Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph (43 page)

Payments were small, so one had to turn out a good deal of music to get by. Haydn discovered a clever and profitable way to market his work: he would contract a piece or an opus simultaneously to two or more publishers in different countries, giving each limited but exclusive territory. That meant he could be paid for a given piece more than once (all this was done openly). Beethoven eventually took up that procedure and found himself bedeviled with its innate problem: to keep pirates at bay as long as possible, a given piece had to come out in every country at the same time. But in an era of slow mail and slower travel, coordinating publishing dates across Europe and England was a dicey affair. Beethoven made use of another kind of contractual arrangement with patrons who commissioned from him: on delivering the piece to the person who commissioned it and collecting his fee, Beethoven would put off publication and give the person exclusive rights to the work in manuscript for a stated time (usually six months to a year); then he would be free to sell it at will.

Years before, Beethoven had written his brother that for anything he wrote he had his pick of publishers, who paid whatever he asked (though he did not usually demand extravagant prices). Even though he changed publishers often, he would rarely have much trouble getting things in print, if not always with the houses he wanted. Which is to say that as of the new century he remained in pleasant professional circumstances; he would remain so for the next decade. The counters to the rosy prospects were his declining hearing and his health. He was miserably ill through much of the winter of 1800–1801 with what he described as “frightful attacks” of vomiting on top of his old chronic diarrhea; and at the same time, he wrote, “my ears hum and buzz day and night.”
⁴²

 

The Holy Roman Empire was having a hard winter of its own. In the ongoing War of the Second Coalition, Austria suffered another mauling from the French at the Bavarian village of Hohenlinden. The hospitals of Vienna filled up with wounded soldiers—gratifying to musicians at least, because benefit concerts would be needed.
⁴³
The Battle of Hohenlinden forced the Habsburgs to make peace, which meant the end of the latest coalition against France. In the Treaty of Lunéville, signed in February 1801, Austria conceded all its territories in Italy except for Venice. The thousand-year-old Holy Roman Empire was not just shrinking; it was dying.

In the middle of January 1801, Haydn conducted his
Creation
at a benefit for wounded soldiers in the
Grosser Redoutensaal
of the Hofburg. In another benefit at the end of the month, Beethoven felt well enough to play his Horn Sonata, now in print as op. 17, with Giovanni Punto. Haydn conducted two of his symphonies on that program.

Beethoven had other matters on his mind. In January he wrote another long letter to publisher Franz Anton Hoffmeister in Leipzig, laying on his respect, pleasure, gratitude, humility, etc. If he was in demand, he still felt the need to court publishers vigorously. As a practical item, he offers to make a piano arrangement of the Septet. He names his prices for the pieces accepted: 20 ducats (around 100 florins) for the Septet arrangement; the same for the C Major Symphony (a shockingly low price); the B-flat Piano Concerto for a bargain 50 florins. He also asks 100 florins for the big B-flat Piano Sonata, reassuring Hoffmeister, “This sonata is a terrific piece, most beloved and worthy brother.” He goes on to give quite lucid reasons for the prices, in effect telling the publisher his business: “I find that a septet or a symphony does not sell as well as a sonata. That is the reason why I do this, although a symphony should undoubtedly be worth more . . . I am valuing the concerto at only [45 florins] because, as I have already told you, I do not consider it to be one of my best concertos . . . I have tried to make the prices as moderate for you as possible.”

At the end he emits an inked sigh for having to make these mundane arrangements: “Well, that tiresome business has now been settled. I call it tiresome because I should like such matters to be differently ordered in this world. There ought to be in the world a
market for art
, where the artist would only have to bring his works and take as much money as he needed. But, as it is, an artist has to be to a certain extent a business man as well.” The market idea is neither irrational nor insincere. Beethoven was thinking of similar organizations proposed during the French Revolution.
⁴⁴
It was not, however, an idea a publisher would conceivably be receptive to.

Beethoven includes an aside showing that the recent middling-to-bad reviews in the
Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung
were still eating at his mind: “As for the Leipzig r[eviewers], just let them talk; by means of their chatter they will certainly never make anyone immortal, nor will they ever take immortality from anyone upon whom Apollo has bestowed it.”
⁴⁵
As the bestower of immortality he cites not the Christian God but Apollo. Since he does not believe God makes miracles or meddles in one's born gifts, he resorts to a metaphor.

At the end of his letter to Hoffmeister, Beethoven adds, “For some time I have not been well; and so it is a little difficult for me even to write down notes and, still less, letters of the alphabet.” Perhaps, but he had taken on a commission to write the music for a ballet called
Die Geschöpfe des Prometheus
(The Creatures of Prometheus). For this apparently merely commercial job, he dropped every other project and jumped in.

 

The
Prometheus
ballet and its story were the creation of dancer, choreographer, composer, and impresario Salvatore Viganò, the recently appointed ballet master of the Vienna court. Viganò was one of the premiere dancers and choreographers in Europe, in those days at least as famous as Beethoven.
⁴⁶
Viganò's approach to ballet was reformist and controversial. He was given to storytelling with pantomime and tableaux, as it would be with
Die Geschöpfe des Prometheus
. He had the usual problems of reformers. As one of his admirers described it, “There was something disconcerting in suddenly seeing dramatic action, depth of feeling, and pure plastic beauty of movement in a particular form of spectacle in which one was hitherto accustomed to seeing nothing but leaps and contortions, constrained positions, and contrived and complicated dances.”
⁴⁷

On the face of it, Viganò's plot for this new ballet was chimerical. The figure of Prometheus, in Greek myth the demigod punished by Zeus for bringing fire to humanity, was not exactly the same character as the hero of the ballet. Viganò took a newly invented Prometheus myth from an eighteenth-century French novel and adapted it to his Enlightenment taste. As the playbill explained, Viganò's new Prometheus was “a sublime spirit, who came upon the men of his time in a state of ignorance, who refined them through science and art, and imparted to them morals.”

Prometheus carves stone statues of a man and a woman and magically brings them to life, only to discover that his creatures are alive but not yet human. They have no spirit, no soul. In order to teach them feelings, wisdom, and moral awareness, Prometheus takes them to Apollo on Parnassus. The god commands his subjects to humanize the creatures by bringing them to understand music, drama, and dance, each represented by its respective deity. At the end, Apollo commands “that Bacchus [performed by Viganò himself] make known the heroic dance that he invented.”
⁴⁸

The idea of humanity being illuminated by art and science is a high-Aufklärung theme that struck deep resonances in Beethoven. He would later write, from the same kind of conviction, “Only art and science can raise men to the Godhead.” That the arts were necessary to become fully human was an idea that reached back to the core of his
Bildung
in Bonn, where, for one example, the goal in founding the National Theater had been to create “an ethical school for the German people.” But there was a more specific body of thought relating to ethics, morality, and art that Viganò may have drawn from: the recent philosophical writings of Friedrich Schiller.

Schiller had been one of the artists and thinkers who hailed the French Revolution. He had virtually prophesied it in his most famous poem, “An die Freude.” He had been declared an honorary citizen of France. But the coming of the Reign of Terror horrified Schiller. After the execution of Louis XVI he wrote, “I haven't been able to look at the papers for the last fortnight, I feel so sickened by these abominable butchers . . . The [revolutionary] attempt of the French people . . . has plunged not only that unhappy people itself, but a considerable part of Europe and a whole century, back into barbarism and slavery.”
⁴⁹
Schiller remained true to the Enlightenment principles of the Revolution, but he recoiled from endorsing, as some did, what became of the Revolution in France. And despite all the rage against tyranny in his early plays—
The Robbers, Fiesco, Don Carlos
—Schiller retained a characteristically German-Aufklärung faith in enlightened princes who had the power to impose reform from above.
⁵⁰

In the 1790s, after devoting years to studying Kant's philosophy, Schiller issued what amounted to his answer to the Terror and the failure of the Revolution to establish a rational society:
On the Aesthetic Education of Man
. The essence of that book, which had a wide and lasting influence, is that the ideal society cannot rise from revolution but only from education in aesthetics—in other words, from an appreciation of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful, and their embodiment in Art. “Art is a daughter of freedom,” Schiller wrote; and, “It is only through Beauty that man makes his way to Freedom”; and, “The way to the head must be opened through the heart.”
⁵¹
Earlier he had been fervent about the Aufklärung
Glückseligskeitphilosophie
, the philosophy of happiness as the goal of life. The ideal society, in which brotherhood and freedom make happiness possible, Schiller called Elysium. This was the essence of “An die Freude”: “Joy, thou god-engendered daughter of Elysium.” That poem, rising from the revolutionary (and Masonic and Illuminist) spirit of the 1780s, was part of his path to the
Aesthetic Education
.

Whether Viganò read this work of Schiller's or whether he and Beethoven absorbed their ideas from the zeitgeist, these kinds of ideals were the foundation of
Die Geschöpfe des Prometheus:
learning of beauty and art makes a human being free, moral, and ethical, thereby able to mold lives and societies that are harmonious and happy. The story of the
Prometheus
ballet would be a representation of that ideal in sound and movement.

The depth and breadth of these ideas, however, are not particularly audible in the tone of Beethoven's music, which on the whole is in conventional ballet style. Like most composers of his time, he was schooled in the traditions of genres: how a symphony is distinct from a quartet, how the tone of an overture to an opera is distinct from the first movement of a symphony. To study composers as models for his works was also to study how they handled genres. He had spent the last decade exploring and mastering one medium and genre after another. Now he tried his hand at ballet music, which required a certain elegance and lightness of touch, and he conformed to that expectation as best he could.

After his latest siege of illness, complaining of exhaustion, Beethoven got to work. In the first two months of 1801, he wrote an hour's worth of orchestral music—overture, introduction, and sixteen numbers. The job appealed to him beyond the commission fee and his attraction to the story and ideas. It was a way of making himself better known to the Viennese court and getting practice in theatrical music. He was not a beginner in writing for dance; there had been the
Ritterballet
in Bonn and ballroom dances for Vienna. In style, this music for the theater would be entirely distinct from his work for the concert hall and his other theatrical music. The
Prometheus
Overture, elevated and Mozartian in tone, begins dramatically, with dissonant chords punctuating silence. From there, he kept the ballet music graceful, tuneful, light and pleasing even in its sterner moments (though as it turned out, not light enough for reviewers). Given the speed at which he had to produce the score, there was little time for rumination in any case.

Still, what mainly galvanized Beethoven were the humanistic implications of the ballet, in particular its finale. After much dancing by the gods of the various arts, in which the new creatures join in, to the horror of his children Prometheus is killed by a wrathful Melpomene, Muse of tragedy. But luckily Thalia, Muse of comedy, is on hand to cheer everybody up and bring the demigod back to life.
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And so, “amid festive dances the story ends.” The particular festive dance that Beethoven and Viganò chose for a finale was one of the most popular dances of the time: the
anglaise
or
englische
.

Beginning as an English country dance, the
englische
had spread across Europe. There were regional variations, but it was always done as a contra dance: a line of women and a line of men changing partners during its course. By 1800, the Viennese form of the dance was accompanied by a suite of short tunes in changing meters: say, a touch of minuet in three-beat, a two-beat segment, and so on. It ended with a waltzlike segment.
⁵³

Dances usually have symbolic dimensions that are part of their image and popularity. The
englische
contra dance had uniquely progressive implications. The constant change of partners as one danced down the line produced a literal mingling of classes; a nobleman might end up hand in hand with a merchant's daughter. This was not a small thing. It was something new in public social life, even radically new. In the
englische
each participant was, for the duration of the music at least, an equal
citoyen
of the dance, and for that reason the
englische
acquired a frisson of democracy. In turn, for some thinkers that situation made the
englische
into a symbol of an ideal society. One of those caught up by that symbol was Schiller, who wrote in a letter,