Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph (38 page)

It was an age when for many listeners the polish and virtuosity of pianists were at least as important as the music they played. Competing virtuosos were treated like rival athletes. The piano enthusiasts of Vienna split into Beethoven and Wölffl camps. Between the two men, however, the rivalry stayed friendly. Beethoven tended to be more generous to competitors (except overrated ones) than Mozart had been. After all, in his generation he knew he still had no real peer as a composer. Wölffl for his part dedicated his op. 6 Piano Sonatas to Beethoven.

Inevitably when they were in Vienna together, there would be a duel. It took place before a packed audience at the home of wealthy businessman and one-time Mozart patron Baron Raimund Wetzlar. Beethoven's patron Prince Lichnowsky sat in the front row; host Baron Wetzlar was a devotee of Wölffl. The two contenders played their own music, improvised alone, and, seated at two pianos, tossed ideas for improvisation back and forth in mounting waves of virtuosity.
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The favored, Mozartian style of playing in those days was Wölffl's: lucid, concise, subtle. A favored term of approval was a “pearly” sound, each note delicate and distinct. Beethoven, in comparison, was less precious, more fiery, technically dazzling with his blinding scales and double and triple trills. In his youth he had spent a great deal of time teaching himself to play the piano as distinct from the harpsichord and clavichord. He had a rare gift for a singing legato at the piano, achieved partly by his prophetic technique: he held his fingers bent and close to the keys, his body still, his fingers sometimes hardly seeming to move. During loud passages, though, he might break hammers and strings on the delicate, harpsichord-like pianos of the time.

Most reviews of his playing pointed out these things in one way or another. After the duel, a summary of the opinions of local cognoscenti was included in an
Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung
article of May 1799 called “The Most Famous Female and Male Keyboard Players in Vienna.” After commending a couple of women virtuosos, the anonymous writer compares the styles of the two leading “gentlemen”:

 

Beethoven and Wölffl cause the most sensation. Opinions about preferences for one over the other are divided. Nevertheless, it seems as if the majority is inclined toward [Wölffl] . . . Beethoven's playing is extremely brilliant but less delicate, and it occasionally crosses over into the obscure. He demonstrates his greatest advantage in improvisation. And here it is really extraordinary with what ease and yet steadiness in the succession of ideas B. does not just vary the figurations of any given theme on the spot . . . but really performs it. Since the death of Mozart . . . I have never found this kind of pleasure anywhere to the degree provided by Beethoven. Here, Wölffl is inferior to him. However, Wölffl has . . . fundamental musical learning and true dignity in composition, plays passages that seem impossible to execute with astonishing ease, precision, and clarity . . . Wölffl gains a special advantage because of his unassuming, pleasant bearing over Beethoven's somewhat haughty manners.
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Another and more Romantic account came, years later, from conductor and composer Ignaz von Seyfried. He witnessed this duel or another one like it between Beethoven and Wölffl and recalled his impressions of these “athletes” and “gladiators.” He declared it was “difficult, perhaps impossible, to award the palm of victory to either one.” In his lavishly metaphorical description, there is, as in the
AMZ
account, an implication that Beethoven was a composer and player for the few rather than the many:

 

In his improvisations even then Beethoven did not deny his tendency toward the mysterious and gloomy. When once he began to revel in the infinite world of tones, he was transported above all earthly things;—his spirit had burst all restricting bonds, shaken off the yokes of servitude, and soared triumphantly into the luminous spaces of the higher aether. Now his playing tore along like a wildly foaming cataract, and the conjurer constrained his instrument to an utterance so forceful that the stoutest structure was scarcely able to withstand it; and anon he sank down, exhausted, exhaling gentle plaints, dissolving in melancholy. Again the spirit would soar aloft, triumphing over transitory terrestrial sufferings, turn its glance upwards in reverent sounds and find rest and comfort on the innocent bosom of holy nature. But who shall sound the depths of the sea? It was the mystical Sanskrit language whose hieroglyphs can be read only by the initiated. Wölffl, on the contrary, trained in the school of Mozart, was always equable; never superficial but always clear and thus more accessible to the multitude.
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In these responses, one finds an important element of the critical debate that marked Beethoven's public career. The ideal of the later eighteenth century, the age of reason, placed a supreme value on transparency, coherence, and restraint: the art that hides art, the “organic,” the elegance and irony that mask emotion while subtly revealing it. It was a time when the tragic voice in music (heard mainly in opera and religious works) felt detectably forced and stylized. Mozart's greatest operas were comedies, which suited the temper of the time and the temper of its music.
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Originality was valued, but only in good measure. In search of the “natural,” “pleasing,” and “accessible,” the later eighteenth century dismissed the creations of the previous era as “baroque,” a word actually meaning a misshapen pearl, made into a term for art overdecorated and overcomplex (in musical terms, too densely contrapuntal). As a pejorative, the term
baroque
was allied to “bizarre,” meaning deliberately provocative, irrational,
unnatural
. (The modern, nonpejorative use of the word
Baroque
as the name of a period in the arts came much later.)

Another characteristic complaint visited on Beethoven was that his sonatas were “fantastic.”
Fantasia
was the time's term for a genre in a quasi-improvisatory style outside the usual formal models, free in meter, tempo, form, and character, “in which,” wrote a theorist of the time, “the composer arranges the images of his imagination without an evident plan, or with a certain level of freedom, and thus sometimes in connected, at other times in quite loosely ordered phrases.”
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Mozart had written famous fantasias.

To compose fantasias was acceptable to the aesthetic sensibility of the time; to call them sonatas was not. Beethoven founded everything he did on models from the past, but many musicians and critics did not understand or approve of the ways he pushed tradition. In fact, he was pushing his models in directions innate to them: he used contrast, but sharper contrasts; a variety of keys, but a broader variety; developments and codas, but longer and more varied ones; transitions, but sometimes longer transitions than usual and sometimes none; and so on through every dimension of music. Those who could not hear the connections to the past accused Beethoven of making his sonatas too much like fantasias: loose, incoherent, beyond all decorum.

Charles Burney, in
General History of Music
of 1776 had defined the attitude of the high Enlightenment: music was “an innocent luxury, unnecessary, indeed, to our existence, but a great improvement and gratification to the sense of hearing.” A few years later Mozart wrote to his father, “Passions, violent or not, must never be expressed to the point of disgust, and music must never offend the ear . . . but must always be pleasing.” Mozart epitomized the Enlightenment's musical aesthetic in the letter describing some of his new works: “These concertos are a happy medium between what is too easy and too difficult; they are very brilliant, pleasing to the ear, and natural, without being vapid. There are passages here and there from which connoisseurs alone can derive satisfaction; but these passages are written in such a way that the less learned cannot fail to be pleased, without knowing why.”
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When Ignaz von Seyfried wrote about Beethoven's music using terms such as “mysterious,” “gloomy,” “Sanskrit,” “hieroglyphs,” “the initiated,” he drew a line between Beethoven and the eighteenth-century taste for subtlety, restraint, irony, broad appeal, the happy medium. In order to make his way, Beethoven had to change that aesthetic. That task would not be entirely his job, however. As of 1798, there was a new spirit in the air that was to foster an audience for whom words like “mysterious,” “hieroglyphs,” “fantastic,” even “bizarre” would be terms of praise. This was the movement that named itself Romantic, which came to embrace Beethoven as its essential musical voice. Even though the Romantic sensibility was abroad in the land by the end of the eighteenth century, it had not yet made its way to music. When Beethoven's music and that sensibility connected, his ascent toward the status of demigod began. The contest between Beethoven and Wölffl in a crowded eighteenth-century Viennese music room was, in a real sense, a duel between the past and the future of music.

In June 1799, a hapless critic of the
Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung
with little to no experience of Beethoven was assigned to review the op. 12 Violin Sonatas. Contemplating these pieces so mild, so beholden to Mozart (and to a later age so barely Beethovenian), this befuddled listener could only splutter:

 

After having arduously worked his way through these quite peculiar sonatas, overladen with strange difficulties, he must admit that . . . he felt like a man who had thought he was going to promenade with an ingenious friend through an inviting forest, was detained every moment by hostile entanglements, and finally emerged, weary, exhausted, and without enjoyment. It is undeniable that Herr van
Beethoven
goes his own way. But what a bizarre, laborious way! Studied, studied, and perpetually studied, and no nature, no song. Indeed . . . there is only a mass of learning here, without good method. There is obstinacy for which we feel little interest, a striving for rare modulations . . . a piling on of difficulty upon difficulty, so that one loses all patience and enjoyment.
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He relents enough to suggest that “this work shouldn't be thrown away because of these complaints. It has its value . . . particularly as a study for experienced keyboard players. There are always many who love excessive difficulties in invention and composition, that which one could call perverse.” He ends these backhanded compliments by hoping the composer will “follow the path of nature,” when he will “certainly provide us with quite a few good things for an instrument over which he seems to have extraordinary control.”

Beethoven generally read everything he could find written about himself. He would have read that review with blood boiling. Soon he would find a way to twist Breitkopf & Härtel's arm to assign him more sympathetic reviewers. Within a few years, he had the satisfaction of seeing op. 12 go through several reprintings by Artaria in Vienna, and further editions in Paris and London.
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Meanwhile he issued works designed to show critics and the public that, when he wanted, he could write as pleasingly as you like.

 

On March 19, 1799, Joseph Haydn publicly unveiled the work he considered his magnum opus, the oratorio
The Creation
, on a libretto by Baron van Swieten. Haydn considered oratorios and masses the most important musical genres and the crowns of his work, and he wanted to leave behind something to place beside the Handel oratorios, above all
Messiah
, which he had come to admire in London. The old master worked slowly and carefully on the piece, praying to God for inspiration as always, but now sketching more elaborately than he had done in his decades as a palace servant, when he had to turn out a constant stream of works to order.
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Presumably Beethoven attended the premiere of
The Creation
at the Burgtheater. He subdued his jealousy as best he could, admired the scope and splendor of the music as best he could. His agitated state of mind around the premiere is perhaps indicated by a rare wrangle he had with Zmeskall over tickets, the only time on record when there were strong words between them. “You seemed to be offended with me yesterday,” Beethoven wrote, “perhaps because I declared rather heatedly that you had acted wrongly in giving away the tickets . . . etc., etc.”
The Creation
drew the largest crowd ever seen in the court theater. Its legendary opening masterstroke is the hair-raising proclamation of “Let there be light!” in a great C-major effulgence bursting from the depiction of Chaos. It was an effect not only in music but in his audience that Haydn had calculated as precisely as the eponymous
fortissimo
explosion in the
Surprise
Symphony. Knowing that moment would begin the piece with a coup de théâtre, Haydn swore the musicians and choir to secrecy. At the premiere it caused the sensation he knew it would. The oratorio went on to be, for many years, one of the most popular large choral works in the repertoire.

Jammed in amid the throng of adoring listeners in the Burgtheater, Beethoven might have sensed with a touch of relief that the wild acclaim was not quite earned. The music had manifold splendors, but when all was sung and done, vocal works of Handelian scope were not really Haydn's forte any more than opera had been, and the style of
The Creation
was generally operatic. The aria depicting the creation of the earth, for one example, starts in a
furioso
mode suitable for a revenge aria on the stage. In the end, Haydn was at his best on a more immediate and intimate scale: a string quartet, a piano sonata, a symphony whether witty or elegant or judiciously Sturm und Drang.

It would not have required an inordinate gift of prophecy for Beethoven to foresee that this kind of scope and ambition was actually his own forte, even if he did not yet know when and how he could manage it. For him, when great works were in question, Handel would become the prime model and challenge, not Haydn (given that Beethoven and his time hardly knew the large works of J. S. Bach). Nor would it have been especially humbling for Beethoven to realize that he might never write a better string quartet than Haydn's greatest ones, and several of those greatest ones were brand-new.