Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph (119 page)

His affairs now were at loggerheads in a way that would have been fatal to most men and most artists. But not to him, though it certainly affected his production. Now and then he said, I am not crazy yet. Somehow he never was, not quite. And somehow in the throes of his suffering he never lost his kindness or his humor. From Mödling in the fall he wrote publisher Artaria in Vienna, “Most excellent Virtuosi
senza Cujoni
[without balls]! We inform you of this and of that and of other things as well, from which you must draw the best conclusions you can; and we request you to send us what is due to the composer, i.e., six . . . copies of the sonata in B♭.”
⁸⁸

In autumn came another portraitist, Frederick Schimon. Heavily involved in the mass, Beethoven allowed the painter to set up his easel in an adjoining room and otherwise ignored him. Schimon worked at his leisure, finishing everything in the picture but the eyes, which were the most important part. He got his chance when Beethoven, pleased at how this artist had not discommoded him but came and went quietly, invited him to coffee. Schimon added the eyes: filmed, electric, and searching, the most striking part of an otherwise lumpy portrait, just as Beethoven's actual eyes were the most electrical part of his peasant's face.
⁸⁹

 

At the end of 1819, Beethoven offered to sell the new mass, “which will soon be performed,” to Simrock in Bonn. The piece was far from finished—he had no idea how far. “My most gracious Lord,” he wrote Simrock, “the Archbishop and Cardinal has not yet got enough money to pay his chief Kapellmeister what is right and proper . . . Therefore one must earn one's bread elsewhere.” He was
Kapellmeister
in ironic terms only. If he hoped to secure a formal
Kapellmeister
position from Rudolph, that never came to pass. But the mass forged on. Meanwhile in March, as Beethoven worked on the Credo with a long way to go on the work, his only deadline passed when Rudolph was enthroned as archbishop of Ölmutz.

Beethoven spent much of the late winter preparing yet another legal memorandum, this one for the Appeals Court—forty-eight carefully argued pages, his longest one yet. It was written with the help of lawyer Bach, who urged Beethoven “to proceed as moderately as possible in all things so that it does not appear as if there were malice.”
⁹⁰

Dated February 18, 1820, the draft of the memorandum begins, immoderately, “It is painful for a man like me to have to sully himself to the smallest extent with a person like fr[au] B[eethoven]. But since this is my last attempt to save my nephew, for his sake I am submitting to be so humiliated.” He cites horrible crimes, nefarious purposes, unconscionable consequences. Meticulously he reviews the financial details. He admits that “once in a passion I dragged my nephew from the chair because he had done something very wicked; and since he has had to wear a truss ever since his hernia operation . . . the swift pulling consequently caused him some pain in the
most tender place
whenever he turned around quickly.” The doctor, however, had assured him that “not the least damage was done.”
⁹¹
He ends with an appeal to the Almighty.

Presumably Bach tempered the malice and bile in the document the court received, but there was plenty left. To add to the tragicomedy, it was in this period that Johanna van Beethoven gave birth to an illegitimate daughter.
⁹²
That may have been the last nail in the coffin for her case. (In an utterly inexplicable footnote, Johanna named the daughter Ludovica, the feminine form of Ludwig, presumably in honor of the brother-in-law who loathed her and stole her son.)

This time, Beethoven's barrage of words worked. On April 8, 1820, the Appeals Court issued a judgment in his favor. He and his friend Karl Peters were named co-guardians, Johanna excluded. Beethoven and his circle celebrated what seemed at last to be a final victory. But the object of these years of struggle, Karl van Beethoven, had his own life and agenda. To him, Uncle was becoming more a meddlesome nuisance than a guardian. And Karl had his own tricks in how he handled adults.

Soon after the Appeals Court decree, Fanny Giannatasio and her family visited Beethoven. “It was the first time we have seen him for a year,” she wrote in her diary. “I fancied he was very glad to see us. He seemed tolerably well, and at all events, he has a respite from the worries and torment of Karl's mother. It pained me terribly to realize that all our relations with this highly-gifted being are to a certain extent ended . . . He made me a present of a new song of his, which gave me immense pleasure.”
⁹³

The song was
Abendlied unter'm gestirnten Himmel
. It is a vision of the soul looking up at the starry night sky, where “no fear can torture it any more, no power can give it orders; with transfigured countenance it flies up to the heavenly light.” Fanny's quietly regretful report of that evening is the last time she mentions Beethoven in her journal.

29

T
HE ROMANTICS SAID
a genius is a person of a superhuman order who envisions and embodies worlds grander, more beautiful, more sublime, more terrifying than this one. Indeed Beethoven, by his late years already perceived as the quintessential Romantic genius, lived in another reality. Some territories of that reality were exalted, sublime, incomparably beautiful. Others were misanthropic, delusional, rationally and morally shabby. As an Aufklärer he believed in reason, while in his daily life he increasingly lost himself in unreason.

Still, somehow he never entirely lost himself. To be an artist is to be wholly committed to the products of your imagination. Some products of his imagination did him great harm—in the end, far more harm to him than to anyone else. But they did not wreck his art. It may appear too easy to say that the darkness never polluted the beauty and the beauty never illuminated the darkness, but that seems to have been what it was with him. His worlds contained irresolvable contradictions, warring territories, but he kept the boundaries intact and survived it all.

Toward the end of 1819, when he was still caught up in the legal wrangles over nephew Karl, in a newspaper he read a quotation from Immanuel Kant that riveted him: “There are two things which raise man above himself and lead to eternal, ever-increasing admiration: the moral law within me, and the starry sky above me.” These were perhaps the most celebrated words Kant ever wrote—they are inscribed on his tomb. In a conversation book Beethoven condensed this vision to its essence: “‘The moral law within us, and the starry sky above us.' Kant!!!”
¹

Like many things that inspire us, these words appeared when Beethoven was ready for them. They resonated with the whole of his life and music and helped point him toward the future. The important works of his middle years, starting with the
Eroica
, were largely humanistic: in rough terms, the conquering hero in the Third Symphony, the heroic individual in the Fifth. The Sixth Symphony and the Mass in C were steps toward a new sacred music, the Sixth more deistic in its sense of nature as divine revelation, the Mass in C a considered but provisional liturgical work. Now in his age, as many people do, Beethoven drew closer to God. As in all other things, he did it on his own terms.

In those words Kant had drawn closer to the divine as well. For him and his time, the starry sky was the external raiment of God, who lives beyond the stars, watching over His perfect universe. As Haydn sang in
The Creation
, “The heavens are telling the glory of God.” Kant's philosophy notified humanity that as an infinite being, God was not available to finite human senses or reason, so here on earth we have to work out our happiness and morality for ourselves. As well as a humanistic moralist, Kant was a believer, so his words were personal for him: the moral law within
me
, the starry sky above
me
. For him God did not dictate moral law through scripture; rather the moral sense within each of us resonates with the unknowable but omnipresent divine order. The implication was the same in Beethoven's reverence toward nature as the true scripture, the immediate revelation of divine grace and order. It was partly in that sense that in regard to their work, Haydn and many others of the time referred steadily to the “natural.” It was a matter of pursuing the rational and direct and unadorned, and in that way reflecting the divine order of nature.

What seems to have caught Beethoven about Kant's words was that kind of conception.
The moral law within us, and the starry sky above us
. His obsession with moral imperatives, with the necessity of personal goodness and the iron sense of duty that Kant and his time preached, was in these words unified with God in a radiant interchange stretching between the earth and the heavens. These ideas were going to be central to the
Missa solemnis
Beethoven had been working on for nearly a year now, and the exalted and exalting idea of humanity standing on earth and raising its gaze to the stars was going to be a familiar image in the music he was to write for the rest of his life.

 

The gulf between Beethoven's music and his life, the exaltation and the darkness, only widened in his age. His projects were more ambitious than ever as he won the court battle over Karl's guardianship and directed his energies from his years-long legal struggles back to composition. In his daily life he remained as harassed, scattered, and earthbound as ever. His illnesses were more serious and prolonged, so more expensive. He was tumbling steadily deeper into debt.

He had long since lost his fees for performing. The yearly stipend from his patrons was not enough to support himself and Karl. Publications and commissions were now a life-and-death matter. In his later years he wrote more letters than ever to publishers and patrons—courting, cajoling, pitching, selling, demanding, complaining. He had become frantic about money, ransacking his trunk for pieces to sell no matter how old or how slight, composing one “trifle” after another in hope of quick cash. This was in part a matter of relentless mathematics: selling publishers the massive works that most concerned him now, a gigantic mass and a gigantic symphony, could not earn him enough to account for the time they cost (though he always maintained a forlorn hope that they would). He had to pay for the big pieces with trifles, and with serious smaller ones like piano sonatas and string quartets.

At least, with the guardianship settled, for the first time in years he could return to a semblance of routine in his work. Now he had a circle of friends influential in ways other than those of the aristocratic patrons he used to cultivate. If these friends could not shower him with money, they were ready to help out in other ways. He remained close to Karl Bernard, editor of the leading Viennese newspaper. Newer to the circle was Friedrich August Kanne, editor of the
Wiener Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung
, a composer himself, encyclopedically learned, writer of a history of the Catholic Mass, alcoholic, and something of a grand eccentric.
²
Kanne and Beethoven consulted about the mass and about opera librettos; they had an ongoing debate about the emotional qualities of keys, which Beethoven believed in and Kanne did not.
³
That Kanne was becoming an important music critic in Vienna did not hurt.

Old friend Karl Peters, one of the first to write in the conversation books, remained in the circle. Beethoven had become close to lawyer Johann Baptist Bach, who helped him through the court case. He had finally befriended Joseph Blöchlinger, head of Karl's school; amid endless discussions of the boy, they often played chess together.
⁴
Among newer friends and sycophants were music publishers Antonio Diabelli, Sigmund Anton Steiner, and Tobias Haslinger, the latter an amiable young man who worked for Steiner. Beethoven was fond of Haslinger and amused them both with affectionate teasing. Beethoven regularly stopped by Steiner's music shop on the Graben, where he could visit with local musicians and where hopefuls like the young Franz Schubert observed him shyly from a distance.

Nearly all these men (Beethoven had no women confidants now) had some degree of expertise and influence in one area or another; all of them did him favors small and large. On the pages of the conversation books they could speak without worrying about prying ears. Politically they were progressive, which is to say that they hoped someday for the return of an enlightened emperor like Joseph II, or even Napoleon. In May 1820, Bernard wrote, “The whole of Europe is going to the dogs. N[apoleon] should have been let out for ten years.” The boyish jokes and naughtiness continued: Beethoven discreetly jots down his admiration for a passing woman's backside; friend Janitschek teases him about trolling for whores and later cries on the page, “I salute you, O Adonis!”; Peters again offers his wife; Beethoven writes down the title of a French book on venereal diseases.
⁵

Later in a conversation book, writing in French for privacy, Beethoven gave a sad summary of his old relationship with the teenage Julie Guicciardi, whose parents broke up their courtship (if that is what their relationship actually amounted to): “I was loved by her, and more than her husband ever was . . . She was already his wife before [they immigrated ] to Italy—and she sought me weeping, but I rejected her . . . If I had wished to give the strength of my life to that life, what would have remained for the nobler, the better?”
⁶
With no women available to him now but prostitutes and (if it was not all joking) friends' wives for release, that idea was what he had retreated to, to armor his regrets. He had seized on Karl as someone to love, someone to love him. But with Karl he experienced family life mostly in its troubles, without the consolations of a wife who could understand and forgive him.