Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph (15 page)

In the massive Adagio assai that begins the Piano Quartet in E-flat Major, listeners then and later could only be stunned at the subtlety and depth of feeling, call it a certain wistful pathos, coming from a composer of age fourteen. This does not sound like learned rhetoric, like everything he had written before; it sounds like music from the heart. What had he experienced to arrive at such an outpouring? All that can be certain is that he had experienced his model, Mozart's Violin Sonata in G, K. 379. In his opening, Beethoven follows Mozart's introduction closely. The gestures and the low, close harmonies are Mozart's, and so is the Mozartian tone: languid, seemingly suspended between conflicting emotions, peculiarly shadowed for the major mode.

For all their modeling, these works are closer than Beethoven had ever been to the composer the world would know. While he based each of them on a particular Mozart violin sonata, his imitation became freer, more his own, as he went. He began making the models his own with his choice of medium: the virtually unknown piano quartet instead of solo sonata.
²⁹
If in all the quartets he generally follows Mozart's forms, meters, and key relations, he extends everything; his quartets are longer and more substantial than the Mozart solo sonatas. The C Major Quartet has the dancing gaiety of its model in Mozart's C Major Sonata, K. 296, though Beethoven's is more madcap.
³⁰
Like Mozart, Beethoven concludes the piece grandly, with double-stops on the strings—but Beethoven's finish is longer and louder than Mozart's.

After his introduction to the E-flat Quartet, Beethoven, like Mozart, launches into minor mode, but more so: a fiercely driving Allegro con spirito. The most striking thing is the key. After Mozart's G-major beginning, the Allegro is in an unexpected G minor, but that key itself is common, and a resonant one for the violin because it involves the open strings. In his quartet, Beethoven makes the same turn to the parallel minor, but that puts him in the outlandish key, at the time almost unknown, of E-flat minor—unresonant and ungratifying for the strings, but giving them and the untempered keyboard a singular shadowed coloration. (E-flat minor was familiar, though, to someone who knew
The Well-Tempered Clavier
.)
³¹
Here begins Beethoven's lifelong attraction to unusual keys, often ones in the deep-flat direction, like the six flats of E-flat minor.

In the fourth bar of his Allegro, Mozart introduces a dissonance, a diminished-seventh chord. Beethoven makes the same harmonic move in the same place, but his dissonance is more stark, a D diminished seventh clashing with a tonic pedal, and he prolongs the tension for four bars to Mozart's one. In volume, Mozart never goes beyond
forte
and
piano;
right away, Beethoven crescendos from
forte
to
fortissimo
on the dissonant chord. Beethoven's piano part is harder to play than Mozart's, challenging the fingers of amateur musicians.

Foreshadowed here is another of Beethoven's lifelong patterns. He pushes every envelope, makes his models his own partly by doing everything
more:
volume levels both louder and softer than his models, everything more intense, more poignant, more driven and dramatic, more individual, longer and weightier, with heightened contrasts and greater virtuosity. There is an attempt to give each piece a higher profile, a more individual personality than in the past. Mozart and Haydn shared motives among their movements; Beethoven took that unifying device further, creating intricate interconnections of melody, harmony, key, and gesture throughout a work.

The other two piano quartets are based less directly on Mozart's notes, more on the violin sonatas' tone and especially their forms. Maybe here was the essential point of this assignment: not just to study in Mozart the common layout of Classical forms—sonata form, theme and variations, rondo—but also to understand how malleable these formal models not only can be but must be, for a composer who wants to say something fresh, to make forms motivated from within rather than by rote.

The signs of immaturity in the Piano Quartets are less glaring and pervasive than in Beethoven's earlier pieces. Here, his age is shown in the restricted string writing, the cello usually stuck fast to the bass line. A testament to how close to his later voice these quartets are is that he used ideas from them in three works graced with opus numbers: the C Minor Piano Trio, op. 1, no. 3, and two of the Piano Sonatas op. 2.
³²

There would be another legacy of these Piano Quartets. They were breakthroughs for him, and the spark of that breakthrough was Mozart. Through Mozart, Beethoven began to discover himself. Mozart was to remain his prime talisman, the model to whom he would return year after year for ideas and inspiration. On a 1790 sketch in C minor, Beethoven broke off and wrote, “This entire passage has been [inadvertently] stolen from the Mozart Symphony in C [the ‘Linz'].” He then reworked the passage slightly and signed it “Beethoven himself.”
³³
At the same time that Mozart became a talisman, he became a challenge, another father from whom Beethoven needed to escape.

 

For Christian Neefe, 1785, the year of his student's Piano Quartets, his reinstatement as full court organist, and the publication of his
Dilettanterien
was also the year when it became clear that whatever his strengths were, whatever his devotion to the goals of the Aufklärung and Illuminati, his talents did not include leadership. As prefect of the Minerval Church, Neefe had earned enemies.

In a written denunciation, some lodge members, among them court official Clemens August von Schall and
Kapelle
hornist Nikolaus Simrock, declared brother Glaucus to be a failure as prefect. Joseph Eichoff, eventually one of Beethoven's closet friends in Bonn, penned a devastating appraisal. Neefe is a good musician, Eichoff wrote, but he is proud and opportunistic, and he insults people we don't need as enemies. Specifically, Eichoff cited a row of moral faults:
Self-regard
. Neefe believes all his works are masterpieces, and when people are looking at his things, he watches them intently, waiting for praise. He cavalierly wrote a satire of Count Belderbusch and read it out in a beer hall.
Pride
. He is a name-dropper and presumes inappropriate intimacy with people.
Thirst for power
. He is argumentative, can't stand being contradicted, believes as leader he can do no wrong.
Talkativeness
. He likes to gossip over a glass of wine at Widow Koch's wine house.
³⁴

Whether or not the accusations against Neefe were fair, they were believed. By 1786, Bonn's Minerval Church of Stagira had collapsed. By that point, in any case, the Order of Illuminati had been outlawed in Bavaria, and its eight-year career was essentially over. But the passion for Aufklärung had not dampened among progressives in Bonn. Many Illuminati members, including Neefe, soon joined a new, less radical, but in the end more broadly influential organization, the Lesegesellschaft, or Reading Society.

Later Neefe wrote of this period in his life with regret but remarkably little bitterness: the ideas of the order were splendid, he said, “but in the results I discovered many gaps, many personal weaknesses, and still worse things that convinced me to remove myself.”
³⁵
The “science” of moral self-improvement had turned out more elusive than expected.

If with the collapse of the Illuminati lodge Neefe failed in his most ambitious endeavor to promote Aufklärung, Beethoven's Piano Quartets represent what may have been the last major creative collaboration between Neefe and his pupil. Though in his mid-teens, Beethoven was now a rival to Neefe on the organ bench at court and some of his friends were sworn enemies of his teacher, the two remained colleagues, and the older man continued his paternal interest in the younger. At court, they worked peaceably side by side.

In any case, after the Piano Quartets, Beethoven seems to have largely put composition aside for several years, giving his energy to keyboard practice.
³⁶
By the time he left Bonn, he would be one of the finest piano players alive. And in his last years in Bonn, new mentors and champions shaped him.

6

C
ONCEIVED AND DECREED
under the reign of Elector Maximilian Friedrich, the University of Bonn was inaugurated in November 1786, under new Elector Maximilian Franz. He decreed a grand Rhenish celebration. The town was decked with flags, and bells rang the hours through three days of ceremonies. There were processions, church services, and speeches; public debates were held around a triumphal arch erected for the occasion.
¹
In his inaugural proclamation to the faculty, Max Franz laid out an agenda for the school by way of citing his brother the emperor in Vienna: “Joseph, who knew how to value men and the benefits of the Aufklärung, gave them to you in the confidence that you will live up to his high intentions.”
²

A certain symbolism figured in the first location of the university. It took over the Bonn Academy, the former gymnasium of the Jesuits, who for years had imposed a conservative Catholic education across Bonn, as across most of Germany. The first rector of the university was liberal theologian Bonifaz Oberthür, once a brother in the Illuminati lodge.
³
The reactionary clerics and professors of Cologne, nominally subjects of Max Franz, understood that this new university was a progressive rival to the University of Cologne, so they made themselves the first line of resistance against the liberal and anticlerical spirit flowing from Bonn. If the intellectual vanguard of the University of Bonn did not comprise the godless revolutionaries they were painted as, they constituted a true hotbed of Aufklärers, committed to all things rational and practical, their religion tending to Protestant and deist.

The founding of the university epitomized the golden age of old Bonn's intellectual and artistic life. It was as a representative figure of that high-Aufklärung era and a contributor to it that Beethoven came of age. The early faculty included physician and Beethoven's friend Franz Gerhard Wegeler. Teaching classics was Eulogius Schneider, a former monk who was heading away from the church and toward revolution. The philosophy of Immanuel Kant became a staple of the university. Among the early students was Bartholomäus Fischenich, later professor of natural law and human rights, who became friends with Friedrich Schiller over their mutual fervor for Kant.
⁴
The galvanizing force of the Aufklärung ferment in Bonn flowed not just from the university, however, but also from the new Elector and his court.

Maximilian Franz hardly looked the part of a thinker or a dynamic leader. He adored music and dancing, but his principal enthusiasm was the table: one of the heroic trenchermen of his time, Max Franz is said eventually to have weighed upwards of 480 pounds. The sight of the Elector heaving his prodigious avoirdupois into motion on the dance floor earned him the nickname
L'abbe sacrebleu
, “Father Omygod.”
⁵
In manner usually jovial and easygoing if oddly affected, Max Franz gave audiences in a worn black uniform and wandered the streets of his capital in the early morning wrapped in a dirty topcoat.
⁶
In those and other aspects of style and substance he echoed his brother Emperor Joseph II in Vienna. Growing up in Vienna under the rule of his formidable mother, Empress Maria Theresa, Franz took up Joseph's high-Aufklärung ideals. In 1770, the year Beethoven was born, Franz's mother sent his sister Marie Antoinette off to France to become queen beside Louis XVI. On Max Franz's one visit to his sister in France, his lack of polish—perhaps also his girth—embarrassed Marie Antoinette and created a rift between them. In Vienna, he had befriended Mozart, and for a while Mozart envisioned himself the future court
Kapellmeister
in Bonn. But by 1781, Mozart was fed up, writing his father, “Stupidity stares out of his eyes. He talks and pontificates incessantly, always in falsetto.”
⁷

Still, behind this Elector's outlandish facade lay convictions that bore vitally on Bonn and its life practical, philosophical, and artistic. He wrote, “To rule a land and people is a duty, a service to the state. I must make everything depend on making my people happy.” If his table was excessive, he was generally frugal in matters of spending and ceremony. The extravagant building projects with which Elector Clemens August had once nearly bankrupted the state were anathema to Max Franz. If he made a show of anything, it was austerity.

Generous, open-minded, sometimes absurd, the Elector was still firm and tart in his opinions. In 1786, he wrote in a letter, “I was never and never will be a Freemason, because I've always considered Freemasonry a useless game of tricks and ceremonies to pass the time for bored minds.”
⁸
When the local painter brothers Kügelgen exhibited their work in the Rathaus, he observed, “I understand absolutely nothing about art, but I can see that they are splendid fellows,” and he gave them a stipend to go study in Rome, expecting them to come back to Bonn and adorn the court and town with their art (which they did). Max Franz proved similarly generous with Beethoven, with the same sort of hopes.

Music was the Elector's favored art. In Vienna, he had studied voice and viola and followed Italian opera, Gluck's reform opera, German singspiels, church music old and new, and the chamber and orchestral music of Viennese salons and public concerts.
⁹
As Elector, he built up the forces of the Bonn court
Kapelle;
the orchestra became one of the finest in German lands. He liked to read through opera scores at the piano; in 1788, he reopened the National Theater, with an emphasis on opera productions. Under his influence, private music making flourished even more than before in the houses of the nobility and the middle classes. Though he kept on the Italian Andrea Luchesi as his
Kapellmeister
, he and Christian Neefe turned the traditional Italian orientation of court music toward Germany and Vienna. That change influenced the musical taste of the whole town—and likewise the taste of teenage Beethoven.