Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph (109 page)

As he had earlier to Ries that year, he told Fanny's father about the love of his life—surely the woman he had called Immortal Beloved. Fanny wrote, “Five years ago he made the acquaintance of a lady, whom to marry would have been the highest happiness life could have afforded him. It was not to be thought of, was quite impossible, in fact, and was a chimera. But still his feelings remain the same now as then. ‘I cannot put her out of my thoughts,' were words which pained and hurt me beyond measure.”
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In the spring of 1816, around the time Beethoven made that confession to Giannatasio and in a letter to Ries (“I have found
only
one whom no doubt I shall
never
possess”), he completed what amounted to a more lasting memorial to his lost love, a song cycle called
An die ferne Geliebte
(To the Distant Beloved). For all this work's unmistakable grounding in his own pain, however, he remained Beethoven. No matter how self-pitying he could be in person, he was not so in his art. In this work no less than in any earlier ones, he thought abstractly as well as emotionally, universally as well as personally.

Here in the guise of little tunes in folk style, in
An die ferne Geliebte
he created a new kind of unity, a cycle in which the story is unified and the whole greater than the parts. To take what on the surface appears to be a series of songs and make them into a structure of interdependent elements is an echt-Beethoven way to go about things, even when his own sorrows were involved. No song can be detached; each segues into the next. As in his instrumental music, there are internal motifs and interrelated keys and a return at the end.
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Beethoven had known folk music German and otherwise since his childhood, as well as songs written in folk style by composers including his teacher Christian Neefe. He had wielded the style himself here and there.
⁴³
More recently he had made the dozens of folk-song arrangements for Thomson, which had recently departed from the original British Isles tunes to include Continental ones. Any effort that extensive was going to have an impact on his more ambitious work. He copied down a folk song, like a touchstone, on one of the sketches for
An die ferne Geliebte
.
⁴⁴

Part of the folk style he adopted for the cycle was a certain emotional restraint. The lyrics of true folk songs contain a full measure of passion and tragedy, but they do not treat those emotions operatically—especially since most folk songs are strophic, meaning each verse is sung to the same melody. In a strophic song one verse may concern love and another death, and the tune has to encompass them evenhandedly. The first five of the six numbers in
An die ferne Geliebte
are strophic, varied en route; the variety is in the evolving piano accompaniment, in the contrast from song to song, in the unfolding of emotions from joy in nature to sorrow in love.

The verses came from a young Jewish medical student named Alois Jeitteles, who wrote poetry and plays with some success. How Beethoven ran across this cycle of six verses is not clear, but they could not have been better suited to his frame of mind at the time, or to his requirements as a composer.
⁴⁵
The poems themselves enfold a pattern of echoes and returns and foreshadowings that are Beethovenian in their motivic structure.

For him
An die ferne Geliebte
was an address to his own distant, lost beloved, expressed in terms not of operatic anguish but of hope and gentleness, in the artless style of folk song: “What sounded from my overflowing heart, / Without the trappings of art, / Conscious only of its longing.”
⁴⁶

The cycle begins with a simple E-flat chord and a simple strophic tune stretching over five stanzas. This will be one of his nonheroic works in E-flat. The evolving accompaniment subtly paints the poet's changing feelings: “I sit on the hill, peering / Into the blue mist-shrouded landscape, / Seeking those distant country pastures / Where I first found you, my beloved.” Mountains, valleys, clouds, brooks, birds, longing in the midst of nature: those high-Romantic images return and develop through the course of the cycle. The end of the first number tells us that these are songs ultimately about songs—all songs, all music—and also about themselves as an emblem of love and remembrance: “For all space and time recedes / At the sound of songs, / And what a loving heart has consecrated / Will reach another loving heart.” Here in essence is Beethoven's poetic definition of music itself. The composer's loving heart consecrates his gift to the world.

In the second number, as the poet looks out over the mountains the accompaniment conjures hunting horns and the singer's voice echoing in the cliffs. Again there is an underlying sympathy between nature and his feelings as he looks to the western horizon: “Where the sun's rays fade, / Where the clouds gather, / There I long to be!” The clouds return in the fourth song, gliding above birds whose calls drift into the music. (Here and in most of his vocal works, whatever his objections to literalistic tone painting, Beethoven paints every possible word, image, and feeling.) In the fifth number spring awakes, the swallow “busily fetches from every nook and cranny / Soft scraps aplenty for her bridal bed,” and she and her mate make their nest. The music here is a beautiful, simple C major whose purity sets up the poignancy of a turn to C minor at the last words: “Our love alone beholds no spring, / And its net profit is tears.”

The last song is no lament but rather returns to the gentle hope and resignation of the opening in the way it captures the potency and timelessness of music itself: “Accept them then, these songs / Which I sang for you, my love. / Then sing them again at eventide / To the sweet sound of the lute.” That image of the singer's beloved taking up the melodies he has created leads to a heart-tugging
molto adagio
on “You sing what I sang.” On a small scale, that is as distilled a musical and symbolic moment as the trumpet call that announces liberation in
Fidelio
. Two loving hearts drawn apart are united in music, the poet's song and his heart echoing in the song and heart of the beloved. In the most direct yet profound way, in that moment Beethoven is united with his own lost beloved in the only way he can be, and no less with all beloveds and all lost loves—which is to say, with all humanity.

At the last verse the opening melody of the cycle returns, and again we hear the consoling couplet that ended the first song: “What a loving heart has consecrated / Will reach another loving heart.” As in all his best music, here is form at the service of intense emotion. With those lines the music speeds to a racing, almost operatic coda. From gentle beginning to triumphant end,
An die ferne Geliebte
is what its verses say it is: private anguish universalized and transcended in its singing.

The cycle is less than fifteen minutes long, its style deliberately simple and restrained. All the same, in conception and structure it is innovative unto revolutionary.
An die ferne Geliebte
marks the beginning of the integral Romantic
Liederkreis
, song cycle, as Beethoven dubbed it in his first edition. It was written when a young man named Franz Schubert had already written some of his first important freestanding lieder. This little set of songs by Beethoven would show Schubert the way toward his own song cycles—likewise toward the broadening possibilities of the new pianos as an accompanying instrument.
⁴⁷

For Beethoven, at the same time that one hopes this music helped put to rest an emotional calamity that still gnawed at him, it also played its part in his rebirth as a composer. Simplicity and directness had always been ideals for him, but here he expressed them in terms of folk music, of the kind that by now he had been working with for years in his folk-song arrangements. The folk style and a new emphasis on lyric melody were going to play a part in the complex of forces that shaped his late music. So was the kind of overt musical recall that happens at the end of the cycle.

Beethoven dedicated the songs to his old patron Prince Lobkowitz, who had returned to the fold paying his share of Beethoven's stipend. But by the time the music reached his house, Lobkowitz was dead at forty-four.
⁴⁸
In any case, with
An die ferne Geliebte
Beethoven virtually said goodbye to lieder; he completed only two more substantial ones,
Resignation
in 1817 and
Abendlied
in 1820.
⁴⁹

 

For Beethoven the consolation of
An die ferne Geliebte
was spiritual at best. The miseries of his external life continued as before. Through 1816, he was determined to get Karl away from the Giannatasios to live with him, preparatory to sending the boy to a boarding school beyond the reach of his mother. By the end of the year he had for the moment given up on that dream. He could not shake the cold that had gotten into his lungs, and he had gone through a row of servants trying to find ones he could live with. As his music began to revive, everything else was falling apart. “My household is almost exactly like a shipwreck or tends to resemble one,” he wrote Giannatasio. “In short, a soi-disant expert in such matters has cheated me over these [servants]. And, moreover, my health does not seem to be improving so very rapidly.” So he says regretfully that the school is to keep Karl for another quarter. He directs the Giannatasios that the boy's piano lessons with Czerny should continue, three days a week. On a visit he brought up the idea of his coming to live with the Giannatasios, which made Fanny both excited and apprehensive.
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It was another chimera; nothing came of it.

Toward the end of 1816, Beethoven wrote his nephew after they had visited his father's grave on the anniversary of Carl's death:

 

My dear Karl of my Heart!

I can't see you today, not yet, because I have a great deal to do! And, moreover, I am not completely recovered. But do not be anxious . . . Indeed I too mourn for your father, but the best way for us both to honor his memory is for you to pursue your studies with the greatest zeal and to endeavor to become an upright and excellent fellow, and for me to take his place and to be in every way a father to you, and you see that I am making every effort to be all this to you.
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In juggling the contrapuntal demands of Karl's operation and school and lessons and overcoats and underwear, his own odious servants and the Queen of the Night, and his deteriorating health and hearing, it would seem that Beethoven would have had no time to think about business. But he never stopped thinking. Even in the times when he was bedridden in a filthy room, bleary with illness, his head lying on a sweat-soaked pillow, he was thinking, scheming, composing in his head.

Now he was sending a steady stream of letters to England, where his old student Ferdinand Ries and conductor Sir George Smart championed him. In London the Birchall publishing house accepted several pieces including the
Archduke
Trio and piano arrangements of the Seventh Symphony and
Wellington's Victory
, before a new owner took over who wanted nothing to do with Beethoven.
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To help inspire Ries, Beethoven sent a compliment: “The Archduke Rudolph plays your works too, my dear Ries, and among these I find
Il Sogno
particularly delightful.”
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After the breakup of Count Razumovsky's quartet following the burning of his palace, Beethoven lost two of the men from that quartet who numbered among his leading champions in Vienna. Violinist Ignaz Schuppanzigh had found work in Russia; he gave an all-Beethoven farewell concert in February 1816, the program including the third
Razumovsky
Quartet, the op. 16 Quintet, and the still-popular op. 20 Septet. A week later cellist Joseph Linke, living out of town at Countess Erdödy's estate, gave a concert that included a Beethoven cello sonata, perhaps one of the two new ones written for him, published as op. 102.
⁵⁴

At the Schuppanzigh concert Carl Czerny manned the piano in the op. 16 Quintet. In a spirit of youthful enthusiasm he added a number of his own flourishes to the part. It was an old and slight piece, but at the end of the concert Czerny got a royal chewing out from Beethoven in front of the other musicians. The next day came Beethoven's apology in a note: “Tomorrow I will call on you myself to have a talk with you.—I burst forth so yesterday that I was sorry after it had happened; but you must pardon that in a composer who would have preferred to hear his work exactly as he wrote it, no matter how beautifully you played in general.—I shall make amends
publicly
at [Linke's concert]. Be assured that as an artist I have the greatest wishes for your success.” Beethoven kept his word about the public apology.
⁵⁵

During the same period, Johann Nepomuk Hummel left town. Once a Mozart student, he had found acclaim as a pianist and composer. After a shaky start to their relations, he and Beethoven had become rivals more friendly than otherwise. Happy to contribute, Hummel had directed the artillery in the
Wellington's Victory
performances. As a farewell gift Beethoven wrote Hummel a canon on
Ars longa, vita brevis
(Art is long, life is short). Beethoven was developing a habit of marking occasions or honoring visitors with little canons, most of them to ironic texts. As a sadly ironic echo of that text, Hummel did not see his friend again until Beethoven was on his deathbed.
⁵⁶

 

The op. 102 Cello Sonatas written for Linke were the last of Beethoven's essays in a genre he had essentially invented in op. 5. They also mark his farewell to chamber music with piano—that in part because he was no longer a performing pianist. In op. 102 appear more elements that will mark the late music, his second new path: