Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph (126 page)

There are further homages, more music about music, in unexpected ways. The somber slow chorale of Variation XX, recalling his equali for trombones, is answered by another parody emphasizing the rattling repeated chords of the theme. Variation XXII jumps in with the most startling moment in the piece: a quotation, in blank octaves, of “Notte e giorno faticar” from Mozart's
Don Giovanni
, the aria that introduces us to the don's comic sidekick Leporello. At some point Beethoven had realized that Mozart's tune has a similar harmonic structure to the Diabelli waltz, and it begins with a descending fourth, the leading melodic motif gleaned from the waltz. Woven into the piece, Mozart is another spirit hanging over the
Diabellis
.

That homage to Mozart is wry but not satirical, any more than is the Handelian fugue of Variation XXXII. Nothing overtly conjures Haydn, but the whole of the
Diabellis
is in effect a testament to what Beethoven's teacher did with variations. So the
Diabellis
are music about life, about the piano, and about the past of music, with homages to Handel, Bach, and Mozart, and tacitly to his rival Haydn.
¹⁰⁵

The Handelian fugue is preceded by the spiritual core of the
Diabellis:
Variation XXV, a magnificent tragic aria full of Baroque figuration that streams like tears. Then comes the big fugue, the climax but not the end. Instead he concludes the variations with a gentle farewell enfolding two final evocations—of Mozart again, and of himself.

Rather than a final cadence, the fugue falls into cadenza-like roulades, as if wiping away everything that came before. There is a muted, magical moment of transition. Then Variation XXXIII, an epilogue rather than a climax, takes shape as a little minuet looking back to Mozart. At the same time it has some of the exquisitely simple and ingenuous quality of the ending variations of op. 111, where Beethoven turned our eyes upward to the stars and said farewell to piano sonatas. Both that sonata's finale theme and the final variation of the
Diabellis
begin with a descending fourth; both are in an artless and supremely artful C major.

With the minuet the variations end on a gesture of wistful irony, of profound play. At the conclusion the minuet seems to dissolve, to evanesce, until the final
forte
thump in the middle of the bar. It is like a gentle wave of farewell, and a wink. The irony of the ending points to a fundamental quality of the genre. In a sonata, after the exposition and development and recapitulation, the piece comes to an end, with or without a coda. There is no such model for finishing variations, no predetermined conclusion. Ordinarily, when finished with a set of variations, the composer fashions an ad hoc conclusion—say, a vigorous fugue with a rousing final cadence. Otherwise, the music threatens to go on endlessly. Recall the time when painter W. J. Mähler visited Beethoven when he was finishing the
Eroica
. Beethoven played him the variation finale of the symphony and kept going with improvised variations for two hours.

So variations are in theory an infinite form, and Beethoven's ending ironically reminds us of that:
I could keep going at this forever, friends, and all of it would be marvelous. But I have to stop somewhere, so here it is: lebewohl. Ta-da!
His very serious joke ends the way life can, in the middle of a sentence. There is the final poetry of the
Diabelli
Variations. They were conceived in terms of radical contrasts from one to the next, and the last notes are contrasted to a silence on the brink of eternity.
¹⁰⁶

When Diabelli's house brought out the variations on the publisher's theme, in his advertisement he struck a note that must have made even Beethoven proud: “We present here to the world Variations of no ordinary type, but a great and important masterpiece to be ranked with the imperishable creations of the old Classics . . . more interesting from the fact that it is elicited from a theme which no one would otherwise have supposed capable of a working-out of that character . . . All these variations . . . will entitle the work to a place beside Sebastian Bach's masterpiece [the
Goldberg
Variations].”
¹⁰⁷
History thereafter hardly put it better.

 

The quotidian marched on. The tangle of Beethoven pieces in circulation, both sold and offered, became increasingly complicated. He had never juggled so many balls at once, in the moil of offering works large and small to a smorgasbord of publishers at the same time that he kept an eye out for others, and meanwhile composing at something close to his old heat. Peters turned down the bagatelles Beethoven sent him; Clementi published a set of them in England that was promptly pirated by Moritz Schlesinger and then by a publisher in Vienna. As a result, Beethoven ended up getting no money for the Continental edition of the bagatelles. This fee had been earmarked to pay off his debt to Johann. He had to write a new set of bagatelles to address his brother's loan.
¹⁰⁸
Yet the next February he offered Moritz the
Missa solemnis
and the Ninth Symphony.
¹⁰⁹

In July he wrote Rudolph that his infection was improving—“I have been able to use my eyes again”—and he was composing the symphony for England that he hoped to finish in less than a fortnight. His outlandish misconceptions of the time he needed to finish big pieces continued, even when he was not writing publishers. Still, the Ninth Symphony would be done by early the next year.

A new pot of trouble arrived that month in an excruciatingly detailed letter from Schindler. Johann's wife and daughter were back to their amusements while Johann was laid up in bed:

 

About your brother and the people dear to him, I shall confine myself to telling you as much as circumstances now allow.

He is weak, unfortunately a far too weak man, though greatly to be pitied . . . He has two vipers at his side . . . These persons, despite their most venerable name, are worthy of being locked up, the older woman in prison, the younger in a correction house. How they can treat a husband and father in such a manner during his illness can only be imagined among barbarians . . . It is more than barbaric, when the wife, while her husband lies ill, leads her lover into his room to [meet] him, gets herself all gussied up like a sleigh horse in his presence, then goes driving with [the lover] and leaves her sick husband languishing at home.
¹¹⁰

 

Schindler goes on to practical business and ends, “I am, in deepest
submission
, Your unalterably loyal, A. Schindler.” Beethoven's hanger-on detested Johann, and here he was playing to Beethoven's prejudices about Therese and her daughter. Beethoven had dubbed them, respectively, “Fat Lump” and “Little Bastard.” Still, storming over to Johann's house in Ludwig's usual fashion would not be advisable this time. In a conversation book, Schindler reported that Therese had declared that if Ludwig showed up at her house, she would be waiting for him in the hall with an iron poker in hand.
¹¹¹

Taking the route of discretion, Ludwig wrote Johann a stern letter:

 

Now you've gotten into a fine mess: I am informed of everything that Schindler has observed at your house. He was useful to me, so that I can learn about you and also help you.

You see how right I was to hold you back from this, etc. . . . I advise you to come out and stay here, and later to live with us all the time. How much more happily you could live with an excellent youth like Karl, and with me your brother.
¹¹²

 

In August he returned to full big-brother mode: “However little you may deserve it so far as I am concerned, yet I shall never forget that you are my brother; and in due course a good spirit will imbue your heart and soul, a good spirit which will separate you from those two canailles, that former and still active whore, with whom her fellow miscreant slept no less than three times during your illness and who, moreover, has full control of your money, oh, abominable shame, is there no spark of manhood in you?!!!”
¹¹³

Johann recovered from his illness and the issue died down without further theatrics from either side. From August 1823, Beethoven spent two months taking the cure in Baden. Shortly after he got there he received word that Wenzel Schlemmer, his main copyist for the last thirty years, had passed away. Schlemmer had possessed well-honed skills in divining the scrawls and blots and erasures of Beethoven's manuscripts. Beethoven had long counted on him for that so he did not have to recopy his more battle-scarred pages. (Contrary to legend, though, most of his final manuscripts are quite clean and clear.) Now to his longtime struggles with sloppy engravings from publishers were to be added struggles with underpaid and indifferent copyists.

He also wrote Johann, “I am delighted to hear that you are in better health. As for me, my eyes are not yet quite cured; and I came here with a ruined stomach and horrible cold, the former thanks to that arch-swine, my housekeeper, the latter handed on to me by a beast of a kitchen-maid.”
¹¹⁴
In fact, Beethoven was in fairly fine fettle that summer, grousing away vigorously. The Ninth Symphony was going well. A British visitor found him capable of following conversation without an ear trumpet—so his hearing seemed to be in a relatively better phase.
¹¹⁵
Things were going better with his ward too. Beethoven's letters to Karl in these months are avuncular and affectionate: “Goodbye, little rascal, most excellent little rascal . . . Don't indulge in gossip at [Schindler's] expense, for it might injure him. Indeed he is sufficiently punished by being
what he is
.”
¹¹⁶

To Franz Grillparzer he wrote, “As you must have noticed at Hetzendorf, this obtrusive hanger-on of a Schindler has long ago become extremely odious to me.”
¹¹⁷
Nonetheless, this summer Schindler was living in Beethoven's flat in Vienna.
¹¹⁸
Beethoven had come to rely on this coattail-hanger and for the moment did not want to send him away. For his part, Schindler also detested Karl, as he generally did anyone closer to Beethoven than himself. If it had not been so much the case before, with the advent of Schindler the dynamic of the circle around Beethoven began to be inflected by the question of who hated whom.

Grillparzer visited Beethoven in Hetzendorf to further share ideas for the
Melusine
libretto that neither man realized was foredoomed. In a conversation book the playwright made some suggestions about the music that foreshadow a composer of the next generation named Richard Wagner: “I have been thinking if it might not be possible to mark every appearance of Melusine or of her influence in the action by a recurrent and easily grasped melody. Might not the overture begin with this and after the rushing allegro the introduction be made out of the same melody.” Their discussions were calm and professional, but Grillparzer still found their meeting odd in the extreme. At table with the playwright and, as it happened, Schindler, Beethoven left the room and returned with five bottles of wine. One flask he put before Schindler, three before Grillparzer. As the latter remembered, this was “probably to make me understand in his wild and simple way that I was master and should drink as much as I liked.”

When Grillparzer had to return to town, Beethoven got in the open carriage with him and rode all the way to the gates of Vienna, where he got out to return to Hetzendorf on foot—a walk of some hour and a half. Seeing he had left some kind of paper on the seat, Grillparzer shouted at Beethoven, who turned with a laugh and sprinted away. A befuddled Grillparzer unrolled the paper to find the cab fare inside. “His manner of life,” the poet concluded, “had so estranged him from all the habits and customs of the world that it probably never occurred to him that under other circumstances he could have been guilty of a gross offence.”
¹¹⁹
In their meeting, Grillparzer recalled, Beethoven had told him
Melusine
was “ready.” Again, not one note of sketch intended for the opera was ever found.
¹²⁰
Beethoven had fallen into the habit of promising anything to anybody, trying to keep all his prospects on the hook.

 

In Vienna in the winter of 1823–24, Karl lived with his uncle as he began philology studies at the university, to make use of his gift for languages toward an academic career. As is familiar in teenagers, Karl was also turning his intelligence to manipulating his uncle, disparaging the people he knew Beethoven would enjoy hearing disparaged, flattering him about his adulation from the public.
¹²¹
Beethoven played Karl sketches and listened to his opinions. In 1823, when Beethoven was working on the slow movement of the Ninth Symphony, Karl wrote in a conversation book, “I'm glad that you have brought in the beautiful andante.” It was the second theme of the movement, which Beethoven had sketched while he was working on the opening movement.
¹²²

Beethoven still felt relatively well, though in a letter he begged off lessons with Rudolph, saying he was weakened by the purgatives he was taking. He added some more inspirational words, of a kind he hardly wrote anybody but Rudolph: “There is nothing higher than to approach the Godhead more closely than other mortals and by means of that contact to spread the rays of the Godhead through the human race.”
¹²³
Here was a new or at least revised credo, confirming the turn from the humanism of the
Eroica
and Fifth Symphony to the atmosphere and ethos of the
Missa solemnis
.

Two pressing issues turned up that winter. After years of waiting, the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde again made inquiries concerning its commissioned oratorio
The Victory of the Cross
, for which it had long since given him an advance of 400 florins. Surely by this point Beethoven had no illusions that he would ever actually produce the thing, but he was also not interested in returning the money. Instead, he pushed the mass on them: “The great Mass is really rather in the oratorio style and particularly adapted to the Society,” which often mounted oratorios. He assured the group of “my zealous desire to serve the Society in whose benevolent deeds in behalf of art I always take the greatest interest.” In the end, both parties let the commission slide, and the society never got its money back.