Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph (61 page)

The
Waldstein
took its place as one of the defining works of the Second Period in its heroic mode, but it is much more than that. For Beethoven in the white-hot years of his full maturity, this sonata was a feat of disciplined craftsmanship that would have been practically unimaginable if he had not done it. Enforcing a relentless economy of material, he marshaled every element of music—melody, harmony, rhythm, volume, register, timbre, form, proportion, key—to create the effect of a twenty-minute crescendo of intensity and excitement on an instrument of limited pitch, color, and volume. In every dimension—expressive, technical, pianistic—here is a defining demonstration of what musical
composition
is about. Only Beethoven was capable of doing it, and only he was capable of surpassing it. A year later, with a work called
Appassionata
, he did just that.

 

By December 1803, Beethoven was busy sketching the opera he owed Schikaneder by contract, on the impresario's ancient-Rome libretto
Vestas Feuer
. At the same time, he told friend George August Griesinger, a diplomat, agent for publisher Breitkopf & Härtel, and longtime Haydn devotee, that he was keeping an eye out for “reasonable texts.”
¹⁰
It could not escape his attention that
Vestas Feuer
lacked anything close to aesthetic or ethical depth. Perhaps as he contemplated setting the text to music, he rationalized that not so long ago Mozart had taken on an outlandish Schikaneder idea called
Die Zauberflöte
and made something out of it. Still, he pushed Schikaneder to find a better writer to tone up the text.

Meanwhile the more tangible business of the profession went on. Toward the end of November, Carl van Beethoven wrote Breitkopf & Härtel, having offered the firm the Second and Third Symphonies, “At this time I cannot accept your recent offer of 500 florins. I am sorry about this, but you may regret it in the future, because these symphonies are either the worst that my brother has written or the best.”
¹¹
This was another bit of evidence that Ludwig, himself so careful and patient in cultivating publishers, exercised no oversight in how Carl pitched the music. A few weeks later, pupil Ferdinand Ries was writing Simrock in Bonn, “Beethoven will absolutely not sell his new symphony, and will reserve it for his tour, for which he is also composing another one now.”
¹²
The tour in question seems to have tapped Beethoven's ongoing determination to go to Paris, which as late as the next spring he declared “irrevocable.” Those sorts of declarations, so dependent on financial and political matters, rarely work out, and that one did not.
¹³
But as a further element of his French campaign, at the end of the 1803 sketchbook where he had laid out most of the Third Symphony, he began sketching a triple concerto in French style.

It was in this period that a practical joke went awry, with unpleasant results. Beethoven had played over the
Andante favori
for Ries and Wenzel Krumpholz, who liked it so much they pressed him to play it again. On the way home, Ries stopped by Prince Lichnowsky's to tell him about this new piece, and played as much of it as he could remember for the prince, who picked up some of it. Next day Lichnowsky visited Beethoven and in the course of their conversation said he'd composed a little number of his own. Over Beethoven's groans, he insisted on playing it.

When Beethoven heard Lichnowsky start the
Andante favori
he was not in the least amused. Innocently, Ries and Lichnowsky had inflamed his deep-lying paranoia about his ideas being stolen—a not entirely irrational fear in Vienna. Beethoven took his rage out on Ries, refusing ever again to play when his student was present. If Beethoven was asked to perform in company, Ries had to leave the room. Beethoven held to that policy from then on.
¹⁴
For well and for ill, when he got something into his head, there was no budging it unless somebody could convince him he was in the wrong.

Still, for all the friction, there was no break between composer, student, and patron. The latter two understood that with Beethoven, friction was going to be part of the picture. Ries was functioning as an assistant now, probably in exchange for lessons (they remained purely piano, not composition). The following year, the student took a calculated risk in their relationship when he soloed in the Third Piano Concerto. To that point the solo part of the Third Concerto had never been written down. Beethoven wrote it out especially for Ries's performance.

For Ries this was a defining moment: his first public appearance as Beethoven's pupil, with Beethoven conducting. The occasion was one of the public concerts produced by Ignaz Schuppanzigh in the Augarten pavilion. Ries asked his teacher to write a cadenza for him. Beethoven declined, saying Ries was a composer and ought to write his own, but that he would vet it. When Ries showed his cadenza to Beethoven, he was told to rework a particularly hard passage. Ries didn't; then in a play-over he bungled the passage and again was ordered to change it. He duly wrote an easier version but did not feel happy with it. At the concert, as Beethoven settled into a chair to listen to the first-movement cadenza, Ries decided on the spot to play the harder version. When he launched into it he saw Beethoven nearly jump out of his chair. Ries managed to bring it off well enough. Beethoven joined the bravos at the end, then afterward said, “But you're stubborn all the same! If you'd missed that passage I would never have given you another lesson.”
¹⁵
Ries knew he meant it, that their relationship turned on that cadenza.

Ries in those days was spending perhaps more time with Beethoven than anyone else. He recorded a number of such moments. At one point Beethoven got his student a job for Count Johann Georg Browne and his wife, for years some of his most generous patrons. Ries's duties consisted largely of playing Beethoven's music hour after hour for the couple and their guests. One night in Baden, tired of it all, he improvised a little march of his own. A visiting “old countess” fell into raptures, thinking it was a new work of Beethoven's. Ries went along with it as a joke on her. Then to Ries's horror Beethoven arrived in Baden the next day, appeared at the Brownes', and found the countess raving about his wonderful new march.

With no other choice, Ries pulled his master aside and told him he had intended to “make fun of her foolishness.” Since Beethoven couldn't stand this particular lady, who was always after him about something, he didn't mind at first. Ries was forced to repeat the march and fumbled through it, Beethoven standing beside him. When a new chorus of praises broke out at the end, Ries saw Beethoven's fury rising—then he suddenly dissolved in laughter. “There you see, my dear Ries!” he said later. “Those are the great connoisseurs who aspire to judge all music so correctly and astutely. Just give them the name of their darling; more than that they do not need.” In a more productive response to that bit of comedy, Count Browne commissioned Beethoven to write four marches for four-hand piano that became op. 45.
¹⁶

These episodes were all symptomatic. Beethoven could ride roughshod over people, he could be thoughtless, he could be distracted and forgetful, his responses were always unpredictable, but he was not intentionally mean and he liked to be generous. Yet as his old teacher Haydn fell into a sad decline, Beethoven was not notably thoughtful, visiting the ailing and depressed master less and less. Already in 1799, Haydn had written publisher Gottfried Härtel, “Every day the world compliments me on the fire of my recent works, but no one will believe the strain and effort it costs me to produce them. Some days my enfeebled memory and the unstrung state of my nerves crush me to the earth to such an extent that I fall prey to the worst sort of depression, and am quite incapable of finding even a single idea for many days thereafter; until at last Providence revives me, and I can again sit down at the pianoforte and begin to scratch away.”
¹⁷

The failing and forgetful old man was disappointed that Beethoven made himself increasingly absent. Haydn opined to their mutual friend Griesinger that it was “on account of his great pride.” Even so, Haydn still asked his musical visitors what the Great Mogul was up to. In 1803, Haydn sent Beethoven a libretto for a proposed oratorio, asking what he thought of it. Beethoven looked it over and advised against taking it on. He may have understood that the old master did not have another oratorio in him. In fact, Haydn's work had drifted to a halt except for some folk-song arrangements for Scottish publisher George Thomson, who also aspired to have Beethoven working for him.
¹⁸

 

By the latter part of December 1803, Beethoven, after drafting eighty-one pages of the first scene, had given up Schikaneder's
Vestas Feuer
in favor of a new story that had seized him.
¹⁹
He wrote Friedrich Rochlitz, editor of the
Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung
, who had just plied him with a libretto of his own,

 

If the subject had not been connected with magic
, your libretto might have extricated me this very moment from a most embarrassing situation. For I have finally broken with Schikaneder, whose empire has really been entirely eclipsed by
the light
of the brilliant and attractive French operas . . . I hoped at least that he would have the verses and the contents of the [
Vestas Feuer
] libretto corrected and considerably improved by someone else, but in vain . . . Just picture to yourself a Roman subject . . . and language and verses such as could proceed only out of the mouths of our Viennese
apple-women
—Well, I have quickly had an old French libretto adapted and am now beginning to work on it.

 

This “old French libretto” had been floating around since the mid-1790s and had already been set by three composers.
²⁰
It was
Leonore, ou l'amour conjugal
, by J.-N. Bouilly, librettist of Luigi Cherubini's
Les deux journées
, which had made a sensation in Vienna a couple of years before. The same composer's
Lodoïska
and
Faniska
had fared the same. These works initiated a craze for French opera in Vienna. Bouilly claimed that both his librettos were based on actual incidents during the Reign of Terror. They were part of a genre that came to be called “rescue opera,” which with its themes of heroism and liberation had a connection in the public mind with the French Revolution. This story concerned a woman named Leonore whose husband Florestan is a political prisoner. In the dungeon he is being starved to death on the orders of the prison's governor, Pizarro, whose crimes Florestan has denounced. Leonore dresses up as a young man named Fidelio, gets a job at the prison, and finally manages to expose Pizarro to the minister Don Fernando and liberate her husband. Librettist Bouilly claimed that the story was based on a real incident, and he himself had played the part of Don Fernando in the event.
²¹

For Beethoven, taking up this fashionable libretto accomplished several things at once. The Bouilly gave him an alternative to
Vestas Feuer
that he could actually embrace with pleasure—a story of triumph over tyranny. (He said later that he considered Bouilly's
Les deux journées
to be one of the best librettos ever written.)
²²
Schikaneder's annoyance he would deal with in due course, but
Leonore
would also fulfill his contract. Rescue operas were now the rage in Vienna; he counted on that to help launch the piece. At the same time, this French story and the influence of Cherubini gave him another route of escape from, on the one hand, the conventions of Italian opera he had studied with Salieri, and on the other, the influence of Mozart that he had been trying to hold at bay for years. Neither of those influences had done much good for
Christus am Ölberge
. Now for opera and theater music Beethoven could embrace a current, fresh, popular model: Cherubini, Italian born but long in Paris, whom Beethoven admired more than any other living composer, whose brilliant orchestral style he appropriated as part of his own theatrical voice.
²³
In one more medium, he had found his way around the looming presence of Mozart: instead of Mozartian domestic comedy or fantastical singspiel, he would compose revolutionary French opera.

Finally, in its story
Leonore
galvanized Beethoven. Here was a woman whose devotion to her husband leads to an extraordinary act of heroism, who stands up to tyranny as an individual and triumphs. It was a contemporary, realistic tale; he could use spoken dialogue—like a singspiel—rather than the traditional operatic recitative that he found artificial. Around the time he took up the
Leonore
libretto, two other composers produced versions of it in Italian. As part of his general preparation he got himself a copy of one of those, the
Leonore
of Ferdinando Paer, though what his study of it contributed to his own version would be harder to detect than the pervasive influence of Cherubini—with, inevitably, contributions from Mozart as well.
²⁴

As for the whole idea of taking on an opera, Beethoven seems to have pursued it the way he pursued every other genre, as a problem to attack and solve with the help of models in other composers. But opera was going to make demands on him that he never had to cope with before. He knew a great many operas, his experience starting with his years in the orchestra pit and rehearsal stage of the opera in Bonn. In Vienna he constantly attended the theater in search of entertainment and ideas. Still, for all that experience Beethoven was not a man of the theater in the way Mozart had been. Where Mozart had started writing opera at age eleven and worked up step by step to the climactic productions of his last years,
Leonore
was Beethoven's first attempt. The oratorio
Christus
had been his closest approach to opera, and from it he had mainly learned what not to do.