Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph (33 page)

As much as anything, the sonatas are about the instrument, the cello's colors, moods, big range, singing voice, and robust staccato. Though there is no sense of tragedy troubling the sonatas, the introduction of No. 2 in G Major is dark and brooding, leading to an Allegro molto of churning intensity that ends nonetheless with a big joyous coda, followed by a genial and puckish rondo finale.
²²
Inevitably, there are prophecies of later works, but on the whole, Beethoven wrote no other pieces quite like them, perhaps because never again would he find himself happy and hearty and fathering a medium he knew he would, in a way, own forever.

 

By late November 1796, Beethoven was back in Vienna, taking up a busy schedule of piano students and new projects, rejoining old friends. The teasing and affectionate relationship he had fallen into with Zmeskall is shown in a note of this year to the baron, who had perhaps gotten tiresome, but Beethoven was in a jovial and forgiving mood: “From today the Count of Music has been
dismissed
with ignominy.—The first violin is being transported into the wilds of
Siberia
. For a whole month
the Baron has been forbidden to put any more questions
or to commit
any more
precipitate actions or to interest himself in anything but his
ipse miserum
”—his “miserable self,” in bad Latin.
²³

When Beethoven's twenty-sixth birthday arrived, in December, he received an invitation from his counterpoint tutor Albrechtsberger: “My very best wishes for your name-day tomorrow. May God give you health and satisfaction and grant you much good fortune. My dear Beethoven, if you should happen to have an hour at your disposal, your old teacher invites you to spend it with him.”

Stephan von Breuning wrote of Beethoven to Bonn family and friends, “In my opinion . . . the journey (or perhaps the outpouring of friendship upon his return!) has made him more stable, or actually a better judge of men, and has convinced him of the rarity and value of good friends. A hundred times, dear Wegeler, he has wished you were back with us, and he regrets nothing more than that he did not follow many of your suggestions.”
²⁴

But Stephan von Breuning was premature in judging Beethoven changed. He was not a better judge of men or a better friend; he was simply in the best of health and the best of moods. None of that would last in the coming year, least of all the good health.

 

Still, luck and talent had given Beethoven a splendid year. Music in Vienna in 1796 was summed up for the public by publisher Johann Ferdinand Ritter von Schönfeld in
A Yearbook of the Music of Vienna and Prague
. After listing some of the “Special Friends, Protectors, and Connoisseurs in Vienna,” including Princess Lichnowsky and Baron van Swieten, Schönfeld profiles leading composers and performers, noting their styles and quirks and making some critical points. In regard to St. Stephen's
Kapellmeister
Albrechtsberger, “His main subject is church music, and his fugues are exceptional. He is no friend of modish music in the
galant
style.” The article on Haydn is extensive and mixed: “His symphonies are unequaled and, as many imitators have found, inimitable, it is equally true that they are his greatest works . . . But there is many a man of taste who will listen to his older products of this kind with greater pleasure than to his younger ones. Perhaps he has been wanting to show that he too can wear the garments of the latest musical fashion.”

As for “Bethofen,” “a musical genius who has chosen to live in Vienna for the last two [
sic
] years,”

 

He is generally admired for his extraordinary speed and the ease with which he plays extremely difficult [music]. He seems recently to have entered deeper into the inner sanctum of music, and one notices this particularly in the precision, feeling, and taste of his work. It has heightened his fame considerably. His true love of art is revealed by the fact that he has become a student of our immortal Haydn, to be initiated into the sacred mysteries of composition . . . We already have several beautiful sonatas from him; the most recent are particularly outstanding.
²⁵

 

It is hard to imagine Beethoven could have been anything but pleased about this sort of attention, but given his nature, that is no guarantee that he actually was.

 

The year 1797 started with another concert. It was a benefit for the string-playing and composing cousins Andreas and Bernhard Romberg, more refugees from Bonn, the French occupation, and the breakup of the court
Kapelle
. There had been friction over planning the program, as there tended to be when Beethoven was involved. Apparently Haydn had promised to supply a symphony and then reneged. Beethoven wrote Lorenz von Breuning, “We spoke yesterday, although I almost find it shameful that he might give a symphony of his or not.”
²⁶
After the concert, Lorenz von Breuning reported to Franz Wegeler, who had returned to Bonn, “Beethoven is . . . the same as of old and I am glad that he and the Rombergs still get along . . . Once he was near a break.”
²⁷

In February 1797, the cello sonatas were published, and soon other products of the previous year: a four-hand piano sonata, op. 6; and
Twelve Variations on a Danse Russe
, dedicated to Countess von Browne, who as a token of thanks gave Beethoven a horse. Beethoven found a stable for the horse, rode it a few times, then forgot about it. In the absence of the owner, a stable hand began renting out the horse and pocketing the profits. Some time later, Beethoven received a huge feed bill, at which he was astonished and infuriated.
²⁸

Another publication that winter would turn into one of the abiding successes of his life, the song
Adelaide
. Beethoven obviously loved the sentimental verses of poet Friedrich von Matthisson. He labored on the setting of the poem “Adelaide” for more than two years. The poem's four stanzas conjure up images of the beloved inspired by nature, each verse ending with a rapturous refrain of her name: “Adelaide!” In the last verse, the poet imagines his tomb and a purple flower growing out of the ashes of his heart, each petal inscribed “Adelaide.” Beethoven laid out the song through-composed in three sections, like a small solo cantata. For it, he created a singular style, limpid and direct, though with far-roaming modulations.
²⁹
Like the cello sonatas and other works of his early maturity, it is a style if not quite “Beethovenian,” not derivative either. Matthisson received the dedication and, in 1800, a copy of the song with an admiring and pleading letter from Beethoven: “My most ardent wish will be fulfilled if my musical setting of your heavenly ‘Adelaide' does not altogether displease you and if, as a result, you should be prompted to write another similar poem . . . I will then strive to compose a setting of your beautiful poetry.”
³⁰

Beethoven's romantically themed songs would sometimes be addressed to women in his life. Was he singing to a woman with the perfervid
Adelaide
? Possibly, in his fashion. As is perennial with bards and musicians, Beethoven had begun to attract female attention. When Franz Wegeler was in Vienna, he was amazed at his old friend's romantic life. In his teens Beethoven had been quick to fall in love, though also prudish, and in any case unsuccessful in his attempts. Wegeler had found, as he would recall, “Beethoven was never not in love and was usually involved to a high degree.” In Vienna he “was always involved in a love affair, at least as long as I lived there, and sometimes made conquests which could have been very difficult indeed, if not impossible, for many an Adonis.”
³¹
How platonic or otherwise Beethoven's “affairs” and “conquests” were, Wegeler does not note. At least among Bonners, it was a discreet age.

Adelaide
might, in fact, have been written as part of Beethoven's courting of Magdalena Willmann, a beautiful and talented contralto whom he had known in the Bonn
Kapelle
and who had come to Vienna to sing at Schikaneder's theater. Beethoven began the song around the time Willmann arrived in Vienna, and she sang a song of his, likely the recently published
Adelaide
, at a concert of April 1797. Around the same time, he wrote a combined setting of two poems, “Sighs of an Unloved One” and “Reciprocated Love.” (He would recycle the tune of the latter years later, in the
Choral Fantasy
.) But the adorable Willmann would not be one of his conquests. He proposed to her that year and she turned him down, one would hope with more gentle reasons than the ones she gave her daughter years later: when he courted her at age twenty-six, she said, Beethoven had been “ugly and half crazy.”
³²
These would be recurring themes among women he was in love with.

 

In later 1796 and into the next year, the French were devouring Austrian territory in Italy. Kaiser Franz II sent a giant army south, but Napoleon outgeneraled the Austrians in a series of battles. At Arcole in November, he raced alone ahead of his army to plant the flag on a bridge, then, surrounded by the enemy, was rescued by his troops (or so the myth ran). The climactic disaster was the Battle of Rivoli, in January 1797, when the Austrians lost fourteen thousand men to France's five thousand. When afterward Franz II rejected the terms of surrender, Napoleon declared to his troops, “Soldiers! You have been victorious in 14 pitched battles, 70 actions; you have taken 100,000 prisoners . . . Of all the foes who conspired to stifle the Republic in its birth, the [Holy Roman] Emperor alone remains before you.”
³³
With the hated Austrian yoke off their backs, many Italians cheered the French army as liberators. Of that moment Stendhal wrote in
The Charterhouse of Parma:
“The departure of the last Austrian regiment marked the collapse of the old ideas . . . It was necessary to love one's country with real love and to seek heroic actions. They had been plunged in the darkest night by the despotism of the Habsburgs; they overturned it and found themselves flooded with daylight.”
³⁴

For those who had hailed the French Revolution, Napoleon was becoming its embodiment and fulfillment, the man who would liberate nations and spread republicanism across Europe. Taking shape at the same time were the fever and mythology called nationalism that would inflame the next two centuries. While Italians erupted in nationalist and Jacobin sentiments, planning revolutions, harassing priests, threatening to disenthrone the pope, Napoleon set his army marching for the Austrian border.

In Vienna there was a convulsion of Austrian patriotism, to which Beethoven contributed with a pair of war songs. In the autumn of 1796, he wrote
Farewell of Vienna's Citizens
to the troops. In the spring came the
Kriegeslied der Oesterreicher:
“We are a great German people; / we are powerful and just. / You French, do you doubt it? / You French, you understand us badly! / For our prince is good, our courage sublime.” That spring, the not-so-sublime Austrians and the French struck a deal that, for the moment, staved off an invasion. (Lacking enough reinforcements made Napoleon conciliatory.) In October, the Peace of Campo Formio declared, among other provisions, that the east bank of the Rhine, including Bonn and most of the former Electorate of Cologne, now belonged to France.
³⁵
A Bonner wrote sadly, “With the Court, both luster and employment have gone.”
³⁶
What no one could have imagined is that the Treaty of Campo Formio also served as overture to the finish of the thousand-year history of the Holy Roman ­Empire.
³⁷

Beethoven's war songs were unapologetic exercises in popular patriotism. The more enduring musical responses to the time were Haydn's. He had been commissioned to write masses for the name day of Prince Nikolaus Esterházy; two of them would be the
Mass in Time of War
(also known as the
Paukenmesse
[Mass with the Kettledrum], for the drums of its beginning) and the
Missa in Angustiis
(Mass for Times of Distress). The latter became known as the
Nelson
Mass, in honor of British admiral Horatio Nelson, who shortly before the piece premiered destroyed the French fleet in the Battle of the Nile. Nelson heard the premiere of the mass while visiting the Esterházy Palace, and he and Haydn struck up a friendship. In a larger sense, what Haydn had done was to join his music to a historical moment. Beethoven would not miss the implications of that.

Previously, at the Burgtheater on February 12, 1797, Franz II had been greeted on his birthday by an anthem newly composed by Haydn:
God Protect Franz the Kaiser
. It was inspired by the British national anthem,
God Save the King
, which Haydn had admired during his time in England. His song would become the unofficial Austrian national anthem. Its melody is one of Haydn's finest, with a quality of timelessness, naturalness, and a touching and noble simplicity, like so much of his work. France had
La Marseillaise
, and now Austria had its anthem. Haydn's pride in having written it would be a solace for him in his sad last years. For Beethoven, the fact that Haydn and not Beethoven had written such an anthem would burn in him until his own last years.

 

In February 1798, General Jean Baptiste Jules Bernadotte arrived in Vienna as the new French minister. He had been Napoleon's aide-de-camp in the Italian campaign.
³⁸
Young, handsome, and fiery, a zealot with a revolutionary tricolor plume on his hat and pistol-shaped sideburns, Bernadotte was well received by everyone at court, including the kaiser, and he raised a sensation among the ladies. Bernadotte had been ordered that he was not to recognize “any other official rank than that of citizen.” In theater performances he ordered his staff to hiss at every cry of “Long live the emperor!”