Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph (44 page)

 

I can think of no more fitting image for the ideal of social conduct than an English dance, composed of many complicated figures and perfectly executed. A spectator . . . sees innumerable movements intersecting in the most chaotic fashion . . . yet
never colliding
 . . . it is all so skillfully, and yet so artlessly integrated into a form, that each seems only to be following his own inclination, yet without ever getting in the way of anybody else. It is the most perfectly appropriate symbol of the assertion of one's own freedom and regard for the freedom of others.
⁵⁴

 

So, the “festive dances” that end the
Prometheus
ballet are more than a formal conclusion. Choosing an
englische
for the finale made the end and goal of the story a symbol something like Schiller's image of “one's own freedom and regard for the freedom of others.” The music for this finale begins innocuously enough, with a lilting two-beat tune, distinctively an
englische
. A simple bass line anchors the simplest possible harmonies. Yet over the next two years that little tune and its bass line would come to obsess Beethoven, for their simplicity that held enormous musical potential and for the harmonious society this dance represented to him, to Schiller, and to many others.

Here burgeoned a train of thought that took Beethoven and music itself to a new place. By means of this ballet, he began to understand how he could join his art to the social, ethical, moral, and spiritual ideals of the age. That train of thought took him beyond youthful brilliance and craftsmanship to his full maturity.

In this period, Beethoven revised his 1794 setting of Matthisson's “Opferlied” (Song of Sacrifice). Its Schilleresque last lines became a touchstone with him: “Give me, as a young man and as an old man . . . O Zeus, the Beautiful together with the Good.” In autograph albums, he would quote that indispensable joining of the sensuous and ethical:
the Beautiful together with the Good
.
⁵⁵

15

A
T ITS PREMIERE
,
Die Geschöpfe des Prometheus
had a middling reception, the reaction to the dance more middling than to the music. One J. C. Rosenbaum reported to his diary, “The ballet did not please at all, the music a little . . . At the end the ballet was more hissed than applauded.”
¹
Most ballet aficionados wanted their leaps and positions rather than Salvatore Viganò's high-minded pantomime. The
Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung
reviewer summarized: “As much dignity and artistic design as it had . . . it nevertheless was not liked in general . . . The music also did not entirely live up to expectations, even though it possesses more than
ordinary
merit . . . However, that he wrote
too learnedly
for a ballet, and with too little regard for the dance, is certainly not subject to doubt.”
²
All the same, there would be a respectable fourteen performances of
Prometheus
in 1801, more the next year.

After the premiere Beethoven ran into Joseph Haydn on the street. The old man greeted him with, “Now, yesterday I heard your ballet and it pleased me very much.”

Beethoven attempted to be gracious: “Oh, my dear Papa, you're very kind, but it's a long way from being a
Creation
!”

Confused about what that meant, Haydn replied, “That is true, it is not yet a
Creation
, and I very much doubt whether it will ever succeed in being.” And they took their leave, both of them baffled and annoyed.
³

If Haydn's reply to Beethoven's attempted compliment meant anything, it was not the absurd statement that
Prometheus
could never turn into a
Creation
but that its composer would never rise to a
Creation
. Haydn kept up with what Beethoven was putting out, and he could not have liked much of what he heard.

Haydn had his own frustrations as of 1801. He had been seriously ill in the winter of 1800–1801 and was worn down by his labors on another giant oratorio from a text by Baron von Swieten,
The Seasons
. He was disgusted with himself for taking on the project and for giving in to Swieten's pressure to put into the piece literalistic depictions of flora and fauna, not omitting croaking frogs. The public would eat up the representations of nature in the oratorio, but Haydn dismissed some of those passages as “Frenchified trash.” Though after its premiere, in May 1801,
The Seasons
would find nearly as much popularity as
The Creation
, Haydn was nearly exhausted as a composer. “
The Seasons
,” he said, “has finished me off.”
⁴
He would not complete the set of string quartets commissioned like Beethoven's op. 18 by Prince Lobkowitz, with which he surely had intended to show his one-time pupil a thing or two. He had a visiting card made that said, quoting one of his song texts, “Gone forever is my strength, old and weak am I.”
⁵
Senility was overtaking one of history's supreme musical minds.

As Haydn sank, Beethoven rose. After the short but intense labor on the ballet, he got back to practical business. Time he had once spent practicing piano was now going into the unending nuisance of publishers and publications. In a letter to Hoffmeister in Leipzig regarding ongoing projects, he apologized for not writing sooner to “my dear brother”: “I was ill, and in addition, I had a great deal to do . . . Perhaps the only touch of genius which I possess is that my things are not always in very good order . . . I have composed a ballet; but the ballet-master has not done his part very successfully.”

Another element holding up his dealings with Hoffmeister was that he had begun what became an extended courtship of Breitkopf & Härtel. The firm, founded in 1719, was the leading music-publishing house in Europe. Beethoven wanted its celebrated imprint on his works. If he thought the firm paid better than lesser publishers, however, he was to learn otherwise.

There was another matter between him and Breitkopf & Härtel. He wanted to strike back at the humiliating reviews of his music in its journal, the
Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung
. Beethoven was becoming a hot name in print, and he knew it. So he was ready to issue a little warning to a house that wanted his music. With great precision of purpose, he wrote to Gottfried Christophe Härtel, head of the company. The pans of his op. 12 Violin Sonatas and other pieces had galled him, and he was already anticipating future nasty notices:

 

Please be so kind just to inform me what types of composition you would like to have from me, namely, symphonies, quartets, sonatas and so forth, so that I may be guided by your wishes . . . I merely point out that
Hoffmeister
is publishing
one of my first concertos
, which, of course, is not
one of my best compositions
. Mollo is also publishing a
concerto which was written later
. . . Let this serve merely as a hint to your Musikalische Zeitung about reviewing these works . . . Advise your reviewers to be more circumspect and intelligent, particularly in regard to the productions of younger composers. For many a one, who perhaps might go far, may take fright. As for myself, far be it from me to think that I have achieved a perfection which suffers no adverse criticism. But your reviewer's outcry against me was at first very mortifying. Yet when I began to compare myself with other composers, I could hardly bring myself to pay any attention to it but remained quite calm and said to myself: “They don't know anything about music.” And indeed what made it easier for me to keep calm was that I noticed how certain people were being praised to the skies who in Vienna had very little standing among the best local composers . . . However, pax vobiscum—Peace between you and me.
⁶

 

Settling down, Beethoven then offers to donate something for the benefit of the indigent last daughter of J. S. Bach, whom he calls, with his underline accent, “
the immortal god of harmony
.” The gist of his message to Härtel concerning reviewers was this: if you want my things, call off your dogs. And Gottfried Härtel, who did want Beethoven in his catalog and had sent him a query about it, did call them off. Though the
AMZ
would have plenty more criticism for Beethoven over the years, there would be no more snarling reviews like the one that greeted op. 12. Härtel did not necessarily direct the critics to go easy; rather he found more progressive and sympathetic reviewers to assign to the Great Mogul. The tone of the
AMZ
reviews shifted decisively toward a tempered respect. And so it came to pass that a historic turnaround of opinion concerning Beethoven in Germany's leading musical journal was stage-managed behind the scenes by Beethoven himself.

One of the first visible results of his maneuver was the
AMZ
review of the opp. 23 and 24 Violin Sonatas. The judgment of the last set had been on the order of “strange sonatas, overladen with difficulties.” This time, it was a mixed notice, including even a swipe at the last reviewer: “The original, fiery, and bold spirit of this composer, which . . . [earlier] did not find the friendliest reception everywhere because it occasionally stormed about in an unfriendly, wild, gloomy, and dreary manner, is now becoming more and more clear, begins more and more to disdain all excess, and emerges more and more pleasant without losing anything of his character . . . The less he strives to impress and glorify himself . . . the more he will work for the satisfaction of the better people and at the same time for his own permanent fame.”
⁷
Call this review transitional. When the value of “pleasing” declined and the values of “original, fiery, and bold” ascended, Beethoven criticism came of age. The sonatas themselves are transitional, perhaps the last time Beethoven was detectably cautious, with Mozart's violin sonatas hanging over him. These are patently ingratiating pieces. Beethoven had settled into his pattern of periodically courting listeners and critics with more agreeable items. If the intent was in some degree practical, even commercial, the motivation was not purely venal. He was, after all, a servant not only of the Good and the True but also of the Beautiful.
⁸

There are bold touches as well, say, the consistently contrapuntal quality of the op. 23 in A Minor and its experiments with form (the recapitulation in the first movement arrives on the “wrong” theme, a rarity with Beethoven).
⁹
Op. 24, his first violin sonata in four movements, is sunny and lyrical enough eventually to earn the title
Spring
Sonata. The dewy loveliness of its opening is carried on in a second movement that seems almost like a parody of an eighteenth-century
galant
aria, until some late modulations take it in a memorably poignant direction. In keeping, the finale starts like an echo of Mozart and then ventures into territory not at all Mozartian (this following a wry scherzo whose tininess—just over a minute—is part of the joke).

If opp. 23 and 24 are the freshest of Beethoven's violin sonatas so far, they hardly hint at the creative tide that was rising in him. Still less do they reveal his gathering despair.

 

By this time, Beethoven had said any number of literal and symbolic farewells to his youth in Bonn. Another milestone came when in July 1801 Bonn's exiled Elector Maximilian Franz died at age forty-five near Vienna in Hetzendorf, where he had lived out his last decade dreaming of reclaiming his throne. Beethoven had planned to dedicate his First Symphony to his old sovereign and employer, but now there was nothing to be gained from it. On the title page he scribbled out the dedication to Max Franz and wrote in the name of a living and still useful patron, Gottfried van Swieten. For the summer he retired, as it happened, to Hetzendorf. He had acquired the Viennese habit (for those who could afford it) of leaving the reeking, dusty, sweltering city for a summer in the country.

Meanwhile friends from Bonn were arriving in Vienna. Stephan von Breuning, son of his one-time champion and mentor Helene, came to town in the summer of 1801 and settled permanently. “We meet almost every day,” Beethoven reported to Franz Wegeler. “It does me good to revive the old feelings of friendship. He has really become an excellent, splendid fellow, who is well-informed and who, like all of us [Bonners] more or less, has his heart in the right place.”
¹⁰
Beethoven would soon change his tune about Stephan's temperament. Composer Anton Reicha, Beethoven's closest friend in his later teens, came to Vienna for a while in 1802. These companions had to compete for Beethoven's time with his more celebrated Viennese friends and patrons, but he had a special fondness for friends of his youth—though that did not forestall the usual frictions.

Another refugee from Bonn around the beginning of 1802 was pianist, violinist, and composer Ferdinand Ries. His father Franz had been concertmaster of the Bonn orchestra. Ferdinand was a child when Beethoven left Bonn. Now eighteen, he arrived at Beethoven's door destitute, with a letter of introduction from his father, having spent the last year in Munich copying music for pennies and nearly starving.
¹¹
He hoped to study piano and composition, and to find a savior. Beethoven brushed aside the letter with, “I can't answer your father now, but write to him that I could not forget how my mother died.” He had not forgotten, that is to say, how Franz Ries helped the family in the aftermath of losing Maria. Beethoven would become a generous mentor and keyboard teacher to Ries, but he refused to teach him theory or composition. For theory studies, he sent the youth to his old counterpoint master Albrechtsberger. As for composition, Ries would have to teach himself, with informal coaching from Beethoven.