Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph (120 page)

The court decision giving him Karl's guardianship was effectively final. Now the boy was largely insulated from his mother at Blöchlinger's boarding school. In summer 1820, Johanna made a last, desperate appeal directly to the emperor, and the official papers survived. They provide a view into how much the authorities in Metternich's police state knew about its citizens. The chief of the Royal Police and the Censor's Office reported to Emperor Franz II, “It is evident that this boy, now 13 years old . . . ran wild to some extent under the influence of his uneconomical mother, who did not have the best reputation. For a year now, at his uncle's expense, he has been in the private school of a certain Blöchlinger . . . His talent and his application are praised, and if he commits many thoughtless and youthful pranks . . . they are ascribed much more to his imprudence, combined with a passionate temperament and the habit of doing violence to obedience and decorum . . . than to ill will.”
⁷
The emperor had plenty of reason to be suspicious of Beethoven—and his whole circle of liberals, for that matter—but he did not assent to Johanna's petition. She gave up trying to get her son back, but she never did lose contact with him. Meanwhile if she had in part lost a son, she had a new, illegitimate daughter for consolation.

 

Beethoven was desperate over money. Karl accounted for much of the drain, in addition to Beethoven's old carelessness with finances and the expense of spas and medical treatment. He still did not spend on luxuries, though his wine bills were high.
⁸
His habit of floating two or more flats at the same time still consumed a good deal of his income, likewise servants. His anxiety about money would never abate. Eventually some of his sketch pages were covered by numbers, obsessive financial figuring, written in long columns to be added up since he never learned to multiply. He composed more of the little piano pieces he called bagatelles, “trifles” intended for quick sale. At the same time he fell into the dangerous habit of promising unfinished, sometimes unbegun pieces to publishers who might give him an advance. There were other compromises. In 1819, he had directed Ries in London to try to sell a disjointed
Hammerklavier:
“Should the [
Hammerklavier
] not be suitable for London, I could send another one; or you could also omit the Largo and begin straight away with the Fugue, which is in the last movement, and then the Adagio, and then for the third movement the Scherzo—and omit entirely no. 4 . . . Or you could take just the first movement and Scherzo and let them form the whole sonata.”
⁹

In April 1820, he sent ten variations on national folk songs, eventually op. 107, to publisher Nikolaus Simrock in Bonn. He asked for 315 florins, telling Simrock, “I am not asking anything more for them since I have composed many of these trifles.”
¹⁰
In another letter, he offered Simrock the enormous work he had only just set out on: “You will receive the Mass by the end of May or the beginning of June. So please remit the 100 Louis d'or to Herr F[ranz] Brentano, to whom I will send the work.” Franz, the businessman husband of Beethoven's old friend (or lover) Antonie Brentano, was serving as middleman for some of his larger transactions.

To help keep the Brentanos on his team, he dedicated the new op. 109 Sonata to Maximiliane, the couple's piano-playing daughter. To Maxe he wrote a letter about it that was both sweet and disingenuous: “A dedication!!!! Well, this is not one of those dedications which are used and abused by thousands of people—it is the spirit which unites the noble and finer people of this earth and which
time
can
never
destroy. It is this spirit which . . . calls you to mind and makes me see you still as a child, and likewise your beloved parents, your most excellent and gifted mother, your father imbued with so many truly good and noble qualities.”
¹¹
To Franz he wrote, “I would like you to regard this work as a token of my lasting devotion to you and your whole family—but do not put any wrong construction of this dedication, by fancying that it is a hint to use your influence.” Perhaps, but he depended on Franz for his good wishes and, in his service as a go-between, his reputation as a businessman.

Did Beethoven actually believe he would finish the mass this year? His old habit of excessive confidence about his output was accelerating—though at times in earlier years there appeared to be no limits to his productivity. Now if age and physical decline did not slow him down, deafness did. He could no longer work through pieces at the keyboard, so he had painstakingly to go through them note by note. Probably he was still feeling his way with the mass, did not yet envision its full scope. In any case, before long he took to deliberately misleading publishers about works in the pipeline.

To add to his endless annoyances, another portrait painter showed up wanting him to sit still. This one was Joseph Karl Stieler, from Munich. He had been engaged in making pictures of great men, his catches including Goethe (for a painting eventually as famous as his Beethoven). He was also responsible for the notorious Gallery of Beauties, portraits of thirty-six women who had captured the eye of King Ludwig I of Bavaria. Stieler was, in other words, a successful artist for the high-placed, appreciated for turning out flattering images.

Stieler's portrait shows Beethoven in a grape arbor, holding a manuscript and pencil.
¹²
The manuscript is labeled “
Missa solemnis
in D♯” (the strange key name was the German indication for D major). Here Beethoven is fierce and indomitable, his head tilting forward so he looks upward past the viewer, rapt in his genius. Stieler tidied up not only his subject's ungovernable hair but also his clothes and his face. This person is a roughly handsome, well-dressed man, which the actual subject was not. For the next two centuries Stieler's painting endured as the ultimate Romantic image of Beethoven—which is to say, an icon in the cult of genius.

That spring of 1820, Beethoven sent a note to one of the prime architects of the myth that was forming around him: the critic, composer, and fabulist E. T. A. Hoffmann, whose 1813 articles on the Fifth Symphony had placed Beethoven once and for all among the Romantic demigods. Hoffmann's name had come up in the conversation books: “In the
Phantasie-Stücke
by Hoffmann,” somebody wrote, “you are often spoken of.” This elicited one of Beethoven's puns based on the meaning of the writer's name: “Hofmann [
sic
] you are no hope-man.” By now Hoffmann had reached the summit of his fame with his tales of doppelgängers and automatons and other delirious fantasies. If he had not done so already, Beethoven perused the critic's writings about himself and probably sampled the tales as well, and sent off a letter of thanks. It was a tip of the hat from a living myth to his prime mythologizer: “I am seizing the opportunity . . . to approach a man so full of life and wit as you are—Also you have written about my humble self. Also our
weak Herr Starke
[another pun:
Stark
= ‘strong'] showed me some lines of yours about me in his album. Thus I am given to believe that you take some interest in me. Allow me to say that this from a man with such distinguished gifts as yourself pleases me very much. I wish you everything that is beautiful and good.”
¹³

Meanwhile Beethoven had seized a new publisher, or rather two related ones. He sold Continental rights to twenty-five Scottish folk songs (op. 108), first arranged for Thomson in Scotland and now revised, to the house of Adolf Schlesinger in Berlin. The publisher's son Moritz ran an allied company in Paris. When the variations were dispatched he sketched some more piano bagatelles, which were a steady concern of his in these days—small pieces to be sold in sets. At the same time he agreed to write three new piano sonatas for Schlesinger. That commitment he kept. Though he was working away at the mass, between this summer and the end of 1821, the only major pieces he completed were the sonatas for Schlesinger, opp. 109–11. All three live among the legends of his late works.

In rural Mödling in the summer of 1820, his various initiatives continued, some of them trivial, some underhanded, some (the piano sonatas) with splendid outcomes. As always he rambled the hills and woods and gorges, sometimes with visitors. As he stood with his editor friend Bernard on a viewpoint looking out over the landscape, Bernard wrote in a conversation book phrases that must have echoed in Beethoven's feelings and fantasies: “One feels quite a different person in the country . . . Let's found an Institute for philology, philanthropy, poetry, and music here in Mödling—and have that cook to cook for us!”
¹⁴

In autumn a Dr. Müller, visiting philologist from Bremen, noted like most visitors that Beethoven went on about “everything, the government, the police, the manners of the aristocracy, in a critical and mocking manner. The police knew it, but left him in peace either because he was a fantastic [i.e., crazy] or because he was a brilliant artistic genius.” Likely there was one more reason the police let Beethoven alone: in dealing with an artist adopted by Archduke Rudolph, brother of the emperor, the police had to proceed with caution. If Beethoven was aware that his connection to Rudolph gave him a certain umbrella of protection in a repressive state, he did not appear to notice it. But unlike the fate of so many in Vienna, there was no record he was ever harassed or even visited by the police.

His friendships in these years tended to last, but publishers came and went. Beethoven and his Viennese publisher Steiner, whose house had printed his works great and small since the Seventh and Eighth Symphonies, were growing apart, partly because of Steiner's mounting impatience over the money Beethoven owed him—some 3,000 florins. Beethoven had been stalling Steiner for a long time, and not politely, meanwhile shopping his music elsewhere. The inevitable demand from Steiner to pay up arrived in late 1820: “I am not in a position to lend money without interest; I helped you as a friend in need; I relied upon and believed your word of honor . . . nor have I ever plagued you . . . and must therefore solemnly protest the reproaches made against me.”
¹⁵
Meanwhile, the folk-song arrangements and variations that had earned Beethoven a steady trickle of income from George Thomson in Scotland dried up, after years of the publisher's entreating him to write more simply. Thomson had done nothing but lose money on Beethoven.

As for Karl, he remained the reasonably good student he had been, even with the increase in his laziness and acting out. If Beethoven had gained any understanding or tolerance regarding normal teenage foolishness, it is not evident in his dealings with his ward. In the summer Karl ran away from boarding school to his mother again. Beethoven wrote him, “Little by little you have become accustomed to horrible deeds . . . Now when you are more than 13 years old, goodness must establish itself anew in you. You should not hate your mother, but you cannot view her as another good mother. This is evident, and as long as you are guilty of further violations against me, you cannot become a good person; that is the same as if you rebelled against your father.” The same day he wrote headmaster Blöchlinger detailed directions of what to say to the boy: “Lead back to the pain that he has caused me,” and, “[T]he foundation of his moral improvement is to be based upon the recognition of his mother's true nature.”
¹⁶

Yet compared to the troubles of the immediate past, both Karl and his mother were going easy on Beethoven. His health was not going easy. In January 1821, he contracted a rheumatic fever that kept him in bed for six weeks with violent pain in his joints.
¹⁷
By March he was up and working, but then in July he came down with a jaundice that lasted some two months. This hepatitis was not painful, but he called it “a disease that is extremely loathsome to me.” If the illness comes from a liver condition, as his likely did, it can lead to mental confusion and cause fluid to accumulate in the abdominal cavity. By this point Beethoven wore a body belt, “owing to the sensitive condition of my abdomen.”
¹⁸
In the next few years his liver was going to be his undoing. Debility would come and go, but from this point illness would not relent for one day in carrying him toward his grave.

 

Beethoven's life in 1821 left relatively few traces in the record. For some reason no conversation books survived from this year, and relatively few letters. There is no extant response from him, for one example, to the passing of Josephine Deym-Brunsvik-Stackelberg, who had been his obsessive love in the first decade of the century and remained a candidate for his Immortal Beloved. Josephine died in Vienna in March after a miserable second marriage had left her alone and childless. Her sister Therese, once Beethoven's vivacious young pupil and now a pious old maid, had resisted their connection with all her influence. Yet when her sister died, Therese wrote in her journal, “If Josephine doesn't suffer punishment [after death] on account of Luigi's woe—his wife! what wouldn't she have made out of this hero!”
¹⁹
Did Beethoven feel any comparable regret at Josephine's passing?

But he composed, finishing the new piano sonatas for Schlesinger and adding forests of notes to the mounting pages of
Missa solemnis
sketches. In the summer he went to Baden for the cure, with its elaborate regime of bathing and medication.

This summer the local commissioner of police in Baden, dining with a party, was interrupted by a constable who advised him that they had a tramp in the jail who would not shut up. “He keeps on yelling that he is Beethoven; but he's a ragamuffin, has no hat, an old coat . . . nothing by which he can be identified.” The commissioner said he would get to it in the morning. But in the middle of the night a policeman woke him up, saying the disturbance was unbearable. The tramp was demanding that Herr Herzog, a local music director, be called to identify him. Herzog was dragged out of bed and taken to the jail. “That
is
Beethoven!” he exclaimed. Herzog took Beethoven back to his own house and gave him his best room.