Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph (29 page)

Among other refugees from the French was Beethoven's oldest friend, physician Franz Wegeler. He had experienced a remarkable rise and a disastrous fall. In 1793, at age twenty-seven, Wegeler had been elected rector of the University of Bonn. At the approach of the French army, he signed a resolution forbidding students to have any contact with French prisoners being marched through town. The order was issued for health reasons, in fear of students catching typhus. But the resolution was interpreted as antirevolutionary, and as the French approached, Wegeler had to flee to keep his head.
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In Vienna, he and Beethoven had a warm reunion. Among other things, Wegeler served as somebody Beethoven could vent his complaints to: “He developed . . . an aversion to being asked to play at social occasions. Many times he came to me, gloomy and upset, complaining that he was forced to play even if the blood burned under his nails.”
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Soon enough there was a blowup between them, followed by one of Beethoven's hyperbolic apologies:

 

What a horrible picture you have shown me of myself! Oh, I admit that I do not deserve your friendship. You are so noble and well-meaning; and this is the first time that I dare not face you, for I have fallen far beneath you. Alas! For eight weeks now I have been a source of distress to my best and noblest friend. You believe that my goodness of heart had diminished. No, thank Heaven, for what made me behave to you like that was no deliberate, premeditated wickedness on my part, but my unpardonable thoughtlessness . . . Yet, oh do let me say this in my defense, I really was always good and ever tried to be upright and honorable in my actions. Otherwise how could you have loved me?
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It should not be doubted that this letter, and all the letters like it that Beethoven wrote over the years, was sincere. It was characteristic of him that when the fury passed he was, sometimes, ready to listen to the remonstrations of a friend. Whether or not his goodness of heart was exactly as he painted it in the letter, Beethoven was nonetheless correct that there was nothing premeditated in his rage and vituperation. There is no record that he ever deliberately set out to hurt or betray a friend, though he fought with most of the friends he ever had. In Wegeler's case the prodigal was forgiven, the friendship restored. Nothing shook it again before Wegeler left Vienna, in 1796; after that he never saw Beethoven in the flesh again. At that point of complete separation their friendship became, for Beethoven, perfect and unassailable.

All of Beethoven's testimonials to his goodness had to do less with what he truly was than with what he believed he had to be. If he was not mean, he was still proud, suspicious, paranoid, contemptuous of much of humanity. In youth he had been taught by the ancients and by the Freemasons and Illuminati around him that the foundation of wisdom is “know thyself.” As his letters show over and over, his self-knowledge ranged from insightful to delusional. Even less did he understand anybody else. What he did understand, as fully as anyone ever had, was music and its connection to the heart and soul.

 

In his diary, Beethoven had decreed 1794 as the year when he must become a whole man, which also meant getting his career properly under way not only as a virtuoso but also as a composer. The collapse of the Bonn court lost him a good deal of income but was otherwise a gift, freeing him from having to account to anybody for anything he was doing. He would never have to report upward again. For better and for worse, he was his own man, with patrons and income from publishers and performers. Though he disliked teaching, he took on piano students, especially aristocratic ones who could pay well, also particularly talented ones whom he would teach for little or nothing. Young female students, talented or not, he taught with special attention.

What mainly made up 1794 for Beethoven was continuing contrapuntal studies with Albrechtsberger, practicing piano intensively, and working on the new piano trios and piano sonatas. He continued to revise the B-flat Piano Concerto, probably adding a new slow movement. Soon he would write a concerto in C major, more mature than the earlier one but still more conventional than otherwise. Beethoven was cagey in these years, more himself in smaller works than in larger.

In 1795 he was ready to place the previous year's projects before the public. At the beginning of March, for a gathering at the palatial home of Prince Franz Joseph Maximilian von Lobkowitz, Beethoven played a program including perhaps one of the concertos, perhaps an improvisation. “One named Beethoven touched everybody,” wrote a member of the audience.
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This new patron, Prince Lobkowitz, was two years younger than Beethoven, another indefatigable aristocratic music fancier, from one of the most prominent and influential families in Austria.
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Suffering from a deformity that required him to use a crutch, he was not able to take on the usual military or diplomatic careers of men of his class, so he turned to the arts. An able bass singer and violinist, Lobkowitz in 1796 founded a private orchestra that traveled with him among his palaces and country houses; he was one of the last of the Viennese nobility to follow that outdated fashion.
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He made his musicians and his home available to composers for programs and tryouts of new pieces. Sometimes there would be multiple rehearsals going on in different rooms of his palace.
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In her memoir, Countess Lulu von Thürheim had a touch of sympathy for this prince: “In his castle at Eisenberg the door was open to artists and the dinner table was laid uninterruptedly . . . He himself composed several operas and, although he walked with a crutch, he took an active part in the performances. Even though he was himself a spendthrift, his purse was open to all and sundry who called on him for help.”
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As he did with Prince Lichnowsky, Beethoven would quarrel periodically with Lobkowitz, and like Lichnowsky, this prince had his eccentricities: he would let mail go years unopened, spent weeks in total seclusion, obsessively watched people on the street by way of a mirror.
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But in contrast to the imperious and demanding Lichnowsky, Lobkowitz was a mild and forgiving sort, especially when it came to first-rate musicians. When he and Beethoven fought, they fought as equals.
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Beethoven's private concert for Lobkowitz at the beginning of March 1795 may have been a warm-up for a major part of his campaign that came at the end of the month: his public debut in Vienna. He took part in three benefit concerts in three days, the first two for the Tonkünstler Society at the venerable Burgtheater. Two days before the first concert, Franz Wegeler visited his old friend and witnessed a sight he never forgot. Beethoven was composing the finale for the C Major Piano Concerto, handing each page of score with the ink still wet to four copyists sitting in the hall, who were writing out the instrumental parts for a rehearsal the next day. At the same time Beethoven was wretchedly sick to his stomach, a familiar condition for him. So Wegeler watched his friend finish a rondo finale for piano and orchestra virtually in one sitting, his work interspersed with violent fits of vomiting. The next day Wegeler heard the concerto rehearsed with the whole, presumably small, orchestra crammed into Beethoven's flat. Here Beethoven produced another feat. Finding that his piano was a half step flatter than the winds, he played his solo part in C-sharp major.
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On March 29, 1795, the Viennese musical public heard Beethoven premiere the concerto in a program including an oratorio by Herr ­
Kapellmeister
Kartellieri called
Joas, King of Judah
. The next day he did an improvisation at the second Tonkünstler benefit. On the thirty-first, he played a Mozart concerto during a performance of Mozart's opera
La Clemenza del Tito
, in a program for the benefit of the composer's widow Constanze.
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Which Mozart he played was not noted, but it was likely the D Minor, Beethoven's favorite, the most dramatic, demonic, call it
Beethovenian
of Mozart concertos.
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In the
Wiener Zeitung
of April 1, there was a notice of the first Burgtheater concert: “As an intermezzo . . . the celebrated Herr Ludwig van Beethoven reaped the unanimous applause of the audience for his performance on the pianoforte of a completely new concerto composed by him.”
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The first two piano concertos are exercises in the style of the day, no less telling for that. Beethoven took up each musical genre individually, distinctly, with reference to its literature and traditions. In comparison to the bold personalities of some works, such as the sonatas and trios from op. 1 on, the relatively well-behaved first two concertos suggest that, so far, he was inclined to view the genre in terms more practical than ambitious. As with Mozart's concertos, these were vehicles for his career as a virtuoso. In any case, he was not yet ready to challenge Mozart's supremacy.

Because they were vehicles for himself, Beethoven did not regard his earlier piano concertos in the same terms as a sonata or symphony or string quartet. The latter were genres to be composed, premiered, perhaps touched up, then published as soon and as profitably as possible. His piano concertos were items to play around with for a while, revising as he went, the solo part evolving, the cadenzas left for improvisation.
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None of this is to say that he considered his first concertos potboilers, or that he did not take pains with them. As he performed them over the months before publication he polished them, in the process learning a good deal about the colors and balances of the orchestra. And as with other of his less overtly brash works in these years, the concertos have beautiful slow movements that are more original than their surroundings.

The Piano Concerto No. 2 in B-flat, written first but published second, as op. 19, started life in Bonn around 1790. The first movement, much revised, was likely the only surviving element of the original version. A new rondo finale finished its evolution around 1798.
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Its opening movement has a military air, like G. B. Viotti's and many concertos in that era, eventually including all Beethoven's solo concertos. (If a convention suited his purpose, he used it.) For a main theme he juxtaposed brisk fanfares with lyrical phrases, both rather on the conventional side. As occurs often in Mozart, after an extended orchestral tutti the soloist first enters with a quasi-new idea derived from earlier material. The soloist emphasizes the lyrical aspect of the material, providing some quite lovely stretches.

In the end, the opening movement of the B-flat is grand and effective, but it still adds up to one of the most routine orchestral movements Beethoven ever published. It features rough transitions, stolid block scoring in the winds, and a drifting quality recalling a young small-town composer following his nose—and a mature composer who didn't have the time or patience to fix everything. Beethoven surely understood that. It didn't bother him excessively. When he first presented the B-flat to a publisher, he introduced it as a work “which I do not claim to be one of my best.” Yet as in the early violin sonatas and string quartets, beneath a not particularly bold surface, his searching nature can't help showing itself. The first movement of the B-flat Concerto has startling tonal excursions: after some nervous modulations, the second theme arrives with a leap into D-flat major. In the recap, that theme returns in an even more peculiar G-flat major, another distinctively spiced key when pianos were not tuned in equal temperament.

The next two movements sound more mature, more Viennese. The Adagio in E-flat major is Mozartian in conception—it echoes the preciousness of the eighteenth-century
galant
mood and the lofty choruses of Mozart's
Magic Flute
—but more nearly Beethovenian in tone, with an elegantly nocturnal atmosphere. The keys include a strikingly dark B-flat minor, and the handling of the piano is fresh and brilliant. Traditionally, concerto finales were lively and witty sonata-rondos—another convention, and Beethoven invariably conformed to it. The soloist ends the piece with a blaze of double trills in the right hand, a specialty of his at the keyboard.

While the B-flat Concerto developed over the better part of a decade before he was ready to put it in print, the later C Major, published as Piano Concerto No. 1, op. 15, was a quicker and more confident affair. Beethoven had noted down a few ideas for it in 1793, including the rondo theme, then perhaps drafted the three movements sometime around the end of 1795. It was the completion of the finale, under trying circumstances, that Franz Wegeler witnessed.

Op. 15 turned out to be another well-behaved item, predictable in much of its material, including its foursquare military first movement, its droll rondo finale, its slow movement ornamenting an elegantly
galant
theme. If in his person Beethoven had left behind the courtly wig for a fashionable French-style hairdo, in his concertos he had not yet taken the wig off.

Again, but no more so than in the B-flat, this concerto works in some tonal experiments—in a C-major first movement, the second theme lands on E-flat.
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The more subtle experiment in the first movement is that its main theme is more a rhythm than a tune. Its marching tread, especially its opening long–short–short–long tattoo, Beethoven used as a scaffolding for themes throughout the concerto, starting with the first movement's second theme and including the main theme of the next movement.

In the C Major, the character of the soloist is more distinctive than in the B-flat. Bringing the piano out of the militant opening tutti with a sweeping lyrical turn, Beethoven gave the soloist the character of, say, a jolly lieutenant in the regiment, sentimental but well muscled and his own man. For all his flamboyant passagework, he never plays the martial opening theme. The Largo second movement, in A-flat major—unusual for a work in C major—is atmospheric and introspective, gradually passionate. In the rondo finale the soloist is a rambunctious lad, with his floor-shaking dance that defies us to find the beat. On its last appearance he brings in the rondo theme in the wrongest of wrong keys, B major, before getting chased back to a proper C major. The style of this finale amounts to a playful version of the usually more placid dance called the
englische
, a genre that in a few years would come to preoccupy Beethoven.