Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph (116 page)

So this is a fugue that unfolds like no other, in the large view also subsuming something like a combination of rondo (a traditional finale model) and variations.
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As Beethoven admits above the opening measures (in Italian, despite his vow to use German terms), it is a
fuga a tre voci con alcune licenze
, “fugue in three voices with some license.” (As he presumably knew,
con alcune licenze
was used as an indication in improvisatory pieces of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.) License, indeed. He sets forth a gigantic, manic fugue, or rather a teeming sonata/rondo/variation/fantasia on the idea of a fugue—again, Baroque fugue plus Aufklärung forms, including the thematic development that pervades the movement. Moments of comedy, pathos, and lyricism pass through the music like mists in wind. Often there are huge spaces between the hands, creating a singular sonority between the resonant bass and silvery and percussive high register.

Few listeners can follow all the twists and turns of the finale; most only try to take in what sounds like a churning dynamism glittering with trills, at the same time a kind of epic athletic contest for a performer struggling with piano keys and hammers and the limits of human endurance.
What is difficult is good
, and what is difficult is woven into the sounding impact of the
Hammerklavier:
a certain desperate quality in the performance is not only in some degree inevitable but necessary. This is a descendant of the end of the
Appassionata
, in which the assault on the player and instrument is part of the effect. The music seems to be tearing piano and performer apart.

Unlike some of his work of the previous decade, then, this is not music exalting a hero but rather music heroic in its essence. To a large extent, the hero in question is the performer, and after that the listener. Again, the piece exists on the other side of the eighteenth-century notion of piano sonatas and its notion of music in general as an elegant pleasure largely within the reach of amateur performers and listeners. The outer movements of the
Hammerklavier
are excessive beyond ease and beyond pleasure, sometimes nearly beyond human, though they enfold moments of wonderful beauty. The superhuman and the intimately human are both part of the
Hammerklavier
. Perhaps, given Beethoven's literary passions, is it relevant that the same can be said of Homer.

The listener experiences the whole of op. 106 as one takes in storms in the mountains and other forces of nature. For the strong of heart,
what is difficult is beautiful and good
.
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“Now,” Beethoven said, “I know how to compose.” In fact, though the
Hammerklavier
informed virtually every piece he wrote afterward, he never wrote another one that sounds or works quite like this sonata. It was an experiment and an extreme. The works that followed, some even more gigantic, played out the sonata's implications in their own mostly gentler ways. Still, there would be a further enormous fugal finale to come, one that would set a new mark for excess and obsession not only in fugues but in the entirety of music. Beethoven would name that one the
Grosse Fuge
, the “Great Fugue.”

 

As of 1818, Beethoven was not stone deaf and he never quite reached that point, but by then when he finished the most monumental of piano sonatas he was functionally deaf. How did he do his work? A professional composer can read and create music in his or her head without a piano, just as one reads and writes prose. Cultivating that inner ear is a basic skill for any trained musician, though some have a better inner ear than others. (It helps to have perfect pitch; there is no evidence as to whether or not Beethoven had it.) That was the foundation of how he worked in his deafness: he could compose away from the keyboard. All the same, in practice he had always done much of his work at the piano, making use of his facility as an improviser. Improvisation, again, was key to his process. What went down in his sketchbooks was shorthand for a great deal of work done at the piano and in his head, playing and revising. As his deafness shut him off from sound, he went to great lengths to hear the piano as well as he could—getting the louder Broadwood and the ear trumpets and the metal sound amplifier he attached to the piano. Apparently sometimes he held up an ear trumpet to the amplifier. (Neither that contraption nor a detailed description of it survives.)

The third means was more direct. He still spent a great deal of time improvising at the keyboard, even when he could hear nothing of what he played. When he improvised publicly in later life, the reported results ranged from splendid to pathetic; sometimes his hands got onto the wrong keys, and usually his pianos were out of tune. But after all his years as a virtuoso he had a sense of virtual hearing through his fingers. Maybe of the collection of stratagems he used to overcome his deafness, finger-pitch memory was the most useful. With it he could still draw on improvisation as his engine, his creative consciousness functioning through his fingers. Perhaps in the throes of improvisation it felt to him like he heard every note and nuance.

Did his deafness change his music? Of course it did, but
how
it did, how much of the late style had to do with his hearing, is not easy to discern. There are miscalculations, particularly in the late orchestration, but they are far outweighed by fresh and remarkable effects of spacing and color, in orchestra and piano and string quartet. Continuity is another matter. Czerny reported, secondhand, that Beethoven told a friend his deafness “prevented him from adhering, in his later works, to the consistent flow and unity of his earlier ones, for he had been accustomed to composing everything at the piano.”
⁴⁹
None of that is entirely accurate. Much of the late music has an unbroken flow and long-sustained arcs. Maybe here Czerny's own skepticism about the late period is speaking. Still, in one way and another Beethoven had to adapt his composing to his disability, mostly in ways only he would know.

Maybe the obsessive concentration on unity of material in the
Hammerklavier
was a way of attacking his disability. Having done it, he did not need that kind of obsession anymore. With the
Hammerklavier
he not only proved to the musical world that he was still capable of supremely ambitious works (even if some of the world considered this piece quite mad); he also proved it to himself. Now, seeing his new path clearly before him, there were no bounds to what he intended to do. But the fact that now he could hear music only in his head is surely what gave some of the late music an inward, ethereal, uncanny aura like nothing else. Some of the late music is like a memory of music sounding in the mind, with an ineffable beauty and poignancy. All his late music is pervaded with both loss and transcendence.

 

As Beethoven worked on the
Hammerklavier
in 1817–18, the Karl-and-Johanna troubles were in abeyance. With Karl living with him, sometimes in the country, there was less opportunity for Johanna to get at her son. But when they returned to Vienna, the struggle heated up again, toward its coming climax. Johanna had surely expected more access to Karl as a reward for contributing to his support. When Karl was back in Vienna that autumn of 1818, Johanna struck through the courts. She submitted to the Landrecht a petition to get the boy back. When that was rejected she applied to have Karl taken from the Gymnasium day school and placed in the Royal Imperial Convict, a boarding school—where she might be able to reach him. That too was rejected by the court. Meanwhile, probably to put pressure on Beethoven, she stopped paying support.

Somehow or other Johanna had been seeing or communicating with Karl, who at twelve was on the verge of sowing his oats as a teenager yet still somewhat pliable. Like a teenager too, he was becoming embarrassed to be seen in the company of his shabby, deaf guardian, who looked so peculiar that passersby gawked and street urchins heckled him. Beethoven habitually strode along quick-time, singing and mumbling to himself, muttering insults at passersby. He would not have moderated any of that when the boy was with him.

On December 3, Karl ran away to his mother. Distraught beyond words, Beethoven went to the Giannatasios. “Never shall I be able to forget,” Fanny Giannatasio wrote in her diary, “the moment when he came and told us that Karl
had left
him, and had gone to his mother . . . To see this man weeping, who has already had so much sorrow to bear, was one of the saddest scenes I ever witnessed. I remember Beethoven's exclaiming, with the tears running down his cheeks . . . ‘Ah, he's ashamed of me!'”
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But Beethoven dried his tears and next morning went to Johanna to fetch Karl home. She promised to send him back that night; to make sure, he summoned the police, who took the boy to the Giannatasios'. Immediately Johanna made another appeal to the Landrecht, complaining that Beethoven intended to send her son far away.
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This time the court called for a hearing to interview all three principals: Beethoven, Karl, and his mother. It was in this round that Beethoven made a disastrous mistake involving a letter of the alphabet.

He turned up for the hearing with his editor friend Karl Bernard, who probably wrote down the judges' questions for him and provided advice. Whether or not Karl and Johanna had been coached, the court record shows their testimony was careful, coordinated, and effective. Examined first, Karl astutely played the middle. Was he getting good grades? Yes, between “eminent” and “first class.” Why, the judges asked, did he leave his uncle? “Because his mother had told him she would send him to public school,” Karl responded, “and he did not think he was getting on under private instruction.” How was he treated by his uncle? “Well.” Did he prefer to be with his mother or his uncle? “He would gladly remain with his uncle if he had someone with him, because his uncle is hard of hearing and he cannot talk with him.” Did his mother persuade him to run away? “No.” Has his uncle mistreated him? “He had often punished him but only when he deserved it . . . After his return [from his mother] his uncle had threatened to strangle him.” Did his uncle encourage him to speak disrespectfully of his mother? “Yes, and it was in his uncle's presence, whom he thought he would please by it.” Did his uncle exhort him to pray? “Yes, he prayed with him morning and evening.”
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Presumably the court was not too concerned about Beethoven's threat to strangle the boy; it was the kind of thing one said in angry moments, and no one expected he was serious. What Karl thought of it was not asked. To what extent his answers were inflected by fear of his uncle cannot be said.

Johanna testified last. Karl had come to her on his own accord, she said, “because he did not like to live with his uncle.” She had advised Karl to go back, but he was afraid to. Had her brother-in-law forbidden her to see her son? He had told her to meet Karl at various places, then when she arrived he was not there. Had his uncle treated the boy well? Here, remarkably, Johanna did not condemn Beethoven at all—in fact, as far as the record shows, she never did. Echoing Karl's testimony, Johanna said that his deafness made it impossible for Karl to converse with him and except for the unreliable servants there was nobody who could properly take care of him: “His cleanliness was neglected and supervision of his clothing and washing; persons who had brought him clean linen had been turned back by his guardian.” Had she heard of her son speaking disrespectfully of her? She had not. Was her husband of noble birth? “The documentary proof of nobility was said to be in the possession of the oldest brother, the composer . . . she herself had no document bearing on the subject.” The last question was what, in fact, had already decided the matter for the Landrecht.

The judges asked the question because of what Beethoven had revealed in his testimony a few moments earlier. After asking him about the circumstances of Karl's flight, the court asked, In whose actual care was the nephew? Beethoven said he had arranged piano lessons and tutoring. “These studies occupied all the leisure time of his nephew so completely that he needed no care; moreover, he could not trust any of his servants with the oversight of his nephew, as they had been bribed by the boy's mother.” Had the boy spoken disrespectfully of his mother in his uncle's presence? “No; besides, he had admonished him to speak nothing but the truth; he had asked his nephew if he was fond of his mother and he answered in the negative.” Beethoven said he did not want Karl to be schooled in the Convict, as Johanna had petitioned for, because there were too many pupils there and too little supervision. For the moment, he said, he could only see hiring a tutor for the boy or sending him back to the Giannatasios' boarding school for the winter. After that he would send him to the Convict school in Mölk. Of course, he rambled on, ideally he would like to have Karl study at the excellent Theresianum in Vienna, “if he were but of noble birth.”

Those few words let the cat out of the bag. It was a ruinous bit of information that Beethoven had volunteered unasked. The court pounced.
Were he and his brother of the nobility and did he have documents to prove it?
“Van,” Beethoven replied, “was a Dutch predicate which was not exclusively applied to the nobility; he had neither a diploma nor any other proof of his nobility.”

What made one noble was a rather informal matter; if one had a noble name, one was presumed to be so until and unless documents were required. All along, many people had assumed the
van
in Beethoven's name made him noble, because in Germany that was often the case:
van
was the equivalent of
von
. But as Beethoven admitted to the court before he thought better of it, that was not the case in Flanders, where his family was from.

A week later the Landrecht, reserved for the nobility, transferred his case to the commoners' court, the Magistrat.
⁵³
Beethoven had to begin all over again.