Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph (123 page)

Beethoven had not needed much prodding to become disgusted with the Schlesingers. He wrote Moritz in Paris, “Apparently I am to have several unpleasant experiences with you and your father.” They had fumbled his intended dedication of op. 110 to Antonie Brentano (it went to Archduke Rudolph), and he believed Moritz had shortchanged him by a dozen florins in the payment for opp. 110 and 111: “such insulting niggardliness, the like of which I have
never
experienced.”
⁵⁴

Was Beethoven a habitual anti-Semite, as Peters seems to have been, in common with a large percentage of Germans? The record shows only a few Beethoven cracks about Jews, and the foregoing is one of the worst of them—in some ways still worse because it was done cynically to abet his courtship of a manifestly anti-Semitic publisher. Racial and ethnic bigotry was general in those days; another example appears in a Mozart letter to his father: “A charlatan, like all Italians.” In the end, there is no indication that Beethoven had any more animus toward Jews than he had to the aristocracy, to the Viennese, to much of the rest of humanity. In any case, he kept submitting works to both Schlesingers, even after Moritz pirated some bagatelles.
⁵⁵

Likewise he kept dangling the mass in front of more publishers. Peters had offered 1,000 florins. Three weeks after receiving that offer, Beethoven wrote Artaria in Vienna that for the same fee, “All I can do is to
give
you the
preference
.”
⁵⁶
Why would he double-deal like this for the same fee? Perhaps because he owed Artaria money and he hoped he could fob off Peters with the “trifles” he intended to send.

By this point, Beethoven had unequivocally promised the mass to Simrock, Schlesinger, Peters, and Artaria, assuring them that the score would be immediately forthcoming. Those four houses would not be the last he courted and double-crossed, and in the end none of them got the piece.

Toward the end of 1822, he tried another and yet more dishonest gambit to keep publishers on the line. Now he said there were actually two masses under way; soon he was claiming three. To Peters in November: “In regard to the Mass things are as follows: I had already finished
one
long ago but I have
not yet
finished another . . .
I do not yet
know which of these two Masses you will receive.”
⁵⁷
By the “long ago” work he did not mean the already-published Mass in C but indeed the
Missa solemnis
, still not finished at all. The other mass he wrote of, which eventually metamorphosed into two, was bogus. True, for a while he did float the idea of writing a mass expressly for Franz II, and for it he made inquiries about the emperor's taste in masses. A few, very few, sketches survived for a mass in C-sharp minor.

To what extent do these promises represent deliberate lies, as opposed to an excess of optimism? Beethoven probably hoped to write two more masses, one of them for the emperor. If one wants to be generous, one can say that in his desperation he took the intention for the reality.

In spring 1823, an outraged Peters, having advanced Beethoven money, not only gave up on the mass but rejected all the miniatures he had received, starting with the bagatelles: “I have had several of them played but
not one person
wants to believe me that these are by
you
.” He wanted, he wrote Beethoven heatedly, only “
exceptionally
” good pieces.
⁵⁸
Beethoven was perhaps boggled by this response, since publishers were always plaguing him to write simpler and easier things.
⁵⁹
Yet he doggedly kept after Peters. In the end nothing came of their years of negotiations. At some point, very apropos, Beethoven confessed in a letter to Peters, “Everything I do apart from music is badly done and stupid.”
⁶⁰

 

Amid all this frustration, busywork, and chicanery, he kept composing and retained some of his high spirits. He wrote Johann gaily in autumn 1822, “Two women singers called on us today and as they absolutely insisted on being allowed to kiss my hands and as they were decidedly pretty, I preferred to offer them my mouth to kiss.” The two singers were probably Henriette Sontag and Karoline Unger, both of them teenagers at the time, both of them to be involved in the premiere of his new symphony.
⁶¹
Later he passed on to both of them some wine given to him by an admirer. A friend reported that after drinking it, Sontag “vomited fifteen times the night before last . . . With Unger the effect was in the opposite direction. What a pair of heroines! . . . Both beauties send you their regards and ask for a better and more wholesome wine in future.”
⁶²

Work continued on the mass and he made some sketches toward ninth and tenth symphonies. In early September he got word that the director of the newly built Josephstadt Theatre wanted him to adapt for its opening the
Ruins of Athens
incidental music, written for a similar opening in Pest and quite unknown in Vienna. Beethoven agreed. While a lyricist came up with new words for the existing vocal music, transferring the story from Hungary to Vienna, Beethoven mounted one of his old-style marathons. In a couple of weeks or so he wrote a new chorus, a ballet segment, and an overture he called
Die Weihe des Hauses
(The Consecration of the House)—having decided the old
Ruinin von Athens
Overture would not do for this occasion.
⁶³
The grand and rather Handelian
Weihe des Hauses
, with stately trombone parts in the introduction and a fugue in the Allegro, showed that he still had his old professional skill at writing polished and effective occasional pieces in a hurry. For the premiere on October 3 the hall was packed with listeners primed for a new Beethoven sensation, but with the deaf composer directing and the orchestra uncertain, the response was muted.
⁶⁴

From that performance came an equally mixed result. Leading the violins in the house orchestra was Anton Felix Schindler. Then twenty-seven, he had played violin since childhood but studied philosophy and law at the University of Vienna. Schindler kept performing as an amateur, and in that capacity may have first met Beethoven in 1814 and occasionally encountered him thereafter—among the opportunities being the time he spent working as a clerk for Beethoven's lawyer and friend Johann Baptist Bach.

By the time the new theater opened in 1822, Schindler was accomplished enough to go professional and became concertmaster of the orchestra.
⁶⁵
In his person Schindler was gaunt unto sepulchral, in manner dour and pretentious. He was an able musician and ambitious in other ways as well. By his own later account, he served as a confidant and unpaid secretary of Beethoven from 1819 to the end. Schindler's entries in the conversation books seem to bear out that claim.

But among Schindler's less admirable qualities was extravagant fabrication, most of it designed to convince the world and history that he was far closer and more indispensable to Beethoven, and for far longer, than he actually was. The first extant authentic letter from Beethoven to Schindler is dated June 1822, and that probably marks the actual beginning of their association. After Beethoven died, Schindler forged entries from himself in the conversation books dated before 1822 and some others dated afterward (having appropriated the books from the rooms where Beethoven died). He also invented any number of stories of things Beethoven said and did in those years. It is Schindler who reported that Beethoven said of the Fifth Symphony opening, “Thus fate knocks at the door!” and of the background of the op. 31, no. 2, piano sonata, “Read [Shakespeare's]
The Tempest
.” Both stories entered legend. Beethoven may have said them, he may not have.

Schindler went on to write the first major Beethoven biography, a work of the most remarkable mendacity and biographical incompetence. Hardly anything in it can be trusted on its own—a maddening predicament for future historians, because surely some of it is true. In later years, poet Heinrich Heine described Schindler as “a long black beanpole with a horrible white necktie and the expression of a funeral director,” and noted that his business card read,
L'ami de Beethoven
.
⁶⁶
Beethoven's old Bonn friend Franz Wegeler had some dealings with Schindler and detested him. Ferdinand Ries wrote in a letter, “From beginning to end he acted like an old house-nag . . . and wrote me a witty, dumb letter to cover it up. He can go to hell.”
⁶⁷
Over and over in their relations, Beethoven echoed that sentiment in one form and another.

Yet Schindler succeeded in attaching himself to Beethoven. As a sign of that, he began to acquire Beethovenian nicknames. He was
Lumpenkerl
(“Ragamuffin”),
Hauptlumpenkerl
(“Chief Ragamuffin”),
Samothracian Lumpenkerl
(referring to the Mysteries of Samothrace, i.e., member of an occult order). Most tellingly, Schindler was ­“Papageno,” after Mozart's bumbling sidekick in
Die Zauberflöte
.
⁶⁸
Clearly Beethoven understood Schindler's character. One did not have to be paranoid to dislike and distrust him.

The problem was that Beethoven badly needed an unpaid secretary and general factotum of the kind he had long relied on. Franz Oliva had filled that role for years before he left for Russia in 1820. Beethoven's longtime helper Baron Zmeskall was incapacitated with gout.
⁶⁹
Brother Johann did a few services, but he had an estate far from town and an unfortunate family to occupy him. Karl helped out increasingly, but he was young and occupied with his studies. Schindler saw his chance, and he took it. He began his connection to Beethoven as the archetypal hanger-on. He ended by making Beethoven his career. In Schindler, Beethoven saw somebody prepared to jump at his beck and call. In Beethoven, Schindler saw his fortune and his immortality.

At least two good things can be said of Anton Schindler. He was a faithful errand boy to Beethoven for two or three of the last years, and Beethoven made good use of him—including borrowing money from him. And if Schindler put words in Beethoven's mouth, they were sometimes astute words. Schindler was an able musician and had good instincts about Beethoven's work—instincts that also illustrate the time's attitudes toward music. Whether Beethoven actually said “Thus fate knocks at the door” is unknowable, but as a succinct metaphor regarding the first movement of the Fifth Symphony, it survived because it could hardly be bettered.

 

By the middle of 1822, Beethoven's creative juices were flowing as they had not for a decade. He was about to return to the
Diabelli
Variations, begun in 1819. In July he wrote to Ferdinand Ries in London with his usual mix of affection, flattery, and business: “Have you any idea what fee the
Harmony
Society [he means the Philharmonic] would offer me for a grand symphony? I am still toying with the idea of going to London, provided my health permits it . . . You would find in me the just critic of my dear pupil who has now become a great master.”
⁷⁰
He already had some sketches toward two new symphonies. This small inquiry among many other schemes was going to have great consequences for Beethoven and for his art.

In July he wrote brother Johann, “As to my health, I feel better. For the last few days I have had to drink Johannesbrunnen water and take the powders four times a day; and now I am to go to Baden and take 30 baths . . . The Cardinal Archduke is here and I go to him twice a week. I have no hope of generous treatment or money, I admit. But I am on such a good, familiar footing with him that it would hurt me exceedingly not to be pleasant to him. Besides I do believe that his apparent niggardliness is not his fault.”
⁷¹
A week later he asked “Most Excellent Little Brother! High and mighty landowner!” for a loan. He noted the 3,000 florins that he owed Steiner; the publisher was pushing him to pay up or make a deal for his complete works. Beethoven did not want to agree to that idea until Steiner canceled the debt. Having dealt with Beethoven, the publisher was not foolish enough to agree to that proposal. Karl, who wrote out the letter to Johann, ended, “I secretarius, embrace you too with all my heart and hope to see you again soon.”
⁷²
Karl was a sometime secretary for his uncle now, and to the job brought his fluency in French and English.

Throughout Beethoven's career, all the schemes and machinations on which he spent so much of his energy only occasionally bore fruit. Much of the time, the things that turned out to be important in his work were opportunities that fell in his lap. Another of those arrived in November 1822, in a letter from Prince Nicolai Galitzin in St. Petersburg. He was a cellist married to a pianist, and a Beethoven zealot. “As much a passionate amateur in music as a great admirer of your talent,” he wrote, “I take the liberty of writing to you to ask if you would consent to compose one, two, or three new quartets.”
⁷³

Here was a commission that arrived out of the blue that happened to be in tune with projects Beethoven wanted to do—he had already been working on a quartet, his first since the F Minor of 1810. Galitzin may have been inspired by the presence in St. Petersburg of Beethoven's champion Ignaz Schuppanzigh. If so, it added a chapter to the violinist's glory in history.
⁷⁴
By the end of 1823, when he agreed to compose the three quartets for Galitzin, after more than a decade of creative searching, moneygrubbing, and comparative loose ends, Beethoven had in the pipeline most of the monumental works that were to occupy his last years:
Missa solemnis
, Ninth Symphony,
Diabelli
Variations, and now the set that came to be called the
Galitzin
Quartets.