you have found out about the Lobkowitz affair in the matter of my salary, for
I have not a farthing left
. Furthermore, I beg your brother to write to Prague so that I may receive the Kinsky salary due to me.”
⁵⁴
He surely exaggerated about being down to his last farthing, but in one way and another he had gone through a great deal of money. Between March 1809 and November 1812, he received 11,500 florins from the stipend, the belated 200 pounds from his sale of works to Clementi in England, some 1,500 florins from Thomson for the folk songs, and several thousand from Breitkopf & Härtel. In a time when one could live well enough on 1,300 silver florins a year (paper florins were worth much less), he had made somewhere over 6,000 florins in each of the preceding three years. Yet by 1813 he had also borrowed some 1,100 florins from Franz Brentano; eventually his debt to Franz totaled 2,300.
⁵⁵
Other than to brother Carl, there is no record of where it all went.

 

Despite everything, when the celebrated French violinist Pierre Rode arrived in Vienna, Beethoven responded to his presence—and to his admiration for the French violin school—with his first violin sonata in some eight years. It turned out to be his last. The piano part was written with Archduke Rudolph in mind; Rudolph and Rode premiered it at the Lobkowitz palace on December 29, 1812.

The four-movement Sonata for Violin and Piano in G Major, op. 96, is not Beethoven's grandest or most exciting in the medium and it may be technically his easiest to play, but it is surely his greatest. Here the qualities that would mark the late music begin to take focus: the subtlety of effect, the ability to turn suddenly from one idea to another with a mysterious purposefulness, the long-suspended harmonic periods, the melodic beauty, the deep-lying thematic integration based on a few motifs, the sometimes childlike simplicity that he makes touching and unforgettable. Beethoven's affection for Rudolph, his gratitude despite everything, surely colored the music. At the same time he tailored the piece to violinist Rode's style and taste. He wrote Rudolph, “In our finales we V[iennese] like to have fairly noisy passages, but R does not care for them—and so I have been rather hampered.” (He wrote Rudolph in the same month, “Since Sunday I have been ailing, although mentally, it is true, more than physically. I beg your pardon a thousand times.”)
⁵⁶

For Beethoven G major tended to be a gentle and pastoral key, and gentleness pervades this sonata. It begins with a little violin fillip of indefinite meter and tonality like a birdcall, introducing a movement of heart-filling warmth and charm conjuring the outdoors: reverie, birds, summer breezes. Nature was still Beethoven's cathedral; here is a fresh angle on a pastoral style. Nearly the entire first movement is marked
piano
or
pianissimo
. Figures evoking birdcalls and breezes will be abiding sources of material, as will the opening trill. Another idea that arrives later in the exposition is a poignant intrusion of notes borrowed from the minor, especially the flat sixth degree—and most especially E-flat, the flat six of G major, which will play a role in the sonata both as a note (sometimes disguised as D-sharp) and as a key.

Formal outlines are on the whole simple and regular; the second movement Adagio espressivo is a straightforward ABA, the main theme one of his long-breathed lyrics, the middle section a blissful trance. The movement segues directly into a rough and ironic scherzo with jolting, offbeat accents; its trio has the lilt of a folk dance, say a German
Ländler
.

Another kind of folkish simplicity is the basis of the finale, Poco allegretto. (He had sketched the theme earlier, perhaps for the A Major Cello Sonata.)
⁵⁷
Its theme suggests a little dance tune from a comic opera. The movement is continuous, the sections contrasting but flowing together, so it is not all that obvious that we are hearing a theme and six variations with a couple of interludes, one being a stretch of chromatic fugue whose apparently out-of-nowhere subject is actually a stretching out of the movement's opening theme. The coda gives us a bracing gust of wind, a warm reminiscence of the theme, and a jolly burst of final chords. All this is to say that the effect of the finale is less its nominal form, a theme and variations, than a stream of consciousness. That quality too will mark much of the late music: the old forms still functioning but sunk beneath the surface, a few seminal motifs flowering into a proliferation of melody, everything with an effect of transcendent, rhapsodic freedom.

This exquisite sonata shows that while life had assaulted Beethoven and he had faltered, his courage, his discipline, and his devotion to his craft had not deserted him completely. Here is the inner world of an aging, unhappy, chronically ailing composer who had increasing difficulty hearing anything but what sang in his head, but who remembered the sounds of nature and the feelings of exaltation and of love human and divine that he found there. These are things only an artist older and wiser, who has done much and suffered much, can fully understand and truly speak of.

 

Still, living back in the Pasqualati house overlooking the bastion in Vienna, his production slowed alarmingly. After the Violin Sonata in G Major, in the first half of 1813 he finished nothing else but some folk-song settings and a piece for a play at the Burgtheater.
⁵⁸
With few if any friends left to unburden himself to, no shoulders to weep on, in 1812 he began to keep a
Tagebuch
, a diary. Its first entries reveal the rawest anguish he had expressed since the Heiligenstadt Testament. This was a private testament, addressed only to himself and to God:

 

Submission, deepest submission to your fate . . . O hard struggle! . . . You must not be a
human being
,
not for yourself
,
but only for others;
for you there is no longer any happiness except within yourself, in your art. O God! give me strength to conquer myself, nothing at all must fetter me to life. In this manner with [A.] everything goes to ruin.
⁵⁹

 

[Two entries later:] O terrible circumstances, which do not suppress my longing for domesticity, but [prevent] its realization. O God, God, look down upon the unhappy B., do not let it continue like this any longer.

 

The Heiligenstadt Testament had been written when he was younger, healthier, in the middle of his fame as a virtuoso, his work running strong and in demand, his wounds fresh, and there were fewer old scars. Then his response to suffering had been defiance, not resignation, not submission. By the time of the
Tagebuch
submission was the only path left for him. He did not believe in miracles, in God coming down from the stars to answer his prayers, but he had no one but God to pray to for an end to his suffering. As he had done in that earlier cry from the cross, he threw himself on his art as the only meaning left in his life. But in that earlier cry, when he feared never to feel joy again, he had not given up on love and family. Now he was letting go of those dreams too.

Every woman he had truly loved—including Julie Guicciardi, the singer Magdalena Willmann, Josephine Deym, Therese Malfatti, his Immortal Beloved—had rejected him or had been lost because of forces outside his control. Now he gave up on women, gave up hopes for love and romance and family. As he wrote in the
Tagebuch
, to give up on love is close to giving up on life. Once again his art was all he had left. But now, for the first time, his art was drifting.

Here was another turning point in his life, as the Heiligenstadt Testament had been, as the declaration of a new musical path had been before that. Beethoven had acted on those declarations with all the fierce power of his will. But his will was waning now; there is no decisiveness in his declaration of submission and withdrawal, only anguish. For the moment he did not have the energy and confidence to lift himself up. He was about to be very busy, in a time when the demand for his work heated up suddenly. But in spirit he was still on the way down.

Yet Beethoven, capricious in all things, was capricious even in his despair. Among those first anguished entries in the
Tagebuch
is a technical note: “The precise coinciding of several musical voices generally hinders the progression from one to the other.” (He appears to mean that contrapuntal voices need to be rhythmically distinct.) And there would be few further cries from the soul like the ones that begin the diary. Nor did the
Tagebuch
become a record of daily events. The bulk of it is a collection of quotations Beethoven liked, from a great variety of literary sources, sprinkled with practical musical and household items, excerpts from potential opera librettos, and so on. “How should Eleison be pronounced in Greek?” runs one note. “E-le-i-son is correct.” (That toward another try at a mass.) Authors quoted or referred to include Schiller (the most frequent), the philosophers Herder and Kant, the fantasist Gozzi, the Spanish dramatist Calderón, Pliny, Plutarch, Homer. He wrote down only a few entries about music and no quoted reviews of his work, good or bad. There is not a single entry about current events, which were in world-changing convulsions during the time of the
Tagebuch
.