Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph (114 page)

Yet in his moil of feelings Beethoven adds about Johanna, “K[arl] has done wrong, but—a mother—a mother—a bad mother is still a mother.” He was torn between dueling obligations: his duty to rear his nephew properly, and his and Karl's natural duty to a mother. That second duty explains his occasional spasms of generosity and regret concerning Johanna. It all weighed on him badly. He assures Nannette about the servant squabble, “This affair has given me a dreadful heart attack from which I am not yet completely recovered . . .
Still it won't be necessary to take me to the madhouse
. . . Please send us a comforting letter about the art of cooking, laundering, and sewing.”
²⁸
He announces he is sending Karl to a village parson for tutoring. His nephew was to be kept at his studies daily while Beethoven was busy working. He tells Nannette he has heard disturbing reports of this Parson Frölich but hopes for the best.

From there things took a precipitous turn downward. Beethoven got word from the parson that Karl was acting up, disturbing the other students. By this point Karl was revealing a gift for playing the people who were jerking him around. He told the parson that his uncle egged him on to revile his mother either by writing it down or by shrieking into his uncle's ear. Karl said further that he agreed to do this only to get in his uncle's favor and avoid punishment. In turn, Beethoven reported to the parson with “malicious joy” that Karl had picked up his uncle's term for Johanna, “raven-mother.”

The parson was shocked at these violations of the fourth commandment, to honor thy father and mother. To Beethoven, meanwhile, Karl reported that Frölich would line up students on a bench and have them whipped by the strongest of their classmates.
²⁹
Within a month the instruction with Frölich ended in mutual outrage. “There are human brutes indeed,” Beethoven wrote Nannette, “and one of them is the parson here, who ought to be thrashed.”
³⁰
All three of these letters concerning the saga of Karl and the servants and the parson were produced in June 1818.

Nannette Streicher gave Beethoven patient-unto-heroic service in those years. She was, however, no blind acolyte. Nannette understood Beethoven at his best and his worst. Later she told the British publisher Novello, in her flavored English, “[A]s a beggar he was so dirty in his dress, and in manner like a bear sulky and froward, he laughed like no one else it was a scream, he would call people names as he passed them . . . he was avaricious and always mistrustful.”
³¹

 

Yet somehow, again, that summer of 1818 was splendidly productive. Beethoven generally felt healthier and cheerier in the country. It was his first stay in picturesque Mödling, a medieval-to-Renaissance town south of Vienna, its hoary stone buildings arranged along a street that stretched up to hills topped with ruined castles. It was a prospect to inspire a Romantic, and a Beethoven. He became a regular at the Three Ravens pub, lived in the fifteenth-century Hafner-Haus on Herrengasse (later Haupstrasse). His flat had cozy, groin-vaulted rooms facing trees and vineyards in back, reached by an arched balcony that looked down on the courtyard. Mödling's hills and woods were a few minutes' walk away.

It was probably during this first of his three summers in Mödling that he was approached by another portrait painter. By then Beethoven, a man not enamored of his own physiognomy, looked at the species of painter as something to which he had to submit from time to time as a kind of penance for his fame. This artist, August von Klöber, left some sharp-eyed memories of their encounter. He had been advised by a Viennese musician who knew Beethoven that it was best to deal with this subject in the country, where he was usually more approachable. Beethoven agreed to the sittings if they did not take too long.

Klöber was first shown into Beethoven's rooms by a servant; she said he could occupy himself with the resident books by Herder and Goethe until Beethoven got home. Finally Beethoven arrived with Karl. Klöber found he had to communicate by writing or via Karl, who shouted into his uncle's ear trumpet. Karl sat down at the piano to practice. Klöber noticed that deaf as he was, Beethoven could sense every mistake Karl made, corrected each one, and had him repeat passages.

The artist observed his subject professionally, as a figure he had to capture in his surface and in his essence. “Beethoven always looked very serious,” Klöber recalled. “His extremely lively eyes usually wandered, looking upwards somewhat darkly and low-spiritedly, which I have attempted to capture in the portrait.” Eventually that look became mythologized as Beethoven's
blick nach oben
, raising his eyes to heaven. In fact it was the characteristic stare of a deaf man straining to hear.
³²
“His lips were shut, but the expression about the mouth was not unfriendly.” Klöber noted that one of Beethoven's favorite topics was the overweening vanity and perverted taste of the Viennese aristocracy, “about whom he never had a good word to say, for he considered himself neglected by them, or not sufficiently understood.” More and more as he got older, Beethoven despised the nobles he depended on to pay his rent. Archduke Rudolph, around whom there was no hint of scandal, was spared some of that contempt, but not all of it.

Klöber found that Beethoven could manage to sit still for only some three-quarters of an hour. The artist was agreeable to that, so Beethoven in turn became agreeable to him. That gave the painter a lot of free time. “You must have a good look at Mödling,” Beethoven told him, “for it's quite lovely here, and as an artist you must certainly be a nature lover.” Klöber took the advice. In his tramps around the countryside he occasionally saw Beethoven striding along with sketchbook in hand; he would stop as if listening, and with a stub of pencil jot down something on the page. Once, the artist caught sight of his subject climbing a hill across the valley, a broad-brimmed felt hat under his arm. At the top of the hill Beethoven lay down under a pine tree and watched the sky for a long time.

“Beethoven's dwelling in Mödling was quite simple,” Klöber recalled, “as indeed was everything about him. In those days he wore a light blue frock-coat with yellow buttons, white waistcoat and a fashionable necktie,” but all of them “in a quite neglected state. His complexion was healthy and robust, the skin somewhat pockmarked; his hair was the color of blued steel . . . When his hair was tossed about by the wind he had something absolutely Ossian-like [meaning bardic] and demoniacal about him. In friendly conversation, however, he took on a genial and mild expression . . . Every mood of his spirit was immediately and violently expressed in his countenance.”
³³

Klöber's final oil portrait placed Beethoven, holding a sketchbook and pencil, in the Mödling countryside with Karl lying under a tree behind him. At some point that painting was lost. All that survived is a preparatory drawing Klöber made of Beethoven's head, the eyes looking into the distance, the hair wild. Despite a certain stiffness, it is one of the essential Beethoven renderings. He looks formidable but not forbidding—just as Klöber, Potter, and others found him in person. The portrait has none of the glowering scowl of the Klein life mask and the Romantic sculptures and paintings that followed from it. Klöber made Beethoven an imposing, powerful, utterly self-possessed presence, but also a person standing before you in the company of his nephew. It is one of the few renderings of Beethoven in the Romantic era that did not make him into a demigod. Beethoven complimented Klöber on the treatment of his hair. Most portraits, he said, made him look too tidy.
³⁴

 

That summer of 1818, Beethoven had his new Broadwood in Mödling to work on the piano sonata that was becoming Brobdingnagian. This year he also added to his sketches for two symphonies intended for the London Philharmonic Society. As always, he wanted to take the two works in contrasting directions. Some of his sketches had always been in the form of prose. A speculation toward one of the planned symphonies shows him improvising in words. It amounts to a portrait of the early, speculative stages of the creative process:

 

Adagio Cantique—

Solemn song in a symphony in the old modes—Lord God we praise you—alleluja—either as an independent piece or an introduction to a fugue. Perhaps the entire second symphony [the Tenth] will be characterized in this manner, whereby singing voices will enter in the finale, or even in the Adagio. The violins, etc., in the orchestra will be increased tenfold in the finale. Or the Adagio will in a distinct way be repeated in the finale, with the singing voices introduced one by one. In the Adagio text, a Greek myth, the text of an ecclesiastical song—in the Allegro, a celebration of Bacchus.
³⁵

 

This does not quite describe what became the Ninth Symphony, was perhaps intended for the Tenth that was never finished, but it still foreshadows elements of the Ninth and other works. By “a symphony in the old modes” he means the ancient church scales outside the usual major and minor scales; they go under the names Dorian, Lydian, Phrygian, and so on. The eighteenth century had abandoned all the church modes other than major and minor, but it was traditional to use the others in contrapuntal studies because they were based on modal sacred music going back to Palestrina. Beethoven wanted to draw Palestrina and the other Renaissance polyphonists within his grasp.

Moreover, the prose sketch shows he was thinking about a symphony with voices. Whether or not he already imagined them singing Schiller's “An die Freude” cannot be said at this point nor for a while to come. “Greek myth . . . a celebration of Bacchus”: he had sketched ideas for an opera libretto concerning Bacchus, the Roman avatar of the Greek god Dionysus. Both of them were divinities not just of wine but of ecstasy, of being taken out of oneself, of possession with divine dancing joy. One can hear the eventual scherzo of the Ninth Symphony in those terms. His prose improvisation toward the new symphonies describes no specific piece to come but hints at several including the
Missa solemnis
.

 

In autumn 1818, Beethoven and Karl returned to Vienna, the twelve-year-old beginning at the Akademisches Gymnasium, with extra instruction in music, French, and drawing.
³⁶
With Karl settling into a new situation, Beethoven finished the epic Piano Sonata in B-flat Major, op. 106, that he had been working on over the last two years. Having decided for both nationalistic and practical reasons to put away the standard Italian terms in music, he called it
Grosse Sonata für das Hammerklavier
, the latter a German name for
pianoforte
, which is Italian. (Beethoven believed, mistakenly, that the piano had been invented in Germany. In fact it was invented by the Italian Bartolomeo ­Cristofori, in the early eighteenth century.) He had directed that the title page of the previous sonata, op. 101, should also designate it as
für das Hammerklavier
. But the future would know op. 106 as the one and only
Hammerklavier
, because even in other languages that name seems to convey something of the formidable and intractable quality of the music. The first of his piano sonatas to use the four-movement pattern since op. 31, no. 3, this was Beethoven's ultimate hammer thrown at the pleasing, popular, amateur tradition of the piano sonata.

“
What is difficult
,” he wrote to the publisher Haslinger about the far tamer (but still plenty difficult) op. 101, “is
also beautiful, good, great
and so forth. Hence everyone will realize that this is
the most lavish
praise that can be bestowed, since what is
difficult makes one sweat
.”
³⁷
Here is another moment in a letter where Beethoven revealed something essential about himself:
What is difficult is beautiful and good
. His life and career, his struggles with technique and with counterpoint, his struggles with his health were a testament to that credo. He found writing counterpoint, to name one example, supremely difficult. He never achieved true facility at it. Partly for that reason, as a challenge for himself and for listeners, in his last years he pursued counterpoint of burgeoning complexity and ambition.

The
Hammerklavier
was his supreme challenge to players and listeners alike. Counterpoint lies at its core, along with the ne plus ultra of his abiding determination to make the whole of a piece a single conception. The
Hammerklavier
is one of the most obsessive works anybody had ever attempted. The future would be duly obsessed with it. To the degree that
what is difficult is good
is true, this is the greatest of Beethoven's piano sonatas—just as he told Carl Czerny it was going to be, well before he finished it. Clearly part of “great” to Beethoven was its great size—this is the longest of his sonatas, at some forty-five minutes—and its outsize demands. The formula would be the same in his mass and his next symphony. Shrewd in his understanding of performers as he was in every other dimension of his craft, he knew the commitment, the intensity, even the anxiety that have to be marshaled for a performer to handle challenges like these. The trials inflicted on the performer become part of the music.

The
Hammerklavier
begins with a fanfare marked
impetuoso
that spans most of the keyboard; then comes an intimate contrapuntal answer that is in fact a flowing variation of the fanfare: