Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph (25 page)

Haydn was now at the height of his fame and essentially a free man, somewhere between on call and pensioned off by his employer of twenty-eight years, the house of Esterházy. He retained his salary and his title of
Kapellmeister
. Industrious as always, in the fertile decade of the 1790s Haydn produced some of his finest work, including symphonies and string quartets that would be models for every composer in those genres to come. When Beethoven began working with him, Haydn was working on commissions that would be due when he returned to England for his second visit.

As a teacher, Haydn was patient and kindly, as he was in most things except when he felt his honor or his status in music questioned, or his pocketbook threatened. Someone left an account of him teaching composition (not to Beethoven) in the later 1790s. Looking over a symphony by the student, Haydn saw a line of rests for the winds and quipped, “Rests are the hardest things of all to write.” Looking further, he frowned. “I don't find anything wrong in the part writing. It's correct. But the proportions are not as I would like them to be: look, here's an idea that is only half developed; it shouldn't be dropped so quickly; and this phrase connects badly with the others. Try to give the whole a proper balance; that can't be so hard because the main subject is good.” However, added the observer, “This was all spoken with charm.”
²

These are perennial issues between teachers and students of composition: don't overscore, learn to sustain, don't drop ideas before they've made their point, pay attention to proportion and continuity. Studying Beethoven's pieces, Haydn would have said the same kinds of things. In the Bonn scores, Haydn noted that Beethoven already had the habit of generating new themes in a work from earlier ones. For some time, Haydn had been composing with tiny melodic and rhythmic motifs, matters of two or three or four notes presented at the beginning, then wielded with endless subtlety and imagination to build themes through the course of a piece. Beethoven picked up Haydn's motivic technique, though it may have been more a matter of refining and extending what he was already doing.

In their discussions, Haydn surely deepened Beethoven's conceptions of form. The model that a later time named “sonata form,” for nearly a century used in most first movements and often elsewhere, had been brought to maturity more by Haydn than by anyone else, and had been certified by Mozart. Looking over his student's pieces, Haydn would have noted a precocious understanding of form. But he would also have found certain problems, including overwrought harmonies, miscalculations of emphasis and scale. The
Imperial
Cantatas often meander. Like most imaginative young composers, this one needed to learn how long to run with an idea and when to stop. He needed to learn the power of simplicity.

There is no record of what transpired in their lessons. But it can be said that at least by his op. 2 Sonatas, composed in 1794–95, Beethoven was showing the fruits of his studies in a startlingly mature way. After his months with Haydn, Beethoven emerged a far more sophisticated composer. To mention only one issue: Before Haydn, Beethoven had a shaky idea of proportion, might write an introduction to an aria that was a quarter its length. After he finished the lessons with Haydn, he had one of the most refined senses of proportion of any composer—a sense of it, in other words, at the level of Haydn.

Still, the extent of the debt Beethoven owed his teacher he never understood, or anyway never acknowledged. To all and sundry for the rest of his life, he would declare he had learned nothing from Haydn, nothing from anybody but himself, and from studying the music of the masters.
³

 

For Beethoven, whom someday everyone would declare a revolutionary, the process of becoming a proper composer was not to come up with revolutionary conceptions but something like the opposite: to base the future on the past, to master the traditional crafts of the art and then to embody that knowledge in his own way. From beginning to end, but especially in the early Vienna years, Beethoven was obsessed with technique. He also sensed that his creative road had to lead through Vienna, above all studying what Mozart and Haydn had done. Which is to say: the Classical high-Viennese style was Beethoven's route to understanding himself as a composer.

In Bonn he had learned harmonic practice, how to build chords and chord changes and changes of key over a bass line by way of studying “thoroughbass.” This was a practical matter for an organist and pianist, because sometimes one was required to extemporize an accompaniment from a bass line, but it also imparted a good sense of managing harmony. He had learned to make new material out of a given idea by writing variations on a theme. He had absorbed conventional formal models and instrumentation.

When he arrived in Vienna, the aspect of craft Beethoven knew to be his weakest suit was counterpoint, the art of weaving melodies together. Neefe had never really taught him counterpoint, which was regarded as an abstruse but nonetheless valuable study for a composer. Thus the period's term for contrapuntal music: the “learned style,” with its overtone of pedantry. During his first year in Vienna, largely putting away ambitious creative work, Beethoven turned his full attention to counterpoint, turning out dozens of exercises.

What that study amounted to, for any composer of that time and long after, was something on the face of it absurd: a systematic, minutely rule-bound course of study in the style of Renaissance choral music in general, Palestrina in particular. In other words, one of the essential paths to becoming a serious composer in the eighteenth century was to master the skills of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The particular hurdle Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven had to clear was a 1725 treatise by Viennese court
Kapellmeister
Johann Joseph Fux (pronounced
fooks
) called
Gradus ad Parnassum
, or
Steps to Parnassus
. The original had been an imaginary quasi-Socratic dialogue, in Latin, between a teacher and his student. Haydn, like Mozart with his pupils, used his own adaptation of the treatise.

Fux laid out the path to mastery of counterpoint in a series of “species,” each exercise starting with a given melody in long notes called a
cantus firmus
, “fixed song.” Writing counterpoint—one or more new melodies—around a preexisting cantus was a technique going back to the Middle Ages, but Fux put the practice into a rationalized and systematic method. In first species the student composes a new melody under or on top of a cantus, one note for each note of the cantus. In second species there are two notes per note of the cantus, in third species four notes, and so on. The species proceed in increasingly elaborate stages until one is writing four-part counterpoint in a kind of abstraction of Renaissance–Palestrina style, using the old church modes as well as modern major and minor scales. Each stage of the process accumulates rules governing the relation of every note to every other note. By the point of writing in four parts, the maze of notes and rules has become head-splitting. In the original Fux, the teacher reassures the suffering student that if he can do this, everything else in music will seem easy.
⁴

Why did generations of students submit to this torturous study in an archaic style? For several reasons. It teaches a young composer to make notes do what the composer wants rather than follow where they lead. Fux lectures his imaginary student that to make it work, you have to think ahead, not jump on a solution before you know where you are going. Every note matters, and every note has to be seen in the context of the whole. For a composer like Beethoven, who learned harmony by means of thoroughbass—thinking from chord to chord—species counterpoint led him to understand the long-range movement of melodic lines. Which is to say that he learned a central principle: the lines create the harmony rather than submit to the harmony. (Even when composers of that era seemed to be writing simple melody and accompaniment, they were thinking contrapuntally.)

There is another insight to be gained in doing species exercises. As you learn one rule after another, you also learn that the rules are not immutable but form a hierarchy. You give up one rule for the sake of a higher rule, and ultimately what determines that choice is your taste, ear, and sensitivity. So the later stages of species counterpoint approach the subtle relativity of decisions that is free composition. Submitting to Fux's rules carries over into finding and following your own rules, and also into knowing when to break them.

These are the conceptions and skills Beethoven willed himself to master—these, and the more practical matter of being fluent at the learned style when he needed it. The early Classical
galant
style had viewed counterpoint as old-fashioned, inexpressive, charmless, as symbolized by C. P. E. Bach's nickname for his father: “the Old Wig.” The mature Viennese Classical style shaped by Haydn and later Mozart put counterpoint back into the picture, especially with fugal passages and movements integrated into the new formal models. Mozart's discovery of J. S. Bach was also a discovery of the power of counterpoint; it helped lead him to his greatest music. So the richness of the Viennese Classical style had much to do with both overtly contrapuntal episodes and steady contrapuntal undercurrents.

Steeped in Haydn and Mozart, Beethoven took as self-evident that he needed the learned style to be a true craftsman. Yet in the end his mighty efforts to master counterpoint never entirely took. It was not his kind of discipline. On the page as at the keyboard, his forte was improvisation, the lightning flash of inspiration. He would never be a natural contrapuntist, never completely fluent though he wrote a great deal of counterpoint, some of it splendid. Yet exactly because counterpoint remained a struggle, it was also an endless challenge and fascination. “Whatever is difficult,” Beethoven would write, “is good.” He never forgot Fux, never forgot Palestrina, never forgot the old church modes. Eventually all these elements, and Bach, found their places in his art.

 

As for the great Haydn as a teacher, Beethoven was soon disgusted. Correcting counterpoint exercises is a tedious business; the best counterpoint tutors tend to be pedants, and Haydn was anything but. “Art is free,” he said, “and is not to be diminished by any chains of craftsmanship.”
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In Beethoven's exercises, Haydn missed more mistakes than he caught, and Beethoven knew it. That his teacher had his own urgent projects would not have mattered to this pupil. Haydn seems to have remained patient, or maybe the word is
dogged
. But it is not entertaining to work with a student, however talented, who clearly considers you a sloppy teacher at the same time that he hates being told what to do.

There was another issue Beethoven would probably not have cared about, if he knew of it. At the end of January 1793, a month after the lessons began, Haydn lost one of his most treasured friends when Marianne von Genzinger died at age forty-three. She was a married woman with whom he had carried on a platonic relationship, much of it through letters in which he poured out his feelings. Haydn had a spouse, but she was impossible and they had separated long before. (Haydn referred to her in a letter as “my wife, that infernal beast.”)
⁶
For that matter, Haydn was juggling a long-time mistress from his Esterházy Palace days, plus a new mistress in London. But nobody could replace Mme Genzinger in his life. After she died, friends noted that Haydn became less warm, more sarcastic.
⁷
For a number of reasons, then, Haydn would be no lasting mentor for Beethoven. Like most younger people, Beethoven called the old man “Papa,” but he had little affection to spare for father figures.

Beethoven's formal lessons with Haydn probably lasted only through spring 1793, but there would be contacts and consulting between them in the coming years, and now and then they appeared in concerts together. There was a curious postscript to his counterpoint studies. Some years after Beethoven died, a venerable Viennese composer and teacher named Johann Baptist Schenk stepped forward with a startling account of that period. Frustrated with Haydn's carelessness, Schenk recalled, Beethoven had come to Schenk behind Haydn's back to correct his counterpoint exercises first, which Schenk was happy to do. Wrote Schenk, “I pointed out to him, however, that our work together must forever remain a secret.” But a year later, Schenk continued, Haydn found out about the deception and was furious, which put a permanent crimp in relations between teacher and student.

The trouble is, Schenk's yarn does not add up. For one thing, Beethoven seems to have saved all his exercises, as he apparently tried to save every page he put pen to. The 245 pages that survived show a steady trickle of mistakes that had not been corrected by anybody. Only 42 pages show any corrections at all.
⁸
Is it conceivable that in his old age Schenk, a distinguished composer and teacher, would cook up the story? It is more than conceivable; it was standard practice. The science of history was still taking shape in the early nineteenth century, and there was little sense of the primacy of fact. To make up things about one's relationship with a historic figure like Beethoven was a convenient way to engrave one's name in history. It was also a good way to settle scores. Schenk hated Haydn, declaring to a friend, “Mozart was a good soul, but Haydn was false through and through.”
⁹

In any case, there never was a complete break between Haydn and Beethoven. The old master was patient and generous, the young man not so stupid as to openly insult the leading composer in the world. In May 1793, Haydn took Beethoven with him to the Esterházy Palace in Eisenstadt, to acquaint his employer Prince Nikolaus with this new talent. Beethoven returned to Vienna, while Haydn stayed on in Eisenstadt, working intensively on the pieces for England.
¹⁰
Haydn was frantically busy when he returned in the fall, so it is likely the regular lessons never resumed.