Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph (16 page)

At the end of 1787, Max Franz also lent his imprimatur to the founding of Bonn's Lesegesellschaft (Reading Society). Given the collapse of the Illuminati and the official suspicion lingering over the Freemasons, the accumulating Aufklärung fervor of the thinkers and clergy of Bonn needed new outlets. In an era when books were too expensive for many, the Lesegesellschaft proposed to be a repository of liberal and practical literature, newspapers, and journals concerning not only news and politics but also geography, history, agriculture, everything practical and progressive. With the Elector's blessing, the Lesegesellschaft established its meeting rooms at the center of Bonn in the Rathaus, the Town Hall that presided over the market. In the inaugural ceremonies, Max Franz's portrait was ceremoniously installed in the society's main reading room, accompanied by verses from Eulogius Schneider, the university professor and one of Bonn's
Schwärmers
for all things progressive. Schneider hailed the Elector as “protector of the Lesegesellschaft” and the town's symbol of Aufklärung.

In the end, the golden age of Bonn that Max Franz galvanized in scholarship, ideals, and the arts turned out to be a short interlude in the life of a rather small town. While the university ascended to an important position among German institutions, it never rivaled the ideas coming out of Leipzig University, where the high-Aufklärung figure Christian Fürchtegott Gellert lectured on philosophy; of Königsberg, where Kant presided; of Weimar, where Goethe and Schiller lived; or of the enlightened courts of Joseph II in Vienna and Frederick the Great in Berlin. Bonn remained a backwater where the progressive spirit was reflected, not formulated. The effects of its golden age fell mainly on the lives of strong but ultimately obscure individuals. The only figure from the heady period of Max Franz's Bonn to live prominently in history would be Beethoven.

 

During the festivities that inaugurated the university, a procession ended at a ceremony with a uniformed Beethoven, age fifteen, at the organ.
¹⁰
By then, his family had moved out of the Fischer house to a spacious flat on Wenzelgasse. Baker Theodor Fischer had finally gotten tired of all the music upstairs while he was trying to sleep, and politely gave them notice. The Beethovens' new flat did not entirely reflect the family's fortunes or happiness. Maria van Beethoven had given birth to Maria Margaretha Josepha, her seventh child, but the mother had also contracted tuberculosis, in those days generally a death sentence.

Johann, about to be forcibly retired and hapless in dealing with an ailing wife, her medical bills, a new baby, and two vigorous younger sons, was sinking into the bottle. He began to sell off family effects and pawn others; in a petition of July 1787, with Maria in desperate condition, he begged the court for an advance on his salary. Apparently, it was not granted.
¹¹

Desperate to turn his fortunes around and regain some control in the slide of events, Johann cooked up another of his schemes. He sued the estate of the late Count Belderbusch for the return of valuables he had given the minister after old Ludwig died in hopes of securing the position of
Kapellmeister
. In other words, Johann wanted back his unsuccessful bribe, which mostly consisted of antiques and heirlooms his father had brought from Flanders: paintings, a clock, porcelain, laces, a fine Flemish Bible, and so on, the collection valued at hundreds of florins.

If there was some justice in Johann's demand, there was no intelligence in the way he went about it. He forged the signature of a local lawyer on a legal document and got caught. Shown the document, the lawyer wrote on it, “The above signature is not in my hand and I have not the slightest knowledge of this document, with all its vilenesses.”
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Thereby Johann van Beethoven ended his last economic initiative in a muddle of delusion, dishonesty, and ineptitude.

 

Ludwig at fifteen and sixteen was steadily busier at court, bustling between theater and chapel, giving keyboard lessons to children of the nobility and officialdom, playing in chamber groups and as soloist with the orchestra. The pace of his days was much as his father's had been, both of them overworked employees of the
Kapelle
. At that time, Beethoven was small and thin but solidly built, maybe less unkempt than before because he had to keep up his court musician's uniform: sea-green frock coat with matching breeches, white or black silk stockings, shoes tied with black bows, embroidered vest with gold cord, crush hat carried under the arm, wig curled with a braid in back, a little sword hanging on a silver belt.
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He had become more at ease with people, acquiring a circle of friends. But still he craved solitude, to be at home alone with music, to roam the woods and hills on the banks of the Rhine.

In his composing he did not follow up the stunning advance of the Piano Quartets with more ambitious works, but rather fell into occasional pieces, songs, experiments, sketches. The dozens of pages of surviving Bonn sketches include experiments in piano figuration and texture, probably jotted down as he improvised. He made a start at a C-minor symphony that went nowhere.
¹⁴
He taught piano to Maria Anna von Westerholt, daughter of an official of the electoral stables. In 1785 or the next year, perhaps for her and her family, he wrote a slight, Mozartian trio for piano, flute, and bassoon. For the same instruments and orchestra, he produced a triple concerto he called
Romance cantabile
, his largest orchestral effort to date; it appears to have been played at court.
¹⁵

By then, Beethoven was making sketches on loose sheets that he carried with him for the rest of his life. He worked out his completed pieces in these pages, preserving unused sketches as an accumulating mine of ideas. For several years beginning in 1785, though, piano would be his main focus. He planned a career as a composer and pianist, his performing as important to him as his writing. Later, he said that in those days he practiced “prodigiously,” often well into the night, and he speculated that it damaged his health. In any event, if excessive practicing did not affect his health, something did.
¹⁶

In the later 1780s, Max Franz gave Beethoven more time to practice by frequently going out of town; during his absences, court music making slowed.
¹⁷
The Elector was musical enough to understand what kind of talent was blooming in his young assistant organist. So, with the Elector's financing, Beethoven was dispatched, aged sixteen and alone, on the most ambitious journey of his life to that point: to Vienna, the capital of German lands and Europe's capital of music.

 

The purpose of his journey to Vienna is not altogether clear—whether to study or to play concerts or simply to absorb the atmosphere in the city. The leading musician in town then was Mozart, and certainly Beethoven hoped to meet him, play for him, perhaps have some lessons. Mozart had been a mentor at a distance; Beethoven wanted him in person.

In spring 1787, Ludwig said farewell to his suffering mother, to his brothers, to bleary father Johann. He left Bonn around March 20, setting out on rough and muddy roads in a jolting coach. En route, he seems to have stayed in Augsburg, where he met Johann Andreas Stein, maker of his favored pianos, and daughter Maria Anna, called Nannette, who was to follow her father's trade in Vienna.
¹⁸
Eventually both of them were numbered among the finest instrument makers of their time, and among Beethoven's friends. In Augsburg, he stayed with
Hofrat
Joseph von Schaden and his wife, another Nannette. She was a well-known pianist and singer, her husband a Freemason and one-time Illuminatus. Impressed with this teenager, the couple accompanied Beethoven as far as Munich and gave him names of Freemasons to look up in Vienna.
¹⁹
The boy was learning the value of Masonic connections. On April 1, he appeared in a Munich newspaper's list of arrivals as “Herr Peethofen, musician of Bonn via Cologne.”
²⁰
The spelling shows one of the many pronunciations of his name.

After some eighteen days on the road, Beethoven reached Vienna around April 7. Shortly after, someone brought him to Mozart. The go-between may have been another Masonic connection, because Mozart was a fervent lodge brother.

The one-time prodigy of prodigies was now one of many musicians in Vienna with a wife and children, trying to keep his head above water. At that point Mozart was as admired as any composer alive, but his wife was constantly and expensively ill, and he was unwell himself. Meanwhile, he had been receiving distressing reports about his father back home in Salzburg. (Leopold Mozart had only weeks to live.) Around the time Beethoven arrived, Mozart had just returned from Prague, where the public adored him more unequivocally than the Viennese did, and he was in the middle of composing
Don Giovanni
. It could hardly have been a worse time for a musician of sixteen to introduce himself to a famous, busy, and worried man. But Mozart received the teenager from Bonn and agreed to hear him play. Or so the story goes.

Who knows what Beethoven thought of his first sight of this living legend. In those days Mozart looked like a fat little bird, with bug eyes and aquiline nose and a formidable head of hair that he had dressed daily. He was always on the move, fidgeting or tapping his feet. When it came to musicians, Mozart was exceedingly hard to impress. The endeavors of others generally only reminded him of his own superiority. As he wrote his father about the acclaimed Muzio Clementi, one of Beethoven's models for piano composition, “About the Clementi Sonatas. They are valueless as compositions as everyone who plays or hears them will recognize. Clementi is a charlatan like all Italians.”
²¹

Beethoven was fortunate that he did not know how brutal Mozart could be in his judgments. The whole story of their meeting is a matter of myth, which accumulated roughly like so: The teenager played some of his showpieces and Mozart was, as usual, unimpressed: at sixteen, he had been miles ahead of this youth from the provinces. Maybe Beethoven showed him the Piano Quartets, which had been based on Mozart's violin sonatas. Maybe the older man took that as a compliment and noticed how precocious they were. At last Beethoven asked the master to give him a theme he could improvise on. Mozart obliged. Listening to the results, he was finally impressed. He strolled out of the music room and observed to some other guests, “Keep your eyes on him—someday he'll give the world something to talk about.”

Thus rose a foundation myth, a passing of the torch, the sort of thing the coming generations of Romantics elevated to scripture. Possibly it happened that way, equally possibly it did not, because Beethoven was not yet the improviser he later became.
²²
But his talent could not have been lost on Mozart. Afterward there may have been something on the order of lessons, or not. In later years, at one time and another Beethoven said he never heard Mozart play, also that he heard him several times. If the latter, Beethoven had only one comment on the great man's piano performance: “He had a fine but choppy way of playing—no legato.” Which is to say, he found Mozart outdated, a harpsichord player rather than a true pianist who could produce a singing legato.

Beethoven's dismissive comment on Mozart's playing is virtually the only thing he is recorded to have said about his first sight of Vienna and his encounter with his chief artistic model. At that time, the walled city with its twisted streets had around two hundred thousand inhabitants, a larger percentage of them musicians than in most places of the world. It was a bustling, cosmopolitan, polyglot center on a far grander scale than Bonn. The court of Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II sponsored much of the important music, opera, and theater in town. Beethoven presumably took in some of the splendors of churches and palaces, heard as much music as he could, maybe played in some gilded salons, but there is no record of what he did or what he thought about it. There is also no record of whether he encountered the fury of the Viennese, both highborn and low-, against Joseph's high-Aufklärung social and political agenda, promoted by dictate, which had struck at the ancient powers of the aristocracy and the church and imposed rational austerities that the Viennese hated.

 

The idea was probably for Beethoven to stay in Vienna for a while, take in the scene, have some lessons with Mozart if possible, make some connections, all this at the Elector's expense, and pay his way with the proceeds of his performances. As it turned out, he stayed in Vienna less than two weeks. A letter came from his father saying that Maria van Beethoven was failing and he must come home at once.

He hastened back to Bonn, hastening in those days meaning more than a week of travel on wretched roads. On the way back he again stayed over in Augsburg with lawyer von Schaden and his wife, borrowing money from them to get home. He discovered the truth when he arrived: Maria von Beethoven coughing blood, suffering the tuberculosis victim's final torment of slow suffocation. The physicians of that time had no concept of the causes of tuberculosis and no treatment for it. He saw his younger brothers traumatized, his father drunk and helpless, useless doctors filing in and out, friends gathering to help as best they could, a baby in the house who still needed the breast: all ordinary horrors of the age, no less terrible for that.

Ludwig watched his beloved mother suffer for more than two weeks before she was released, on July 17, 1787, from a life of many cares and few satisfactions. Having buried her first husband and four children, Maria van Beethoven died at forty years old. Feeling lost and devastated, sixteen-year-old Ludwig was now the only capable person in the family. Father Johann, for his part, did the only thing he knew how to do: he gathered up his wife's good clothes and went out to sell them. Cäcilie Fischer was shocked to see those familiar fineries, with their memories of holidays and happy times, for sale on the street. She ran home in tears to tell her parents.
²³
Kapelle
concertmaster Franz Ries, who had taught Ludwig, stepped in with help and money. Beethoven remembered Ries's kindness warmly and long.