Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph (105 page)

 

Beethoven had shared the general hope that the Congress of Vienna would turn out a progressive force in Europe. Before long he realized it had been one more failed hope, like the French Revolution, like Napoleon. Still keeping his lines open to Breitkopf & Härtel despite their not having taken anything from him in years, he wrote Gottfried Härtel in his usual confiding tone: “Since I last wrote to you . . . how much has happened—and far more evil than good! As for the demons of darkness, I realize that even in the brightest light of our time these will never be altogether chased away.”
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Beethoven's Teplitz admirer Karl Varnhagen von Ense, now part of the Prussian diplomatic corps, found his hero had grown “uncouth . . . he was particularly averse to our notables and gave expression to his repugnance with angry violence.”
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After the congress, rants against the aristocracy and their morality became a constant theme of Beethoven's conversation. Part of it at this point was his fury at Lobkowitz and the Kinsky estate over the stipend, and his general disgust at being dependent on aristocratic patronage. At the same time he knew that nearly all the notables in attendance at the congress, all those who had led the war against Napoleon, all those kings and emperors and princes and counts and dukes and archdukes and barons ruled the world not because of their skill or talent or labor but because of the titles before their names, glory they had been born to and never had to earn. The Enlightenment and the French Revolution had challenged that ancient network of privilege, but an ocean of blood had not succeeded in changing it.

As for Napoleon, exiled to the island of Elba, it turned out that he had one more grand trick up his sleeve. On March 7, as Prince Metternich headed for bed exhausted after a negotiating session that ended at 3 a.m., a valet handed him an envelope marked “Urgent.” He threw it on the bedside table and tried to sleep. Failing that, he got up and opened the envelope. It was an inquiry from the English commissioner who oversaw Napoleon in exile, asking rather pathetically whether anyone had seen Napoleon in the Genoa harbor, because he was no longer to be found on Elba. Metternich, and soon the whole of Europe, was electrified and horrified. Napoleon had fled exile with his soldiers and horses and cannons in his ships, all conveniently supplied him by his conquerors.

Napoleon landed in the south of France. Onshore his first act was to declare the Congress of Vienna null and void. Over the next three months he made his way to Paris, gathering troops as he went, installed himself in the Tuileries (Louis XVIII having fled), and began to form a new government. The allied armies marched toward France. With his reconstituted army, Napoleon decided to strike north against the Prussians and the multinational forces of Wellington before they were joined by the Russians and Austrians.

After beating the Prussians at Ligny, Napoleon attacked Wellington's outnumbered forces at the village of Waterloo, near Brussels. The battle was tipping toward the French when the Prussians appeared and gave the victory to the allies. The battle had been, Wellington admitted, “a close-run thing.” Back in Paris, Napoleon abdicated for the second and last time. Now there was no coddling from the allies. His second exile was to the remote South Atlantic island of St. Helena, where he lorded it over the locals, dictated his self-glorifying memoirs, and faded away with cancer. From his death in 1821, Napoleon ascended into myth and legend. As myths and legends tend to do, they mostly glossed over his crimes and despotism and reconstituted his glory. At least in terms of human freedom, Napoleon had surely been better than the leaders who followed him. The negation of what he achieved was accomplished with relentless repression on a cowed and exhausted European population.

 

During the sound and fury of Napoleon's last hurrah, Beethoven pursued his life of a composer barely composing. He occupied himself with business, fulminations, and abortive projects. His old friend Carl Amenda wrote from Courland, pushing an acquaintance's opera libretto,
Bacchus
. The success of
Fidelio
was bringing librettists flocking. Beethoven was interested in Amenda's idea. (One of the sketched titles for the Ninth Symphony was “Festival of Bacchus.”)
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He made a few sketches toward the Bacchus opera, one of which reveals some of his method of extracting and relating themes. Under a line of music he jotted, “It must be evolved out of the B.M. . . . Throughout the opera probably dissonances, unresolved or very differently, as our refined music cannot be thought of in connection with those barbarous times—Throughout the subject must be treated in a pastoral vein.”
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The “B.M.” seems to mean “Bacchus motif,” representing the main character, to be used in developing further themes in terms both abstract and symbolic. The harmonic style of the piece was to be expressive of the subject—breaking harmonic rules to symbolize barbarous times.

In April, he signed a major publishing contract with Steiner in Vienna, sending him the
Archduke
Trio, symphonies Seven and Eight, and
Wellington's Victory
as repayment for Steiner's loan to brother Carl.
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He was already on warm, bantering terms with Steiner and his partner Tobias Haslinger, of whom Beethoven was particularly fond. He had given everybody joking military titles: Steiner the “Lieutenant General” and his shop in the middle of Vienna the “military headquarters.” Haslinger was “Adjutant,” himself “Generalissimo.” The firm issued the Seventh and Eighth Symphonies in score and parts during 1816–17, their inevitable losses for that publication offset by sales of arrangements of the works for wind ensemble, string quintet, piano trio, piano duo, and so on.
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News of an unauthorized performance of
Wellington's Victory
in London again brought out his ire that the prince regent had not responded to his offer of a dedication: “All the papers were full of the praises and the extraordinary applause which this work had won in England. Yet no one [i.e., the prince regent] thought of me, its composer; nor did I receive the least mark of gratitude or acknowledgment of indebtedness.”
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Soon there was some gratitude from London, by way of an offer from the Philharmonic Society to compose three overtures. In earlier years Beethoven would have sat down and dashed them off. Instead, the next year he sent three overtures already composed, all of them minor, claiming they were new:
Die Ruinen von Athen, König Stephan
, and the relatively new
Namensfeier
, finished in March 1815 (this is a stately and slight overture based on sketches from years before).

Beethoven knew and was fond of the young composition student Charles Neate, who bought the overtures for the Philharmonic Society. When the society realized that for its commission of three new overtures it had been given used and not-all-that-excellent goods, its members were understandably put out. Beethoven made things worse with a sudden demand for an additional five pounds for expenses. When matters came to a head he blamed Neate, back in England, who had also tried, without success, to sell publishers the overtures and other pieces including the Seventh Symphony and the F Minor Quartet. Admitting that indeed the overtures were not exactly new and “do not belong to my best and greatest works,” Beethoven insisted they had found considerable success and ought to fulfill the commission. Publishers did not share that opinion. His old pupil Ferdinand Ries, now living in London and championing Beethoven, found the
Ruinen
Overture in particular “unworthy of him.”

When the overtures did not sell, Beethoven further blamed Neate for accepting them in the first place, and wrote some nasty words to his young British friend: “I swear that
you have done nothing
for me and that you will do nothing and again
nothing
for me, summa summarum,
nothing! nothing! nothing!!!
”
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He got a hurt letter from Neate: “Nothing has ever given me more pain than your letter to Sir George Smart. I confess . . . that I am greatly at fault, but must say also that I think you have judged too hastily and too harshly of my conduct . . . What makes it the more painful is that I stand accused by the man who, of all the world, I most admire.” Among other things, Neate explained, he'd had fiancée problems.
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Touched and sympathetic, regretting his fury as he often did, Beethoven apologized: “What can I answer to your warm-felt excuses? Past ills must be forgotten and I wish you heartily joy that you have safely reached the long wished-for port of love.”
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From his futile efforts to sell Beethoven in Britain, Neate received a letter from one publisher saying, “For God's sake don't buy anything of Beethoven!” Another rejected the overtures with, “I would not print them if you would give me them gratis.”
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For some time after, the imbroglio soured British publishers on Beethoven.
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His relations with publishers had always been forthright and more or less aboveboard, but a new element of fudging, manipulation, and finally outright deception had begun to creep in.

 

In June 1815, the Congress of Vienna signed the Final Act. Among its elements it created the German Confederation of thirty-eight states under the nominal leadership of the Austrian emperor. Sovereigns were placed back on their thrones. Russia did not get all of Poland, as Tsar Alexander had wanted, but got most of it; Poland was dismembered again. The pope got the Papal States back; Austria reclaimed much of northern Italy. This and other gains made Austria the second-most-populous state in Europe, after Russia.
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Prussia got part of Saxony and Poland and became the de facto dominant German state, while Russia dominated eastern Europe. The agreements so painfully and intricately arrived at were a patchwork that had little to do with the wishes, languages, and traditions of the peoples involved. All the same, the agreement lasted for decades and inaugurated a century of relative peace in Europe.

In Germany and Austria it was to be a peace enforced by relentless repression. Metternich was determined to sacrifice liberty to stability, to the eternal “legitimacy” of thrones and aristocracies. In essence the state decreed that, to the greatest extent possible to enforce, history was to stop moving. The status quo was all. Politics were erased from public life. There were to be no more dreams or dreamers, only tranquil and submissive subjects. As Emperor Franz I informed a delegation of schoolmasters, “I have no use for scholars, but only for good citizens . . . Whoever serves me, must teach what I order; whoever cannot do this or comes along with new ideas, can leave or I shall get rid of him.”
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While the Final Act of the congress turned out splendidly in terms of the peace and stability of Europe, likewise for the old thrones and aristocracies, for the people of Germany and Austria it represented the beginning of a spirit-killing twilight age: the bland, conformist, philistine era that came to be called the Biedermeier.

The position of Metternich and his emperor was that a single word of criticism of any ruling power, any aspiration to civil freedom or constitutional government, was an ember that could flare into revolution. Any club or assembly of persons could nurture subversion. As much as humanly possible every play, novel, poem, painting, every private letter, every conversation, every word or image written or uttered or pictured was scrutinized by spies and censors for political content, for the least whiff of any sentiment not endorsing the status quo. Police, spies, and censors were now a central part of the state budget. They inspected gravestones, cuff links, tobacco boxes for hints of secret societies and subversion. At one point crates of china passing through Vienna from France to Trieste were found to be labeled with the brand name Liberté. Officials eradicated the banned word from every box before sending them on.

As it had been for years, now more uncompromisingly than ever, each dramatic performance was watched by officials with a copy of the script in hand; extemporizing was forbidden. When the leading playwright Ferdinand Raimund apologized onstage for beating his mistress, he was clapped in irons for three days for departing from the script.
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Said the author of an 1828 book,
Austria As It Is
Observed
, “A writer in Austria must not offend against any Government; nor against any minister; nor against any hierarchy, if its members be influential; nor against the aristocracy. He must not be liberal—nor philosophical . . . nay, he must not explain things at all, because they might lead to serious thoughts.”
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Periodic student and worker movements across Europe were quickly suppressed.

Across the whole of life, German governments enforced a conformity and mediocrity of thought that led inescapably to an impoverishment of imagination and spirit. The elaborate bureaucracy created by Frederick the Great in Prussia and Joseph II in Vienna to serve the aims of benevolent despotism proved equally effective at sustaining naked despotism. To think or speak freely was something possible only in secret among trusted friends and family. The safest place was one's own home; the most characteristic designs of the Biedermeier age were parlor furniture. Enforcement was carried out not mainly in terms of executions or terror but by the constant threat of police and prison. After a while in the Biedermeier, the main enforcement was the beaten-down complacency of the population, who were tired of war and generally better off economically than their ancestors. In the long run repression bred revolution, but that did not flare in Europe until 1848, and those revolutions failed.

Again, all this amounted to the attempted negation of the French Revolution and of Napoleon—though in practice, elements of the Napoleonic Code survived in France and elsewhere, including greater freedom for Jews and reforms in government bureaucracy. Like many progressives Beethoven had been optimistic about the outcome of the Congress of Vienna, hoping for reform and peace. No more than anyone else could he have imagined the pall of repression that was about to settle over Austria, what had already been a police state turning into a more ruthless and efficient one. That had its implications on music as on the rest of life. After the congress, musical tastes turned to dance music, light opera, comic singspiels, Rossini operas. All this music, wrote Stendhal, “diverted the mind from politics and . . . was less troublesome to a government.”
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Beethoven was quick to understand the reality taking shape. Recall his letter of March 1815 to Härtel: “Since I last wrote to you . . . how much has happened,—and far more evil than good!”