Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph (24 page)

He had grasped the Viennese devotion to pleasure. It included a love of shows of every kind: music and theater; jugglers, acrobats, clowns, and puppet shows in the streets; and a compulsion for showing off. Aristocrats and the prosperous middle class promenaded along the six miles of ramparts, the men in tight blue riding coats and white trousers and stovepipe hats, the women with corkscrew curls and flowery dresses with wide hoops and deep-cut bodices. On summer nights, throngs streamed out of the city gates onto the Glacis, once a moat encircling the walls but now a broad meadow where soldiers paraded, where there were circuses, vendors of ice cream and sausages and wine from endless sources.
¹⁸
Surrounding the Glacis began the suburbs and the vineyards that flowed up into the hills of the Vienna woods.

Dancing was everywhere. Every year, Karneval and the days between Epiphany and Ash Wednesday in January saw an orgy of dancing. Dance fashions evolved continuously, though the courtly minuet featuring solo couples lingered well into the nineteenth century. But more vigorous and populist styles had arrived, including the contra dance called
anglaise
or
englische
. In this line dance everyone regularly changed partners, so the
englische
had a democratic frisson: the changing couples created a literal mingling of classes. On the rise by 1800 was the swirling and scandalous three-beat waltz, the first dance in which couples actually embraced. Vienna and the waltz were made for each other. The waltz craze in the city would be addressed by prodigious new dance halls; one, the Apollo, could accommodate six thousand people in motion.
¹⁹

Some dance halls offered more intimate services. In a society where men tended to rise slowly in professions and marry late, prostitution flourished. When it was suggested to Joseph II that brothels be licensed, he replied with sour irony, “The expense of roofing would be ruinous, for it would be necessary to put a roof over the whole city.”
²⁰
With most of the populace forced to live in cramped and stuffy housing, everyone spent leisure hours in cafés, sipping coffee—which the Viennese had been the first Westerners to discover, in the tents of the conquered Turkish army—and indulging in the confections for which the city was famous. Each level of society had its own cafés and its own brothels, from the dives of workingmen and the haunts of soldiers to elegant establishments for the nobility.
²¹
Besides coffee, the Viennese were drinkers of wine more than beer; the Vienna woods were full of little inns serving new wine and simple food.

None of this was quite what it appeared. If gaiety and a fickle search for pleasure marked the Viennese, it was a heavy kind of high spirits rising from an undercurrent of frustration and anxiety. The city's pursuit of mirth stood in for the pursuit of happiness. “The situation is desperate,” runs an old Viennese saying, “but not serious.”

 

Viennese commoners had plenty of diversions but no voice. It was not so different at the top of the social scale. Emperor Joseph II had hamstrung the aristocracy and concentrated power in the throne, with the censors, bureaucracy, and police as enforcers. Though Franz II restored some aristocratic privileges, all but returning farmers to serfdom, the nobility still had little real power. The result was that there was little to keep them occupied other than private amusements. Wrote Madame de Staël,

 

All the best people go en masse from one salon to another, three or four times a week. Time is wasted on getting dressed for these parties, it's wasted on travelling to them, on the staircases waiting for one's carriage, on spending three hours at table; and in these innumerable gatherings one hears nothing but conventional phrases . . . The great lords parade with magnificent horses and carriages in the Prater, for the sole pleasure of recognizing there the friends they have just parted from in a drawing-room. These seigneurs, the richest and most illustrious in Europe . . . even allow miserable fiacres to hold up their splendid conveyances. The Emperor and his brothers take their place in the queue and like to be considered as simple individuals.
²²

 

The priesthood, their liturgy and influence tightly controlled by the state, lived similarly to the nobility. An Italian visitor wrote, “A host of priests say Mass daily and receive a florin for it. The rest of the time they seek distractions, particularly with the fair sex . . . Libertinage is enormous in Vienna and the women are very coquettish.”
²³
And a British visitor: “No city perhaps can present such scenes of affected sanctity and real licentiousness.”
²⁴

Many of the nobles' amusements naturally ran to display and dissipation, but they also ran to music. “Music,” wrote a visitor of the 1780s, “is the only thing in which the nobility shows good taste.”
²⁵
In Vienna as in Bonn, but on a far grander canvas, the Viennese musical aristocracy was passionate unto obsessive. A number of Beethoven's admirers and patrons were capable amateur performers who could manage a Mozart sonata or a Haydn quartet. A few aristocratic amateurs were true virtuosos, and their ranks included many women. Later Beethoven's favorite performer of his sonatas would be a baroness. There were some three hundred professional pianists in town, many capable amateurs, and upwards of six thousand piano students.
²⁶

Around Germany and Austria in the eighteenth century, the main impetus of music making and music supporting had shifted from the church to the courts, of which the
Kapelle
of Bonn and Haydn's employers, the Esterházy princes, were examples. In Haydn's day as
Kapellmeister
, the Esterházy Palace musical establishment had included a resident orchestra and opera troupe, visiting theater and dance companies, an opera house seating five hundred, and a splendid puppet theater.
²⁷
The arts were a means for princes to show off their wealth and taste and to one-up their rivals. The Vienna
Hofkapelle
, the court orchestra, had a nearly three-hundred-year tradition. In Vienna by the 1890s, most of the palace orchestras outside the Hofburg had been disbanded as too expensive and no longer fashionable, but the yen for music still ran strong.

So then and for decades after, the main venues for music making in Vienna were private, in parlors of the middle class and the ornate music rooms of palaces. For all its musicality, however, Vienna was rich in dance halls but poor in music halls. In the eighteenth century, public performances and dedicated halls had sprung up in London, in Paris, in Leipzig, and elsewhere around Europe, but in Vienna the nobility liked to keep music for themselves. Wrote a correspondent from Leipzig, where public concerts in the Gewandhaus were an institution, “It is astonishing that in this munificent city of Emperors, where the passion for music is cultivated to the highest degree, there is no suitable concert hall at all, neither one which is acoustically favorable nor one which can accommodate a sizeable number of listeners.”
²⁸

So while music was heard all the time everywhere, public concerts had to rely on any space where there was enough room for the requisite seats. Likewise opera, which along with theater was a citywide obsession. In just over a year before December 1792, 180 Italian operas were mounted in Vienna, plus 163 ballets. Most were produced in two venues. The Burgtheater, a legendary old hall attached to the Hofburg, had seen the premieres of three Mozart operas. It was small and stuffy, but the acoustics were good. The Kärntnertortheater, next to the Kärntner Gate, was roomier but barnlike in its acoustics. Both halls were administered by the court and used for plays and concerts as well as opera.

Across town, the huge ramshackle residence called the Freihaus included a theater run by impresario and actor Emanuel Schikaneder, famous as the cocreator of, and first Papageno in, Mozart's
Die Zauberflöte
. He presented a variety of entertainments, including opera. Just after Beethoven arrived in Vienna, Schikaneder announced his hundredth performance of that singspiel (this was, however, a public-relations fib—it was more like the sixtieth). At the turn of the century, Schikaneder moved his troupe to the new Theater an der Wien, the largest hall in the city, and above the entrance he placed a statue of himself as Papageno. He understood that was his immortality.
²⁹

Otherwise, orchestral music was heard in restaurants, University of Vienna halls, the large and small ballrooms of the Hofburg. Public concerts were at least on the rise in the 1790s.
³⁰
In summer they were given inside or outside a pavilion, or else a restaurant, in the Augarten, a park north of the city. Though the Burgtheater had a good orchestra in residence, it was used mainly for plays and operas. Besides the private orchestras lingering in a few palaces, there were no standing ensembles in town and no subscription series. Orchestras were assembled ad hoc, mostly staffed by amateurs. Yet Vienna was overflowing with able musicians, enough to fill several orchestras.
³¹
The amateurs were often able players and intrepid sight-readers, necessary in a milieu where most concerts were put together in one rehearsal.

One reason the majority of performers were part-timers was that pay for professional musicians was miserable. At the summer palace of the Esterházy princes, for whom Haydn worked, 6,000 florins were once spent on a single puppet play, while the
Kapelle
members, who all together made not much more than 600 florins in half a year, were housed in plain quarters two to a room, forbidden to have their families in residence. Haydn, as
Kapellmeister
, was granted three modest rooms.
³²
Yet the Esterházy orchestral and opera establishment was one of the finest in Europe before it was dissolved by a new prince who was indifferent to music.

If you were a composer or performer wanting to show your wares in Vienna, you rented the hall yourself, put together the chamber ensemble or orchestra and paid them, and often sold advance tickets out of your own apartment. Mozart prospered in Vienna for a while, mounting one-shot subscription concerts, the subscribers being mostly from the nobility. That system was moribund by the time Beethoven arrived. For his whole career in Vienna, he produced his own concerts and pocketed the occasionally handsome proceeds. But most of the time he lost money, and sometimes lost disastrously.

The exception to that pattern was charity concerts of various kinds, which paid nothing but were a good showcase for a musician. The one organization putting on regular public concerts was the Tonkünstler Society, an organization benefiting the widows and orphans of musicians. The group mounted two pairs of charity concerts a year, during Lent and Christmas, when theater productions were forbidden. The programs leaned to symphonies and concertos, later to oratorios.

In Vienna, Beethoven would cobble together a living the same way that most of his contemporaries did, from a combination of composing, teaching, and performing. In that respect, there was nothing ­exceptional about his career in his years as a keyboard virtuoso—performing was the best way to earn quick money. Beethoven never pursued the traditional avenues of writing sacred music and/or working as a
Kapellmeister
for church or court, though he thought he wanted to. Mozart had been part of a growing trend of composers as freelancers. That had not been the plan in his youth. Leopold Mozart wrote his young son that the goal of an ambitious composer was to become “a famous Kapellmeister about whom posterity will read in books.”
³³
By the time Beethoven arrived in Vienna, the glory days of court and chapel
Kapellmeisters
like his grandfather were waning.

 

At the turn of the nineteenth century, the center of European musical development was concentrated in German-speaking lands, and the epicenter of German music was Vienna. The city's singular joining of fantastic wealth, the general powerlessness of the aristocracy and middle class, the passion for music, the constant demand for glitter and show to cover lacerating realities created a cloud of unreality that marked Vienna for the better part of two centuries. Viennese folk and popular music had a singular quality of world-weary, desperate gaiety, a mood that sometimes carried over into the more serious music.

For Beethoven, high-talking Bonn had spoiled him intellectually. To most of these aspects of Viennese life—the endless frivolity, the bittersweet music, the dance-till-you-drop holidays, the open sexuality—he would never be anything but indifferent unto hostile. He frequented cafés and restaurants, drank the beer and wine, enjoyed the music and theater, was lionized in palaces, but essentially he had no sympathy for the city and the people among whom he lived for more than half his life. “From the Emperor to the bootblack,” he declared in old age, “all the Viennese are worthless.” He never again found the kind of idealism and high talk he was reared on in Bonn.

At the same time, living for decades in a place he held largely in contempt, where there was no standing orchestra or subscription concerts or real concert hall, had no great impact on him. Not many artists could flourish in a situation like that, but Beethoven did. Ultimately, he needed no one but himself, and in some degree, sooner or later, he would have despised anyplace he came to rest.

When he had established himself, he would not kowtow to the Viennese but demanded they kowtow to him. To a surprising degree, they did. Nor would the Viennese hold his contempt for them against him particularly. The best explanation for that might be a simple one: when all was said and done, a good many Viennese appreciated great talent when they found it and extraordinary music when they heard it.

10

D
URING HIS FIRST
months in Vienna, starting in late 1792, Beethoven kept up his notebook of expenses, not omitting after-lesson treats at the café: “22x, chocolate for Haidn and me . . . Coffee, 6x for Haidn and me.”
¹
The meetings with Haydn, scheduled and unscheduled, had two aspects. One was informal advice on pieces Beethoven was working on, at that point minor efforts drafted or sketched in Bonn including an oboe concerto (later disappeared), a highly Mozartian octet, and a big piano concerto in B-flat, written and perhaps performed in Bonn, with which he would tinker for years.