Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph (148 page)

The middle two movements are about as contrasting as contrast gets. The scherzo, placed second, is another of his short, minimal, more or less absurdist ones, the humor here perhaps the driest of all. It involves simple lines that seem to be devoted to three different downbeats. Occasionally an errant E-flat blurts in on the offbeat, without explanation.
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The absurdity reaches its denouement in the trio, which begins racing crazily, traces keys upward from F to G to A (the notes of the scherzo's theme), and reaches a boggling moment when, under a screeching folk tune in the violin, the other instruments play a swirling manic
fortissimo
figure in three octaves, unchanged, fifty times. The effect is outlandish, scarcely believable, and intended as such. The slow movement that follows is a transcendently songful theme and four gentle variations, all flowing together, in D-flat—as in the
Appassionata
, Beethoven's key of noble resignation. Here in a quartet whose texture and sound look back to Classical clarity and lightness, the scoring of this movement begins Romantically warm, in low strings with rich double-stops.

By the time he reached the finale, Beethoven was badly ill and perhaps weary of quartets. He confessed to publisher Moritz Schlesinger (to whom he had promised a new quartet to make up for losing the A Minor) that he had a lot of trouble finding ideas for the finale: “Here, my dear friend, is my last quartet. It will be the last; and indeed it has given me much trouble. For I could not bring myself to compose the last movement . . . And that is the reason why I have written the motto:
The decision taken with difficulty—Must it be?—It must be, it must be!
—”
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That is one explanation of the mysterious inscription on the finale of the quartet, if not the only explanation. In effect, as a good Romantic would do, Beethoven picked up a story from his life and retold it with appropriate gaiety mixed with mock solemnity—appropriate both to the story and to the tone of the quartet.

The story went so: one Ignaz Dembscher, a rich music lover, had been hosting quartet parties at his house. Some players wanted to go through the B-flat Major at Dembscher's, but when he asked Beethoven for the parts, it came out that Dembscher had neglected to buy a ticket for Schuppanzigh's premiere of the quartet. Beethoven sent word that he would not supply the parts until the merchant shelled out the price of the ticket, a quite steep 50 florins. Hearing this, Dembscher laughed, “Must it be?” Hearing about this response, Beethoven gave a laugh and dashed off a canon on “It must be! Out with your wallet!”

That canon was what came to him to solve his finale problem in the F Major. It accounts for its mysterious preface: The finale is headed
Der schwere gefaßte Entschluss
, “The Hard-Won Resolution.” Under it lies a
grave
musical question of G–E–A-flat noted
Muss es sein?
, “Must It Be?” Then a laughing
allegro
phrase is noted,
Es muss sein! Es muss sein!
Neither of these phrases is to be played; together they are a preface and program for the finale. Future generations would try to make this a metaphysical question and answer, appropriate to a man at the end of his life.
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But in the movement proper, the solemn introductory music around the
Muss es sein?
phrase is part of the joke: it is the rhetoric of tragedy applied to comedy. The
allegro
is all swirling, dancing gaiety, the
Es muss sein!
figure its motto, and otherwise there are two delicious themes, one legato and the other bouncing, all of it laid out in lucid textures and equally lucid sonata form.

In his early and middle music Beethoven wrote a great many memorable pieces without particularly striking melodies, the fragmentary Hero theme of the
Eroica
an example. In all the late quartets and much other music of his last years, he produced one splendid melody after another. Here Beethoven made another mark on the rest of the century: the ascent of melody, especially singing melody, to a dominant position in the way music was heard and the way it was conceived in terms of form. As the marvelous mechanism of Classical form receded along with its foundation on key relations, melody stepped forward to take center stage. For theorist Adolph Marx, sonata form was above all a pattern of themes. That process was abetted by the leading younger composer in Vienna in those years, Franz Schubert, who happened to be one of the greatest born melodists who ever lived.

The end of the F Major Quartet, the end of the end for Beethoven (with two asterisks to follow), is a smiling pizzicato reminiscence of the bouncing second theme, the first violin then taking up the bow to render a squeaky version of it high above the staff, followed by a lusty and entirely unfraught final cadence. Whether or not Beethoven planned it this way, the retrospective, humorous, Haydnesque quality of the quartet rounded his career in the medium in a natural way. With op. 18, its first number also in F major, he began his journey with quartets grounded in the eighteenth century, but at moments looked ahead toward conceptions that had not yet fully taken shape; with op. 59 he put on the medium the stamp of his maturity and his most searching side; in the late quartets he reached for a more distant future but ended his journey with a look back at the beginning.

The F Major done and dispatched to Vienna, he finished the first asterisk in the conclusion of his life's work, the new finale—an alternative, not a substitute—for the B-flat Major Quartet. What his friends and publisher hoped for was something lighter and less bizarre than the
Grosse Fuge
, even something with the popular touch of the middle movements. Exhausted, depressed, his body failing, Beethoven agreed, or at least obliged. The new finale begins with a Haydnesque tick-tock on octave Gs and presents us a robust, perky, folkish tune that will never leave the scene for long. The theme, the texture, the general atmosphere have the light and dancelike quality of a Classical rondo finale. It is as if the new finale of the B-flat Major Quartet were conceived through the prism of the F Major Quartet. But these days Beethoven never took tradition whole; in practice the movement is a melding of sonata and rondo. The theme sounds, actually, like one of those ditties that in the late music he often takes up in a middle movement, plays with briefly, then drops. But here he needed a substantive finish, so this ditty dances on for more than seven minutes.

As a whole, the B-flat Quartet has two divergent tendencies: the dissociation and general eccentricity of the first movement, and the lyrical and popularistic qualities of the middle movements. Uniting them all were two more tendencies: an air of whimsy and irony to the proceedings (except the tragic “Cavatina”), and the intense individuality of each movement. The
Grosse Fuge
climaxed the eccentric strain of the quartet and took it to an almost unimaginable level. The new finale takes up the whimsical and ironic aspect and embodies it in another distinctive, quasi-freestanding individual. It has echoes of earlier movements, also echoes of the fugue—one example being the beginning, which begins, like the fugue, on an off-tonic G and falls by fifths until it reaches home on B-flat.

The exposition is, by Beethoven's present standards, shockingly regular: first theme (its second part repeated like a dance), second theme in the dominant, lively closing section in the dominant. It goes on to the development with no repeat. That development begins with a lyrical new theme that has the air of a B section in a rondo. Into it is woven a four-note figure that recalls the motto theme of the A Minor Quartet and main theme of the
Grosse Fuge
—the step–leap–step figure.
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At the end of a long development there is a quiet false recapitulation in G minor that slips into the real recapitulation.

That long development was one means by which Beethoven expanded this rondo-like theme to the substantial movement he needed to make a balanced conclusion to the quartet. The other means was an enormous coda that amounts to a development of the development. It is as if Beethoven were reluctant to stop, perhaps wondering whether he was going to be writing his last concluding double bar. The coda builds to a
fortissimo
peroration, then calms to
pianissimo
and a poignant pause. At the end, two brisk and unexceptional bars of cadence.
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And that was that.

With the F Major Quartet and this movement, at the end of his creative life Beethoven finished with a comedy, like Shakespeare in
The Tempest
. In the spectrum of his art one places the sixteen string quartets next to the thirty-two piano sonatas, both bodies of work incomparable journeys of growth and discovery enfolding the whole of life and feeling, and something like the whole potential of a medium and of music itself. The sonatas and the quartets are surveys of what music can be and do. In that achievement lies, to say it again, their kinship with another great synoptic work that had been part of Beethoven's musical consciousness from the beginning: Bach's
Well-Tempered ­Clavier
.

In
The Tempest
Shakespeare says good-bye to his art when he makes Prospero cast his magic staff into the sea. There is a valedictory quality to that play, which is as profound as comedy gets. In Beethoven's last movement there is no valediction. He was already at work on a new symphony and string quintet and had plans for more pieces, and no plans to retire until the pen fell from his hand.

When he got back to Vienna, despite his raging illness he sent Holz a four-bar canon,
Wir irren allesamt, ein jeder irrt anders
, “We all err, each one errs differently.” That second, small asterisk was the last gasp.

 

At the end it was as it is with all such figures: to paraphrase a poet, a great mind and spirit fastened to a dying animal.
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Few men's journeys to death have been so minutely and painfully chronicled as Beethoven's. His primary physician Dr. Wawruch wrote a report of the next months. He begins with a survey of his patient's deafness, his chronic digestive miseries; he notes that Beethoven slept only four to five hours a night. “He began to develop a liking for spirituous beverages, in order to stimulate his decreasing appetite and to aid his stomachic weakness by excessive use of strong punch and iced drinks.” At Gneixendorf he had run around in all weathers, to the detriment of his health. Then, “as he himself jovially said, [he] used the devil's own most wretched conveyance, a milk-wagon, to carry him home.”
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When Wawruch first arrived at the Schwarzpanierhaus he found Beethoven in frightening shape, lungs inflamed with pneumonia, choking, spitting blood, with shooting pains in his side that kept him from sleeping. Within a week that crisis passed and he was briefly out of bed, reading and writing. Then a fit of rage over his treatment by friends and family set off an attack of jaundice and vomiting and diarrhea that had him writhing in pain. His anger had now joined his train of enemies.

He lay in the big bedroom that held his two pianos, his bed facing the window. His cook and maidservant stayed on the job. Friends and relatives gathered: brother Johann, Karl Holz, publishers Diabelli and Haslinger, violinist Franz Clement.
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Once again among the inner circle was the scorned Anton Schindler, who since Karl Holz was busy getting married had been returned to his place as Beethoven's lackey in chief. Gerhard, Stephan von Breuning's son, maintained a regular afternoon shift at the bedside. Stephan did what he could, but he was himself afflicted with a serious liver disease. There was, at last, a rapprochement between Beethoven and Karl. The conversation books show the now twenty-year-old helping to keep his uncle at his medical regimens, giving him enemas.
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After Karl left for his regiment on January 2, 1827, he wrote a couple of letters but never saw his uncle again. In a letter to his lawyer on January 3, Beethoven named Karl his sole heir.
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Out of the blue, in the middle of December arrived the forty-volume set of Handel's works sent by his British admirer Johann Stumpff, who had been searching for the volumes for years. Beethoven was overjoyed. He pointed out to Gerhard the newly arrived stack of books: “I received these as a gift today; they have given me great joy with this . . . for Handel is the greatest, the ablest composer. I can still learn from him.”
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He wrote Stumpff a long letter of thanks, also asking him to propose to the Philharmonic Society that it give a concert for his ­benefit.

Several physicians were brought in for consultation, chief among them Dr. Johann Malfatti, uncle of the teenage Therese to whom Beethoven had proposed years before. Malfatti had been Beethoven's doctor for a time before Beethoven dismissed him as “a crafty Italian” and a quack. Now Beethoven had to be persuaded to accept Malfatti's treatment, and the doctor had to be mollified concerning the earlier insults he had been subjected to. Finally, Gerhard recalled, Beethoven “awaited Malfatti's visit as eagerly as the coming of the Messiah.” Once when he was expecting Malfatti and Wawruch showed up instead, Beethoven turned to the wall and barked, “Ass!”
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In early December he penned a letter to Franz Wegeler in Bonn, finally replying to that old friend's nostalgic greeting of months before. He began with elaborate regrets for his delay in writing and all the things that had kept them separated: “Our drifting apart was due to the changes in our circumstances. Each of us had to pursue the purpose for which he was intended and endeavor to attain it. Yet the eternally unshakable and firm foundations of good principles continued to bind us strongly together.” It was those Bonn-inspired principles he belabored Karl with, and they had turned back on him. He responded to Wegeler's query about the rumor that he was the son of the king of Prussia, and urged his friend to “Make known to the world the integrity of my parents, and especially of my mother.” If Wegeler's son came to Vienna as planned, “I will be a friend and a father to him.”