Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph (37 page)

He enjoyed being generous. One of his nonmusical friends was the celebrated actor J. H. F. Müller, at whose house Beethoven met a young aristocratic amateur pianist named Carl Friedrich, Baron Kübeck von Kübau. Beethoven agreed to hear the youth play, to which he responded as kindly as possible, “My dear fellow, you have no particular talent for music. Don't waste too much time on it. You do not lack, however, a certain facility.” He hired the baron to coach one of his students, a thirteen-year-old girl who was a few years too young to arouse Beethoven's special interest.

Kübau retained vivid and unsentimental memories of Beethoven: “He was a small man with unkempt, bristling hair with no powder, which was unusual. He had a face deformed by pock-marks, small shining eyes, and a continuous movement of every limb in his body . . . Whoever sees Beethoven for the first time and knows nothing about him would surely take him for a malicious, ill-natured and quarrelsome drunk who has no feeling for music . . . On the other hand, he who sees him for the first time surrounded by his fame and his glory, will surely see musical talent in every feature of an ugly face.” Years after their association, the baron was surprised to see Beethoven hustling toward him “in his loping genius-gait, and [he] expressed his pleasure at seeing me again. We talked about all sorts of things . . . he embarked on his favorite subject, politics, which bores me very much.”
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All this he recalled with a certain affection.

It appears to have been in the midst of this sociable and productive bustle that fate's hammer fell.

 

It began, he would recall, with a transport of rage. In his flat he had been arguing over some music with a tenor, who left and then returned to pound on the door as Beethoven was busy composing. He jumped up from his desk, so furious that he was struck with a fit and fell facedown to the floor, landing on his hands. When he got up, he said, “I found myself deaf, and have been so ever since.”
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That fit of rage would have been the trigger, not the cause, of his deafness. By that point he may have had lead poisoning, maybe gotten from the lead salts commonly added as a sweetener to cheap wine, or from lead wine containers, or from the waters of spas. Lead or something equally insidious was ravaging his gut. But lead does not usually attack the ears. That had another cause. Beethoven was doomed to go deaf by something that occurred before, maybe typhus or one of the other illnesses of his past years, or childhood smallpox—in any case, something that had passed but left behind a terrible legacy.

If that moment of fury was when deafness first manifested itself, he was not entirely deaf, or only briefly. His hearing returned, but not all of it. Now what he heard was accompanied by a maddening chorus of squealing, buzzing, and humming that raged in his ears day and night. Frantic, he fled to doctors. They reassured him, gave him medicine. One doctor after another, one remedy after another. None of it accomplished anything.

Medicine was half a century or more away from being able to treat or understand a disability like his. Doctors in those days knew virtually nothing about the true sources of disease. Despite the advent of the scientific method, medicine had made little progress since the Middle Ages. Viruses and the effects of bacteria were unknown, antiseptics unknown, the structure of the nervous system and function of the digestive system unknown. The stethoscope was not invented until 1816. There was no anesthetic for operations; surgeons cut open their patients with furious speed, trying to finish before the screaming victims died of shock. Most medicines did no good at all, and some did great harm.

For Beethoven, the horror in his ears came on top of old, chronic miseries, the periods of vomiting and diarrhea that had assaulted him since his teens. In his profession he saw enemies all around him. Now his body became his most virulent, most inescapable enemy. His livelihood, his creativity, his spirit were under siege by a force that did not care about his music, his talent, his wisdom: the force of fate that had claimed his infant brothers and sisters in childhood, his teacher Franz Rovantini, his mother.

He was twenty-seven years old. At first there had to have been disbelief, a young man's refusal to countenance what was happening to him. It was imperative to hide the decline of his hearing, to hide his panic and depression. He feared it would ruin his career if it came out, and that fear was entirely reasonable. He had to hide everything, turn the old confident and robust face to the world. For the moment he told no one—not Amenda, not Franz Wegeler or Stephan von Breuning. When he did not respond or hear properly, people would think he was absentminded, lost in thought. Let them think that. Meanwhile he would find a cure. He
must
find a cure.

So he went to doctors, one after another. Beethoven was the worst imaginable patient, unable to maintain any regime of medicine or diet for long, furious if results were not immediate. Doctors resorted to leeching, bleeding, lukewarm baths and cold baths, painful and dangerous applications of tree bark tied to his arms, little of it with any solid scientific basis.
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Medicine had learned, at least, that cheap wine with lead salts could have terrible effects on the digestive system and on the personality: it could make a victim irritable and paranoid (and Beethoven was irritable and paranoid enough already). Leaded wine was illegal but still common. Maybe Beethoven knew about these dangers, maybe not. If he did know, it was too late.

Inevitably, the burden of his health entered his music. Perhaps the slow movement of the op. 10 D Major Sonata was a first intimation, or the
Pathétique
. He had composed tragic pages before, but not as intense as those. As a teenager, in the
Joseph
Cantata he wrote powerfully about death because he had seen it. His teacher and a row of siblings had died; he watched his mother succumb by inches. For everyone in that era, death was all around, everyone's life like a battlefield. But for Beethoven this new threat was different, a decay from within: a slow death, the mind watching it, helpless before the grinding of fate. Fate would become an abiding theme for him, its import always hostile.

There must have been days, his ears howling and his body racked by vomiting or diarrhea or both, when he lay in a blinding transport of misery and despair. Beyond the specter of deafness, the kind of incessant and maddening tinnitus Beethoven suffered can by itself drive victims to suicide. Yet when he could work at all he worked with his old energy, with undimmed brilliance and confidence. He met extraordinary suffering with extraordinary endurance and courage. He needed that strength. Other than death itself, going deaf is the worst thing that can happen to a musician. That is easy to understand, terrible to bear.

After the first onslaught, it was some time before he arrived at the realization that there could be no cure, only a steady slide into silence. His days as a virtuoso were numbered. It was well that he did not understand that right away. It is well that a sick man cannot see the future.

 

Beethoven did not pull back from society, not yet, or from performing. In October 1798, he made another tour, to Prague, where he gave two public concerts featuring the first two piano concertos and improvisations, and some private performances. One of those who came to hear was the Czech virtuoso and composer Wenzel Johann Tomaschek. After the first experience of this newcomer, Tomaschek was not just impressed, he was devastated: “Beethoven's magnificent playing and particularly the daring flights in his improvisation stirred me strangely to the depths of my soul; indeed I found myself so profoundly bowed down that I did not touch my pianoforte for several days.”

Tomaschek dragged himself to a second concert that afflicted him equally. Then after a concert at the home of a “Count C.,” he drew some consolation after hearing Beethoven improvise and play pieces including the “graceful Rondo from the A major sonata,” op. 2, no. 2. In his response, Tomaschek, younger than Beethoven but with an older sensibility, showed the distinction between an eighteenth-century musical consciousness and a progressive one: “This time I listened to Beethoven's artistic work with more composure. I admired his powerful and brilliant playing, but his frequent daring deviations from one motive to another, whereby the organic connection, the gradual development of ideas was broken up, did not escape me. Evils of this nature frequently weaken his greatest compositions . . . The singular and original seemed to be his chief aim.”
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Here were charges that would turn up in criticism regularly in the coming years: Beethoven was capricious, he provoked for the sake of provocation, in his work he leaped from idea to idea with no sense of unity or organic unfolding.

By the end of October 1798, he was back in Vienna, playing one of his concertos in a program. Despite the threat to his hearing, he was still an active virtuoso, still practicing intensely, still growing as a performer. But he had taken his next-to-last concert tour.

Later he said that his hearing bothered him most in company, least when he composed. Sunk in his
raptus
, he could shut off the chaos in his ears and hear only what he was improvising on the piano or in his head, sketching on the page. The year 1799 turned out unhappy but richly productive. In the early months he filled his second sketchbook with ideas and drafts toward a string quartet in F major, eventually no. 1 of the set commissioned by Prince Lobkowitz. Through page after page, he drafted variations on an obsessive figure, laying out a nearly monorhythmic kind of first movement that he would often return to in the future. His composing process alternated stretches of improvising at the keyboard with the scratch of a quill pen racing across the page at the table he kept beside the piano. Once or twice a day, in all weathers, he set off on a brisk walk around the city walls, his head ringing with music as he hustled unseeing past palaces and bastions and strolling Viennese. So his creative rhythm was set. Day after day, year after year: improvise, sketch at the table, go out and walk. Walking was as much a part of the process as the rest of it.

Haydn was once asked whether he ever composed with a story in mind. He said he thought he had once, something about a man's confrontation with God, but he couldn't remember which piece. Beethoven told an admirer that there were always stories or images behind his music. Unusually in one case, he admitted the inspiration when somebody guessed it. He played over the slow movement of the F Major String Quartet for Amenda. His friend said it sounded like the parting of two lovers. It's based on the ending of
Romeo and Juliet
, Beethoven said. Sketches for the last part of the movement show a close attention to the story: with a dramatic
fortissimo
“he enters the tomb”; a sweeping figure is noted as “despair”; at “he kills himself,” the music sinks to empty single notes; descending figures represent “the last sighs.”
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But in the final version of the movement, Beethoven took out all those pictorial gestures in the sketches. What remains is a mood, a sense of encroaching threat: the rushing figure he called “despair” became a whirlwind that appears in the middle of the movement and rises to the end like doom.

Except for a few pieces whose character or scene he would label—
Pathétique
,
Pastoral, Das
Lebewohl
—he rarely again spoke to anyone about his images and stories, and few hints show up in his sketches. Even on the page he kept his cards close. Sometimes the stories were a starting point, something to get the notes flowing, like the old days in Bonn when he improvised musical portraits of his friends. Stories, characters, images helped him shape a piece and find evocative ideas, helped keep the narrative and feeling focused. But that was a matter of the workshop, and Beethoven rarely talked about his workshop. And while he was obsessed with technique, he did not appreciate anybody else talking about it: technical analysis was mere “counting syllables,” he would say, as if describing the meter of a poem could explain what the poem is about.

His craftsmanship was nobody's business but his own. He wanted his listeners to create their own stories, their own poetry, their own fantasias from his poems in tone. Eventually he came to call himself not a
Komponist
but a
Tondichter
, a tone poet. In his scale of values, poets were more important than musicians, superior beings all around. In later years, if there was any man alive whom Beethoven placed on a higher plane than himself, it was the poet and writer Goethe.

Beethoven spent most of thirty pages of the new sketchbook on the F Major Quartet, as usual largely working through one movement before going to the next. At the end of the main work on the F Major, he continued on to quartets in G and A major, a septet that was eventually op. 20, and some piano variations, among a miscellany of pieces large and small, finished and unfinished.
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His anxiety about his hearing apparently did not slow him so much as a step.

 

From now on, the stages in Beethoven's career would be tracked by critics in print. There had long been music critics and critical journals; an ambitious new one appeared at the end of 1798: the
Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung
(
General Musical Magazine
), produced by the Leipzig music-publishing firm Breitkopf & Härtel. Though it was in effect a house journal, Breitkopf gave it considerable editorial latitude and named an able first editor, Johann Friedrich Rochlitz. He had studied music in Leipzig, then turned to theology and Kantian aesthetics.
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Rochlitz would make the
AMZ
into the most important musical journal of its time, its format large and double-columned like a newspaper, its stable of writers keeping music lovers apprised of the publications and the doings of famous musicians.

Naturally the journal kept readers apprised of the most dynamic of the younger pianist-composers, Beethoven. By this point he had a serious keyboard rival in Vienna. One of the first extended
AMZ
pieces involving Beethoven, in May 1799, describes a duel with Joseph Wölffl. Originally from Salzburg, Wölffl had studied violin in childhood with Leopold Mozart; later he was a friend and perhaps piano and composition student of Wolfgang. Wölffl was yet another eccentric virtuoso and looked the part: gaunt and tall, his clothes flapping around him. Wenzel Tomaschek described Wölffl's fingers as “monstrously long,” giving him a huge reach on the keyboard. He had the peculiar habit of sometimes playing melodies, even quite fast ones, with one finger.
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