Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph (127 page)

Around the end of the year Beethoven received a letter from his editor friend Bernard saying Johanna van Beethoven was ill and desperate. She had resumed sending half her pension for Karl's support. Beethoven's generosity to anyone in need came to the fore: “Assure her at once through her doctor,” he wrote Bernard, “that from this month onwards she can enjoy her full pension
as long as I live
. . . I shall make a point of persuading my pigheaded brother also to contribute something to help her.” He wrote a friendly New Year's greeting to Johanna, assuring her of “both my and Karl's sincerest wishes for her welfare.”
¹²⁴

His beneficence didn't last. In another letter to Bernard, his moralistic dudgeon intervened: “Since Hofbauer . . . believes that he is the father of [Johanna's] child,
he is probably right
. And as she has become such a strumpet I consider that after all I should make Karl realize the guilt of
her wicked behavior
.”
¹²⁵
He had learned that the confessed father of her illegitimate daughter was paying her support for the child, so he rescinded his offer to let Johanna keep her whole pension. (Eventually her payments lapsed anyway.) These days Karl was running down his mother bitterly in the conversation books—whether from real disgust or by way of playing up to his uncle.
¹²⁶

In February 1824, Beethoven wrote out the final score of the Ninth Symphony. Then he got busy pitching it to publishers and planning a gala premiere of the symphony and the complete
Missa solemnis
. The conversation books broke out with schemes and proposals. Lying over the deliberations like a pall were Beethoven's indecisiveness and suspicion of everything and everybody. Among the voices trying to counter his resistance was alto Karoline Unger, who wrote in a conversation book in sopranoesque vexation, “If you give the concert, I will guarantee that the house will be full. You have too little confidence in yourself. Has not the homage of the whole world given you a little more pride? Who speaks of opposition? Will you not learn to believe that everybody is longing to worship you again in new works? O obstinacy!”
¹²⁷

Unger had no hope of cracking Beethoven's animus toward Vienna that had boiled in him for more than thirty years. He decided to make inquiries about holding the premiere in Berlin. When his friends and patrons in Vienna got wind of that, they realized something dramatic had to be done: they must prostrate themselves in the name of Music and of God and Country.

The circle drafted a long, flowery, abject letter begging Beethoven to keep the premiere in Vienna. It begins, “Out of the wide circle of reverent admirers surrounding your genius in this your second native city, there approach you today a small number of the disciples and lovers of art to give expression to long-felt wishes, timidly to proffer a long-suppressed request.” They plead “in the name of all to whom art and the realization of their ideals are something more than means and objects of pastime.” They plead in the names of Mozart and Haydn, “the sacred triad in which these names and yours glow as the symbol of the highest within the spiritual realm of tones, sprung from their fatherland.” The thirty signers included publishers Artaria, Steiner, and Diabelli, Beethoven's onetime pupil Carl Czerny, the piano maker Streicher, Beethoven's old unpaid secretary Baron Zmeskall, and Count Moritz Lichnowsky, who had been the moving force in getting the signatures.

The letter was published in two journals. When he heard about it Beethoven responded furiously because he believed the public would think he was behind it. But he said he wanted to read the letter carefully, alone. Schindler wrote that he found Beethoven with the letter in hand, much moved. “It is very beautiful,” he said. “It rejoices me greatly!”
¹²⁸
It would be nice to believe that this time Schindler was telling the truth.

As of March Beethoven had agreed that the concert would be in Vienna. Then began the haggles and struggles over venue and arrangements. He wanted the Theater an der Wien, and the directorate was agreeable. But he also wanted Ignaz Schuppanzigh to head the violins. After all, Schuppanzigh had not only performed Beethoven's quartets from the beginning and championed his orchestral music, he had also headed the strings in the premiere of every Beethoven symphony so far. This request in favor of Schuppanzigh was entirely reasonable, a testament to an old colleague, but the management of the Theater an der Wien was not immediately agreeable. So speculation shifted to the barnlike Kärntnertor Theater, which had seen its share of Beethoven performances.

By that point Beethoven was waffling unbearably over arrangements, soloists, program, ticket prices. To get him back on track, ­Lichnow­sky, Schindler, and Schuppanzigh cooked up a scheme to appear at his flat as if by accident and to prod and kid him into making some decisions in writing. This worked, until Beethoven realized he had been duped. Thereupon each of the friends received an insulting note canceling everything. The one to Count Moritz Lichnowsky read, “I despise treachery—Do not visit me anymore. There will be no concert—”
¹²⁹
The count being high aristocracy, Beethoven could have been sent to jail for this insult, but the count retained his composure. The friends knew they were dealing with the most volatile of spoiled children. They let him calm down and went back. This time they had a cheery meeting commemorated by Schindler in a conversation book, starting with a list of those present:

 

Herr L. van Beethoven, a
musikus
[the term for a workaday musician].

Herr Count v. Lichnowsky, an amateur.

Herr Schindler, a fiddler.

Not yet present today:

Herr Schuppanzigh, a fiddler representing Mylord Falstaff.
¹³⁰

 

As the conversation books spun out with plans, the Theater an der Wien offered generous terms, but the orchestra members declared they would play only under their concertmaster Franz Clement, an old Beethoven friend. That finished that venue. At virtually the last minute, just over a month before the mounting of what were intended to be the premieres of the gigantic Ninth Symphony and the
Missa solemnis
, the Kärntnertor was engaged. In the utmost haste, the soloists and a huge orchestra of amateurs and professionals were assembled.

None of that ended the discord. “After talks and discussions lasting for six weeks,” Beethoven wrote Schindler, “I now feel cooked, stewed, and roasted.”
¹³¹
He demanded unprecedented ticket prices, which the management resisted. The censors announced that the
Missa solemnis
could not be included because it was forbidden to perform sacred music in secular spaces. Beethoven hastily arranged a German text to replace the Latin and promised the mass sections would be listed as “hymns.” When the rehearsals began he realized that attempting the complete mass would be impossible, so he cut it back to the first three movements. In a rehearsal of the symphony the lady soloists, alto Karoline Unger, then twenty-one, and soprano Henriette Sontag, eighteen, protested the high notes in their parts. Beethoven refused to budge. Unger called him a “tyrant over all the vocal organs.” Turning to Sontag, she declared, “Well, then we must go on torturing ourselves in the name of God!” Just before the concert the bass soloist withdrew because he could not reach his high notes, and he had to be replaced.

Three rehearsals were planned, but because of a schedule conflict with a ballet performance only two were possible. Meanwhile there were sectional rehearsals with the orchestra and separate rehearsals for the choir and soloists. It was agreed that Michael Umlauf, who had served this function several times before, would be the actual conductor while Beethoven stood in front of him marking the tempos. As he had also done before, Umlauf told the orchestra to follow him and ignore Beethoven. At the last rehearsal Beethoven dissolved in tears at the performance of the Kyrie from the
Missa solemnis
, even though he likely could hear it only through his eyes. At the end he stood at the door and embraced all the amateurs who had donated their service.

Shortly after 7 p.m. on May 7, 1824, Umlauf and Beethoven together gave the first downbeat.

30

T
HE KÄRNTNERTOR THEATER
was full that May 7, 1824, when the Ninth Symphony was unveiled. Curiosity about the new symphony claimed most of the attention, even though three movements of the
Missa solemnis
were also to be heard. The turnout was a testament to how many Viennese still admired Beethoven, how many were ready to buy tickets for a big premiere. Beethoven's old devotee Baron Zmeskall, prostrate with gout, had himself carried into the hall in a sedan chair.
¹
The imperial box lay empty, Archduke Rudolph absent, but the aristocracy was well represented, along with friends and patrons and enthusiasts, and a sprinkling of the random and the curious. The random and curious would not be the ones applauding wildly. They were bewildered by these works, as would be most of the musical world for a long time to come.

While Beethoven had his usual inflated expectations for the receipts, still it was remarkable that the hall was packed. The concert season was over, many Viennese off to their summer sojourns. Rossini fever still raged in the city, decimating the audience for any other music.
²
The Viennese appetite for pleasure was never more voracious than now, when entertainment helped keep a dark political reality at bay. With his string of operas filled with pretty tunes, Rossini satisfied that need. Beethoven, with his strange profundities and his overtones of bygone revolutionary times, was threatened with the most merciless of fates for an artist: being out of fashion.

The program began with the
Consecration of the House
Overture. During all the pieces, Beethoven stood somewhere in front of conductor Michael Umlauf. Accounts of the concert, most of them from years later, differ on whether he was directly in front of the orchestra or among the chorus. He was supposed to give the tempo for each movement, but Umlauf had told everyone to ignore him.

The performing forces were enormous for the time, the house orchestra filled out with less experienced amateurs from the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde: twenty-four violins, ten violas, twelve each of basses and cellos, and doubled winds. The chorus for the mass and symphony numbered ninety, including some boy sopranos who had even more trouble with their part than the women.
³
At the head of the strings sat Ignaz Schuppanzigh. The two men still addressed each other as
er
, “he,” like servant and master. But Beethoven had given up a better hall, the Theater an der Wien, and its house orchestra, partly because the management would not allow Schuppanzigh to lead the violins.

After the overture came the Kyrie, Gloria, and Credo of the
Missa solemnis
, translated into German to pacify the censors and billed as “Three Grand Hymns.” There is little indication of how fared these movements of the mass. The Gloria and Credo are overwhelming in every respect, even more so than the Ninth Symphony. The slim response of critics and audience to the mass may have been a matter of something embarrassing being passed over in silence. The idea of mounting these movements and the Ninth with an amateur chorus and mostly amateur orchestra after a few rehearsals is painful to contemplate. Here could be at least one day in his life when Beethoven was lucky to be deaf.

Then came the Ninth Symphony, the inchoate whispers of its beginning coalescing into towering proclamations. The harmonic restlessness and formal vagaries of Beethoven's music of the last years had turned away even some of his devotees. This was the same on a gigantic scale. Though there were moments of fraught peace and desperate hope, the music of the first movement must at times have seemed like a physical assault. It ended, for some reason, with a funeral march.

But his devotees were there to cheer him, come what may. The stalwarts had come to accept like a force of nature the fact that this shoddy little man with the bulldog face, deaf and widely said to be half-mad at best, was one of the most remarkable figures of his time or of any time. Furious applause after the first movement of the symphony. When the second movement scherzo began, the orchestra's exclamations interrupted by timpani, the audience broke into delighted applause. At one point the scherzo was entirely interrupted by the commotion in the house. Frantic cheers after. The slow movement, with its languid beauty, may actually have been conveyed well enough by the orchestra, and surely the crowd was rapt.

Then it was as if after a sublime interlude of peace Beethoven unleashed a scream from the orchestra: the finale began with a brassy dissonance. The Ninth as a whole was the most formidable symphonic concoction Beethoven had issued since the
Eroica
. He had been accused of bizarrerie many times in the past, but nothing approached this finale. Even before it began, a good percentage of the audience had trickled away. The survivors heard something bizarre indeed: one after another, snippets of the previous movements were recalled, with the double basses of the orchestra seeming to dismiss each of them in gestures that sounded like an operatic recitative. In this performance, even that oddity was incomprehensible, because the basses had no idea what they were supposed to do and produced, a listener recalled, “nothing but a gruff rumbling.”
⁴

The soloists and chorus had been sitting waiting for their entrances, the audience waiting to hear what in the world the singers would do. There was no conception of what might happen because there had never before been voices in a symphony. After the orchestra had reviewed and dismissed the recalls of previous movements and presented a simple little theme, the dissonant fanfare broke out again. The bass soloist rose. “O friends, not these tones!” he cried. “Rather let us sing something more pleasing.” He sounded like a fellow in a tavern, inviting his comrades to try a merrier tune. The men of the chorus obliged, shouting “Joy! Joy!” Whether or not they knew about the text in advance, many of the audience would have recognized Schiller's verses from their famous first lines: “Joy, thou lovely god-engendered Daughter of Elysium, Drunk with fire we enter, Heavenly one, thy holy shrine!” The older listeners knew what those verses stood for: the time of revolutionary fever, forty years before.