Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph (98 page)

The bulk of the entries are inspirational in one way or another. “Portraits of Handel, Bach, Gluck, Mozart, and Haydn in my room. They can promote my capacity for endurance.” (In fact he had no pictures of those composers on his wall.) There were exhortations to stick to his last, to subdue his longings and transcend his pain and deafness: “Everything that is called life should be sacrificed to the sublime, and be a sanctuary of art. Let me live, even if by artificial means, if only they can be found!” He quoted a contemporary comment on artists: “‘Unfortunately, mediocre talents are condemned to imitate the faults of the great masters without appreciating their beauties: from thence comes the harm that Michelangelo does to painting, Shakespeare to drama and, in our day, Beethoven to music.'”

The most unexpected collection of quotations shows that by the mid-1810s, Beethoven was reading Eastern religious texts and books about those religions, most having to do with Hinduism. His underlying concern was to broaden his conception of God. From a commentary on the
Rig-Veda:

 

Free from all passion and desire, that is the Mighty One. He alone. No one is greater than He
. (Brahm.) His spirit, is enwrapped in Himself. He, the Mighty One, is present in every part of space. O God . . . You are the true, eternally blessed, unchangeable light of all times and spaces . . . You alone are the true (Bhagavan—the) blessed one, the essence of all laws, the image of all wisdom of the whole present world—You sustain all things.

 

[Another entry, a paraphrase he had adapted to his own life and work:] All things flowed clear and pure from God. If afterwards I became darkened through passion for evil, I returned, after manifold repentance and purification, to the elevated and pure source, to the Godhead.—And, to your art.

 

[From the Bhagavad Gita:] Blessed is (the man) who, having subdued all his passions, performeth with his active faculties all the functions of life, unconcerned about the outcome. Let the motive be in the deed, and not in the outcome. Be not one whose motive for action is the hope of reward.
⁶⁰

 

[Regarding Indian music:] Indian scales and notes:
sa, ri, ga, ma, na, da, ni, scha
.

 

The final quotation in the
Tagebuch
, added years after it began, also concerns God. It is from Beethoven's favorite book of homilies and natural history, Christoph Christian Sturm's
Reflections on the Works of God and His Providence Throughout All Nature:
“Therefore, calmly will I submit myself to all inconstancy and will place all my trust in Thy unchangeable goodness, O God! My soul shall rejoice in Thee, immutable Being. Be my rock, my light, my trust forever!”

In Schiller's essay “The Mission of Moses,” Beethoven read inscriptions said to be found on Egyptian monuments:

 

I AM THAT WHICH IS,

 

I AM ALL, WHAT IS, WHAT WAS, WHAT WILL BE;

NO MORTAL MAN HAS EVER LIFTED MY VEIL.

 

HE IS ONLY AND SOLELY OF HIMSELF,

AND TO THIS ONLY ONE ALL THINGS OWE THEIR EXISTENCE.

 

These evocations from ancient Egypt did not go into the
Tagebuch
. Beethoven copied them out on a sheet of paper and put them under glass on his writing table so they would be before his eyes as he worked. Those sublime sentiments would play their part in his late music too.

An undogmatic and unbigoted interest in non-Western religions was another part of the Aufklärung ethos Beethoven imbibed in Bonn. For deists, all religions worship the same things with different languages and images and traditions. Beethoven instinctively responded to poetic religious texts (after all, in large part religions are created and sustained by poetry). From these texts he wanted imagery, inspiration, broadening, not dogma. His most ambitious works from the
Eroica
onward had been involved with the world, the hero, the ideal society, joy, beauty, sorrow, personal struggle and triumph, and, so far, a frustrated search for a sacred style in music. Now in his anguish he turned his thoughts upward and beyond, reaching for a sense of the divine larger than any scripture or church. And he turned to God directly: neither the
Tagebuch
nor any of his letters or works to this time had any significant reference to Christ beyond his hasty oratorio
Christus am Ölberge
.

In his art Beethoven was reaching beyond the sorrows of lovers and friends, the rough jokes, the clashes of armies and exaltation of heroes that had inspired his work. Now for Beethoven, Sturm's book melding science and religion joined with a sense of primeval mystery. Beethoven was pulling away from the earth, to a higher angle of view. At the same time he was singing more within than ever, starting with the locked inwardness of the deaf man who can hear only the songs in his own head. No less was Beethoven headed for the childlike, the naive, the utterly simple, all these qualities more than ever. He had not given up his drive, seen from his earliest music, to do and to express and to feel
more
in every direction. It was these kinds of conceptions and images that helped create the music he was to write in his last years: humanity standing under the infinite canopy of the stars, no less human and concrete than before, with no heroes to exalt us but only ourselves, reaching toward one another and, in that, toward Elysium and toward God, to make a world whose order reflects the sublime order of the universe.

 

At the same time, the quotidian hounded Beethoven more than ever. As 1813 began, the element of the
Tagebuch
that prevailed in his external life was the despair of the first pages. Signs of desperation and loneliness were all over him. Occasionally in notes to his old bachelor friend and helper Baron Zmeskall, a new and peculiar term began to turn up, a shared code. In February, Beethoven wrote, “Be zealous in defending the Fortresses of the Empire, which, as you know, lost their virginity a long time ago and have already received several assaults—”; “Enjoy life, but not voluptuously—Proprietor, Governor, Pasha of various rotten fortresses!!!!”; “Keep away from rotten fortresses, for an attack from them is more deadly than one from well-preserved ones.”
⁶¹

The codes here are transparent enough. Beethoven is talking about prostitutes, solicitations, the threat of venereal disease. (A later conversation book cites the title of a French treatise on venereal diseases.)
⁶²
Most bachelors in those days put off marriage until they were settled into a career, and patronized whores as a matter of course. It was estimated that in a population of around two hundred thousand Viennese in 1812, roughly 10 percent were full- or part-time prostitutes.
⁶³
Once, violinist Ignaz Schuppanzigh took Beethoven to a brothel and had to avoid Beethoven's wrath for weeks. Still, it is likely Beethoven was acquainted with the institution before 1813. In these depressed years he began frequenting brothels more often, usually with old bachelor Zmeskall, his faithful helper in that as in much else.

His loneliness could not have been alleviated by these fleeting and tainted pleasures. All of it offended his spirit, his idealization of women and love, his puritanical instincts. The contrition shows up in the
Tagebuch:
“Sensual gratification without a spiritual union is and remains bestial, afterwards one has no trace of noble feeling but rather remorse.”
⁶⁴
Again: “From today on never go into that house—without shame at craving something from such a person.”
⁶⁵
At the same time, there is a commonsense acknowledgment of the inevitability of desire: “The frailties of nature are given by nature herself and sovereign Reason shall seek to guide and diminish them through her strength.” From a Hindu text concerning the sacred image of the phallus, Beethoven copied, “To someone who was offended by the idea of the lingam, the Brahman uttered, ‘Did not the same God who has created the eye also create the other human members?'”

If it were only a matter of everyday sins and regrets, all this might have been a passing symptom of lost love. But in addition Beethoven seemed visibly to be falling apart. Friends found him looking shockingly dirty and run-down. At the end of 1812, composer Louis Spohr met Beethoven at a restaurant, and they got together occasionally after. Beethoven knew of Spohr's work and was kindly toward him. Once, when Beethoven did not show up for several days, Spohr went to see him. Beethoven explained that his boots were in tatters and “as I have only one pair I am under house-arrest.” His manners in those days, Spohr recalled, were “rough and even repulsive.”
⁶⁶

Patrons in restaurants shied away from him. In Baden, piano maker Nannette Streicher and her husband found Beethoven in “the most deplorable condition . . . He had neither a decent coat nor a whole shirt, and I must forbear to describe his condition as it really was.”
⁶⁷
This suggests that he was resorting to the bottle more than usual. The ­Streichers helped him as best they could.
⁶⁸
It was as if Beethoven were sinking to where his father had been at nearly the same age. If he had not been one before, maybe in these years he became a functional ­alcoholic—impaired but still able to work, not out of control. At least, in contrast to his father's case, there are no stories of Beethoven being found rolling in the gutter. The Streichers' report, though, implies something in that direction.
⁶⁹

In his youth, Beethoven had known beyond doubt that he had great powers inside him. As the years brought their blows, whatever his anguish he sustained a conviction that he was equal to anything fate threw at him. After his youthful brashness left him, his essential confidence did not—though he had faltered in the aftermath of Josephine's withdrawal, in 1807. Now he was not so sure he was up to the blows. He wrote to Archduke Rudolph that “unfortunate incidents occurring one after the other have really driven me into a state bordering on mental confusion.”
⁷⁰
Eventually he hit bottom, then began to rise.

From now on, his mind and body, his inner creative tides and his external existence, which had always run on separate yet parallel tracks, were going to diverge more and more. It is as if the more anguish fate heaped on him, the more his rage and desperation and paranoia mounted, the brighter and purer his creative spirit burned. But not yet. That resolution would take the better part of a decade to gather. In 1813 and for some time after, the main thing he thought about was money.

 

Sunk more in grief than in art in those years, Beethoven never wrote of what was going on in the world, but he could not have been unaware of it, and in the end he profited from the results. In June 1812, Napoleon invaded Russia with a Grande Armée of nearly 700,000 men, the largest force in European history. Now the French were pursuing a dangerous two-front war; French forces were also fighting the British and Portuguese in Spain.

In Russia, nearly half Napoleon's troops were Poles and Germans from conquered territories. (One of his aims was to prevent Tsar Alexander I from invading Poland.) As the Russian army retreated before him, the world expected another conquest. At Borodino, on the road to Moscow, the Russians made a stand but retreated after bloody fighting. Napoleon's army swept into Moscow, only to find no troops defending it. Before long, a fire of mysterious origin burned much of the Russian capital to the ground. Tsar Alexander sat tight, refusing all peace overtures.

Finally, with no enemy to fight and winter coming on, Napoleon had no choice but to retreat with his gigantic and unwieldy army. Tsar Alexander enforced a ruthless and devastatingly effective scorched-earth policy in the path of the French as they struggled west in the brutal cold. The retreating troops began to die in the tens of thousands from freezing, starvation, disease, and enemy harassment. Napoleon had lost battles before, but by the time this campaign guttered out, the greatest self-made conqueror in history had directed, in statistical terms, one of the worst military debacles in history. As many as four hundred thousand of his army were dead. The conqueror was no longer invincible; he was running out of soldiers. His enemies stirred again.

In June 1813, Napoleon and the Austrian foreign minister, Clemens von Metternich, made an attempt at negotiation in Dresden. A few days before, a French army fleeing Madrid had been shattered near the town of Vittoria by the duke of Wellington's Anglo-Portuguese forces. The battle effectively marked the end of the Peninsular War that had been boiling since 1808, and so ended French rule in Spain. The constant drain of men and matériel in that war turned out, in the end, to be the main engine of Napoleon's downfall. “It was that miserable Spanish affair,” he said later, “that killed me.”
⁷¹

Metternich knew his opponent intimately from his years as ambassador in Paris; that intimacy had included an affair with Napoleon's sister, among other adventures. Later as a minister back in Vienna, Metternich conceived and engineered the marriage of Napoleon and Marie-Louise, daughter of his emperor, which provided Napoleon with a son and heir. Metternich was not a general, but he was every bit as wily and treacherous a tactician as his opposite. In person and in power, Metternich would survive Napoleon by many years.

At this moment, Metternich knew something the Frenchman did not realize yet: in the game of conquest, Napoleon had put most of his remaining cards on the table in Spain and Russia, and he had lost. In Paris, Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand, a trusted adviser of Napoleon, had in fact been spying for the enemy for years; he assured Metternich of broad French support for Austrian demands. (Talleyrand had also been keeping Metternich apprised of secret military orders sent to French commanders.) No one could have precisely known or believed it yet, but Napoleon was headed on a trajectory toward a nondescript village near Brussels called Waterloo, whose absurd name was going to be, for the rest of history, a symbol of ultimate defeat.