Vienna, 1814: How the Conquerors of Napoleon Made Love, War, and Peace at the Congress of Vienna (28 page)

Prior to his conversion to Catholicism several years before, Werner had spent much of his career around a theater, and it showed. He had been a playwright who had composed a number of works, including the tragedy
The Twenty-fourth of February,
which had been staged by Goethe. At the age of forty-two, Werner had been overwhelmed by the experience of Mass, and converted. The former vagabond poet renounced his previous debauchery, and traded his activities in the brothel and the stage for the pulpit, and even, for a few years, a monastic cell in southern Italy.

It was during the peace conference that Werner had made his way to Vienna. In a city overflowing with theater, both on the stage and in the streets, Werner had attracted a considerable following. He boasted enthusiasm and passion, though some objected to the language of this fiery preacher, claiming it was as coarse as a coachman and probably better suited to the tavern.

On one Sunday, for example, when the pews were once again packed in the Franciscan church, Father Zacharias veered his sermon onto a discussion of a certain part of the human anatomy—“a tiny piece of flesh…on a man’s body”—that often led to the most difficult temptations and the most flagrant transgressions. Its effects were evidenced every day at the congress. The audience must have wondered where this unpredictable priest was headed. Then, gripping the edge of the pulpit, Werner leaned his thin face toward the congregation and asked, “Shall I show you that tiny piece of flesh?”

The congregation was “deathly silent,” and then, after an “agonizing pause,” the priest answered: “Ladies and gentlemen behold the source of our sins.” For those who looked up, Father Zacharias was standing there showing the organ in question: He had stuck out his tongue.

To the sound of “nervous giggling” and the relief of the congregation, the priest reminded how the tongue wagged in excess seriously damaged relationships. Gossip, however, was not to be vanquished so easily, and it would continue to rage, dividing the peacemakers until it seemed that it might succeed foolishness as the uncrowned king of the congress.

I
N LATE
N
OVEMBER
, the scheduled day for Ludwig van Beethoven’s highly anticipated Gala Concert was nearing. The first date picked for the event, November 20, had been moved back a couple of days due to the unexpected illness of the Austrian emperor.

Indeed, as exhaustion seemed pervasive, a vicious flulike virus swept Vienna in late November. Just as the tsar and the emperor had been forced to spend several days at rest, Prince Metternich also succumbed, as did the king of Prussia, Prince Hardenberg, Princess Bagration, Dorothée, and a host of others. In a congress dominated by fashion, it suddenly seemed almost fashionable to be sick. Fortunately, though, this flu—the congress’s “uninvited guest”—would leave town as quietly as it had arrived.

Two additional postponements of the concert followed that week, the last one because of English protests against holding a concert on a Sunday. Soon Beethoven’s concert seemed uncannily like the Vienna Congress itself, riddled with delays, protests, and postponements.

On Tuesday, November 29, Beethoven was finally able to hold the Gala Concert at the Redoutensaal. The program promised a full afternoon of music, and tickets cost only 3 gulden, or 5 gulden for the better seats upstairs. A stellar audience filled the auditorium, including the Russian tsar, the king of Prussia, and many other princes and princesses.

The concert began with “Wellington’s Victory” (also known as “The Battle Symphony”), a triumphant celebration of the Battle of Vitoria, with its creative sampling from “Rule Britannia” and “God Save the King,” packed with drumrolls, trumpet fanfares, cymbal crashes, and veritable cannon blasts that re-created the “horrors of battle” and the joyous celebration of the victory over the Napoleonic beast. It was an explosive extravaganza quite unusual for classical music at the time.

Beethoven had originally written the music for an instrument called the panharmonicon, a small handheld box designed to reproduce mechanically the wind, brass, and string sections of a large orchestra. The device had been invented by Beethoven’s collaborator, Johann Nepomuk Mälzel, the “Court Mechanician,” whose inventions included an ear trumpet and a “Mechanical Trumpeter” that sounded military marches. He also claimed to have invented a mechanical chess player that had supposedly defeated Napoleon in a game of chess during his occupation of Vienna (actually, the real inventor was Wolfgang von Kempelen, and the trick, of course, was a man hidden inside the machine). Another one of his inventions that might have been useful at a congress swarming with spies was a desk with secret compartments guarded by a built-in mechanism that, if disturbed, released a deafening alarm and thick iron locks that automatically gripped the wrists of the transgressor.

It was this rogue inventor and showman who had suggested that Beethoven revamp “Wellington’s Victory” for a real orchestra and launch the piece at a public concert packed with Vienna’s virtuosos. And in the patriotism sweeping Vienna after the war, Beethoven’s work was a hit. The audience in the Redoutensaal received it with rapturous applause.

The second work, the new cantata “The Glorious Moment,” was named in honor of the Congress of Vienna. The text was written by a surgeon named Alois Weissenbach, who had come to Vienna for the peace conference, and Beethoven set the patriotic poem to music. This piece has not aged well, often dismissed by critics as “absurdly bombastic.” Yet it, too, opened to huge applause. Neither composer, however, could hear this response. Like Beethoven, Weissenbach was deaf.

The concert concluded with the Seventh Symphony, billed as the “new large Symphony.” This was, however, not literally new. Beethoven had completed this symphony back in the spring of 1812, and he had actually performed it publicly in December 1813. It was a notoriously difficult piece of music, and the musicians objected at first. Beethoven himself conducted, and was said to “crouch down at the soft passages” and then suddenly leap up for the louder ones. The audience loved it, and Vienna’s newspaper, the
Wiener Zeitung,
raved about the performance.

Actually, it seems, Beethoven was not really directing the concert. He was on stage, of course, moving his baton, but the real director was his assistant, Ignaz Umlauf. As historian Ingrid Fuchs rightly shows, Beethoven was no longer capable of directing complicated pieces. Less than a month later, the musician, Ludwig Spohr, heard one of Beethoven’s rehearsals and testified to the decline: Beethoven’s pianoforte was “badly out of tune,” and “the poor deaf musician hammered the keys so hard in forte that the strings rattled.” Beethoven made countless mistakes, and the visitor left, as he put it, “gripped by profound sorrow at such a miserable fate.”

Beethoven’s patron, the Russian ambassador Count Razumovsky, looked on loyally with admiration, claiming that the “world is too small for him.” Others were less impressed, prone to judge Beethoven’s compositions as too loud, too long, and too heavy, “like Hercules using his club to kill flies.” Indeed, just as the congress had split in Russian and Austrian factions, police spies reported that “anti-and pro-Beethoven factions [were] forming.” Sure enough, since Beethoven had been supported by a Russian patron and the tsar, the Austrians stayed away from the concert, and the English were not much in evidence there, either. Entertainment, it seemed, was echoing diplomacy.

That night, Beethoven was exhausted, he confessed, by the many “fatiguing affairs, vexations, pleasure and delight, all intermingled and interflicted or bestowed upon me at once.” He also complained about the measly tips he received. The king of Prussia, who left halfway through the concert, gave only a “very paltry” 10 ducats, whereas the Russian tsar generously paid some twenty times that.

A
S
B
EETHOVEN CONDUCTED
“The Glorious Moment,” the congress it celebrated was still no closer to resolving its disputes.

The Russian tsar was increasingly viewed as a villain. Besides his rude treatment of foreign ministers, he had arbitrarily handed over one kingdom to his allies, and ordered his army to occupy another. Everything seemed to confirm the worst fears of some diplomats—that he was a dangerous megalomaniac. Gentz summed up the sentiment: “The language of justice and truth is not one Russia understands.”

At a ball, for instance, Alexander approached the beautiful Countess Széchenyi-Guilford and asked flirtatiously, “Madame, I note that your husband is not present; may I have the pleasure of occupying his place temporarily?” Her response expressed the frustrations of many: “Does Your Majesty take me for a province?”

Vienna’s drawing rooms and makeshift embassy suites also buzzed with heated discussion of Prussia’s controversial seizure of the kingdom of Saxony. Outside of the Prussian delegation and its few allies, opinion was overwhelming negative. Many complained of “the detestable Prussians” and denounced their occupation as an outrageous breach of international law.

In fact, many German states had started a petition to resist this aggression. Smaller and midsized states that felt threatened by Prussia signed to protect their “unfortunate brother,” the king of Saxony, agreeing that they could not sanction such a dreadful and unjust “act of violence.”

This petition against the Prussian annexation made its rounds, and was soon signed by almost every major prince or delegate in Germany. By the middle of December, however, the protest was dead. The reason was simple. The Prussians had made known, in no uncertain terms, that they would regard any state that signed the petition as an outright enemy. One by one, the weaker powers had asked to remove their signatures.

After the Prussian occupation and the intimidation that squashed the protest, tempers were flaring, and feelings of betrayal burned on all sides. Talleyrand took quill in hand and penned one of the more remarkable documents of the Vienna Congress. This paper, a letter addressed to Metternich dated the nineteenth of December, was an elegant combination of philosophy and policy that affirmed the importance of justice and the rights of states in the face of aggression in international affairs.

The French foreign minister first reminded Metternich that his country asked nothing for itself. France was satisfied with its borders and had no desire whatsoever for additional territory. What his embassy hoped instead was to persuade its fellow peacemakers to agree to one guiding principle, namely, “that everywhere and forever the spirit of revolt be quenched, that every legitimate right be made sacred.”

France aspired, in other words, to create a situation whereby “every ambition and unjust enterprise [would] find both its condemnation and a perpetual obstacle.” This might sound like a grand, unattainable ideal, he said, but Europe really had no choice. Without such principles in place, held firm and rigorously guarded, international affairs would soon degenerate into a reckless pursuit of self-interest and power—just as that reckless scramble had plunged the Continent into that “long and deadly horror” of the last quarter century.

Now that Napoleon was defeated, Europe must take this opportunity to crown justice as the “chief virtue” of international affairs. Leaders of states must pledge that they would never act nor acquiesce in any deed that could not be considered just, “whatever consideration [that] may arise,” because only justice, he said, can produce a true state of harmony and stability. Anything short of that would create a misleading and meaningless false order, destined to collapse when the first powerful state decided to take advantage of its superior strength.

“Might does not make right,” Talleyrand reminded. Has not Europe, he added, suffered enough from that doctrine, and paid for it “with so much blood and so many tears”? The golden age of peace could be right around the corner, if only every peacemaker would follow this course of action.

Talleyrand had pored over this statement, selecting every word with care, and he made sure it circulated in Vienna. He personally handed a copy of the letter to the tsar’s minister, Adam Czartoryski, and sent another one to Castlereagh. Talleyrand’s audience, he clearly hoped, was not only Metternich, but also Vienna and, ideally, eventually the Continent at large.

While many praised Talleyrand’s masterpiece, as admirers already dubbed it, the Prussians were not so happy. For them, this was, of course, nothing more than another clever yet thinly veiled attempt on the part of France to sow discord among the Allies for her own gain, and the Prussian ministers lost no time trying to undermine and discredit this statement. This was Talleyrand, after all. Was this man, with his string of broken oaths, really to be taken seriously? Some in the Prussian embassy circulated stories that the French were trying to seize the left bank of the Rhine and Belgium, as they had done in the 1790s.

Besides that, Talleyrand’s position was being undermined by another rumor, this one undoubtedly true.

News trickled into Vienna that France was becoming highly unstable. King Louis XVIII, after only six months on the throne, was very unpopular, and his whole government was as detested as the French government had been on the eve of the Revolution. Generals were restless. Soldiers missed Napoleon, and so did many veterans who had been reduced to half pay, or even unceremoniously dismissed at the end of the war, and now, in the postwar recession, were forced to beg or steal. A report reached Talleyrand in December from the War Office telling of a regiment of the king’s infantry that had “burnt its [Napoleonic] eagles, collected the ashes, and each soldier swallowed a portion of them while drinking a cup of wine to the health of Bonaparte.”