Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph (53 page)

The two struck up a friendship. On one of their first evenings Beethoven brought the violinist along for a dinner at Countess Guicciardi's, and he helped introduce the younger man to useful patrons.
³⁹
In their time away from the piano the two men seem to have caroused vigorously. At some point the violinist asked his new friend if they could mount a joint concert, perhaps premiere a piece. Though there was little time, Beethoven did not need persuading. Apparently he had been sketching some ideas for a violin sonata, with the notion that its finale would be the one discarded from the A Major Violin Sonata, op. 30. Since Beethoven was not given to throwing movements together casually, that meant that he based the new movements on material from the existing finale—so, in a way, composed the piece back to front.

The concert date in Vienna was set for May 22, 1803, but it was postponed to the twenty-fourth, likely because the new movements of the sonata, which Beethoven had been writing at top speed with Bridgetower prodding him, were not finished. By the hour of the concert, the first movement had only a sketchy piano part on the page, and the slow movement had to be read from the manuscript with the ink barely dry.
⁴⁰

No matter. The recital, in the big pavilion of the Augarten, seems to have been a grand occasion for both men. Their easy camaraderie was demonstrated when, on a soaring C-major arpeggio in the first-movement Presto, Bridgetower answered the piano's figure with an improvised arpeggio of his own. Ordinarily that sort of thing would have brought an explosion of wrath from Beethoven. This time he jumped up from the piano in delight, embraced Bridgetower, and cried, “Once again, my dear boy!” Bridgetower recalled Beethoven's playing of the slow movement as “so chaste, which always characterized the performance of all his
slow movements
, that it was unanimously hailed to be repeated twice.”
⁴¹

Despite the haste of its creation, what came to be called the
Kreutzer
Sonata amounted to a defining, even galvanizing work of the New Path: another leap in maturity and confidence, a moment where in one more genre he escaped his model Mozart. Beethoven was in a remarkable creative ferment that year, but part of the sonata's hot-blooded nature surely had to do with the circumstances of its creation: his encounter with this professedly “exotic” virtuoso of impulsive personality in his playing and in his person.

This sonata was to become an obsession of the new Romantic generation. The whole is splendid, but its legend rests on the breathtaking first movement. There is a kind of improvisatory excitement and immediacy about it, a breadth and variety of ideas that surprise and dazzle at every turn. At the same time, it is an exercise in sustained intensity of which few composers other than Beethoven were capable. Which is to say, it is in the category of works to come like the
Waldstein
and
Appassionata
Sonatas.

In a subtitle Beethoven notes that the A Major Sonata was written in a style “like that of a concerto.” It begins Adagio sostenuto with an impassioned and virile violin solo in A major, slashing across the strings. The piano answers the violin with a pensively ambiguous and minorish phrase, setting up an essential counterforce. The Presto breaks out in A minor with a seething dynamism that never flags, though for contrast there is a meltingly lovely second theme. The opening gesture of the Presto in the violin is a surge from E to F; that stroke from consonant to dissonant touches off the high tension of the music to come—and also foreshadows the significance of the key of F (and that “sore” pitch) in the course of the first movement, in the entire second movement, and in the middle of the finale. The development manages to ratchet the excitement still higher as it rages through keys and brilliant figures. Near the end, there is a quiet
adagio
moment that will be echoed in the following movements.
⁴²

Next, a set of decorative F-major variations on a gently pulsing theme. Trills near the end of the theme are one of the main ideas to be developed, subsumed into florid figuration. The tone of the variations shifts slowly from playful to more serious, the last one quietly reflective. The finale erupts as a 6/8 tarantella in A major, in which the driving intensity of the first movement is transformed into an exhilarating frolic. As in the first movement there is a suddenly slow and lyrical second theme and a retrospective moment near the end (in practice, these being ideas on which the preceding movements were built).

Beethoven's affection for George Bridgetower is reflected in a joking inscription in improvised Italian that he scrawled on the sonata's manuscript, maybe during an evening of carousing. Roughly translated, it reads, “Mulattic sonata written for the mulatto Brischdauer, a complete lunatic and mulattic composer.” Bridgetower seems to have been an exciting violinist and a brash and lusty personality, and so was his sonata. Who knows to what degree Beethoven was galvanized by some fanciful association of the violinist's African heritage and carnality. If Beethoven's music encompasses the range of human characters and feelings, one category of feeling he usually left out was the sexual. He was powerfully drawn to women but at the same time prudish. He did not consider the erotic a proper subject for art and criticized Mozart for the racy plots of his comic operas. Perhaps the surging passions of the
Kreutzer
constitute the exception to the rule.
⁴³

In the end Beethoven and Bridgetower broke up for a time as friends and colleagues over what the violinist recalled as “some silly quarrel about a girl.”
⁴⁴
So the dedication of the A Major Sonata went to another violinist, Rodolphe Kreutzer, whom Beethoven had met and come to admire in 1798, when Kreutzer was in the entourage of the French minister, General Bernadotte. In regard to the publication and dedication, Beethoven wrote Nikolaus Simrock in 1804, “This Kreutzer is a dear kind fellow who during his stay in Vienna gave me a great deal of pleasure. I prefer his modesty and natural behavior to
all the
exterior without
any
interior, which is characteristic of most virtuosi—As the sonata was written for a competent violinist, the dedication to Kreutzer is all the more appropriate.”
⁴⁵
What Beethoven did not know was that Rodolphe Kreutzer had no use for Beethoven's music and apparently never performed the work that made his name immortal. Kreutzer told Hector Berlioz that he found the sonata “outrageously unintelligible.”
⁴⁶

 

For Beethoven the following summer continued at an exuberant, breakneck creative pace hard to conceive for a man who a year before had been ready to kill himself. If his public performances on piano had begun to recede, as a composer he was juggling more schemes and projects than ever. He still had a flat in Schikaneder's Theater an der Wien as nominal house composer (he spent the summer in Baden and Oberdöbling). Supposed to be supplying operas, he took up the impresario's libretto of ancient Rome,
Vestas Feuer
, and began sketching at it, with little enthusiasm. His seven Bagatelles for piano, a mellifluous and delightful grab bag of miniatures, were published as op. 33. He received a letter from the Scottish publisher George Thomson wanting to commission six sonatas. Beethoven asked for more than 1,300 florins, Thomson offered half that, and there the matter rested.
⁴⁷

A story Ferdinand Ries recalled from 1803 shows the easy relations Beethoven enjoyed with the nobility. He and Ries were the evening's entertainment at the home of his patron Count Browne. Ries missed a note playing the op. 23 Sonata and Beethoven tapped him on the head, only to show his pupil that he had noticed. At that, Princess Browne, leaning on the piano, smiled mischievously. Later when Beethoven was playing
The
Tempest
he made a slip of the fingers that sounded, Ries remembered, “like a piano being cleaned.” The princess rapped him several times on the head, saying, “If the pupil received one tap of the finger for one missed note, then the Master must be punished with a full hand for worse mistakes.” On that occasion, Beethoven chose to laugh, started the sonata again, and “performed marvelously. The Adagio in particular was incomparably played.”
⁴⁸

In August the piano maker Érard of Paris sent Beethoven a gift of a piano, state of the art, part of that being more notes at the top—its range was five and a half octaves, stretching beyond the usual top F above the staff up to C—and with a heavier action and more robust British-style sound in comparison to the delicate Viennese pianos. Beethoven was reported to be “enchanted” with the Érard. Soon with its help he produced epochal works. Later, perhaps inevitably, he became disgruntled with the heavy action and tried to have it lightened. Still, the Érard would be his main instrument for years.
⁴⁹

Carl van Beethoven was nearing the end of his usefulness as an agent and go-between. Ries wrote publisher Simrock a sarcastic warning: “The second Beethoven will soon do you the honor of visiting you. You can very much look forward to this, for all the publishers in Vienna fear him worse than fire, because he is so terribly rude.” Relations with Breitkopf & Härtel had cooled because of Carl's style.
⁵⁰

The difference between Ludwig's dealings with publishers, with which he was perennially annoyed but patient, and Carl's style is seen in the difference between letters each wrote to Breitkopf & Härtel in the autumn of 1803. Beethoven was seething at the firm's house journal for its lukewarm review of his concert. In ironic mode, he wrote Gottfried Härtel, “Please convey my most respectful thanks to the editor of the [
Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung
] for his kindness in allowing such a
flattering report
on my oratorio to be inserted, which contains such
blatant lies about the prices I fixed
and treats me in such a degrading manner . . . What nobility of character is expected of a true artist, and certainly not entirely without good reason! On the other hand, how detestably, how meanly people proceed to attack us without the slightest hesitation.”

Härtel already knew that Beethoven was going to return fire when he got bad reviews in the
AMZ
. Nonetheless, Beethoven was offering the house his new piano variations on
God Save the King
and
Rule Britannia
and some smaller works—which Härtel turned down.
⁵¹
In October 1803, Carl, while offering Härtel major works including a triple concerto (probably not even begun at that point), demanded ominously to know the name of the
AMZ
reviewer: “The reason for this has nothing to do with whether my brother is disgraced in your
Zeitung
or not, because the greatest proof that the opposite is the case comes from the quantity of orders that we receive from everywhere. But I find it very remarkable that you accept such crap in your
Zeitung
. My brother does not know that I want to learn the identity of the reviewer; therefore be so kind as to enclose a little note to me in your reply.”
⁵²
It is unlikely Härtel was so kind.

 

In late summer of 1803, Ries wrote Simrock the surprising news that Beethoven was settled on moving to Paris within a year and a half, “which I am extraordinarily sorry about.”
⁵³
It was a strange determination, and it is hard to conceive what might have come of it, but it was strong. Did Beethoven hope to meet Napoleon, did he imagine himself as one in the French conqueror's stable of artists like composer Étienne-Nicolas Méhul and painter Jacques-Louis David?

In any case, a good deal of Beethoven's effort was now devoted to a multifront campaign to prepare this relocation. One item was the dedication of the new violin sonata to a leading French virtuoso, Kreutzer. Another, perhaps, was the plan to compose a French-style triple concerto. Another was that he was about to put aside Schikaneder's opera libretto in favor of a French one; he knew that writing opera was the best route to fame in Paris.
⁵⁴
Still another, his main project of that summer and fall, was a work he had started sketching in summer 1802, before his Heiligenstadt crisis, directly after the pages devoted to the
Prometheus
Variations.
⁵⁵
It was a symphony dedicated to the most famous of Frenchmen.

17

H
OW DOES A
composer forge a great symphony, with its span of nearly an hour and its myriad notes? Among human endeavors, shaping a long work of music is one of the hardest things to do well. Very few people have ever been consistently good at it. No matter how long the piece takes to write, every note has to be marshaled to the same purpose, and in performance it should unfold as effortlessly as an improvisation. From the outside, the job seems superhuman. As Beethoven saw it from the inside, it was done one quilled note, one theme, one phrase, one transition, one section, one movement at a time.

Often the creation of great things begins with small things: an itch in the mind, a scrap of material, a train of thought that seems on its own to leap into motion. This time, an epic work began with a bit of dance tune.

The
englische
bass and theme from
Prometheus
obsessed him: