Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph (122 page)

 

All the late music was to take somewhere between decades and a century to emerge fully into the repertoire, free of questions of Beethoven's sanity and mutterings of the harm that deafness did to his work. In a time long distant from his, because of its warmth and lyricism, the Sonata in A-flat Major, op. 110, became the most popular of the late sonatas.

It begins with an almost childlike theme of surpassing tenderness, a voice clearly Beethovenian but never quite heard in the world before. To the tempo Moderato is added “songful and very expressive.”
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There follow four measures of a soft chordal theme marked “with amiability,” then another expansive and beautiful melody that varies and expands the opening. (As in op. 26, internal variations in the themes foreshadow a later variation movement.) As in op. 109, the songful beginning gives way to rippling arpeggios, but here they are warm, and that warmth continues into the throbbing second theme. Except for a few bars of
forte
at the beginning of that second theme, the whole movement is soft,
piano
to
pianissimo
.

Here is an example of the capricious surface of much of the late music: from measure 30 there is a high-register, exquisite theme of two bars that is varied in the next two bars; then comes a slow shimmer of six beats, three bars of transition; then the second theme proper sings in the low register for three bars before giving way to another little new idea, then another. There is a sense of the composer picking up an idea, playing with it, then dropping it for a new one equally beautiful, like a child putting down a toy and reaching for another. Yet, unified by inner motifs, the kaleidoscopic train of melodies and textures and feelings does not fall apart but rather flows and sings ceaselessly. Beethoven the consummate master of form and continuity seems now to have the ability to go from anywhere to virtually anywhere else and make it work (a quality he shares with Mozart).

He continued to think of himself not just as a
Komponist
but as a
Tondichter
, a tone poet. The late sonatas and quartets are the distilled essence of his Poetic style, when the larger narrative and larger formal patterns are covered over by an intimate involvement with the moment—shifting ideas and shifting emotions, approaching at times the effect of a stream of consciousness. In the first movement, after that parade of some six distinct ideas in the course of a minute, suddenly without a repeat we begin the short development. It gives way almost undetectably to the recapitulation, which is transformed in its own development, its diaphanous arpeggios wafting over the whole of the keyboard.

From tender lyricism to farce: for the second movement a rambunctious two-beat scherzo based on two German folk songs—first, “My cat has had kittens,” second and more intriguing, “I'm a slob, you're a slob.” Another instant change of mood: a slow movement on the order of an operatic recitative and arioso, the beginning indescribably sorrowful, then a long-arched arioso in A-flat minor (and 12/16 time) marked “plaintive song.”
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Here is music rising from Beethoven's own sorrow to become universal, what the Romantics called
Weltschmerz
, “world-pain.” It sinks to a whisper and a
pianissimo
pause.

The finale is fugal, the main subject based on the opening theme of the first movement. While the fugues in earlier sonatas were mostly robust unto aggressive, none more so than the
Hammerklavier
, this one flows like a choral work. As it reaches a climax comes another one of those startling but somehow inevitable turns that mark the late music: the fugue abruptly falls to pieces and we find ourselves back in the third-movement arioso, now in G minor, more devastated than before. After its gasping, sobbing song, it too seems to dissolve, and we return softly to another fugue, its theme the inversion of the first one. Its opening is marked “little by little coming back to life.” The technique of thematic inversion, for centuries a staple of formal counterpoint, here is made into intense drama and emotion.
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Soon the fugue theme returns triumphantly right side up, and the music gathers strength to the rippling arpeggios of the end.
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More than ever, the late sonatas seem to survey the entirety of life in one vision, from tragic to earthy to exalted, often shifting in the blink of an eye—just like Beethoven's own emotional life. That pattern is distilled further in the next sonata.

 

Beethoven may or may not have intended the two-movement op. 111 in C Minor to be his last piano sonata, but there is no question that it stands as a summation and apotheosis of the man and composer, of the late style, of the furthest potentials of expression in tone.

The overall form of the first movement is a Maestoso introduction and an Allegro that unites fugue and sonata form in yet another singular way. It is also the last appearance of Beethoven's “C-minor mood,” with the intense-unto-demonic qualities that implies. On a sketch page for the movement he copied out fugue subjects from Mozart's Requiem and Haydn's early F Minor String Quartet.
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So op. 111 is at once a return to models, a summation, and a radical reconception.

The introduction begins with pealing, ambiguous diminished chords, the effect recalling the introduction to the
Pathétique—
twenty-five years of growing and suffering later. That gives way to a low, snarling trill, then a roaring, striding C-minor theme breaks out. It starts, stops, stutters, trails off, sounding like a fugue subject that cannot find its footing, that struggles to become a fugue—which it finally achieves, briefly, on a variant of the theme. After a tender hint of a second theme and a repeat of the exposition, the music falls into another short but furious fugue in the development.
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In Baroque terms, that first movement of the C Minor is a sort of prelude leading to a sort of fugue. The movement proper, marked Allegro con brio ed appassionato (“fast and with fire and passion”) rages to its end largely on the opening motif, sometimes varied and fragmented, most of it loud until a calming coda that seems to enfold the whole of the movement while preparing the next. The tempo is constantly in flux, slowing, speeding, lurching. This movement is the anti–opp. 109 and 110. Call it a representation of the turbulent, the disjointed, the furious: the manic, unheroic earthly.

The answer, perhaps Beethoven's ultimate answer, is transcendence. From furious and fragmented to a poignant song that seems to stop time in its course. The movement is labeled “Arietta,” the tempo Adagio molto semplice e cantabile—very simply and songfully. It is as if C major were discovered for the first time, like a revelation. As in the op. 109 finale, here are variations on a simple and profound theme, but variations beyond any by anybody else: an unbroken flow that gradually increases in speed, by the third variation reaching a swirling, rhythmic gaiety. The music rises and speeds further, reaching magical shimmering realms high on the keyboard, until finally and unforgettably, the piano is alight with triple trills.

At the coda a specter of the original melody returns and with it the trills, the uncanny celestial light that shimmers on and on, finally making a slow descent back to earth and a simple conclusion.
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These last pages are music beyond words, beyond poetry and philosophy, almost beyond earthly life, but encompassing them all.

In these incomparable pieces Beethoven largely left behind not only the heroic style of his middle music but also the heroic ideal, the dream of happiness bestowed from above by benevolent despots like Joseph II or conquerors like Napoleon—or by revolutions. In the late music power is overcome by tenderness and spirituality, narrative trumped by poetry.

Here then is his Poetic style. As with the Heroic style of his middle years, “poetic” describes some but not all of the music of the period, but it can be called the central current. In the
Eroica
Beethoven gave the responsibility for creating a new world to the conquering hero. Now in his mind the road to happiness, to Elysium, to the perfected society, has become inward, within the heart and soul of each man and woman.

 

Business under God's sky was a different matter. Beethoven had always been a shrewd and sharp dealer of his wares, but now his desperation over finances and his estrangement from reality, including the reality of his own actions, took him past any reasonable moral and ethical line—though it never shook his treasured but increasingly hazy sense of his own goodness. Again, though, part of his desperation was that works like the
Diabelli
Variations and especially the
Missa solemnis
could never pay him back for the time they cost. Any prospective publisher knew that bringing out the mass was going to be a money-losing proposition for many years to come, and the only reason to do it was for the prestige of bringing out what Beethoven was calling his magnum opus.

Another element of his dealings in the next years was that brother Johann had begun seeing to his interests. In the middle of 1822, Beethoven did what he could to reconcile with Johann, whose wife Therese he had long detested (not entirely without reason). Ludwig wrote Johann in May:

 

I have made inquiries about apartments . . . the scheme [of living together] would enable us both to save a good deal . . . I have nothing against your wife. I only hope that she will realize how much could be gained for you too by your living with me . . . Please, let us have peace. God grant that the most natural bond, the bond between brothers, may not again be broken in an unnatural way. In any case my life will certainly not last very much longer . . . owing to my indisposition which has now lasted for three and a half months [the “gout in the chest”] I am very sensitive and irritable . . . Away with everything that
cannot promote
my object, which is, that I and my good Karl may settle down to a kind of life that is particularly necessary and more suitable to me.
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Beethoven had, of course, a great deal against Johann's wife, and Therese soon gave him cause for further outrage. The idea of the brothers living together was absurd, and it appears Johann understood that. Still, they drew closer, for a while lived next door to each other in Vienna when Johann was wintering at the house of his baker brother-in-law.
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This brother prosperous from the pharmacy trade began to advise Ludwig again and to carry on some dealings with publishers—just as their late brother Carl used to do but this time with better results.

Having bought his mansion in Gneixendorf, Johann had begun to play the man of property and leisure, but he seems to have fooled no one. Nephew Karl opined in a conversation book that while Johann might be “worldly, money-grubbing, and vain,” he still had a genuine desire to help.
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Johann had been kind to Karl, enough to arouse Ludwig's suspicion that his brother wanted the guardianship for himself.

Gerhard von Breuning, the son of Beethoven's old Bonn friend Stephan, remembered Johann cutting an outlandish figure, with his bony physique and out-of-plumb features, his clothes an attempt at elegance including white gloves that were always too long for his fingers, so the ends dangled. He was often seen in the Prater park joining the procession of the fashionable in his fancy carriage, sometimes with two liveried servants on board. “Everybody thinks him a fool,” Count Moritz Lichnowsky wrote in a conversation book. “We call him the Chevalier . . . all the world says of him that his only merit is that he bears your name.” Certainly Johann was proud of his connection to his famous brother. He attended concerts of Ludwig's music during which he applauded in his flapping gloves and attempted to shout the loudest bravos.
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At least partly as a result of Johann's advice, in 1822 Beethoven started promising the mass to a row of publishers. The year before, Nikolaus Simrock in Bonn had put his payment for it on reserve with Franz Brentano. In May Beethoven wrote Brentano, “The Mass will be with you in Frankfurt [for Simrock] at the end of next
month
at the latest.” He had meanwhile offered the mass to Schlesinger in Berlin and now—along with smaller pieces—to C. F. Peters in Leipzig as well. Beethoven was at first uneasy about making the Peters offer, but Johann told him, “That's business.”
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C. F. Peters aspired to have new Beethoven works in his catalog, and the mass seemed like a prestigious start. So began months of machinations by both of them. Since Beethoven acknowledged that he had shown the piece to others, Peters's main device in pushing his case was to run down the competition. He wrote Beethoven that Steiner “has dealt unfaithfully with me and has repaid my friendship with ingratitude.”
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In this he was surely playing on Beethoven's break with Steiner, who in turn advised Peters that Beethoven was “absolutely not to be dealt with.”

When it came to the publishers Adolf Schlesinger in Berlin and his son Moritz in Paris, things got nastier. Shortly before he assured Simrock that he would have the mass in his hands in another month, Beethoven had written Adolf Schlesinger, “As to the Mass I have already agreed to let you have the work itself
together with the pianoforte arrangement
for an honorarium of 650 Reichsthaler in Prussian currency.”
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Knowing it had been offered to Schlesinger, Peters heatedly wrote Beethoven that “a Christian Mass composed by a Beethoven cannot come into the hands of a Jew,” above all not “this Jew [Schlesinger], who is nowhere respected.”
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With that cue, Beethoven responded to Peters in kind: soon after offering the mass to Schlesinger, Beethoven wrote Peters, “I
agree to give
you the Mass together with the pianoforte arrangement for—1000 [florins] . . . You will receive a careful copy of the score by the end of July . . . In no circumstances will Schlesinger ever get
anything more from me
, because he too has played me a Jewish trick.”
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But Beethoven had his own tricks. Instead of the mass, whose final score was well in the future, Beethoven assembled a stack of lesser pieces to send to Peters: three small lieder including
Der Kuss
, more or less finished in 1798, six bagatelles, all but one from 1802 and earlier, and four marches for military band.
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He touched up all the pieces before sending them, so it was some time before Peters got them.
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