Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph (170 page)

15. At the risk of adding another ambiguity to so many, Beethoven's statement that he had met his beloved five years before is a thirdhand account, from Fanny Giannatasio del Rio via her father's report from Beethoven. So Fanny's note of a
first
meeting five years before could easily have been mistaken.

16. Walden (
Beethoven's Immortal Beloved
, 76) notes that two independent witnesses in the nineteenth century said they examined the later-missing Beethoven letters that Bettina published, and testified that they were authentic. Secondhand testimony at that distance is tantalizing but, again, not the same thing as having the originals in hand, and the witnesses could not compare the printed versions word for word with the originals. Again: there clearly were more letters between Beethoven and Bettina than the single one of his that survives.

17. Marek,
Beethoven
, 282.

18. Anderson, vol. 1, no. 374.

19. Ibid., no. 376 (paragraph breaks added).

20. Walden,
Beethoven's Immortal Beloved
, 9.

21. Helps and Howard,
Bettina
, 130. These authors, incidentally, make no case for Bettina as the Immortal Beloved.

22. Knight,
Beethoven
, 84.

23. Anderson, vol. 1, no. 379.

24. “‘Friendship Has to Be a Life's Work': Rüdiger Safranski on Goethe and Schiller,” interview with Rüdiger Safranski by Sabine Tenta, January 2010, Goethe Institut,
http://www.goethe.de/kue/lit/aug/en5583450.htm
.

25. Sonneck,
Beethoven
, 88. Goethe's tone in complaining about Beethoven should be read in the context that he is playing to Zelter's aversion to Beethoven's work at this time. Zelter had gone so far as to declare that
Christus
am Ölberge
was “suggestive of Greek vice”—i.e., homosexuality (Helps and Howard,
Bettina
, 130). Later Zelter became a fervent admirer of Beethoven and preached that gospel to his student Mendelssohn.

26. Anderson, vol. 1, no. 379.

27. Sonneck,
Beethoven
, 86–87.

28. Anderson, vol. 1, no. 380.

29. Friedenthal,
Goethe
, 412; Kerman, “
An die ferne Geliebte
,” 135. Kinderman, in
Beethoven
, 246, notes that in 1822, Mendelssohn did play for Goethe Beethoven's setting of “Wonne der Wehmut,” and Goethe was delighted with it.

30. Anderson, vol. 1, nos. 377, 382, 388. After this summer it seems Beethoven and Amalie Sebald had no further contact.

31. Albrecht, vol. 1, no. 164.

32. B. Cooper,
Beethoven's
Folksong Settings
, 16.

33. Albrecht, vol. 1, no. 163.

34. Ibid., no. 167.

35. Ibid., vol. 2, no. 170.

36. Anderson, vol. 1, no. 405.

37. Ibid., no. 352.

38. B. Cooper,
Beethoven's
Folksong Settings
, 101.

39. Ibid., 73.

40. Ibid., 79.

41. Ibid., 83, 89.

42. Ibid., 164–65.

43. Ibid., 10.

44. Ibid., 43.

45. Thayer/Forbes, 1:541.

46. Landon,
Beethoven
, 190–92.

47. Solomon,
Beethoven
, 282.

48. B. Cooper,
Beethoven
, 212.

49. Anderson, vol. 1, no. 393.

50. Ibid., no. 428.

51. Ibid., no. 429.

52. Ibid., no. 411.

53. Albrecht, vol. 2, no. 171.

54. Anderson, vol. 1, no. 412.

55. Thayer/Forbes, 1:553–54.

56. Anderson, vol. 1, nos. 392, 394.

57. Kinderman,
Beethoven
, 163.

58. B. Cooper,
Beethoven's
Folksong Settings
, 37.

59. I have not given page numbers for the
Tagebuch
entries. The “A” to whom Beethoven refers, Solomon reads as Antonie Brentano, his candidate for the Immortal Beloved. Walden (
Beethoven's Immortal Beloved
) and others question whether it refers to Antonie and/or whether in Beethoven's scrawl it was an
A
at all—the
Tagebuch
survives only in two copies made by others, and there are a number of places where the transcription either is clearly wrong or trails off because the original could not be read. Here are yet more ambiguities that keep the Immortal Beloved mystery afloat.

60. Beethoven, “Beethoven's
Tagebuch
,” 268.

61. Anderson, vol. 1, no. 406; vol. 2, nos. 562, 681.

62. M. Cooper,
Beethoven
, 31.

63. Musulin,
Vienna
, 133.

64. Quoted in Solomon,
Beethoven
, 284, where Solomon details Beethoven's connection to prostitutes in this period.

65. Beethoven, “Beethoven's
Tagebuch
,” 255.

66. Sonneck,
Beethoven
, 94–100.

67. Solomon,
Beethoven
, 284–85.

68. Thayer/Forbes, 1:554.

69. Mai, in
Diagnosing
Genius
, 146–47, outlines the medical evidence for Beethoven's being “alcohol-dependent”—what I call a “functional alcoholic”—rather than showing “abuse,” as his father had.

70. Anderson, vol. 1, no. 426.

71. Nicholls,
Napoleon
, 197–99.

72. This is Metternich's account of the meeting with Napoleon, which should be taken with several grains of salt.

 

26. We Finite Beings

 

1. Anderson, vol. 1, no. 427.

2. Knight,
Beethoven
, 159.

3. Scherman and Biancolli, 907n2.

4. Thayer/Forbes, 1:544.

5. Ibid., 1:560.

6. Marek,
Beethoven
, 455.

7. Ignaz Moscheles, who was working with Beethoven at the time, said that in fact much of the plan for
Wellington's Victory
and some of the military music came from Maelzel.

8. Thayer/Forbes, 1:566.

9. Scherman and Biancolli, 908.

10. Part of the impression of silliness that strikes Americans, at least, about
Wellington's Victory
is that in English
Malbrouk
(called “Marlborough” in the score) is also the tune of “For He's a Jolly Good Fellow” and “The Bear Came over the Mountain.”

11. Dalhaus,
Ludwig van
Beethoven
, 17.

12. Kinderman, in
Beethoven
, 170, has a discussion of how
Wellington's Victory
relates to kitsch.

13. Thayer/Forbes, 1:565.

14. Again, the connection of Classical-period music to dance is made in Rosen's
The Classical Style
.

15. The chromatically slithering bass of the Seventh's first-movement coda returns in a new guise in the coda of the finale.

16. Conductor James Sinclair notes that his and others' performances slightly over-dot the Seventh's first-movement rhythmic figure to give it more lightness. I see the three-note dactylic figure that dominates the second movement of the Seventh as an evening out of the dotted figure that dominates the first movement. The dotted figure returns in various augmentations in the scherzo, notably in the trio, but there are echoes of the dactyls in figures near the end of the scherzo. The dactylic figure is then diminished and intensified in the fiddle tune of the finale.

17. Famously, the second movement begins and ends on a i 6/4 chord that is a color rather than a functional harmony. In that it resembles Beethoven's use of diminished sevenths, which often are treated not functionally but rather as a color and a device for suspending tonality.

18. The way Beethoven develops an important pitch can be seen in the adventures of F and C in the first movement. F serves as N of V in A, as the third of D minor, the fifth of B-flat major, and so on.

19. The idea of the Seventh as unified by the moods of dance rather than a sense of dramatic narrative is not an entirely new kind of thinking for Beethoven. The A-flat Major Piano Sonata, op. 26, for example, is held together not by narrative nor particularly by motifs but by
the idea of variation
.

20. Solomon,
Beethoven
, 276.

21. Thayer/Forbes, 1:566.

22. Clive,
Beethoven and His World
, 225.

23. Anderson, vol. 1, no. 441.

24. Ibid., no. 457.

25. Thayer/Forbes, 1:557.

26. Ibid., 1:571.

27. Clive,
Beethoven and His World
, 313.

28. Thayer/Forbes, 1:572.

29. Ibid., 1:571.

30. Anderson, vol. 2, no. 462.

31. Thayer/Forbes, 1:569.

32. Ibid., 1:567.

33. Anderson, vol. 1, no. 485.

34. Kinderman,
Beethoven
, 160.

35. For me, part of the humor in the Eighth is that the first three notes of the opening theme, C–A–B-flat, continually reshuffled, form the motivic foundation of all the themes in the Eighth. Another element holding together the themes is the idea of a prolonged upbeat: at the beginning, the first bar (as I think it should be phrased) is the upbeat to the second bar. The second-movement theme prolongs the upbeat idea, and the minuet comically extends it to seven beats. Meanwhile the first-movement development is a study in how to intensify a single sustained harmony through the course of a phrase, using texture, rhythm, and rising lines. The “errant” C-sharp in the Eighth is the same pitch as the “sore” C-sharp in the
Eroica
, but here it functions quite differently, more subtly and wittily.

36. As in the first movement, the second theme in the finale arrives in the “wrong” key, this time A-flat (with its D-flat as fourth degree) and then rights itself into the “proper” C major. From early in his work Beethoven used analogous harmonic moves in movements of a piece as a unifying element. (To concentrate only on pitch motivic relationships throughout a work is to miss half the kinds of relationships he is concerned with.) The D-flat-to-C-sharp intrusions near the end of the finale are a classic case of Beethoven “explaining” an underlying idea.

37. Thayer/Forbes, 1:575.

38. Lockwood, in
Beethoven: Music
, 234, observes that “the [Eighth Symphony's] delicate shading and subtle balances may have been harder for him to achieve than the direct outpouring of action in the Seventh.”

39. Thayer/Forbes, 1:576.

40. Alsop,
Congress Dances
, 55.

41. Nicolson,
Congress of Vienna
, 85, 93.

42. Ibid., 93.

43. Musulin,
Vienna
, 136–37.

44. Thayer/Forbes, 1:578. Thayer implies, without quite saying so, that Schuppanzigh was the violinist at the premiere of the
Archduke
, and does not mention the cellist. According to Moscheles, Spohr was a bitter opponent of Beethoven's music.

45. Landon,
Beethoven
, 151.

46. Anderson, vol. 1, nos. 478–79.

47. Ibid., no. 481.

48. Thayer/Forbes, 1:563.

49. Ibid., 1:583.

50. Senner,
Critical Reception
, 2:180.

51. Thayer/Forbes, 1:586–87.

52. Ibid., 1:588–90.

53. Anderson, vol. 1, no. 502.

54. Ibid., no. 486.

55. Hofmann,
Viennese
, 97.

56. Knight,
Beethoven
, 94.

57. Brion,
Daily Life
, 165. It hardly needs to be said that in this period, “remedies” for venereal disease were fraudulent. There were no functional treatments at all.

58. Hofmann,
Viennese
, 105.

59. Nicolson,
Congress of Vienna
, 34.

60. Alsop,
Congress Dances
, 33.

61. Brion,
Daily Life
, 172.

62. Nicolson,
Congress of Vienna
, 159.

63. Ibid., 161.

64. Alsop,
Congress Dances
, 140.

65. Alexander's father, Tsar Paul I, was legendarily erratic. Alexander came to power when a group of officers murdered his father while Alexander sat downstairs listening to the screams. The old regimes were full of such stories, though the Russian ones tend to be more extreme.

66. Hofmann,
Viennese
, 97.

67. Alsop,
Congress Dances
, 124.

68. Ibid., 12.

69. Nicolson,
Congress of Vienna
, 177.

70. Anderson, vol. 2, nos. 493, 495n1.

71. Kolodin,
Interior Beethoven
, 224.

72. Anderson, vol. 2, no. 498.

73. Wyn Jones,
Life of Beethoven
, 123.

74. The main secondary key in the new
Fidelio
overture is C major, the key the opera ends in.

75. The eerie effect of the timpani A–E-flats in the dungeon has much to do with the tuning. Timpani in those days were almost invariably tuned on the tonic and dominant of the current key. Tuning them to a tritone was deliberately aberrational, also echt Beethoven in creating a powerful effect with simple means.

76. As B. Cooper notes in
Beethoven
, the imprisoned Florestan's vision of Leonore as the angel of freedom echoes the end of Goethe's
Egmont
—perhaps deliberately on the part of Treitschke, who conceived this new end of Florestan's aria.

77. The end of
Fidelio
is yet another of Beethoven's joyful endings, which for him meant mostly tonic and dominant harmonies,
fortissimo
, in simple textures and usually open keys between three flats and two sharps. I think here, as in the end of the
Egmont
Overture and even the Fifth Symphony, listeners by the end are left a bit battered. These endings lack, in a word, subtlety. For me the most successful and truly hair-raising of all Beethoven's joyful endings is the
Eroica
's.

78. Robinson (
Ludwig van Beethoven
) and others note that the theme of “O namenlose Freude” comes from the sketches for the abortive
Vestas Feuer
and from a theme in the F-major Andante from the
Joseph
Cantata.