Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph (74 page)

At the same time, Clementi's understanding that his edition was going to be only for Britain reflects Beethoven's pursuit of the kind of multiterritory publishing deals Haydn had arranged (and for which Beethoven had once criticized Haydn). In April Beethoven wrote his publisher friend Simrock in Bonn, “I intend to sell the following six new works to a firm of publishers in France, to one in England, and to one in Vienna simultaneously.” He offered the French rights for all the pieces to Simrock (who finally published only the quartets)—Bonn now being, thanks to Napoleon, part of France. With this method one could be paid for the same piece two or more times. It was all aboveboard but tricky to manage. To forestall piracy, all the editions needed to come out virtually on the same day, but in practice they rarely did. In any case, Beethoven was exhilarated by the prospects when he wrote Count Franz Brunsvik, Josephine's brother, in Buda. He seems to have picked up some of Clementi's hilarity:

 

I am to get 200 pounds sterling—and, what is more, I shall be able to sell the same works in Germany and France . . . so that by this means I may hope even in my early years to achieve the dignity of a true artist—So,
dear B
, I need the
quartets
. I have already asked your sister [Josephine] about this . . . If you can arrange for the Hungarians to invite me to give a few concerts, please do so—you can have me for 200 gold ducats . . .

Whenever
we
. . . drink your wine, we souse you, i.e. we drink your health—All good wishes. Hurry—hurry—hurry and send me the quartets . . . Schuppanzigh has got married—
to somebody very like him
[in girth], I am told—what will their family be like???? Kiss your sister Therese and tell her that I fear that I shall have to become a great man without a monument of hers contributing to my greatness—send me tomorrow, send me immediately the quartets—quar-tets-t-e-t-s.
⁴⁴

 

The quartets were the
Razumovskys;
he had lent the manuscripts to Franz. His reference to Therese von Brunsvik probably refers to her hobby of painting portraits. She never did his.

The current object of his attentions in Vienna was
Fidelio
librettist Joseph Sonnleithner's publishing house, Bureau des arts et d'industrie. By this point his volunteer agent was no longer brother Carl, and brother Johann made some attempts in that direction that only provoked hostility between them. Now his go-between was Ignaz von Gleichenstein, to whom Beethoven wrote that summer, “You may tell my brother [Johann] that I shall certainly never write to him again—Of course I knew the reason for his behavior. It is this: because he has lent me money and has formerly spent a little for me he is (
I know my brothers
) probably worried because I cannot yet repay the sum; and the other one [Carl], moved by a spirit of revenge against me, is probably egging him on too.”
⁴⁵

Gleichenstein, soon to be made a baron, was another music-loving amateur, a friend of Haydn's, a cellist, and a colleague of Stephan von Breuning at the War Ministry. He and Beethoven had known each other for some time; by this summer they used the intimate
du
address. Gleichenstein had been witness for the signing of the contract between Beethoven and Clementi. As an agent he proved a great deal more expedient than Beethoven's brothers.

As for Johann van Beethoven, he badly needed the money he had lent Ludwig and was cannily making his demand for payment when he knew his brother was doing well. Johann was about to buy an apothecary shop in Linz, at a bargain but still beyond his means. Gleichenstein secured the payment from the Bureau des arts et d'industrie, for the same six pieces sold to Clementi, and used the money to pay off the debt to Johann—who the following year took possession of the apothecary shop so desperate for cash that he sold the iron gratings off the windows.
⁴⁶
Johann's business, however, thanks to the French army, was about to bring him a comfortable fortune.

 

Beethoven spent the first part of summer 1807 in Baden, working and taking the waters for the headaches that had bedeviled him for months, then went to Heiligenstadt.
⁴⁷
When he informed Prince Nikolaus Esterházy that the commissioned mass was nearly done, he explained that the headaches “prevented me at first from working at all and even now [have] allowed me to do very little work.” As evidence he enclosed a letter from Dr. Schmidt. His physician had given up treatment with leeches and prescribed spurge-laurel bark to be applied to his arms. One remedy was as useless as the other.
⁴⁸

It was actually a productive if physically miserable summer, with at least one comic interlude. Beethoven got into the habit of stopping during his walks to admire a comely young farmer's daughter as she worked in the fields. They never spoke, and Fräulein Liese was not pleased to be ogled by this unhandsome stranger. When her father was arrested for a drunken brawl, Beethoven showed up to remonstrate with the village council and for his vociferousness nearly got himself thrown in jail.
⁴⁹

Despite the ongoing headaches, he worked with something like his usual discipline, indoors and out, on long walks in the hills and fields. He heard from Count Oppersdorff, who declared himself pleased with the Fourth Symphony he had commissioned and was ready to pay 500 florins for a fifth. Beethoven finished the Esterházy mass, picked up some symphonic sketches from several years back, and plunged in.

As autumn arrived, he had to break off composing and travel to the Esterházy Palace at Eisenstadt for the premiere of the Mass in C on September 13, celebrating the name day of the princess. He found the attitude of the singers and musicians presaging a fiasco; at the dress rehearsal four of the five altos in the choir did not show up.
⁵⁰
Meanwhile Beethoven discovered that he was not, as he was accustomed to, getting a room to himself in the palace but was relegated to sharing a dank apartment in town with the court secretary of music.

Who knows what sort of mass Prince Nikolaus and his court expected from Beethoven. Based on precedent, they might have anticipated one of three things: the full operatic, bravura treatment, as in
Christus am Ölberge
, by then a fairly popular piece; an operatic/symphonic mass on the Haydn model; or perhaps something excitingly bold, Beethovenian. That summer he had humbly written Nikolaus, “I shall hand you the Mass with considerable apprehension, since you, most excellent prince, are accustomed to have the inimitable masterpieces of the great Haydn performed for you—.”
⁵¹
In terms of formal outline, there were no rules or standards in mass settings, only precedents, and on the whole Beethoven followed Haydn's models in layout.
⁵²
In the end, though, he was looking for something quite new, but this time new in the direction of subtlety and simplicity.

With due anticipation, the audience for the premiere assembled in the glittering music room of the Esterházy Palace, scene of any number of Haydn triumphs. Beethoven gave the downbeat for the mass, bringing in the basses on their unaccompanied and almost inaudible Kyrie. As the underrehearsed, apathetic performance unfolded, the prince and princess, the court, and the cognoscenti alike would have been befuddled. What they heard was a mass compact, chaste, sometimes ingenuous unto childlike, with echoes of the past from Haydn back to the Renaissance yet largely unlike any other sacred music they had ever heard.

Beethoven was still searching for a fresh and direct sacred style, far from
Christus
. On a sketch of the Agnus Dei he wrote, “Utmost simplicity, please, please, please.”
⁵³
As he worked he copied out for study passages from Haydn's
Creation
Mass. If in some respects he followed his old master's model, the music hardly sounded like it.
⁵⁴
The court expected brilliant perorations, high drama, suffering, exaltation, all the moods of the text in high-Beethovenian style. What it got was a work gentle, devotional, ceremonial. Often the choir sings in block harmonies, the orchestra is subdued, the music full of exquisite small moments and subtleties that require a loving and nuanced performance—exactly what the premiere was not.

For a composer, a fiasco is a uniquely traumatic experience, emotionally and physically, even worse when one is on the podium. It plays out excruciatingly slowly as the piece goes on and on and the fidgets and whispers grow in the audience. A bad performance amplifies the misery. Beethoven would have finished the performance in high dudgeon. Nikolaus, meanwhile, was not the liberal and tolerant sort of nobleman Beethoven was used to but an old-fashioned prince who considered composers to be servants. To be served badly by a mere musician sullied his court and his princely dignity.

After the performance, the cognoscenti and musicians gathered to talk over the music and to give the usual ceremonial congratulations to the composer. When Beethoven appeared, Nikolaus turned to him and barked, “But, my dear Beethoven, what is this you have done?” Presumably he went on to more pointed complaints. Nearby stood court
Kapellmeister
Johann Nepomuk Hummel, Mozart's most famous pupil and a more or less friendly rival of Beethoven. Beethoven saw Hummel chuckle at the prince's response—for all Beethoven knew, chuckled with schadenfreude.
⁵⁵
Based on precedent, what ensued would have been an unpleasant scene and a precipitous flight on Beethoven's part, as had taken place the year before at the Lichnowsky Palace and at the Theater an der Wien. Legend would have it that he left the palace immediately in a huff. In fact, there was no unpleasant scene. He lingered at the palace for several days, hoping for a performance of a concerto, parts for which had been specially copied for the occasion.

Nothing came of the concerto and little from the mass, and there would be no more commissions from the house of Esterházy. Another attempt to find his voice as a sacred vocal composer had come to little. Beethoven spent years trying to sell the mass to one publisher after another, finally giving it to Breitkopf & Härtel for free. Prince Nikolaus wrote a friend, “Beethoven's mass is unbearably ridiculous and detestable, and I am not convinced that it can ever be performed properly. I am angry and mortified.” But this time Beethoven had held his tongue and burned no bridges. In 1808, Nikolaus sent him 100 florins to help out with a performance of parts of the mass in Vienna.
⁵⁶

Beethoven added to the pile one more unhappy experiment with sacred music and bided his time. The Mass in C stood, in the end, as something of a disengaged work, like
Christus
, however contrary in style. Both came from a man who since childhood had rarely been found inside a church. For Beethoven, God was a constant presence, but religious dogma, the liturgy, the kind of incantations chanted over him at his baptism had long since lost their magic. He was, all the same, fond of the piece. “I do not like to say anything about my Mass or myself,” he wrote Breitkopf & Härtel, “but I believe I have treated the text as it has seldom been treated.”
⁵⁷
Certainly he had. It is a unique and beautiful work—only not a particularly exciting one.

 

In the midst of this creative frustration, Beethoven returned to a still-simmering romantic frustration, in the form of Countess Josephine Deym. Around the time of the mass performance she wrote him a friendly if guarded note apologizing for some unintended slight and adding, “For a long time I had indeed wished to have news of your health, and I would have inquired about it long ago if modesty had not held me back. Now tell me how you are, what you are doing . . . The deep interest that I take in all that concerns you, and shall take as long as I live, makes me desire to have news about these things. Or does my
friend
Beethoven, surely I may call you thus, believe that I have changed?”
⁵⁸
They had been in Baden at the same time in July but apparently did not meet. She surely hoped that he had calmed down, was ready to be friend rather than suitor. His response of September 20, from Heiligenstadt, showed otherwise. His passion flared up, along with his breathless dashes on the page:

 

Dear, beloved and only J! Again even a few lines, only a few lines from you—have given me great pleasure—How often have I wrestled with myself, beloved J, in order not to commit a breach of the prohibition which I have imposed upon myself [not to see her]—But it is all in vain. A thousand voices are constantly whispering to me that you are my only friend, my only beloved—I am no longer able to obey the rule which I imposed upon myself. Oh, dear J, let us wander unconstrainedly along that path where we have often been so happy—Tomorrow or the day after I shall see you . . . Until now my health has continued to be very poor, but it is slowly improving . . . I returned from Eisenstadt a few days ago. I had hardly been back in Vienna for a day when I called on you
twice
—but I was not so fortunate—as to see you—That hurt me deeply—and I assumed that your
feelings
had
perhaps
undergone some change—But I still hope . . . Do not forget—do not condemn / your ever faithfully devoted / Bthvn / I am just coming into town today—and I could almost deliver this letter myself—if I did not suspect that I might for the third time fail to see you.
⁵⁹

 

His letter of the next month reveals that Josephine had ordered her servants not to let him in the house. Whatever it took, however she admired him as an artist, she was not going to be tormented by the fury of his love anymore. He learned, if he had not before, that the intimate feelings of women were a quite different matter from the enthusiasm of admirers. It is notable that he never questioned Josephine's right to make her own decisions and run her own life, even if one of those decisions was to turn him away. There is a wan resignation in his last two surviving letters to her: