Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph (124 page)

Meanwhile he had agreed without enthusiasm to an offer of composing an oratorio for the Boston Handel and Haydn Society. He was pleased that his reputation had reached North America but no happier with this oratorio project than he had been with the one from the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Vienna. Traditional oratorios did not inspire him. Neither piece would get even begun. In regard to the Boston offer he wrote in a conversation book, “I cannot write what I should like best to write, but that which the pressing need of money obliges me to write. This is not to say that I write only for money—when this period is past I hope to write what for me and for art is above all—Faust.”
⁷⁵

With the
Missa solemnis
nearly done and two new symphonies still in the speculative stage, his supreme ambition had turned toward Goethe's towering drama of human ambition and frailty (no one except perhaps Goethe knew that the second half of
Faust
was yet to come). More immediately, Beethoven was interested in returning to opera. There had been an acclaimed revival of
Fidelio
in Vienna the previous year, and the Kärntnertor Theater wanted a new opera from him.

That 1822 performance marked the debut in the role of another of the first great Leonores, soprano Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient, who was then seventeen. In a memoir she recalled her terror when Beethoven asked to take over the direction. She recalled the spectacle at the dress rehearsal: “With a bewildered face and unearthly inspired eyes, waving his baton back and forth with violent motions, he stood in the midst of the performing musicians and didn't hear a note!” She continued, “With each number, our courage dwindled further, and I felt as though I were watching one of Hoffmann's fantastic figures appear before me.” Finally, inevitably, the orchestra fell apart and house
Kapellmeister
Umlauf had to tell him it was not going to work. At the performance the next evening, the singer saw Beethoven sitting behind the conductor, following the performance with his fierce gaze as if he were trying to hear it by force of will.
⁷⁶

 

The
Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung
kept music lovers apprised of Beethoven's doings. In May 1822, the paper reported, “Our Beethoven seems to be becoming more receptive to music again, which he has shunned almost like a misogynist since his worsening hearing ailment. He has improvised masterfully a few times in a social gathering to everyone's delight and proved that he still knows how to handle the instrument with power, joy, and love. Hopefully the world of art will see the most exquisite fruits spring forth from these welcome changes.”
⁷⁷
No one could have had any idea of how lavish those fruits would be.

The year 1823 arrived with little to nothing of political importance happening around Europe. It remained that way for the rest of the decade, a testament to how thoroughly governments, above all in German lands, had shut down dissent, freedom of the press and of assembly, and as much as possible had drawn boundaries around speech, imagination, thought itself. In such times, instrumental music remained the only truly free art (only in the next century would demagogues address that matter as well). From the 1780s on, a generation had been inspired and troubled and devastated by a wave of revolution and war. That wave had crested and retreated. For artists, where was left to go but inward?

Despite his vocal hatred for the Metternich regime, Beethoven continued to go about his business without interference, his main order of business still taking the
Missa solemnis
to market. His first extant letter to Anton Schindler the previous June had included, “Please be so kind as to send me both the German and the French invitations to subscribe to the Mass.” He had come up with a new scheme for getting money out of this unwieldy work: he would offer subscriptions to crowned heads, high aristocracy, any person or organization in Europe and Russia willing to part with the money. Each subscriber was to receive a deluxe hand-copied score, not made by the composer but autographed by him. His own final score was now getting done—though he tinkered with details for months to come.

It was an entirely legitimate idea, but to bring it off required further dissimulation. Beethoven had to assure his potential subscribers that the mass would not be published in the near future, if at all, while at the same time keeping his row of publishers on the hook. He wrote the subscription pitch letters himself, each carefully crafted for its recipient including lavish helpings of flattery. For this initiative he had plenty of incentive. His debts had gotten to the point that in early 1823 he cashed in one of his eight bank shares, which had been sacred, not to be touched, intended as a bequest for Karl. But he had to keep his creditors at bay. Publisher Steiner and a tailor had threatened to sue (the latter from Beethoven's recent campaign to upgrade his threadbare wardrobe). The 1,250 florins he claimed from the bank share did not all go to his debt, however—he needed some of it for the expenses of copying the enormous mass scores for the subscribers.
⁷⁸
In March he formally made Karl his heir. From that point, no matter how desperate he was, he did not touch the remaining seven shares.

His pitch letters went to every acquaintance who was highly placed or knew somebody who was. He kept Schindler, Johann, and Karl busy collecting names and information and running chores. The conversation books buzzed with advice and plans among his circle. In February he wrote Goethe, telling him of his
Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage
setting and asking humbly for any comment: “Indeed your criticism, which might almost be regarded as the very essence of truth, would be extremely welcome to me, for I love truth more than anything . . . How highly would I value a general comment from you on the composing of music or on setting your poems to music!” He went on to ask Goethe to propose to the Weimar court a subscription to the mass.
⁷⁹
At that moment the titan of German letters was seventy-three and dangerously ill, his attention occupied by fever and delirium. Goethe recovered in the summer, but he never responded to Beethoven's ­letter.
⁸⁰

Beethoven wrote Carl Zelter in Berlin, Goethe's longtime musical adviser and now director of the celebrated Singakademie, asking him to put in a word with the Prussian court and suggesting that much of the mass could be done “almost entirely
a la capella
”—an absurd idea (the Singakademie performed only a cappella works).
⁸¹
Having just been named a member of the Royal Swedish Music Academy, Beethoven used that honor as part of a pitch to Karl XIV, the king of Sweden. Years before, the king had made Beethoven's acquaintance when he was Jean Bernadotte, an officer in Napoleon's army and disastrous French ambassador to Vienna. No offer came from Sweden.

Beethoven knew the secretary of the Privy Council of the Prussian court, Friedrich Duncker, author of the play
Leonore Prohaska
, to which Beethoven had contributed incidental music in 1815. In a long letter he gave Duncker details of his latest illnesses, complained of the expenses his nephew caused him, then got to the point with a touch of philosophy: “Although a man may find his greatest happiness in constantly looking
upwards
, yet in the end he too is obliged to pay attention to his immediate necessities . . . Well, I am now returning to the grand solemn Mass . . . which could also be performed as an oratorio.” The Prussian king did smile on a subscription.

As he started thinking about the actualities of performance, Beethoven began to promote the idea that the mass could be performed outside church, like an oratorio. This was a new conception for liturgical pieces, and it was being done increasingly around Europe. Though there were no reports of Beethoven attending a Mass in his adulthood, surely he understood at some point that the
Missa solemnis
had grown beyond anything imaginable within a sacred service, so secular venues were his best hope for performance.

By the end of his subscription campaign he had sent out about two dozen proposals. The asking price for each score was 50 ducats, about 250 florins, of which some 85 went for copying. The legwork done by his nephew and friends was, of course, free. In the end he sold ten subscriptions, for a net profit of around 1,650 florins. Combined with the eventual selling price of 1,000 florins from a publisher, his net for the mass amounted to something less than three years of a lower-level civil servant's income for his four years of labor. Among the subscribers were Tsar Alexander of Russia, the kings of Prussia and Denmark, the grand dukes of Darmstadt and Tuscany, the Cäcelia Verein chorus in Frankfurt, and Prince Galitzin in St. Petersburg—the last of whom actually arranged the premiere of the mass, that and a second one in the city the only complete performances of it in Beethoven's lifetime. Louis XVIII of France not only subscribed but sent Beethoven a commemorative gold medal, of which the recipient was inordinately proud, pointing out to people that it contained half a pound of gold.
⁸²

During these efforts, his games with publishers continued. In February he assured Peters in Leipzig that “two or three Masses” were forthcoming.
⁸³
At about the same time he offered the mass to publisher number five, Anton Diabelli's new house. Diabelli pressed him hard about it but got only promises.
⁸⁴

 

In the middle of all this business Beethoven was still thinking about future projects. In the spring he wrote Franz Grillparzer, Austria's leading playwright, “to ascertain the truth of the report that you had written an opera libretto in verse for me. How grateful I should be to you for your great kindness in having this beautiful poem sent to me in order to convince me that you really considered it worthwhile to offer a sacrifice to your sublime Muse on your behalf.”
⁸⁵
Beethoven had approached his acquaintance Count Dietrichstein, head of the two court theaters, to query the writer.
⁸⁶
Grillparzer had known about Beethoven since childhood, after his mother ran afoul of him in Heiligenstadt when she eavesdropped on his composing.

Grillparzer's well-known plays included
Sappho
and
The Golden Fleece
trilogy.
⁸⁷
The names of Beethoven and Grillparzer would come to be linked in history, but the latter was never other than skeptical, maybe even scared, of Beethoven's music. The brooding and erratic writer's musical loyalties lay in the eighteenth century. In his journal he railed at Beethoven's “unfortunate” influence, his violations of “all conception of musical order and unity,” his sacrifice of beauty to the “powerful, violent, and intoxicating.”
⁸⁸

At the time Grillparzer and Beethoven communicated, the writer actually had two librettos available, one dark and one light. The serious one was
Drahomira
, from an old Bohemian legend,
⁸⁹
but he submitted the light one first, saying later that he “did not want to give Beethoven the opportunity to step still closer to the extreme limits of music which lay nearby, threatening like precipices, in partnership with material that was semi-diabolical.” So he put before Beethoven
Melusine
, from an old folk tale about a mermaid.

The two men had some memorable meetings that Grillparzer recalled. Arriving with Schindler for the first visit, he first found the composer “lying in soiled nightwear on a disordered bed, a book in his hand . . . As we entered Beethoven arose from the bed, gave me his hand, poured out his feelings of goodwill and respect and at once broached the subject of the opera. ‘Your work lives here,' said he, pointing to his heart. ‘I am going to the country in a few days and shall at once begin to compose it. Only, I don't know what to do with the hunters' chorus which forms the introduction. Weber [in
Der Freischütz
] used four horns; you see, therefore, that I must have eight. Where will this lead to?'”

Beethoven was joking, but Grillparzer apparently didn't get it.
⁹⁰
He suggested that the hunters' chorus could be omitted. Here began months of consultations and revisions over the
Melusine
libretto that ended up nowhere. Folk tales about mermaids were not in the least Beethoven's style, and as he kept Grillparzer dangling for years he hardly sketched a note for the opera. Still, the two men were able to joke together, after a fashion. When Beethoven said he intended to remain unmarried, old bachelor Grillparzer replied with an archetypal male conceit: “Quite right! The intellects have no figures, and the figures have no intellect.”
⁹¹

 

On March 19, 1823, came a watershed moment in Beethoven's life, when he presented a copy of the
Missa solemnis
to Archduke, now also Cardinal, Rudolph, five years after he had proposed the idea. There is no record that Rudolph paid Beethoven anything for the mass or for the presentation copy, but Rudolph did write to the Saxon court suggesting it buy a subscription, and it did. When the cardinal was in Vienna now, he expected a three-hour composition lesson every day, which all but precluded composing. Beethoven felt frustrated but resigned. To Ries in London he wrote, “I am being shorn by the Cardinal more closely than I used to be. If I don't go to him, my absence is regarded as a
crimen legis majestatus
,” Beethoven's bad Latin for “high treason.” He ends, naughtily, “Give my best greetings to your wife until I arrive in London. Take care. You think I am
old
, but I am a
youthful old man
.”
⁹²

In April there were two more watersheds. He finished the monumental
Diabelli
Variations, most of which had been sketched in 1819 and then put aside for the mass and other projects. And his rotund violinist and champion Ignaz Schuppanzigh returned to Vienna from Russia, reconstituted his string quartet, and resumed concertizing.
⁹³
His first orchestral concert of 1824 in the Augarten included three movements of the Fifth Symphony.
⁹⁴