Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph (54 page)

 

 

 

There was the protean quality of the
Basso del Tema
, anchoring the simplest harmonies but with a hint of something beyond—a little chromatic slide of three notes, the smallest touch of seasoning. The bass line was something next to nothing that could be the foundation of anything. Yet its implications reached far. Bass and tune formed the image of a dance that for Beethoven had come to represent something in the direction of Schiller's “most perfectly appropriate symbol of the assertion of one's own freedom and regard for the freedom of others.” An image, in other words, of an ideal society.

It was in summer of 1802, in Heiligenstadt before his crisis, around the same time as he worked on the
Prometheus
Variations, that on a couple of pages Beethoven made exploratory sketches for the first three movements of a new symphony, probing for a sense of its character and leading ideas. Most of the sketches are toward the exposition section of a first movement. None of them ended up in the finished piece.

Though it does not appear in those first sketches, the implicit galvanizing element was the
Prometheus
theme. He kept its E-flat major as the key of the symphony. In his time this was called a noble, heroic, humanistic, echt-Aufklärung tonality: as said before, the main key of Mozart's Masonic pieces and of
Die Zauberflöte
. For the beginning of the piece, at this point Beethoven imagined a solemn, slow introduction based on another simple idea, an ascent on a triad. A few bars labeled
seconda
were a try at a slow movement in C major and 6/8 meter. Toward a third movement were a couple of lines he labeled
Minuetto serioso
. He wrote down nothing specific for the finale; he already knew it would be based on the
Prometheus
material, in a similar direction as the piano variations.
¹

Around June of 1803, he rented three rooms in what had been a winegrower's house in Oberdöbling, a village up the hill from Heiligenstadt. It was the kind of simple place he liked, in the countryside. The house was surrounded by gardens and vineyards and sat beside the solitary Krottenbach gorge that separates Döbling from Heiligenstadt.
²
It was a countryside to beckon the wanderer. In that setting he returned to the symphony in a new sketchbook.

For Beethoven a big work was a dramatic and emotional narrative, also a moral and ethical one. At the same time, for him and his age music was called a kind of rational discourse on stated themes, a wordless rhetoric like an oration, or like a sermon founded on its verse of scripture.
³
At some point since the previous year's sketches, he had done significant work on the new symphony. Among other things, he had found
das Thema
, the all-important leading theme.

He had also settled on the symphony's subject. It was to be what he and his time called a “characteristic” piece and what the future would call a “program” piece, based on some sort of story or image usually conveyed by a title. The subject of this symphony inspired by the
Prometheus
music was to be another Promethean figure, the only man in Europe who appeared to deserve that description as a benefactor of humanity: Napoleon Bonaparte, who had begun his self-willed ascent as “the little corporal” and now was the conqueror and benevolent despot who proposed to bring Europe peace, republican governments, the rule of law, and an end to ancient tyrannies. Hegel declared him a “world spirit on horseback.”
⁴
One Prometheus suggested another. The Third Symphony was to be called
Bonaparte
.

A composer asks of a conception,
What can I do with this? What sort of ideas express it? Where do these ideas want to go?
The answers to these questions are sequences of sounds. Chains of ideas and associations gathered in his mind, rising from the intersection of the
Prometheus
dance and the French conqueror. The symphony would be not only dedicated to Napoleon but also in some way modeled on his character and career and on the larger image of a hero who has the vision and capacity to create a new order, a just and harmonious society: as Schiller said, free and respecting freedom.

As usual, the project was not all abstractions and ideals. Self-promotion was woven into all of it. If Beethoven was going to make his long-planned move to Paris, a
Bonaparte
symphony could be a calling card to the French government, even to Napoleon himself. The political atmosphere made that scheme workable. The 1802 Treaty of Lunéville ended the War of the Second Coalition and inaugurated a hiatus in hostilities between France and its prime antagonist, Austria. For the moment, Holy Roman Emperor Franz II was staying neutral, resisting Russian and English pressure for a new alliance. There was actually talk of a pact between Austria and the French republic. After all, the effects of the Lunéville treaty had been bearable, losing Austria only distant territories and the left bank of the Rhine. To the delight of liberal and anticlerical circles, the treaty also abolished the ecclesiastical states, including Bonn.
⁵
Now in Austria Napoleon was called a peacemaker, even a bastion against radical Jacobinism.

In August 1802, the French Senate proclaimed Napoleon First Consul for life. At this point he was in all but title an absolute monarch, a dictator—just like Holy Roman Emperor Franz II. A German journal of the time declared that Napoleon “had subdued the warring peoples of Europe and Asia, and by his laws made himself loved by those he had conquered.”
⁶
Napoleon declared that he intended to deliver Europe from “the terrible pictures of chaos, devastation and carnage” that war—lately his wars—had brought.
⁷
Millions in the occupied territories were jubilant over their liberation from Austrian rule. In practice, Napoleon was managing another of his balancing acts: keeping progressives around Europe convinced that he was a liberator and the fulfillment of the Revolution while convincing the reactionary rulers in Vienna that he had put revolution to rest.

In the
Bonaparte
Symphony Beethoven wanted to evoke the character and story of a conqueror and the moral dimension of what the French were creating across Europe. Napoleon appeared to have achieved in war and diplomacy the kind of transformations that had escaped Joseph II in Vienna and Maximilian Franz in Bonn.
⁸
At this critical moment in Beethoven's career, to go to France, perhaps to charm the First Consul in person, was to attach himself to the most powerful and dynamic figure alive, the incarnate spirit of the age. In the process he placed himself alongside Napoleon as an embodiment of the age. This would be his means of stepping out of the role of servant in court and parlor and attaching himself to history as an actor rather than an entertainer. In an ideal sense, Beethoven might imagine becoming the kind of ethical and spiritual leader he recognized in poets and philosophers like Goethe and Schiller.
Bonaparte
was aimed toward lifting him to such heights. In the process, it would show the world what a
sinfonia grande
could truly be and do. Here was a conception worthy of the Aufklärung and of his gifts and ambitions.

In these months he had to have felt himself imbued with a sense of possibility, discovery, inevitability. Perhaps he felt (he had reason to feel) that this was meant to be, that a new humanistic spirit had given birth to this music. Napoleon revitalized the Aufklärung ideals Beethoven had grown up with. Now he understood how to attach those ideals to his music. His teacher Christian Neefe wrote, “A meticulous acquaintance with the various characters [of men], with the physical and moral aspects of mankind, with the passions . . . [is required] if music is to be no empty cling-clang.” Beethoven remembered the Aufklärung dream of happiness and brotherhood that the Freemasons and Illuminati proclaimed, that Schiller called Elysium. (It appears that in this period he returned to an old ambition and made a setting of “An die Freude”—or a second setting—but he held it back.)
⁹
These and more threads reaching from the present back to his childhood gathered to make the fabric of
Bonaparte
.

 

In a winegrower's cottage in Oberdöbling in summer of 1803, he settles down to work. As epic dreams unroll before his imagination, he rushes to realize them on the keyboard, in his head, in notes scratched onto the page. He spends hours lost in his
raptus
, improvising at the keyboard, ideas flowing from his fingers into sound, sketchbook on a table beside him to fix the sounds before they are gone. As he writes out the sketches he drums the beat with his hands and feet, cursing the notes for their recalcitrance. For Beethoven composing is a process physical as well as mental; his whole body is involved in it. Every day in all weathers he walks in hills and woods and country lanes, growling and howling and waving his arms conducting the music in his head, stopping to pencil ideas in the pocket sketchbooks he carries with him.

The dots quilled and penciled on the page define an accumulating and clarifying vision of the work. Beethoven has never seen a battle, but years before, on the road from Bonn to Vienna, he encountered armies, heard the bustle and rattle of troops on the march, the bugle calls and martial music. Since then Vienna has been full of armies in parades and exercises, preparing to fight the French. After the battles the city streets filled with soldiers wounded and dying, with funerals and mournful music. These scenes will find a place in the symphony. At the same time his sense of heroes and battles is founded on the ancients, on Plutarch and his exemplary men, Homer and the battle for Troy. So his larger subject will be heroes contemporary and ancient: Napoleon and his fellow benevolent despots Joseph II and Frederick the Great, Hector and Achilles and Odysseus—not only
a
hero but
the Hero
as archetype: Napoleon as man and myth.

The overarching conception and the minutiae of melody and rhythm and harmony feed on one another. As usual, he conceives his ideas in terms of familiar formal outlines. For the first movement he needs a
Thema
for the opening, then what he calls the
mitte Gedanke
, subsidiary ideas. Then he needs ideas for the
Durchführung
, his term for the development section, then a transition to the da capo, the recapitulation.
¹⁰
His forms are not molds to be filled with notes but general guidelines to help organize a conception. This time the conception has a name:
Bonaparte
. Whatever the form becomes, it has to be measured and cut to that subject.
¹¹

He wears out one quill pen after another, notes spreading over empty staves, pages accumulating in the sketchbook. The conception will not be complete in his mind, not completely grasped, until the end is in place or at least in sight. But as usual, by the time sketches are seriously under way, he already has a sense of what the thing is about, what the leading ideas are, a plan for where
das Thema
is headed and why.

But finding material is not a mechanical or mathematical process. Musical ideas, when they come, are like characters in a novel; each appears to the writer with a face and a personality and begins to speak. Beethoven keeps the reins tighter on his ideas than most artists, but he still has to wait for what the Muse, the unconscious, the angels, God—whatever it is—bestows on him.
¹²
Sometimes the ideas come fast, sometimes they have to be courted at length. For Beethoven the process is harder than for most creators, because he demands that every idea has to submit to the plan, to leading motives of pitch and rhythm, the character, flow, key scheme, harmony. It is no easy job to make the wild horses of imagination run on a narrow track. Nonetheless, work on the
Bonaparte
proceeds fast.

 

What does Beethoven know about
Bonaparte
in these early stages? Mainly he knows that it will be in E-flat major and it will end with a variation movement, based on the dance from the
Prometheus
ballet—like the
Prometheus
piano variations but recomposed for orchestra. Though using a naked bass line as a theme for variations is unheard of, a variation movement in a large work is nothing new.
¹³
Haydn and Mozart did it—but as a middle movement in a quartet or sonata or symphony, or more rarely as a first movement. In the
Bonaparte
Symphony the variations on the
englische
are to be the finale, and a symphonic finale has to be pointed and climactic in a way that variations ordinarily are not. For the finale, then, he will have to fashion a new kind of form, a hybrid variation movement.

The finale and its heroic key are the first elements he sees more or less clearly. So in a way he composes the symphony back to front, as he did with the
Kreutzer
Sonata. But finalizing the last movement has to wait. He needs to write the beginning before he writes the ending. For the listener, the finale can't be a beginning, can't be
das Thema
. That has to be the leading theme of the first movement, which sets up the primal sense of the work, its affect, tone, motifs, harmonies. The opening
Thema
begins the story. It needs to be compelling in itself, rich in potential for development and for growing subsidiary themes. At the same time this particular beginning has to contain the germ of the ending already settled on: variations on the
basso
and the
englische
tune.