Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph (88 page)

He begins with a couple of pages about music in general that laid the foundation for the century's dominating myth of Beethoven as the archetypal genius:

 

The reviewer has before him one of the most important works of that master whom no one will now deny belongs among the first rank of instrumental composers. He is permeated by the topic that he is to discuss, and no one may take it amiss if, stepping beyond the boundaries of the customary critique, he strives to put into words what this composition made him feel deep within his soul.

When music is being discussed as a self-sufficient art, this should always be understood to refer only to instrumental music, which, disdaining all help, all admixture of any other art, purely expresses the peculiar essence of this art . . . [Instrumental music] is the most Romantic of all the arts—one almost wishes to say the only one that is
purely
Romantic. Orpheus's lyre opened the gates of the underworld. Music reveals an unknown kingdom to mankind: a world that has nothing in common with the outward, material world that surrounds it, and in which we leave behind all predetermined, conceptual feelings in order to give ourselves up to the inexpressible . . .

The magical power of [instrumental] music works like the wondrous elixir of the wise, by means of which various mysterious ingredients make every drink delicious and magnificent. Every passion—love—hate—anger—despair etc., . . . is clothed by music in the purple shimmer of Romanticism, and even that which we experience in life leads us out beyond life into the kingdom of the infinite . . .

The expression of a childlike, happy soul dominates in Haydn's compositions. His symphonies lead us into a vast, green meadow, into a joyous, colorful crowd of fortunate people. Youths and maidens glide by in round dances; laughing children, listening beneath trees, beneath rose bushes, teasingly throw flowers at each other. A life full of love, full of blessedness, as though before sin, in eternal youth . . . Into the depths of the spirit kingdom we are led by Mozart. Fear surrounds us: but, in the absence of torment, it is more a foreboding of the infinite. Love and melancholy sound forth in charming voices, the power of the spirit world ascends in the bright purple shimmer, and we follow along in inexpressible longing behind the beloved forms . . . flying through the clouds in the eternal dance of the spheres . . .

In this way, Beethoven's instrumental music also opens up to us the kingdom of the gigantic and the immeasurable. Glowing beams shoot through this kingdom's deep night, and we become aware of gigantic shadows that surge up and down, enclosing us more and more narrowly and annihilating everything within us, leaving only the pain of that infinite longing . . . Beethoven's music moves the lever controlling horror, fear, dread, pain, and awakens that infinite longing that is the essence of Romanticism.
⁵⁵

 

Hoffmann goes on to print snippets of the Fifth Symphony with commentary in the manner of the time, citing the ideas with little attempt at analysis. Analysis and niceties of craftsmanship were not high-Romantic concerns. But Hoffmann does note, citing the first bars, “The beginning of the Allegro [the first 21 bars] determines the character of the entire piece,” and he observes without giving examples that “it is primarily the intimate relationship that the individual themes have to one another that produces that unity that holds the listener's soul firmly in a
single
mood.” He cites the “terrifying effect” of the mysterious whispers in the retransition to the recapitulation. Terror, longing, spirits, and the infinite make regular appearances. By the end, he promises, the listener “will not be able to depart from the wonderful spirit kingdom, where pain and joy surrounded him in musical form.”

Beethoven surely read those words, as he appears to have read everything he could find about himself, especially in the
Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung
. Hoffmann's prose fantasia was unlike anything Beethoven had seen written about his music, hardly like anything he could have read about any music. Beethoven was a man of the Aufklärung, the age of reason, used to thinking in concrete terms. Now he was confronted with what amounted to a manifesto of a new age that rejected reason, a manifesto that happened to be inspired by his art. He read about the inexpressible, about unknown kingdoms, the bright purple shimmer of Romanticism, the dance of the spheres, infinite longing, the lever of horror and fear. All of them were called part of his music. What was he to think?

In the Romantic century instrumental music was going to take center stage as the supreme art, and Beethoven's music was going to be central to that process. When he read Hoffmann's words Beethoven could not have understood much of this, at least not yet. But he had to be interested in Hoffmann's reviews, because they were the most admiring and by far the most imaginative ones he had ever received, and in the most important musical journal in Europe. It set forth a brave new world of some kind that he had helped create. And he tended to appreciate it when his poetry in tones inspired poetic responses, especially when they outstripped his own few and fumbling words about music.

For Beethoven Hoffmann's fantasies may have been the first clues pointing toward a second New Path, for which he did not yet know he was searching. At the height of the Aufklärung, Christian Neefe and others had taught him that instrumental music should paint characters, emotions, scenes, implicit but coherent dramas. Beethoven had always written his works at the service of images and stories, though he usually kept those models to himself. Hoffmann provided him a clue that instrumental music did not have to be so specific, so definable. Maybe “the inexpressible” and “infinite longing” were qualities worth capturing, just as worthy as the Aufklärung's Good, True, and Beautiful. That, in any event, was the direction Beethoven was headed. It lay years ahead, on the other side of great acclaim and great suffering.

It was in the middle of his courtship of Therese Malfatti and just before Hoffmann's articles appeared that Beethoven met another avatar of the zeitgeist who was destined for fame. Even better, Bettina Brentano was a dazzling young woman, and she worshiped Genius.

24

I
N MAY
1810, as Beethoven sat working at the piano, he felt a touch at his shoulder. A voice shouted in his ear, “My name is Brentano!” He turned to find a young woman with fathomless brown eyes looking at him. A smile lit up his bulldog face. Gallantly he offered his hand and said, “I've just written a fine song for you.” With that he took, so to speak, the bait.

In his harsh voice he began to sing and play his setting of ­“Kennst du das Land,” a lyric sung by the little Italian dancer Mignon in Goethe's
Wilhelm Meister
. Beethoven did not know that Goethe, that book, that character, that lyric lay at the center of Bettina Brentano's existence.

 

Do you know the land where the lemon trees bloom

And oranges glow from the leaves' dark gloom

and a soft wind wafts from a cloudless sky . . .

You must know that land?

It is there, there, I long to go with you, my beloved.

 

He sang, she remembered, “not meltingly, not softly . . . far beyond cultivation and the desire to please.” At the end he asked her if she liked it. She nodded. He offered another Goethe lyric, “Do not dry the tears of eternal love.”

By then Bettina's cheeks were glowing. Neglecting her for a moment, he leaned over a sketchbook and jotted down ideas for the song. As he wrote, she stroked his hair, arranging the disorderly locks. In his
raptus
, did he notice? When he was done he rose and kissed her hand, and when she turned to leave he came along. “Music is the climate of my soul,” he told her as they walked. “Few realize what a throne of passion each single musical movement is—and few know that passion itself is music's throne.” He sensed she already knew all this. He spoke, she wrote, “as though I had been his intimate friend for years.”
¹

At least, that is how Bettina Brentano recalled their meeting, years later, before her connections and correspondence with celebrated men made her famous, and also infamous.

Bettina was about to turn twenty-five when she met Beethoven. She would not have been the first young female enthusiast to appear in his rooms. It happened now and then, maybe more than now and then. His friend Wegeler mentioned his “conquests,” without giving details. There was the time some years before when his student Ferdinand Ries intruded on a scene of Beethoven romancing a young woman on the couch, whose name he hadn't thought to ask. On that occasion, Beethoven seemed to know what he was doing, at least up to the point that she jumped up and fled. Of the women who appeared at his door, only Bettina would be remembered to history by name.

When Beethoven read E. T. A. Hoffmann's articles on his music, he encountered a defining Romantic figure in print. In his connection with Bettina Brentano, he was stirred by an embodiment of the Romantic spirit in the form of a bewitching young woman. Bettina made it her business to bewitch, and she brought a kind of genius to the endeavor. In her singular and diffuse way, Bettina was talented. She drew beautifully, studied music, sang her own songs in a rich contralto, accompanying herself on guitar. People described her singing as unforgettable. Often she improvised her performances. Eventually she published a collection of songs that show manifest technical deficiencies but a distinctive voice. In later years she became notorious for her liberal politics in a reactionary age. She campaigned against anti-Semitism; she befriended Franz Liszt, the brothers Grimm, Karl Marx, Robert and Clara Schumann, Ralph Waldo Emerson. In her youth Bettina set out to be a muse to great men, to recast them and their lives as myths in her personal pantheon.

Artists and muses of the Brentano family were celebrated before Bettina. Her maternal grandmother, Sophie de la Roche, wrote popular novels and kept a salon. Before he became the titan of German letters, the young Johann Wolfgang von Goethe frequented those salons. In turn, Sophie's daughter Maximiliane became one of the first of Goethe's long string of sweethearts. He gave her black eyes to Lotte in his epochal novel
The Sorrows of Young Werther
.
²
After bearing eight children in an unhappy union in Frankfurt, Maximiliane Brentano died in 1793. Her seventh child, Elisabeth Catharina Ludovica Magdalena, called Bettina, was five when her mother died. Bettina and her sisters were packed off to a convent, her older brother Clemens sent to live with an aunt.
³

Bettina remembered the main privation in the convent to be the lack of mirrors. In her teens, now living with her grandmother, she returned with gusto to life outside.
⁴
Her real first love was for an older girl, the poet Karoline von Günderrode. They exchanged extravagant letters that Bettina published decades later. “I can't write poetry like you, Günderrode,” Bettina wrote, “but I can talk with nature when I am alone with her . . . And when I come back . . . we put our beds side by side and chat away together all night long . . . great profound speculations that make the old world creak on its rusty hinges.”
⁵
Günderrode took up with a married man, who promised her everything and then went back to his wife. One day as they sat on the bank of the Rhine Günderrode opened her dress and showed Bettina the place on her breast where a surgeon had told her a knife would find her heart.

After her lover left her Günderrode went to the Rhine and plunged a knife into that place on her breast. (Goethe visited the scene and made literary use of the story.) Bettina's friend had fallen to the dark, suicidal side of Romanticism. Soldiering through the next decades with reaction and repression surrounding her, Bettina would continue to embody the sunny, idealistic side of the age, which never gave up on the dreams of spiritual and political freedom that had created the Enlightenment and the French Revolution.
⁶

When Bettina was around twelve, her brother Clemens suddenly turned up. She had not laid eyes on him for seven years. He was then twenty, growing toward the important Romantic artist he was to become—as lyric poet, a rival of Goethe. Clemens encouraged Bettina to read Goethe. She promptly went mad for the dancer Mignon in
Wilhelm Meister
. In dress and manner she became the elfin, inexplicable Mignon. She began to conceive a passion for Goethe himself, seeing him as a kind of family property and part of her destiny.

Bettina eventually published the letters between her and Clemens. They reveal an ongoing spiritual battle. Clemens was at once fascinated and repelled by his sister's independence. He wanted her to give up her chimeras and become a proper hausfrau. “In heaven's name,” he wrote Bettina, “don't become a . . . seeress . . . If you knew that . . . witches of former centuries were none other than the victims of constipation, you would take more care to avoid falling into over-sensibility.” And worse: “If you cannot avoid being singular then you had better avoid society altogether . . . Best of all you should be taken for a good quiet girl.”
⁷

Then and later, Bettina's conception of male and female was fluid and unique to herself, and she had a horror of domesticity. For all her love of Clemens, her defiance was intractable: “My soul is a passionate dancer; she dances to hidden music which only I can hear . . . Whatever police the world may prescribe to rule the soul, I refuse to obey them.”
⁸

By Bettina's teens, Goethe was settled into his fame as something on the order of the Shakespeare of German letters. He lived in Weimar, where he was a court minister, friend of the king, and resident genius. Bettina finally ran him to ground when she was twenty-one and he fifty-eight. When his long-ago love's daughter stood before him, Goethe asked what interested her. “Nothing interests me but you,” Bettina said. Goethe invited her onto his knee and put his arms around her. She went to sleep, then awoke, she recalled, “to a new life.” For hours Bettina extolled and chastised Goethe. Then in a fallow creative period, always susceptible to young beauty, he was thunderstruck. He told her he would like to have her always around so he would never get old.
⁹
Their exchange of letters began soon after. Published after he died as
Goethe's Correspondence with a Child
, the book made Bettina famous. That she was hardly a child when they met indicates the kind of adjustments to reality she made in her books of correspondence. But in the end Goethe had not been just an aging bard dazzled by youth. There was more to Bettina than her sparkle. She wrote to him early on (unless she actually wrote these words in middle age) this remarkable piece of poetic world-weariness: “I cannot deny the presentiment that . . . this world, in which my senses are alive, is going to perish; that what I ought to shield and protect, I will betray; that where I ought to patiently submit I will take revenge; and when childlike wisdom artlessly beckons, I will act defiant and claim I know it all. But the saddest thing is that I will label with the curse of sin what is not sin, just as they all do. And I will be justly punished for it.”
¹⁰