Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph (45 page)

Ries would become, like Carl Czerny, a long-term disciple; like ­Czerny, he had been something of a prodigy as a pianist and composer. In 1803, Ries wrote publisher Nikolaus Simrock in Bonn, “Beethoven takes more pains with me than I would ever have believed possible. I have three lessons a week usually from one o'clock till half past two. I shall soon be able to play his
Sonate pathétique
in a manner that will please you, for the accuracy on which he insists is beyond belief.”
¹²
­Czerny was dubious about this would-be rival: “Ries played very fluently, clear but cold.” Czerny also recalled Beethoven saying of Ries's music, “He imitates me too much.”
¹³
No one in Beethoven's life in that period spent as much time with him as Ries, who outside his studies became a reliable helper, amanuensis, and sounding board.

Through this period, Beethoven's spirits seem to have been divided between exhilaration and suppressed depression over his hearing and health. The exhilaration of the 1790s had come from his quick success, the enthusiasm of audiences and patrons, the attention from publishers. The exhilaration of 1801 into 1802 seems to have been more an excitement of discovery, a sense that his ideas were moving toward something new as his attention to performing receded. This mingling of antithetical feelings can be seen in a long reply of July 1801 to Franz Wegeler. Here Beethoven returns not only to the intimacy of childhood friends but to the high idealism of the Bonn years. The Rhineland remained, as far as he was concerned, at the core of his identity. He begins, as often with people he respects, with an abject apology.

 

MY DEAR KIND WEGELER,

I do thank you most warmly for your remembrance of me which I have so little deserved or even endeavored to deserve where you are concerned. Yet you are so very good; you allow nothing, not even my unpardonable carelessness to put you off; and you are still the same faithful, kind and loyal friend—But you must never think that I could ever forget yourself and all of you who were once so dear and precious to me . . . For my fatherland, the beautiful country where I first opened my eyes to the light, still seems to me as lovely and as clearly before my eyes as it was when I left you. In short, the day on which I can meet you again and greet our Father Rhine I shall regard as one of the happiest of my life—When that will be I cannot yet tell you. But indeed I can assure you that when we meet you will certainly see that I have become a first-rate fellow; not only as an artist but also as a man you will find me better and more fully developed. And if our Fatherland is then in a more prosperous condition, my art will be exercised only for the benefit of the poor.

 

This is as Bonn taught him: to be a first-rate artist, you must be a first-rate fellow. The essence of both is duty to humankind. Now and always, Bonn would represent to him peace and escape—an escape he never took. Next he allows himself to crow a little, before confessing for the first time his greatest anxiety:

 

You want to know something about my present situation. Well, on the whole it is not at all bad. For since last year Lichnowsky who . . . was always, and still is, my warmest friend (of course we have had some slight misunderstandings, but these have only strengthened our friendship), has disbursed for my benefit a fixed sum of 600 [florins] . . . My compositions bring me in a good deal; and I may say that I am offered more commissions than it is possible for me to carry out. Moreover for every composition I can count on six or seven publishers . . . People no longer come to an arrangement with me, I state my price and they pay. So you see how pleasantly situated I am . . . I have given a few concerts.

But that jealous demon, my wretched health, has put a nasty spoke in my wheel; and it amounts to this, that for the last three years my hearing has become weaker and weaker. The trouble is supposed to have been caused by the condition of my abdomen which, as you know, was wretched even before I left Bonn, but has become worse in Vienna where I have been constantly afflicted with diarrhea and have been suffering in consequence from an extraordinary debility. Frank [a Viennese doctor] has tried to
tone up
my constitution with strengthening medicines and my hearing with almond oil, but much good did it do me! His treatment had no effect, my deafness became even worse and my abdomen continued to be in the same state as before . . . A more sensible doctor, however, prescribed the usual tepid baths in the Danube. The result was miraculous; and my insides improved. But my deafness persisted, or, I should say, became even worse. During this last winter I was truly wretched, for I had really dreadful attacks of colic and again relapsed completely into my former condition . . . [Dr. Vering] succeeded in checking almost completely this violent diarrhea.

 

This was the bursting of the dam. He had to talk to someone, and Wegeler, as both childhood friend and physician, was the logical choice. Wegeler would have read these words with a chill in his heart. A deaf composer. It was unthinkable. The glorious hopes for his old friend's career appeared to be collapsing.

Beethoven praises his new doctor, Vering, who prescribed the Danube baths, gave him pills and “strengthening ingredients” and an infusion for his ears. And he says he had been feeling better, though “my ears continue to hum and buzz day and night.” Since Wegeler might have something to offer him medically, he goes into the symptoms:

 

I must confess that I lead a miserable life. For almost two years I have ceased to attend any social functions, just because I find it impossible to say to people: I am deaf . . . And if my enemies, of whom I have a fair number, were to hear about it, what would they say?—In order to give you some idea of this strange deafness, let me tell you that in the theater I have to place myself quite close to the orchestra in order to understand what the actor is saying, and that at a distance I cannot hear the high notes of instruments or voices. As for the spoken voice it is surprising that some people have never noticed my deafness; but since I have always been liable to fits of absent-mindedness, they attribute my hardness of hearing to that. Sometimes too I can scarcely hear a person who speaks softly . . . but if anyone shouts, I can't bear it. Heaven alone knows what is to become of me.
Vering tells me that my hearing will certainly improve, although my deafness may not be completely cured
.

 

He liked the new doctor because this one gave him hope. Already, though, there is the encroaching fear that there was no hope, that fate had ordained this cross. He puts down some bitterly prophetic words, based on his childhood reading of the ancients: “Already I have often cursed my Creator and my existence.
Plutarch
has shown me
the path of resignation
. If it is at all possible, I will bid defiance to my fate, though I feel that as long as I live there will be moments when I shall be God's most unhappy creature.”

This is no self-dramatizing rhetoric. Beethoven was beginning to understand what he faced, one element of which could be the end of his performing career. He asks Wegeler to consult with Dr. Vering. He talks about coming to the Rhineland and “in some beautiful part of the country and then for six months I will lead the life of a peasant.” Maybe the country life would cure him. But he knew how bleak a consolation Plutarch's message was: “Resignation, what a wretched resource! Yet it is all that is left to me.” Resignation had its own heroism, but that was no philosophy for a young man, and in any case too passive for Beethoven. His mode of response to any challenge was defiance and aggression.

Dropping the train of sorrows, he tells Wegeler about Stephan van Breuning's arrival, about his nice rooms overlooking the battlements. He offers a gift for a service: “If you let me know how to set about it, I will send you all my works, which, I must admit, now amount to quite a fair number . . . in return for my grandfather's portrait, which I beg you to send me by the mail coach as soon as possible. I am sending you the portrait
of his grandson
, of our ever loyal and warm-hearted Beethoven.” The memory of old Ludwig van Beethoven remained for him a fundamental connection to his homeland and his artistic heritage. He wanted Grandfather Ludwig's imperious gaze watching over him as he worked. Finally in the letter to Wegeler he sends a greeting to Helene von Breuning, one of the irreplaceable figures of his youth. “Tell her,” Beethoven writes, “that I still now and then have a raptus.”
¹⁴
(Wegeler was now married to Lorchen von Breuning, one of Beethoven's first loves.)

The curtain he had drawn over his affliction was parted. Two days after writing Wegeler, he sent another long confessional letter, this one to Karl Amenda in distant Courland. Amenda was a minister, and to him Beethoven recounted not his medical but his spiritual malaise:

 

MY DEAR AMENDA, MY KIND AMENDA, MY WARM-HEARTED FRIEND!

I received and read your last letter with intense emotion and with mixed feelings of pain and pleasure—To what shall I compare your loyalty to me, your affection for me? . . . You are no
Viennese friend
, no, you are one of those such as my native soil is wont to produce. How often would I like to have you here with me, for your B is leading a very unhappy life and is at variance with Nature and his Creator. Many times already I have cursed Him for exposing His creatures to the slightest hazard, so that the most beautiful blossom is thereby often crushed and destroyed. Let me tell you that my most prized possession,
my hearing
, has greatly deteriorated . . . You will realize what a sad life I must now lead, seeing that I am cut off from everything that is dear and precious to me and, what is more, have to associate with such miserable egoists as Zmeskall, Schuppanzigh, and the like. I may say that of all of them Lichnowsky has best stood the test. During the last year he has disbursed for my benefit 600 [florins]. This sum and the steady sale of my works enable me to live without financial anxiety . . . Well, to comfort me somebody has returned to Vienna . . . one of the friends of my youth, and several times I have told him about you . . . He too does not care for Z[meskall], who is and always will be too weak for friendship. I regard him and S[chuppanzigh] as merely instruments on which to play when I feel inclined. But they can never be noble witness to the fullest extent of my inward and outward activities, nor can they ever truly share my life. I value them merely for what they do for me.

 

Having dismissed as hardly more than self-important servants his most devoted Viennese friend and his most skillful interpreter, Beethoven adds a forlorn hope that he and Amenda can rejoin soon. He intends to make more concert tours: “I shall then travel (when I am playing and composing, my affliction still hampers me least; it affects me most when I am in company) and you must be my companion. I am convinced that my luck will not forsake me. Why, at the moment I feel equal to anything.”
¹⁵
That boast was not idle.

November 1801 saw another long letter to Wegeler, partly to report on his medical treatments. Dr. Vering had subjected him to the misery of tying the bark of the daphne plant to his arms. The bark blistered his skin and kept him from playing: “The humming and buzzing is slightly less than it used to be, particularly in my left ear, where my deafness really began. But so far my hearing is certainly not a bit better.” His stomach continued to improve after tepid baths. He would try Wegeler's suggestion of applying herbs to his belly, but he had turned against the latest doctor: “Vering won't hear of my taking shower baths. On the whole I am not at all satisfied with him. He takes far too little interest in and trouble with a complaint of this kind.” He asks Wegeler's opinion of galvanism, treatment with electricity: “A medical man told me that
in Berlin
he saw a deaf and dumb child recover its hearing and a man who had also been deaf for seven years recover his.” (These treatments were all useless, and every part of a daphne plant is poisonous.)

A rising peroration that would live in legend shows Beethoven had not lost hope or courage, at least not on the day of this letter: “If only I can be partially liberated from my affliction, then—I will come to you as a complete and mature man . . . You will find me as happy as I am fated to be on this earth, not unhappy—no, that I could not bear—I will seize Fate by the throat; it shall certainly not bend and crush me completely—Oh, it would be so lovely to live a thousand lives.”

The letter goes on to a different kind of confession. In this period he still taught students, and to a degree he had returned to socializing:

 

You would find it hard to believe what an empty, sad life I have had for the last two years. My poor hearing haunted me everywhere like a ghost; and I avoided—all human society. I seemed to be a misanthrope and yet I am far from being one. This change has been brought about by a dear charming girl who loves me and whom I love. After two years I am again enjoying a few blissful moments; and for the first time I feel that—marriage might bring me happiness. Unfortunately she is not of my class—and at the moment—I certainly could not marry—I must still bustle about a good deal.
¹⁶

 

The dear charming girl was most likely his new piano student, the seventeen-year-old countess Giulietta Guicciardi, called Julie. Staying in Vienna in the 1790s, Wegeler had found his old friend, then the new keyboard lion in town, getting a lot of attention from women. No details of those encounters would survive, in itself a sign that Beethoven did not take these flirtations or affairs seriously. He could fall in love as precipitously as tripping over a cobblestone, but this is the first time his letters show any evidence of it. Julie was the daughter of Countess Susanna Guicciardi, sister-in-law to Countess Anna Brunsvik, who was mother of Josephine and Therese. Beethoven fell for at least two of those musical young cousins, Julie and Josephine, and possibly with all three of them.