Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph (47 page)

By way of relief comes a relaxed scherzo with elegant and winsome themes. Then the most shocking movement of that year's pieces: the finale is marked Presto agitato, which conveys its implacable ferocity. The whispering arpeggios of the first movement have become a torrent of arpeggios that rise to whiplash offbeat chords. As in the previous sonata, the finale is the focus and payoff of the whole. The mystery and incipient tragedy of the first movement have boiled into fury, expressed in a virtuosity that is the antithesis of the first movement's simplicity.

Now, having that year written three sonatas each of which takes a radically distinct direction and embodies a formal experiment, with op. 28, in D major, Beethoven added another whose regular form belied another complete departure. There would be no better demonstration of his unremitting search for variety and contrast than the comparison of this halcyon work to the tumults and innovations of the previous sonatas. The title
Pastoral
was a later publisher's invention, but at least this time it fits the music, which largely unfolds in sunny serenity. At the beginning, over a long tonic drone a falling melody spins out lazily, repeats, is answered by a companion melody that rises and also repeats, giving notice that this sonata will take its time about things and not depart too far from its basis on the simple tonic triad. After a misty and babbling second theme (actually starting in C-sharp major), the
Durchführung
, the “working out” of themes, falls into a mounting agitation that seems to be suddenly soothed when the da capo, the recapitulation, arrives like a rediscovery of bliss.

There is no real slow movement in the
Pastoral
Sonata but rather a bustling one that combines textures: legato and singing in the right hand, staccato and bouncing in the left. Maybe because of that tricky mingling of touches, Beethoven especially liked to play this second movement.
²⁹
The middle is cheery, but toward the end clouds seem to gather into troubled and ambiguous last measures. A drily witty scherzo shoos the clouds away. The rondo finale's theme recalls the first movement's start, its drones now loping along in a droll, donkey-cart gait, with flowing and yodeling lines above. The intervening sections seem to be trying to get excited about something, but they are tamed by the calming return of the A theme and its donkey cart. Finally the suppressed excitement bursts out in a ebullient, virtuosic coda.

Beethoven's concern with unifying the whole of his pieces does not always show clearly in his sketches. Often what is most fundamental in a piece is what a composer does not need to write down, because it is innate in the conception. But in this case, after jotting an idea for the second movement, Beethoven immediately added a few bars of sketch for a finale, both sketches turning around a galvanizing idea, the fifth D to A in melody and accompaniment.
³⁰
The theme in both sketches begins with a descent from A to D.

 

The three sonatas of opp. 26–27 were the most stunning items of 1801, but there was more. Among other works of that year came the only string quintet Beethoven completed as such, published as op. 29 in C Major. From his years of listening to chamber music in aristocratic parlors and the readings he mounted in his own rooms, Beethoven knew intimately the Mozart string quintets, the greatest ones in that sonorous medium, some of the few quintets ever to challenge the string-quartet repertoire. It is indicative of Beethoven's burgeoning confidence that his Quintet is not particularly beholden to Mozart. It is a warmly songful work that for all its lightness of spirit has a singular voice and some startling experiments—it amounts to a covertly radical outing. Its broadly flowing opening theme modulates three times in the first eight measures, beginning a piece marked by restless modulations and prophetic tonal patterns—a second theme in A major, a moment in the recapitulation in which the music modulates stepwise, C major–D minor–E minor–F major–G major–A minor: six keys in eight bars.

After a rather
galant
nocturnal slow movement in F major and a frantic C-major scherzo, the Quintet's finale begins on a main theme that amounts to a tremolo shiver plus falling swoops in the violins. Twice in the course of the finale a new piece of music turns up like an unknown guest at a wedding: a jaunty minuettish tune in 3/4 marked
andante con moto e scherzoso
, the last word indicating “jokingly.”
³¹
A striking work that attracted comparatively little attention in its time or later, the Quintet in the next year was to bring Beethoven a monumental amount of annoyance.

If the Quintet is marked by playfulness of material, key, and form, another work of 1801 is a world away: the cycle of six Gellert lieder, on poems of the pious Leipzig pastor and professor who was one of the beloved voices of the German Aufklärung. The score is dated March 8, 1802, but ideas for the songs went back several years.
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Beethoven's settings match the earnest simplicity of the lyrics: mostly simple, short, syllabic, the accompaniments restrained until the climactic last song. That Beethoven turned to the artless North German piety of these poems, and set them in a style more interested in declaiming the words than in waxing lyrical, is another indication of his state of mind. If doctors could not help him, maybe God could, at least in giving him consolation. These songs come from the heart of his anguish and incipient depression:

 

O God, look also upon my lamentation.

My supplication, my sighing are not concealed from You,

and my tears are laid before You.

Oh, God, my God, how long must I be careworn?

How long will You withdraw Yourself from me?

 

At the end of 1802, a journal called the
Historic Pocketbook
looked back at the year in music, revealing where Beethoven's First Symphony had ended up in the repertoire. It was “a masterpiece that does equal honor to his inventiveness and his musical knowledge . . . there prevails in it such a clear and lucid order, such a flow of the most pleasant melodies, and such a rich . . . instrumentation that this symphony can justly be placed next to Mozart's and Haydn's.” As usual, the newer pieces would have to make their way against a resisting tide: “Impartial connoisseurs were not as pleased with Beethoven's most recent forte­piano works that . . . conspicuously strove to be unusual and original, only too often at the cost of beauty.” “Pleasing,” for this reviewer, was still the highest praise. Excessive originality earned the terms “peculiarity, which verges on the fantastic.”

The
Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung
, however, had now put more progressive critics on Beethoven's case. The review of the three sonatas of opp. 26 and 27 in June says,

 

They are a true enrichment and belong among the few products of the present year that will hardly ever become obsolete; certainly [the
Moonlight
] can never become obsolete . . . This fantasia is one solid whole from beginning to end; it arises all at once from an undivided, profound, and intimately excited heart and is cut, as it were, from one block of marble. It is probably not possible that any human being to whom nature has not denied inner music should not be stirred by the first
Adagio
. . . and be guided higher and higher, and then as intimately moved and as highly elevated by the
Presto agitato
as free-composed keyboard music can elevate him. These two principal movements are written in the terrifying key of C♯ minor with consummate reason.

 

Less than a year old, the
Moonlight
Sonata was ascending toward ubiquity and legend. And now “terrifying” could be a term of approval. Necessary to Beethoven's triumph was a new generation that expected more from music than the “innocent luxury” Charles Burney had called it a quarter century before. One voice of the new generation, Wilhelm Wackenroder, wrote in a novel about his hero's feeling for music: “Many passages were so vivid and engaging that the notes seemed to speak to him. At other times the notes would evoke a mysterious blend of joy and sorrow in his heart, so that he could have either laughed or cried. This is a feeling that we experience so often on our path through life and that no art can express more skillfully than music . . . That is the marvelous gift of music, which affects us the more powerfully and stirs all our vital forces the more deeply, the vaguer and more mysterious its language is.”
³³
There is no record of whether Beethoven read these words or what he knew at this point about the Romantic sensibility. If he did read them, they must have reassured him that there were people out there ready to understand him.

 

Around April 1802, on the advice of his new favored doctor, Johann Adam Schmidt, Beethoven retired for a planned stay of six months to quiet and beautiful Heiligenstadt, one of the villages amid the trees and vineyards of the Vienna woods, a few miles from the city. He took rooms upstairs off the courtyard of a peasant-style house at 13 Herrengasse (later Probusgasse), his outside windows looking to hills and fields and the Danube, in the distance the Carpathian Mountains. The mineral baths of the spa were a few minutes' walk away.
³⁴
His doctor wanted him to rest his ears and regain some health and strength, but he was planning no vacation. Heiligenstadt was close enough for friends and family to visit; among those who came were Ferdinand Ries and brother Carl. Beethoven arrived eager and full of hope that this cure amid the beauty of nature would restore his health and his spirit, maybe even arrest the decline of his hearing.

His ongoing creative fury burned even brighter during this nominal vacation that climaxed in one of the devastating moments of his life. The Heiligenstadt summer of 1802 was blisteringly productive. With him he had brought sketchbooks filling up with ideas and drafts and the nearly finished Second Symphony, a work that, for all its laughter, is far weightier, bolder, and more mature than the First. As he got down to work, his daily walks were not around the battlements of Vienna but through woods and vineyards and alongside brooks.

Trying to gain more time to write and to free himself from selling his notes, he handed off some of his dealings to an agent, writing Breit­kopf & Härtel in March 1802, “I propose, sir, to write to you myself very soon—a good deal of business—and also a great many worries—have rendered me for a time quite useless for some things—Meanwhile you can rely entirely on my
brother
—who, in general, attends to all my affairs.”
³⁵
As an agent, Caspar Carl van Beethoven, now working as a minor tax official in Vienna, proved a slowly unfolding disaster. Carl had the family impatience and quick temper with little of Ludwig's intelligence and still less of his talent. Chipping in, Carl wrote Härtel, “At present we have three sonatas for the piano and violin, and if they please you, then we shall send them. My brother would have written to you himself, but he is not inclined to do anything just now, because the Theater Director Baron von Braun, who is known to be a stupid and crude fellow, has refused him the Theater for his concert and has rented it to the most mediocre artists.”
³⁶

One of Carl's initiatives was nearly to double the asking prices for Ludwig's pieces, and he had success in some quarters—though at the same time Carl's initiatives largely quashed the interest of Breitkopf & Härtel, who wanted things as cheap as possible. Ludwig had sold the First Symphony and the Septet for 90 florins each; Carl demanded and got some 170 florins for the String Quintet. On his own initiative, he tried to persuade Härtel to pay for a series of arrangements of pieces certified by Ludwig but not written by him. Härtel rejected the idea, and Ludwig actually wrote Härtel commending his judgment: “Concerning the arrangements of the pieces, I am heartily glad that you rejected them. The
unnatural rage
now prevalent to transplant even
pianoforte pieces
to stringed instruments, instruments so utterly opposite to each other in all respects, ought to come to an end. I insist stoutly that only
Mozart
could arrange his pianoforte pieces for other instruments, and also
Haydn
.”
³⁷
All the same, in coming years Beethoven would follow the fashion of the time in issuing multiple versions of many of his works, often advertised as
arrangé par l'auteur même
, when in fact that was true of only a few. Earlier ones included an arrangement of the Septet for piano trio and the Piano Quintet with winds turned into a piano quartet with strings. His student Ferdinand Ries recalled that many pieces “were arranged by me, revised by Beethoven, and then sold as Beethoven's by his brother.”
³⁸

Carl apparently got into the habit of rummaging in Ludwig's manuscripts and sending stray items to publishers on his own; some of those pieces Ludwig had no desire to let see the light of day. There were other wrangles over practical matters. When Ludwig finished the piano sonatas of eventually op. 31 that summer of 1802, the brothers had an ongoing argument about which publisher to give them to. Beethoven had promised them to Nägeli in Zürich, and was outraged when he found Carl had offered them to Breitkopf & Härtel in hopes of more money.

It was over the op. 31 Sonatas that Heiligenstadt was entertained one day by the sight of the Beethoven brothers slugging it out on the street. The next day Ludwig, nursing his bruises, ordered Ferdinand Ries to send the sonatas to Nägeli. He also gave Ries a letter for Carl with a “beautiful sermon” about Carl's behavior: “First he showed him the true, despicable character of his conduct, then forgave him completely, but also predicted a miserable future for him if he did not radically change his life and behavior.”
³⁹
At least so recalled Ries, who despised both Beethoven's brothers. The following year Ries wrote to Simrock back in Bonn, “Charl [
sic
] Beethoven is the biggest skinflint in the world—for a single ducat he would take back 50 words of promise, and his good brother makes the greatest enemies because of him.” In any case, Carl continued his efforts as before. When questioned or criticized about it, Beethoven was quick to defend him, explaining, “After all, he is my brother.”
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