Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph (108 page)

 

As Fanny Giannatasio had hoped, when Karl started at her father's school, Beethoven embraced her family and became a regular visitor in the house. For a while they saw the best of him, the part that was open, voluble, funny, generous—even lovable. In the family parlor and around the table he reminisced, rhapsodized, dispensed his singular puns and verbal notions, talked music and politics, played with the children. Like many eccentrics Beethoven had his own language and his own humor. Everybody he knew got a nickname. Fanny was “the Lady Abbess”—presumably he found her to be sober as a nun. He told the family that he had received a commission from the new group of amateur enthusiasts in town called the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde, Association of the Friends of Music. His name for them was the “Gesellschaft der Musikmörder,” Association of the Murderers of Music.
²⁸

In her diary Fanny tracked Beethoven's visits and her burgeoning emotions:

 

January, 1816: Beethoven's appearance pleases me greatly . . . The day before yesterday he was with us in the evening and won all our hearts. The modesty and heartiness of his disposition please us extremely. The sorrow which his unhappy connection with the boy's mother entails preys upon his spirits. It afflicts me too, for
he
is a man who ought to be happy. May he attach himself to us, and by our warm sympathy and interest find peace and serenity! . . . I fear greatly that when I come to know this noble excellent man more intimately, my feelings for him will deepen into something warmer than friendship, and that then I shall have many unhappy hours before me. But I will endure anything, provided only I have it in my power to make his life brighter.

 

February 26th: He . . . allowed us to see in him the goodness of heart which is his special characteristic. Whether he spoke of his friends, or of his excellent mother, or gave his opinion on those who are contemporaries in art with himself, he proved to us that his heart is as well cultivated as his head . . . Has he already become so dear to me that my sister's laughing advice, not to fall in love with him, pains and troubles me beyond measure.

 

March 2nd: How can I be so vain as to believe or imagine that the power of captivating such a soul as his is reserved to me? Such a genius? and
such a heart
. . . Beethoven was with us the whole evening. In the afternoon he had been gathering violets for us, as he said himself, to bring spring to us . . . I spoke with him about walks, baths . . . and Karl's mother. His pure, unspoiled admiration for nature is very beautiful!

 

March: We entreated him so warmly to remain and take supper with us that he consented, and we intensely enjoyed listening to his rich, original remarks and puns. He gave us also many decided proofs that he is beginning to have confidence in us. He did not leave till nearly twelve o'clock.

 

March 21st: Yes, it must be confessed, Beethoven interests me to the selfish point of desiring, nay, longing, that I, and I alone may please him! . . . When I returned home, I found that Beethoven had passed the whole evening there. He had brought Shakespeare with him, and played with mother and the children at ninepins. He told them a great deal about his parents, as also of his grandfather, who must have been a true and honorable man.
²⁹

 

Fanny's diary records a young woman falling in love, imagining herself nurturing and rescuing one of the greatest of men. As a sign of the intensity of her feelings, Fanny is the only woman on record to declare that she liked how Beethoven looked. Otherwise she observed him astutely, noting among other things that his hearing had better and worse days. But as her feelings overcame her, Fanny could not fail to notice his attraction to her prettier and more vivacious sister Nanni, whose very presence could lighten his spirits. He passed over, in other words, the available sister for the more desirable but unavailable one—his old pattern.

 

April 11th: I saw Beethoven again, for the first time since he has been suffering from the illness we feared was hanging over him. At first I was quite alone with him, but as nothing I said seemed to interest him, I began to feel discouraged. Presently Leopold [Nanni's fiancé], Nanni, and mother came in, and then he brightened up . . . He remarked that one of those attacks of colic would carry him off some day; upon which I said that that must not happen for many a long year yet, and he replied, “He is a bad man who does not know how to die! I knew it when a lad of fifteen.”

 

His charm and wit could burst out at any moment, even in the middle of practical matters. He wrote Frau Giannatasio, “The highly born and very well born Frau v G etc., is most politely requested to let me know very soon, so that I need not keep in my head so many pairs of trousers, stockings, shoes, pants, etc., I repeat, to let the undersigned know how many ells of cashmere my upstanding and worthy nephew requires for a pair of black trousers; and . . . I ask her to reply without my having to remind her again. As to the Lady Abbess [Fanny], a vote is to be taken this evening about the question which concerns Karl, namely, whether he is to remain with you.”
³⁰
Despite the social pleasantries with the Giannatasios, his mood remained bitterly depressed. In the spring, he wrote Countess Erdödy:

 

My brother's death caused me great sorrow; and then it necessitated
great efforts
to save my nephew . . . from the influence of his depraved mother. I succeeded in doing this. But so far I have not yet been able to make a
better arrangement
for him than to place him at a boarding school, which means that he is separated from me; and what is a boarding school compared with the immediate sympathetic care of a father for his child? For I now regard myself as his father . . . Moreover, for the last six weeks I have been in very poor health, so much so that frequently I have thought of my death. I do not dread it. Yet I should be dying too soon so far as my poor Karl is concerned . . . Man cannot avoid suffering; and
in this respect his strength must stand the test
, that is to say, he must
endure without complaining and feel his worthlessness
and
then again
achieve
his perfection
, that perfection which the Almighty will then bestow upon him.

 

Written to his old “father confessor,” this is a point of honor that he meant seriously: endurance is the road to exaltation. As his mother had taught, “Without suffering there is no struggle, without struggle no victory, without victory no crown.” But his prevailing depression remained, and that in turn afflicted the depressive Fanny. In her diary she began to confess her jealousy of her sister. By November 1816, she was enduring an archetypal turmoil:

 

I am childish enough to feel wounded because he seems to prefer Nanni to me, although I have told myself a thousand times that I have no right or pretensions to his showing a preference for me. I do not quite like his calling me the “Lady Abbess” when I am busy with my housekeeping . . . It does not please me at all for him to regard me simply in the light of a good housekeeper . . . He had been talking to me for about half an hour when she came in, and immediately he brightened up, and seemed to forget my presence. What more do I want, silly girl that I am? . . . What I feel is the need of loving and being loved, the right of being sympathized with, my soul infused in another soul. That this wish should arise from knowing a man like Beethoven, seems a natural thing to me, and because the wish is there, I do not think I am so unworthy of him.
³¹

 

By then, as they did sooner or later with nearly everybody, Beethoven's relations with the Giannatasio family had become fraught. The process began, as usual, with his becoming indecisive, going sour on people. Johanna kept finding ways to see Karl. The boy must be got out of town. “Beethoven's manner towards us has altered,” a distraught Fanny wrote in her diary. “He is cold now for the first time, and I find myself grieving over it . . . His conduct is at times so very moody and unfriendly that I feel shy with him . . . He said
his life was of no worth to himself, he only wished to live for the boy's sake
.”
³²
Karl was his reason to live, his reason to compose. But composing was not going well. Ideas, rhymes and reasons, were eluding him.

That spring he wrote Ferdinand Ries in London, including one of the lists of his income and expenses that over time became a compulsion with him: “Until now he [Karl] has been at a boarding school. That costs up to 1,100 [florins] and, even so, it is not a good school. Hence I shall have to start a proper household where I can have him live with me.” He ends, “
My best greetings to your wife
. Unfortunately I have no wife. I have found
only
one whom no doubt I shall
never
possess.
Yet I am
not on that account a
woman-hater
.”
³³

If Karl was to live with him, he needed reliable servants. That became another obsession of the next months and years. “Please give up the idea,” he pleaded to old friend Baron Zmeskall, “that no servant can ever put up with me.”
³⁴
This was a forlorn hope. Another request to Zmeskall for a male servant was symptomatic of his attitude: “He need not be physically attractive. Even if he is a bit hunchbacked I should not mind, for then I should know at once the weak spot at which to attack him.”
³⁵
This may have been a joke, but it was not far from the reality of how he managed servants. Meanwhile, in signing off letters he took to designating himself “a poor Austrian musical drudge.”

This year Dr. Carl von Bursy, a friend of Beethoven's long-departed friend Karl Amenda, met Beethoven and contributed his impressions to the record. He found a man “small, rather stocky, hair combed back with much gray in it, a rather red face, fiery eyes which, though small, [were] deep-set and unbelievably full of life.” Bursy had to shout to be heard and was often misunderstood.

By now Beethoven had a practiced line with visitors. “I never do anything straight through without pause,” he told Bursy. “I always work on several things at once, and sometimes I work on this one and sometimes on that one.” (This was neither untrue nor entirely accurate: the sketchbooks show he usually concentrated on one piece at a time, though others could be in progress and he might break off work on one piece for a more pressing project.) This stranger found Beethoven “venomous and embittered. He raged about everything, and is dissatisfied with everything, and he curses Austria and Vienna in particular. He speaks quickly and with great vivacity. He often banged his fist on the piano and made such a noise that it echoed around the room . . . He complains about the present age, and for many reasons . . . Art is no longer held in such high esteem and particularly not as regards recompense.” Bursy found Beethoven's rooms pleasant, with a view out over the bastions. This visitor did not cite the usual squalor. He noted “two good oil portraits . . . on the wall, a man and a woman.”
³⁶
The man would have been his grandfather Ludwig. The identity of the woman did not turn up.

 

In the summer another crisis arrived when Karl developed a hernia that required an operation. In those days any operation was a great trauma, performed on a fully awake and usually writhing and screaming patient. The good surgeons were the ones who could work fast, before the patient died of shock. Beethoven arranged for the operation to be performed at Giannatasio's by Carl von Smetana, a leading Viennese surgeon; afterward Smetana became one of Beethoven's regular medical consultants.
³⁷

For some unexplained reason—possibly a “feverish cold” that struck him in October and lasted for months—Beethoven was in Baden and left it up to the Giannatasios to oversee Karl's operation and recovery. The procedure went blessedly well. After the operation Beethoven wrote Karl some practical items: “So far as I can see, there is still a certain amount of poison in your system. Hence I do entreat you to note down your mental and bodily requirements. The weather is becoming colder. Do you need another blanket or possibly your eiderdown? . . . The truss-maker has . . . promised to call again.”
³⁸

But his relations with the boy were more emotional than practical. As always his feelings gushed out in a jumble, almost crazed sometimes, his mood depending on his health, his success in keeping the mother away, the state of Karl, all on top of his eternal capriciousness and volatility. His self-awareness, however inconstant, was one of the things that helped him survive and work. In July, he wrote to Frau Giannatasio, “I have all this time been really ill and suffering from a nervous breakdown.”
³⁹
His breakdowns tended to the manic more than depressive; he was rarely prostrate and helpless. Among the rants and paroxysms he tried to be a dutiful father, writing to the Giannatasios about Karl's shoes, stockings, coats, pants, and underwear. He did not ignore Fanny completely. In the summer his Lady Abbess was ill, and he went to visit her twice.
⁴⁰
The sight of pain usually brought out his best.

In September 1816, Beethoven deposited 4,000 florins, earnings from his successes during the Congress of Vienna, with his publisher Steiner, with whom it would earn 8 percent interest. That money was earmarked for Karl's inheritance. In the coming years, however desperate for cash he became, however enraged toward the boy, he resisted touching it.

Surges of hope and high spirits were also part of his emotional tides. Fanny Giannatasio was buffeted by those tides again and again. She wrote in August that Beethoven came back from Baden “grumbling, as usual, over his expenses. When I saw him, and heard him speak so kindly of us, the wish of my heart again asserted itself that he would attach himself to us . . . He seems quite well, and says that he knows he shall be strong enough soon, his constitution is so healthy.” She and her sister had visited him in Baden while he was taking the baths and peeked in his
Tagebuch
, the diary, which “appeared to contain many significant things.” In that visit to Baden the sisters saw firsthand the kind of battles Beethoven was having with servants. He turned up with a scratch on his face, explaining that it had happened in an argument with one of them. “Look how he has marked me!” he cried.