Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph (86 page)

Besides the attractiveness of steady work for Thomson, Beethoven clearly enjoyed these Welsh, Scottish, and Irish tunes, all of which he generally referred to as “Scottish.” They gave him a supply of classic melodies to work with, and like anything else musical, they might serve as grist for the mill. When it came to sheer beauty and facility, his melodic gift was not the equal of Mozart's and Handel's, at least, and with his fine judgment he may have understood that. But eventually melody was going to have to carry more weight in his work than it had before. The folk-song arrangements helped him along in that direction.

In his letter Thomson offered 100 ducats (over 500 florins) for the forty-three airs, plus 120 ducats more for three quintets for varied instruments and three violin sonatas. Nothing came of the latter commission. Thomson added a caution that was to become an invariable refrain: “I permit myself the liberty to request that the composition of the accompaniment for the piano to be the most simple and easy to play, because our young ladies, when singing our national airs, do not like and hardly know how to play a difficult accompaniment.”
²⁹
Beethoven had written plenty of music playable by young ladies of modest skill, including the first movement of the
Moonlight
Sonata, but he had never done it to order. He replied patiently but firmly to Thomson: “You are dealing with a true artist who likes to be paid honorably, but who likes glory and also the glory of art even more—and who is never content with himself and tries always to go further and make yet greater progress in his art.” He got to work on the songs right away but did not finish them until the next year. He finally sent the lot in July 1810, noting in his cover letter that he had done them “
con amore
.”
³⁰
Perhaps. In any case, many of his accompaniments did prove too hard for the young ladies who were Thomson's main concern.

Beethoven had every reason to worry about money. In Vienna prices had inflated some 300 percent in the last years. War taxes and requisitions affected everybody, and there was little hope of relief.
³¹
In addition to taking on this piecework in a time of mounting financial catastrophe in Austria, Beethoven decided to reduce his expenses by eating at home rather than in restaurants. This would entail hiring an extra servant as cook. Restaurant food was relatively cheap, but servants were cheaper. Beethoven wrote Zmeskall, “Cursed tipsy Domanovetz—not count of music, but Count of gluttony—Count of dinner, Count of supper and the like . . . I must have someone to cook for me, for as long as our food continues to be so bad, I shall always be ill.” (He was suffering from abdominal miseries that went on for weeks.)
³²
A couple briefly and unhappily worked for him, the husband doing the chores and the wife the cooking. Before long he was writing Zmeskall, who had handled their pay, “I simply cannot see that woman at my rooms again; and although she is
perhaps
a little better than he is, I don't want to hear anything more about either of them . . .
Both of them are wicked people
.”
³³
This period marks the beginning of an endlessly frustrating search, which lasted to the end of his life, for servants whom he found to be other than contemptible.

Creatively speaking, war-troubled 1809 was not the nearly wasted year Beethoven declared it, even if his output was modest by his standards of the last eight years. Quick on the heels of completing the ­
Emperor
Concerto, at Baden in the fall, he finished the gentle and agreeable String Quartet in E-flat Major and six songs, op. 75, that he dedicated to Princess Caroline Kinsky, wife of the benefactor who was too busy at war to see to his part of the annuity. Also in this year Beethoven finished four piano works including his first sonatas since the epic
Appassionata
of 1805.

 

Around the end of 1809, Beethoven spent a good deal of time collecting instructional material to use for Archduke Rudolph's lessons in piano, theory, and composition. Beethoven had a broad knowledge of the musical theoretical literature. Now he put together a thick pile of material including works of his old teacher Albrechtsberger; of Fux, who devised the study of counterpoint in species; of the theorist and J. S. Bach disciple Kirnberger; and from the classic
True Art of Clavier Playing
, by C. P. E. Bach.
³⁴
For the archduke, the only student he had left, he intended to be as good a pedant as Albrechtsberger.

Rudolph was not only the most generous and loyal patron of Beethoven's life but also the most powerful. Beethoven was determined not to estrange an important patron again. If he was resentful of the demands on his time, if he was careless about proper etiquette in visiting the residence of the archduke (who told his servants to ignore it), Beethoven would, as best he could, humble himself when appropriate. There would be no blowups between them, something that could be said of few people in Beethoven's life. In that regard it helped that Rudolph was one of the less imperious examples of his class. It also helped that he had some talent, more than most students. With Beethoven's coaching and meticulous editing, he eventually produced a trickle of respectable work.

How much of Beethoven's relations with Rudolph rose from fondness and how much from calculation is impossible to untangle. After Rudolph returned to town with the royal family, at the end of January 1810, Beethoven finished the three-movement sonata he called
Das Lebewohl
, “The Farewell,” and presented the archduke with the manuscript inscribed to him: “The Farewell, Vienna, May 4, 1809, on the departure of his Imperial Highness the revered Archduke Rudolph,” and at the finale, “The Arrival of His Imperial Highness the revered Archduke Rudolph, January 30, 1810.”
³⁵

The
Lebewohl
had been preceded by two relatively low-key but not inconsiderable piano sonatas. Surrounded by war and occupation and bedeviled by digestive miseries toward the end of 1809, Beethoven did not try to outdo the
Appassionata
, which he called his best sonata, but produced some works of youthful, almost dewy freshness. Creatively, he had begun a period of marking time, but marking time at the height of his powers.

In this period he also fulfilled Muzio Clementi's commission for a piano fantasia. The one-movement Fantasia, op. 77, begins with two startling swoops down the keyboard, like the clusters of notes Beethoven sometimes smashed out before beginning an improvisation. The swoops return as a kind of curtain device in a work of playful and enigmatic charm. The key is given as G minor, that being more or less where it starts, but the Fantasia goes through a patchwork of keys and ideas and ends up with a long stretch of quasi-variations in B major. The capricious spirit of C. P. E. Bach hovers in the background. For Beethoven this potpourri also might have represented a portrait of his scattered life at the time. In any case, it does what a fantasia is supposed to do, which is to be exploratory and quasi-improvisational.

Beethoven still had his French Érard. Though he had paid twice, without success, to have its touch lightened to the style of Viennese pianos, he still appreciated the more robust sound of the Érard, which was close to the sound of British pianos. He had been leaning on local piano maker Streicher to depart from the more delicate Viennese build and sound. Wrote J. F. Reichardt, “Streicher has abandoned the soft, overly responsive, bouncing, and rolling [character] of the other Viennese instruments and—upon Beethoven's advice and request—has given his instruments more resistance and elasticity in order to enable the virtuoso . . . to have more control over the instrument's sustaining and carrying [power], and for the subtle emphases and diminuendos.”
³⁶
Behind England and France as usual, and with Beethoven's prodding, Vienna took another belated step toward the future, in this case the future of an instrument.

At some opposite extreme from the Fantasia is the tightly woven op. 78 Sonata, in two movements and in the eccentric and finger-­tangling key of F-sharp major. With the music as evidence, for Beethoven this key possessed great charm and melting tenderness. The dedication to Therese Brunsvik, the more ascetic sister of Beethoven's hopeless love Josephine, might explain some of its singular spirit. It begins with four
adagio cantabile
measures that are part introduction, part a source of motivic material, part an almost prayerful meditation that inflects everything that follows, starting with the wistful and flowing theme of the Allegro non troppo. The second theme is largely butterfly flutters. Both movements make their points succinctly and exquisitely and move on. In the second movement, alternately dashing and absurdly chirping, Czerny saw wit and childlike mischief.
³⁷
Beethoven was fond of this sonata, not because it was heroic or ambitious but because it was unique—“really something different,” he said. He preferred it to the
Moonlight
, which lies in the equally eccentric key of C-sharp minor.

Like the two sonatas of op. 49 from ten years before, the three-movement Sonatine in G Major, op. 79, is nominally a short, attractive, reasonably easy outing for amateurs. But for Beethoven, simple in 1809 is not the same thing as it was ten years before: there is more depth, more personality, more quirkiness, and it's not all that easy to play. A folksy mood predominates. The first movement is a vivacious and headlong Presto alla tedesca, a
tedesca
being a fast German dance in triple time. The second movement, in G minor, is a sort of song without words, like an aria in a “Turkish” opera, the melodies exotic and infectious. The last movement is a breezy, charming, finally laugh-out-loud rondo Vivace.

His piece for Archduke Rudolph,
Das Lebewohl
, op. 81a in E-flat Major, is one of the few overtly autobiographical works of Beethoven's life. It can be added to the list of his “characteristic” pieces and to his responses to E-flat major that depart from a heroic tone. The sonata forms a simple story of departure, absence, and return, each movement so labeled in the manner of the
Pastoral
Symphony, but the music is not as ingenuous as the
Pastoral
. In any case, what on the surface appears to be an occasional work for a patron becomes a distinctive form, a narrative that as always with Beethoven is addressed not just to a particular occasion but to the ages. The music is inspired by the story, but the story does not entirely generate the music.
³⁸

The atmosphere and the pianism of op. 81 are as individual as in any of his sonatas. It begins with a solemn three-note horn call. So we can't miss the point, Beethoven writes over these notes
Le-be-wohl
. After a poignant and searching
adagio
introduction a pealing Allegro breaks out, everything pervaded with the
Lebewohl
motif.
³⁹
We can interpret the movement, if we like, as the bustling preparations for a journey. The sadness of departure arrives with the coda, which ends with fading farewells echoing into the distance, the harmonies overlapping in a singular way, like horn calls echoing across a valley.

Next comes “Absence,” with its trancelike atmosphere, sorrow and hope locked in an unresolved cycle that can be broken only by “The Return,” which serves as finale. It starts with a jubilant shout of greeting that takes up and embroiders the
Lebewohl
motif, then sinks to a calm joy expressed in brilliant and inventive piano sonorities. Echoing the end of the first movement, the coda has a wonderful warmth, with echoes of the farewell motif resolved into the settled happiness of reunion.

History would mostly remember op. 81a with a French title,
Les adieux
, because Breitkopf & Härtel first published it that way. Beethoven was put out about the change. To Härtel he made an insightful linguistic point, noting that the German farewell is more intimate and significant than the French: “I have just received the ‘Lebewohl' and so forth. I see that after all you have published other c[opies] with a French title. Why, pray? For ‘Lebewohl' means something quite different from ‘Les Adieux.' The first is said in a warm-hearted manner to one person, the other to a whole assembly, to entire towns.”
⁴⁰
Here was another small battle with a publisher in which Beethoven was entirely in the right, and which he lost.

After this effusion of solo piano music in 1809–10, he put away sonatas for another five years.

 

Another product of 1809, a year Beethoven said in June was producing only “a fragment here and there,” was the warm and ingratiating String Quartet in E-flat Major, op. 74, eventually dubbed the
Harp
for its striking pizzicatos. For some reason Beethoven had gotten stuck on E-flat major. Between 1809 and early 1811, he wrote four major works in that key: the
Emperor
Concerto,
Harp
Quartet,
Lebewohl
Sonata, and
Archduke
Trio. Only the
Lebewohl
carried Beethoven's own title, and none of the pieces are in a “heroic” E-flat major.

The
Harp
begins with a gentle, flowing introduction, harmonically and metrically wandering but untroubled, that keeps turning up a foreign D-flat in the middle of what purports to be E-flat major. Here is a “sore” note, the same pitch as in the
Eroica
Symphony, also important to the
Serioso
Quartet, that will again have its resonances. But in keeping with the untroubled mood of this quartet, it is not a
particularly
sore note. A forthright Allegro breaks out with an eighteenth-century atmosphere, until the transition to the second theme injects some pizzicatos rare for the time in being in the foreground of the music rather than an accompaniment.
⁴¹
As with the first two piano sonatas of the year, the exposition and whole first movement are compact and without formal or, for that matter, emotional ambiguities.