Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph (90 page)

Antonie Brentano at least appreciated her husband, called him “the best of all men,” but she felt no passion for him.
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Franz was absorbed in his business and often went back to the office after dinner. She hated living in drab Frankfurt and longed for her hometown of Vienna. As the years went by she slipped into a trance of frustration and sorrow. Clemens Brentano wrote in 1802, “Toni is like a glass of water that has been left standing for a long while.” From 1806 on, her health declined; she was tormented by headaches and a nervous condition. She wrote to Bettina's sister, “A deathly silence reigns within my soul.”
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In only one of her several portraits is there a hint of a smile trying to break through. The earliest portrait, painted when she was twenty-eight, just after her marriage, shows a melancholy beauty with a long, pale neck.
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Not so charitably, Bettina wrote in 1807, “Toni . . . has rouged and painted herself like a stage set, as though impersonating a haughty ruin overlooking the Rhine toward which a variety of romantic scenes advance while she remains wholly sunk in loneliness and abstraction.”
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In 1809, Antonie's father lay dying. She moved to Vienna with her four children, back into the grand house of her childhood that was crammed with art and memorabilia. Franz followed and set up a branch of his business in town. There were concerts and parties. After connecting with the couple through Bettina, Beethoven became a regular visitor and played piano regularly, something people found increasingly harder to coax him into.

It was Antonie's task, after her father died, to organize his collection, get myriad items appraised, and auction them off. The process took more than three years. The whole time she dreaded the return to Frankfurt that would come when the house was empty. In that period, she recalled late in life, her main consolation was Beethoven. She had touched his abiding vein of empathy—at least that, if not something deeper in him. They found a “tender friendship,” she recalled. He would “come regularly, seat himself at a pianoforte in her anteroom without a word, and improvise. After he had finished ‘telling her everything and bringing comfort' in his language, he would go as he had come.” He presented her with manuscripts including the song
An die Geliebte
(To the Beloved). The manuscript bears a note in her hand: “Requested by me from the author on March 2, 1812.”
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Antonie was not the only admired woman friend Beethoven comforted with music in a time of sorrow whether or not he felt a romantic interest in them. He did the same with Baroness Dorothea Ertmann, who was not an intimate but a pianist he admired. What sort of intimacy did Antonie and Beethoven form in this hectic period when on top of his work he hopelessly courted Therese Malfatti and met Bettina Brentano, all while coping with overlapping illnesses? What place in his heart was open to ailing, melancholy Toni? Was it love and hope for reciprocation? He knew and liked her businessman husband Franz. Was he capable of making a play for the wife of a friend, even if the marriage was unhappy? The unanswerable questions of his relations with Antonie Brentano only intensify the mystery of those years that for him were brimming with pain and disappointment, perhaps also touched by hope.

 

If Beethoven was not a Romantic artist setting out mainly to express himself, it is still hard not to connect his emotional storms of 1810 with the String Quartet in F Minor, completed that summer and eventually published as op. 95. It is one of the singular works of his life. After the warm and engaging
Harp
Quartet of the previous year, now he produced a challenge and an enigma. There was no commission; op. 95 is dedicated not to an exalted patron but to his old Viennese helper Baron Zmeskall. It is one of the handful of works to which he gave titles:
Quartetto serioso
.

The
Serioso
is beyond “bold,” deeper than “experimental.” For Beethoven F minor seems to have been a darkly expressive key, more raw, more nakedly tragic than tumultuous C minor. It is the key of the
Appassionata
, of the dungeon scene in
Fidelio
, of the overture to Goethe's
Egmont
written that year. The distilled essence of his sense of F minor is the first movement of the
Serioso
, which seems to involve something on the order of a confrontation between love and rage.

A simple description may be the best representation in words. A grinding
furioso
phrase answered by a violent silence. An eruption of stark octaves in jolting dotted rhythms. Another glowering silence. A wrenching harmonic jump from F minor to G-flat major, the key of the Neapolitan chord but in a tender phrase, quickly shattered by the return of the
furioso
figure.
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After a first theme of twenty bars, which contain those three distinct, starkly contrasting ideas with only silence as transition, there is a short bridge to a second theme in D-flat major that sounds evanescent, breathless, unreal.
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That moment of melting beauty is again invaded by the grinding figure and by the intrusion of uprushing
fortissimo
scales in inexplicable keys.
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In this movement there is more confrontation than transition, no normal key relations, wrenching jumps from key to key, the sonata form so condensed as to be desiccated. There is no repeat of the exposition before the development, because in this movement the material is always volatile, all development. At the same time the music cannot escape from the opening
furioso
figure, which grinds through most of the twenty-two bars of a truncated development. The coda jumps from F minor to D-flat major, rising to a scream and a fall to exhaustion.

A startling jump from F minor to D major, beginning with an enigmatic lone cello stride, begins the Allegretto ma non troppo second movement. Its main theme is of a profound but fragile beauty.
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In its middle comes a strange fugue whose falling chromatic subject feels like an endless descent into melancholy. Among fugues it is one of the most poignant, a quality rarely heard in that disciplined contrapuntal form.

There is no slow movement, nor a scherzo or minuet. In meter and tempo the third movement stands in place of a scherzo. So that there can be no mistake about its import, it is marked Allegro assai vivace ma serioso, very lively but seriously. The movement has an aggressive drive, with its relentless dotted rhythms and blunt silences. In contrast, the two trios are lyrical and soaring, recalling in their tone and keys (G-flat and D-flat) the tender moments of the first movement.

A softly poignant phrase introduces an Allegro agitato finale that is nearly as tight and taut as the first movement. Its main theme begins curt, desiccated, half made of rests, until it reaches a surging, quietly agitated song. The penultimate page dies into silence, stasis, whispers. Then as perhaps the strangest stroke of all comes a coda that seems intended to wipe away all sadness. It is a burst of F-major ebullience like the end of a comic opera, yet still short and curt, ending with an uprushing scale that recalls the peculiar ones in the first movement. If the coda is a resolution to hope, it is an oddly choked-off one—but hope all the same.

Whether the fury and the tenuous moments of hope in the
Serioso
represent Beethoven's state of mind that year is another of that year's elusive questions. But there is no question that the
Serioso
sounds like a cry from the soul. In 1810, he had experienced his second devastating marriage rejection. At the same time, in two new women acquaintances, both of them named Brentano, he perhaps found some possibility of the emotional and family life he yearned for. He knew this quartet was going to be a puzzle for listeners, perhaps enough to do him harm. He did not publish it for six years and in an 1816 letter made an extraordinary declaration: “The Quartet is written for a small circle of connoisseurs and is never to be performed in public.”
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In any case, if the
Serioso
is a cry from the soul that seemed to him too intimate to be made public, it is a tightly disciplined cry, a systematic experiment with the musical norms and forms Beethoven in­herited. In that respect it amounts to something he could not have understood yet: a prophecy of music he was going to be writing a decade later. Surely the music of that coming decade rose in part from the issues and feelings of the
Serioso
brewing in his mind.

In his work Beethoven was entering a protracted search for a second New Path, a new vision of the nature and purpose of music—which is to say, a new vision of the human. Whether or not he ever realized it, the
Serioso
was a clue, a step toward that path. But more than ever before, his struggle toward a new vision would have to be carried on alongside a still more grueling struggle with his health, his hearing, his state of mind.

 

If 1810 was fertile for Beethoven, his productivity still did not approach the all-but-superhuman years before 1808 and never did again. Except for the
Serioso
, which had no immediate ramifications, there were no great bold strides but rather works exercising the imagination and mastery he could always rely on.

The less music he wrote, meanwhile, the more letters. As always most of them were practical, like the prodding one of this year to Viennese piano maker Johann Andreas Streicher, who apparently had asked for endorsements:

 

Here, dear Streicher, are the letters . . . But I do ask you to ensure that the instruments do not wear out so quickly—You have seen your instrument which I have here and you must admit that it is very worn out . . . You know that my sole object is to promote the production of good instruments. That is all. Otherwise I am absolutely impartial. Here you must not be annoyed at hearing the truth from your most devoted servant and friend

Beethoven

 

He was trying to get from Streicher a piano that pleased him, but the reality was that no instrument pleased him for long. The Érard from Paris, sent him as a gift, which had helped inspire the
Waldstein
and
Appassionata
, was now finished for him: “My motto,” he wrote Streicher, “is either to play on a good instrument or not at all—As for my French piano, which is certainly quite useless now, I still have misgivings about selling it, for it is really a souvenir such as no one here has so far honored me with.” He adds that he was suffering from a new complaint, an infection or abscess: “On account of my foot I cannot yet walk so far.”
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Still more letters were directed to publisher Gottfried Härtel, who had finally agreed to take the Mass in C, though not to pay for it. (Incredibly, in October Beethoven jotted down, “The mass could perhaps be dedicated to Napoleon.”)
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There were steady misunderstandings and wrangles over the mass. “For God's sake publish the mass just as you have it,” he wrote Härtel, “without waiting for the organ part . . . The general character of the Kyrie . . . is heartfelt resignation, deep sincerity of religious feeling . . . Gentleness is the fundamental characteristic . . . cheerfulness pervades this mass. The Catholic goes to church on Sunday in his best clothes and in a joyful and festive mood.”
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(Here is another of the few times he revealed an underlying conception of a piece.) After one particularly egregious train of engraving errors that he had meticulously corrected, he wrote Härtel with exasperation and remarkable restraint:

 

Mistakes—mistakes—you yourself are a unique mistake—Well I shall have to send my copyist to Leipzig or go there myself, unless I am prepared to let my work—appear as nothing but a mass of mistakes—Apparently the tribunal of music at Leipzig can't produce one single efficient proofreader; and to make matters worse, you send out the works before you receive the corrected proofs . . . Please note that a whole bar is missing from the pianoforte arrangement of the overture to Egmont . . . All the same I do esteem you very highly. As you know, it is the custom with human beings to esteem one another for not having made even greater mistakes—
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All his courting of Härtel over the years, all his patience and determination were finally negated by an overcautious publisher afraid that Beethoven would lose him money. After taking on a few works, including the
Harp
Quartet and the
Emperor
Concerto, the
Egmont
music, op. 84, was the last new Beethoven work Breitkopf & Härtel published.
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In 1815, Beethoven finally settled a row of pieces on the Viennese publisher Sigmund Anton Steiner, whose house became his principal outlet for years.
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But he doggedly kept pitching ideas to ­Härtel.

The endless drain of proofreading and contending with publishers was hardly Beethoven's only distraction. When Archduke Rudolph was in town he expected several lessons a week in piano and composition, and they dragged on for hours. In this period began a major motif of Beethoven's letter writing for years to come: notes begging off a lesson with Rudolph because of ill health. In early 1811, he wrote, “For over a fortnight now I have again been afflicted with a headache.” A few days later: “I am better and in a few days I shall again have the honor of waiting on you and of making up for lost time—I am always desperately worried if I cannot be zealous in your service and if I cannot be with Your Imperial Highness as often as I should like. It is most certainly true to say that this privation causes me very great suffering.”
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The latter sentiment is most certainly not true; clearly, to Rudolph he exaggerated his physical travails to escape lessons. But in his notes he took pains not to cause offense. He was no longer the brash young lion treating his aristocratic admirers imperiously. He had come to understand the importance of hanging on to this loyal and royal friend. With Rudolph there would be no break like the violent argument that ended the earlier stipend from his once-leading patron, Prince Lichnowsky.