Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph (106 page)

At the same time, in that social, political, and intellectual wasteland, instrumental music, which could have a progressive and even radical frisson without actually saying anything censorable, flourished virtually unhindered. Music enjoyed the freedom of its mystery. And Beethoven, who loathed the new order and said so incessantly, had the relative freedom of his fame and, as far as the authorities were concerned, his madness.

 

Somehow Beethoven appeared in relatively good spirits as the summer of 1815 approached. Surely much of that had to do with money. During the congress he had made a great deal in his concerts, enough to salt some away, and his yearly stipend from the three nobles was back in place. There was a warm exchange of letters with Countess Marie Erdödy. She wrote him a poetic invitation to her estate at Jedlersee, with joking signatures: “Marie the Elder / Marie the Younger, Fritzi the Unique, August
ditto
[these are her children] . . . Violoncello of the Damned [Joseph Linke, Schuppanzigh's once and future cellist] / Old Baron of the Empire / Officious Steward.”
¹¹²
Beethoven promised to visit the countess in Jedlersee but never made it; most of his life from here on was confined to Vienna, which he hated, and its rural suburbs, which he loved.

In another letter to Erdödy Beethoven returned to his old pattern of intimacy to his “father confessor.” Consoling her about some travel miseries she had experienced, he wrote, “We finite beings, who are the embodiment of an infinite spirit, are born to suffer both pain and joy; and one might almost say that the best of us obtain
joy through suffering
.”
¹¹³
Here he put forth a new credo, deeper than the aggressive defiance of the Heiligenstadt Testament, more heroic than resignation. He had arrived at a position that allowed him to exist and work through the endless pains of mind and body that fate inflicted on him and that he inflicted on himself. It enabled him to find joy in his very existence, and the strength of mind and musical imagination he still possessed in full measure. His earlier visions of joy had been simpler, more direct: the pleasure of love and victory and celebration. In the Heiligenstadt Testament he had feared losing that kind of joie de vivre. Now he arrived at a new and terribly hard-won vision of joy within suffering. That philosophy was going to be necessary to sustain not only his music, but his life.

Again, all in all, despite ongoing illness and creative uncertainty, as 1815 wore on Beethoven seems to have been in some of his best spirits in years. But his brother Carl had again become desperately ill with tuberculosis. In October Carl received a minutely insulting letter from his superior at the Imperial Royal Treasury Office, where he worked as a cashier: “Neither from the most mediocre request for a leave of absence . . . nor the hitherto submitted certificate from the . . . Chief Surgeon . . . is the cashier Carl von [
sic
] Beethoven to be seen as suffering from an incurable disease . . . Rather one has much more sufficient reason to come to the last-named conclusion on the basis of his . . . punishable disinclination for his duties; and on his customary negligence.” The next month Carl wrote out his will. Beethoven put a note on the superior's letter: “This miserable bureaucratic product caused the death of my brother, since he really was so sick that he could not perform his duties.”
¹¹⁴

It was not brother Carl's death or his will that caused Beethoven hardly bearable suffering and distraction in the coming years, to the point of nearly driving him mad and finally all but killing him. It was the codicil to the will having to do with his brother's young son, Karl.

27

C
ARL VAN BEETHOVEN
died of consumption, the time's name for tuberculosis, on November 15, 1815. It was the same bleeding, choking nightmare that had claimed their mother. Carl's wife Johanna and son Karl could only watch, and wait for the aftermath. Somehow in his last days Carl managed to create an extensive will. It reveals that he and Johanna had battled a great deal about what was going to happen.
¹

“Certain that all must die,” the will begins, “and feeling myself near this goal, I am, however, in full possession of my faculties, and freely and voluntarily deem it good to make the following, my last deposition.” He commends his soul to the mercy of God, his body to the earth from whence it came. He leaves money for chanting four holy masses. He acknowledges that his wife will have the right to 2,000 florins in bonds she gave him at their marriage. Then he turns to the central issue:

 

5. I appoint my brother Ludwig van Beethoven guardian. Inasmuch as he, my deeply beloved brother, has often aided me with truly brotherly love in the most magnanimous and noblest manner, I expect, with full confidence and with full trust in his noble heart, that he shall bestow his love and friendship that he often showed me, also upon my son Karl, and do all that is possible to promote the intellectual training and further welfare of my son. I know that he will not deny me this, my request.

 

7. . . . I designate my beloved wife Johanna . . . and my son Karl as universal heirs to all my property after the deduction of my existing debts and the above bequests, and that my entire estate shall be divided between them in equal portions.

 

What happened next can only be surmised but seems clear enough. Carl finalized item no. 5 without Johanna's knowledge. When she saw it she protested, there were shouts and tears, she reminded Carl how Ludwig had always despised her, she put her foot down. The result was the “Codicil to My Will”:

 

Since I have observed that my brother, Herr Ludwig van Beethoven, desires after my eventual death to take wholly to himself my son Karl, and wholly to withdraw him from the supervision and training of his mother, and further, since the best of harmony does not exist between my brother and my wife, I have found it necessary to add to my will that I by no means desire that my son Karl be taken away from his mother, but that he shall always and as long as his future destiny permits remain with his mother, to which end she as well as my brother shall direct the guardianship over my son Karl. Only through harmony can the purpose that I had in appointing my brother guardian of my son be attained; therefore, for the welfare of my child, I recommend compliance to my wife and more moderation to my brother.

God permit the two of them to be harmonious for the welfare of my child. This is the last wish of the dying husband and brother.
²

 

Still on the page at the beginning of the fifth item are four words that have been crossed out: “
Along with my wife
I appoint my brother Ludwig van Beethoven
co-
guardian.” At some point before or after that was done, probably on Johanna's prodding, Carl added the codicil unequivocally calling for a dual guardianship and for the boy to live with his mother. Carl told his lawyer he made the codicil because “my brother is too much a composer and hence can
never
according to my idea, and with my consent, become my son's guardian.”
³
But Ludwig was relentless. He wanted the boy for himself, Karl's connection to his mother completely under his control.

In a draft note Ludwig admitted his tampering with the will: “I knew nothing about the fact that a testament had been made; however, I came upon it by chance. If what I had seen was really to be the original text, then passages had to be stricken out. This I had my brother bring about, since I did not want to be bound up with such a bad woman in the matter of such importance as the education of the child.”
⁴
He claimed that just before Carl died he changed his mind and sent his lawyer a message to delete the codicil, but the lawyer was not home and Carl died before it could be taken out. That may or may not be true. In any case, in his last hours of life Carl was thoroughly jerked back and forth by his brother and his wife.

For Ludwig, that his nephew Karl, then nine, had to be taken out of the clutches of a malignant mother was self-evident, something every right-thinking person would agree with. But the codicil remained. The discrepancy between the amended fifth item naming Ludwig as sole guardian and the codicil insisting that Karl should live with his mother was a legal fissure through which flowed years of misery for everybody concerned.

“My poor unfortunate brother has just died,” Beethoven wrote Ferdinand Ries in London, to whom he was sending pieces to show publishers. “He had a bad wife. I may as well tell you that for some years he had suffered from consumption; and in order to make life easier for him, I must have given him 10,000 in Viennese currency . . . I may say that I mourn his loss with all my heart, and that I now rejoice at being able to feel sure that so far as his comfort was concerned I have nothing to reproach myself with.” The support he gave Carl in his illness goes far toward explaining how Ludwig went through so much money in the last few years. He would not have kept track of those expenditures, so he may have given Carl a good deal less or a good deal more. In the letter to Ries, Beethoven pleaded “hardship for several years as well as the complete loss of my [stipend].”
⁵
In fact, in the last couple of years he
had
received his stipend and arrears, totaling 4,987 florins, had earned 7,441 florins from his 1814 concerts in Vienna, and had gotten payments from a row of publishers.
⁶

In Carl's final days, Ludwig seems to have had no idea how critical his brother's condition was. So, since to him Carl appeared to have died unexpectedly (it had not been unexpected for Carl and Johanna), Ludwig immediately formed the idea that his brother had been poisoned by his wife. There was little evil he did not consider Johanna capable of. He demanded that a friend examine Carl's body for traces of poison. To his disappointment, nothing turned up.
⁷

Two weeks after his brother died, Beethoven submitted a lengthy appeal to the Landrecht, the court of the nobility, to make him sole guardian of Karl. As reasons he cited the amended fifth article of the will as well as Johanna's conviction, some years before, for embezzlement, her history of infidelity, and the fact that she had been pregnant with Karl months before their marriage. The widow was therefore, he contended, a manifestly immoral and unworthy mother. That a child could be taken from a mother on such grounds was not unusual in those days.
⁸
Widows had scant legal power; any kind of taint could be reason for the court to name a guardian. Beethoven made his plea to the Landrecht rather than the Magistrat, the commoners' court. To him it was obvious that whatever the circumstances of his birth, he was no commoner. Meanwhile as far as the Landrecht was concerned, the
van
in his name indicated he was nobility; for the moment they did not inquire further.

On the nineteenth of January 1816, the Landrecht appointed Beethoven guardian. He appeared before the court and “vowed with solemn handgrasp before the assembled council to perform his duties.” With that, the matter was apparently settled. To Antonie Brentano he sent a portrait of himself and added the sighing note of a beset but loving parent: “I have fought a battle for the purpose of wresting a poor, unhappy child from the clutches of his unworthy mother, and I have won the day—
Te Deum laudamus
—He is the source of many cares, but
cares which are sweet to me
.”
⁹

At the end of January, Beethoven placed Karl in a well-regarded local boarding school for boys operated by Cajetan Giannatasio del Rio. “I am ready to give Karl to you at any time,” he wrote Giannatasio. “In any case it will certainly be best to remove him later on from Vienna and send him to Mölk or somewhere else. There he will neither see nor hear anything more of his beastly mother.”
¹⁰
There is no record of how Johanna, still in shock after her husband's death, responded at this point to having her son taken away. She probably expected to visit him in school at will.

A few days later Beethoven picked up Karl from the family home, writing schoolmaster Giannatasio, “It affords me much pleasure to inform you that at last I am bringing you tomorrow the precious pledge that has been entrusted to me . . . And now I beg you once more in no circumstances to allow his mother to influence him. How or when she is to see him, all this I will arrange with you tomorrow . . . but you yourself must have some sort of watch kept on your servant, for
she has already bribed my servant
, though for another purpose!”

Giannatasio had two musical daughters: Fanny, then twenty-five; and her younger sister Nanni, who was engaged to be married. The quieter and more serious of the sisters, Fanny suffered from periods of depression, including a recent months-long siege after the death of her fiancé.
¹¹
The family had known a number of prominent people and Fanny idolized Beethoven, so she was duly thrilled to meet him. She wrote in her diary,

 

What I have often vainly wished for, that Beethoven should come to our house, has at length happened. Yesterday afternoon he brought his little nephew to see the Institute; and today everything is arranged. Of my childish embarrassment I will say nothing . . . I cannot describe the delight I feel at being thus brought into communion with a man whom I honor so much as an artist, and esteem so highly as a man . . . How delighted I should be if we could really enter into friendly relations with Beethoven, and if I might hope to make a few hours of his life pleasant to him—to him who has banished so many dark clouds from mine.
¹²

 

Fanny and her family could not have imagined what sort of saga they were entering into with the great man. As Beethoven's feelings surged up and down in the coming months, their feelings—and particularly Fanny's—were obliged to surge as well. Beethoven's intention was to control absolutely Johanna's access to her son, and as soon as possible to send him off to a boarding school far away from her. Soon it became clear that Johanna wanted to see Karl nearly every day, and for the moment Giannatasio had no authority to stop her.
¹³
“[After] the interview of the mother and your charming nephew today,” the schoolmaster wrote, “I have to insist that you, as guardian, show me formal authority in a few lines, by which power I can . . . refuse to allow her to take the son with her . . . It will also not do for her to visit the child too much, for he always mourns her departure.”
¹⁴