Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph (4 page)

Bonn's cathedral, the Romanesque five-towered minster, was started in the eleventh century. Within the remains of the old city walls, the lanes where much of the populace lived were close and dirty and unpaved, the paved streets black-surfaced with lava stone. As everywhere in Europe, the streets stank mightily from garbage and sewage tossed from windows. But most of the houses were of brick, roughly plastered and brightly painted, and all were close to attractive squares and gardens and parks.

On the Rhine, the city's lifeblood, flowed a steady traffic of commercial and pleasure boats, under sail or oar or towed from the banks. The banks were covered with vineyards, the high roads in the countryside planted with fruit trees for the refreshment of travelers. Much of the quality of life in Bonn came from its location and its status as an ecclesiastical state. Taxes were moderate, there was little military presence or impressment, the land was fertile, prosperity flowed in from the river.
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It was a landscape to kindle the imagination, full of beauties a later age would call Romantic. Lying picturesquely across the Rhine was a series of rolling hills, the Siebengebirge.
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An English visitor described the Siebengebirge as “awful,” meaning inspiring awe. Three of the hills were topped by the stark towers of ruined castles, including Drachenfels, where legend said the hero Siegfried slew a dragon and bathed in its blood to become invincible.

The Rhine landscape, full of legends, enchanted a Romantic visitor of the nineteenth century, Victor Hugo:

 

An entire population of imaginary creatures in direct communication with beautiful ladies and handsome knights was scattered throughout the Rhine Valley: the oreads, who seized the mountains and forests; the undines, who took possession of the waters; the gnomes, who captured the inside of the earth; the spirit of the rocks; the spirit-rapper; the Black Hunter, who roamed the thickets mounted on a huge stag with sixteen antlers . . . there is nothing in the woods, crags, and vales but apparitions, visions, stupendous combats, diabolical pursuits, infernal castles, sounds of harps in the thickets, melodious songs chanted by invisible singers, hideous laughter emitted by mysterious wayfarers.
¹⁵

 

In its dream of the triumph of reason and science, the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century failed in its hope of sweeping away old legends and superstitions like these—partly because the next generation, the Romantics, would condemn the reign of reason and embrace the ancient, the wild and mysterious, the mingling of fear and awe they called the sublime.

 

In 1790, Bonn contained some twelve thousand souls, nine hundred of them registered as master craftsmen.
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The people had the usual character of Rhinelanders: lighthearted, not overly hardworking, not too impressed by rank, with an appreciation of a good joke and a good comeback. The roads in German lands were terrible and travel on land or water expensive, so most Bonners stayed home in their pleasant backwater, their town largely out of history and out of mind of the rest of the world. With nowhere else to go for amusement, Bonners loved dancing and music; their religious holidays were more worldly than pious. They loved beef and beer and Rhine wine, and their cooking was liberal with vinegar, too sour for the palates of some visitors.
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On feast days, the gentry and nobility blossomed in multicolored finery, the men in wide-flapped waistcoats enlivened by satins and silks and silver belt buckles and ruffled sleeves, topped by great powdered wigs and cocked hats, with a sword to the side, perhaps a scarlet cloak over the ensemble. The ladies sported long narrow bodices and sweeping robes and long silk gloves, tottered on huge high heels under a cloud of artfully enhanced hair.
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Music was everywhere. The French traveler and memoirist Madame de Staël wrote of the Rhineland: “Townspeople and country folk, soldiers and laborers
nearly all know music
. . . I have entered wretched cottages blackened with smoke, and suddenly heard the mistress, and the master of the house too, improvising on the harpsichord . . . On market days players of wind instruments perform on the town hall balcony over the public square.”
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Presiding over the airy market in the middle of town, the Rathaus made a splendid polychrome town hall, topped by the arms of Bonn, below them two lusty fauns flanking the town clock.

 

In Clemens August's reign as Elector, Bonn was thriving and peaceful. Its only significant business was the court. “All Bonn,” the proverb ran, “is fed from the Elector's kitchen.” The irrationality of the system was not an issue when you could find work at court in one of the myriad titled positions: a Lackey, a Page, a Window Cleaner, a Fowl Plucker, a Master of the Cellar, an Equerry in the Stables, one of the army of Bakers and Cooks, a Minister, a Musician.
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Clemens August's theater and opera productions alone cost upwards of 75,000 florins a year. (The average yearly salary of a court musician: less than 250 florins.) Expenditures for theatrical productions were nothing compared to those for furniture, paintings, objets d'art, and above all buildings. All this splendor was financed by insatiable borrowing from France and elsewhere.
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While the reign of Clemens August slipped toward catastrophic debt, he maintained a facade of grandeur and prosperity, and for it he was loved by his subjects. That would be in contrast to his successor, whose regime had to clean up the financial mess Clemens left behind.

In 1761, after nearly four decades as Elector, Clemens August died in royal fashion. During a trip to visit relatives in Munich he was stricken with illness on the road, barely making it to his fellow Elector's palace at Ehrenbreitstein. Too sick to eat, Clemens still could not resist attending the evening's ball. Once there, he had to dance eight or nine turns with a charming baroness, and naturally could not deny that pleasure to other ladies. At some point he sank to the floor in a faint, and the next day he gently expired. It would be said of Clemens, he danced out of this world into some other.
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After sumptuous funeral ceremonies, his estate from jewels to paintings to porcelain to fiddles was auctioned off, the proceeds applied to his debts.
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Clemens's corporeal remains were graciously divided among his subjects: his body went to the Cologne Cathedral, heart to a church in Altötting, entrails to St. Remigius in Bonn.
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Clemens's successor Maximilian Friedrich was not a Bavarian Wittelsbach like the last five Electors but rather came from the old Swabian house of Königsegg-Rothenfels. The man whose gift for backstage machinations put Max Friedrich on the electoral throne became his chief minister and de facto ruler of the Electorate: the wily, brilliant, hated, and feared count Caspar Anton von Belderbusch. Among his accomplishments, Belderbusch was to be the hero and protector of the Beethoven family.

 

When the new Elector took over in 1761, Belderbusch was quick to impose austerities, because it fell to him to get the state out of debt. In that he succeeded, meanwhile lavishly feathering his own nest. Belderbusch laid the foundation of Bonn's golden age at the end of the century, but he was never able to make the genial and retiring Max Friedrich as popular as his predecessor. A series of natural disasters did not improve the temper of the town. As the ditty ran:

 

With Clemens August one wore blue and white,

Then one lived as in paradise.

With Max Friedrich one wore black and red,

And suffered hunger and may as well be dead.

 

When the new regime trimmed the ranks of court musicians and cut the salaries of the ones remaining,
Kapellmeister
Touchemoulin departed. Court bassist Ludwig van Beethoven saw his opportunity and petitioned the Elector in terms duly outraged yet properly groveling:

 

May it please Your Electoral Grace to permit a representation of my faithfully and dutifully performed services for a considerable space as vocalist as well as, since the death of the Kapellmeister, for more than a year his duties
in Dupplo
, that is to say by singing and wielding the baton . . . Inasmuch as because of particular
recommendation
Dousmoulin [
sic
] was preferred over me, and indeed unjustly, I have been forced hitherto to submit to fate . . .

There reaches Your Electoral Grace my humble petition that you may graciously be pleased . . . to grant me the justice of which I was deprived on the death of Your Highness's
antecessori
of blessed memory, and appoint me Kapellmeister . . . For which highest grace I shall pour out my prayers to God for the long continuing health and government of your Electoral Grace, while in deepest submission I throw myself at your feet.
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The Elector smiled on the petition. Ludwig served as court
Kapellmeister
for the next dozen years. The music-loving chief minister Belderbusch was a reliable patron of the Beethoven family, who repaid him with loyalty and, it appears, a little spying on their neighbors.

If Ludwig's salary became more pleasant with his new position, his life was not the least pleasant. By the time of his ascension to the post of
Kapellmeister
, Ludwig had a son singing in the chapel choir, but in his house he no longer had a wife. She had been shut away as an alcoholic, out of sight and past hope, and their only child possessed a relentless wanderlust.

 

From his first years in the Bonn court
Kapelle
, the elder Ludwig van Beethoven was greatly valued and paid accordingly. He entered service at 400 florins a year, a generous salary for a musician.
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Like other local musicians in a town full of musical amateurs and aspiring professionals, he would have added to his income by giving private lessons. His elevation to
Kapellmeister
in 1761 made him the preeminent musician in Bonn and overseer of the
Kapelle
, the court musical establishment, with a salary of nearly 800 florins.

The duties of a
Kapellmeister
joined leadership to artistry. Ludwig directed the chapel choir, and the chorus and orchestra when they performed together (otherwise the orchestra was directed by the concertmaster, who ranked below the
Kapellmeister
). He did the hiring and firing, oversaw the careers of his musicians, arbitrated disputes. Ordinarily
Kapellmeisters
were also expected to supply new music to the court, in the same way that its bakers supplied bread and its hunters meat. Ludwig was not a composer, but he remained the leading bass soloist in the
Kapelle
, performing in everything from cantatas and oratorios to leading roles in operas.
²⁷

From his parents, who had traded in fine goods, the elder Ludwig seems to have inherited an interest in business as well. He leased two apartments and rented out one of them. More profitably, he started a trade buying local Rhine wine and shipping it in bulk back to his native Brabant; in town, he rented two cellars from which he sold wine by the barrel. In a census of the 1760s, Ludwig is listed not as a musician but as a wine dealer.
²⁸
Later he added a sideline lending money to local citizens.
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For many years off and on, two generations of Beethovens lived in rented rooms on the second floor of a Rheingasse house called Zum Walfisch (the Whale), owned by baker Johann Fischer and then by his son Theodor, who marked the fourth generation to sell baked goods from the ground floor of the house.
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(Theodor's son Gottfried, who wrote memoirs of the Beethoven family, marked the fifth generation of bakers.) The Beethoven flat in the Fischer house was a spacious suite of six rooms.
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The Fischer children remembered it as a vision of prosperity, filled with Flemish luxuries inherited from Ludwig's family: elegant furniture, paintings on the walls, a cupboard sparkling with silver and porcelain and glass, on the table fine linen drawn through polished silver rings.
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Ludwig and his wife, Maria Josepha, had three children, of whom only the last survived: Johann, born around 1740. Like most Bonn children, he was taken out of school early and reared for the family trade, his father teaching him keyboard and singing. To be the child of a craftsman, cook, musician, or the like could virtually guarantee a position at court; the same family names turned up through generations in the same jobs.

Court records from 1752 show Johann van Beethoven entering the choir as a boy soprano; as his voice changed, he dropped to alto and finally to tenor. At first he was unpaid, which was usual with children and teenagers in the
Kapelle;
if a child proved capable and dutiful, he or she would eventually claim a salary. At the beginning of 1764, when Johann was about twenty-four and had sung in the choir some dozen years, he petitioned for a salary and his father followed with a request that he get 200 florins. Johann was granted 150.
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In those days children of the working classes were reared to contribute to the family labors and income, so Johann would also have worked in his father's wine business. And if music was the Beethoven family's route to respect and prosperity, wine was their undoing.

All the Beethovens had a thirst. While old Ludwig was a connoisseur of wine, his wife and son took more interest as consumers. Memoirist Gottfried Fischer recalled that Johann “early got expert in wine-tasting, and became a good wine drinker.”
³⁴
Bonn would know Johann as a tippler the whole of his life, though alcohol fully claimed him only in his last years. His mother, Maria Josepha, was not so lucky.