Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph (50 page)

 

After the Heiligenstadt Testament, that moment of clarity, what happened in Beethoven's life and work? The pattern of his life changed once and for all. His posture in the world had been as a budding master of his art, a virtuoso, a generalissimo, a conqueror laughing at the admiration he aroused. Now he was at the mercy of something he had never encountered before, a malevolent fate beyond the force of his will. It would not be long before the hopeless path of resignation turned to a path of fist-shaking defiance, and that was the right path for him as a still-young man.

On the most elemental level, the decline of his hearing meant that he had to let go of a long-cherished view of himself as pianist-composer. Since childhood he had devoted much of his time and energy to making himself the virtuoso he was. Much of his reputation in Vienna and elsewhere had come from his playing. In losing his hearing, not only was he losing his most prized sense but with the end of his performing career he also was going to lose part of his identity and half or more of his income.

In the next years, while his hearing was in some degree still functional, he would perform on occasion, if rarely publicly. But in 1802, the prospect of having someday to let go of the piano was part of his anguish. At around this point, it appears, he stopped practicing. He had written twenty piano sonatas, most of them in some eight years. He would write only a dozen more, and only two more violin sonatas. The prospect of having to earn a living as purely a freelance composer may have frightened him, as it should have. Bach, Mozart, Haydn—none of them had lived mainly on their earnings as a composer. He could sell anything he wrote, but the fees were small. His most ambitious pieces, concertos and symphonies and choral works, paid proportionately worst of all because they were the least salable.

In all this may lie one fundamental aspect of the stupendous level of creativity he was about to launch into. The crisis of October 1802 confirmed that now Beethoven's life was composing and nothing else. Another element had to do with despair. The reality of being an artist, for most artists, is that it must be on the order of a life-and-death matter or it will not succeed at the highest level a given creator can achieve, whatever that may be. An artist needs to cling to art like a survivor clings to a spar in the middle of the ocean. That was the position Beethoven now found himself in.

The crisis did not forge the New Path but rather made it mandatory. There would be no more of trying this and that. It was do or die, and for Beethoven now that was no metaphor, it was the simple truth. He was not above writing commercial pieces, but to devote most of his time to them was not an option for him. In his serious work, for the first time he had in his grasp
how
to do what he needed to do. By the time he wrote the unmailed letter to his brothers and to the world, he was planning a concert in Vienna that in effect drew a line between the past and the future. He already saw the next step after that: the Third Symphony.

In all things with Beethoven the stronger the challenge, the more aggressive and outsized his response. The depth of his despair was answered by the opposite forces of his will, his courage, his defiance of fate.

 

Soon after writing the Heiligenstadt Testament, Beethoven returned to Vienna and got back to work—on the surface, at least, as if nothing had happened. For the moment, for some incomprehensible reason, given the state of his hearing, he had taken a corner house on the Petersplatz, where his ears would be assaulted by the bells of St. Stephen's on one side and St. Peter's on the other.
³
Friends including Carl ­Czerny and Anton Reicha visited him. He heard about
Lodoïska
, the new opera from France by Luigi Cherubini that had made a sensation in Vienna. He got busy looking for a libretto for himself.

For his upcoming benefit concert, Beethoven decided to write an oratorio on the passion of Christ. He pitched the new piano variations to Breitkopf & Härtel. He placed in the town paper, the
Wiener Zeitung
, a scathing notice that a string-quartet arrangement of his op. 20 Septet, by then a big success, was pirated.
⁴
At that point he was not the most popular and performed composer in Vienna, but he was becoming the most circulated of his generation in print.
⁵

Then arrived a proper public row to rouse his fighting instincts. At the beginning of November 1802, he got a letter from Breitkopf & Härtel giving him hope that his months-long campaign to get them committed to his work was paying off. Having already taken on the new String Quintet, they agreed to publish the piano variations, opp. 34 and 35, and to pay for them a decent if not generous 225 florins (some three months' food and shelter). In the letter, Gottfried Härtel notes that they would like to publish more of his music. “Unfortunately, however, it has come to pass in Germany, with [the appearance of] every interesting new work, the pirate reprinters now often follow suit, so that the legitimate printers . . . often cannot sell a tenth as many copies as the pirate can.” (This was hardly news to Beethoven.) Härtel went on to say the String Quintet op. 29 was engraved and the proofs forthcoming, and he enclosed an opera libretto for Beethoven to consider (he sent it back). For good measure, Härtel turned down the two violin Romances Beethoven had offered; they eventually became opp. 40 and 50.
⁶
The Romances are lyrical and manifestly beautiful, but Härtel did not want to pay for engraving an orchestral work of unusual genre, with many times the notes of a piano piece.

Then to his astonishment and outrage, Beethoven learned that Artaria, his first publisher in Vienna, was about to put out the String Quintet without his knowledge. Its dedicatee and probably commissioner, Count Fries, had given his copy of the piece to Artaria, and the company essentially stole it. This put Beethoven in a nasty bind with Breitkopf & Härtel, threatening to destroy his carefully cultivated relationship with them. He informed Gottfried Härtel of the atrocity by “the
archvillains Artaria
. . . the whole affair is the
greatest swindle
in the world.”
⁷
Härtel was duly appalled: “That Artaria came by the manuscript of your Quintet is certainly only your own fault; since you assured us in writing that this work should be our exclusive property . . . you alone are responsible if serious consequences arise from it.”
⁸
Now, Beethoven was facing a costly debacle because of his own popularity. Carl hardly calmed the waters with a complaint to Härtel about the tone of the letter to his brother:

 

You have written my brother a letter that, if necessary at all, is more appropriate to a schoolboy but not an artist like Beethoven. You would not dare write such a letter to Herr Haydn . . . I have already endured two violent storms on your account, because I explained to him that [the letter] which you wrote was done only in the first heat and was not very prudent . . . Also I am sending you the enclosed
Revers
[retraction] signed by Artaria for your inspection. This
Revers
cost my brother seven days, during which he could do nothing [else], and [it cost] me innumerable trips and unpleasantnesses, and the loss of my dog.
⁹

 

With no legal recourse for Artaria's piracy, Beethoven blasted the company with everything he could think of. He demanded and got the
Revers
, the signed statement Carl mentioned, admitting that its printing was unauthorized, and an assurance that its edition would not come out until two weeks after Breitkopf & Härtel's edition reached the shelves in Vienna. Receiving fifty copies from Artaria for proofing, which in fact were wretchedly engraved, Beethoven instructed his pupil Ferdinand Ries to make so many and elaborate corrections that the copies would be unusable.
¹⁰
Having made sure Artaria's printed copies were ruined, he put a notice in the paper saying its edition was “extremely faulty, inaccurate, and quite useless for the performer, whereas Herren Breitkopf & Härtel, the lawful owners of this quintet, have done their utmost to produce the work as handsomely as possible.” This in turn outraged Artaria, which instituted and won a suit that required Beethoven to publish a retraction. He never got around to it. The affair trickled out in 1803.
¹¹

Despite everything, Härtel asked to see more music. In November, Carl offered two large works that had yet to be premiered: “At present . . . we have nothing but a Symphony and a grand Concerto for Piano; the former is 300 florins, the latter is the same price.” He mentions three piano sonatas, perhaps not yet composed; or, astoundingly, he may be inviting Härtel to print the op. 31 Sonatas that Ludwig, after their fistfight in the street, had sent to Nägeli in Zürich. And that's it for sonatas, Carl adds, “because my brother no longer troubles himself very much with such trifles, and writes only oratorios, operas, etc.”
¹²

At the same time, Beethoven had reason to regret giving op. 31 to Nägeli. When the proofs of nos. 1 and 2 arrived from the publisher, he asked Ries to sit at the piano and play over the proofs for him while he worked at his desk. Ries's reading uncovered a pile of engraving mistakes in no. 1. The climax came when Ries played a bland little phrase and found Beethoven rocketing out of his chair crying, “
Where the hell does it say that?
” Beethoven all but shoved Ries away from the piano to have a look at the page.
¹³
To the disbelief of both men, Nägeli had added four bars to the music, to even out a phrase or to make a correct cadence. In a fury, Beethoven first tried to get the
Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung
to publish a notice with corrections. When that failed, he had Ries send the proofs with a list of eighty mistakes to Simrock in Bonn, who published an at least marginally improved printing of the sonatas with, as Beethoven demanded,
Edition très correcte
on the title page—except as coda to this comedy of errors, that very phrase came out with a typo:
Editiou très correcte
.
¹⁴

 

Around the middle of February 1803, Carl van Beethoven came down with rheumatic fever. Since they were at that point living together, this inevitably claimed some of Ludwig's time and energy. Dealing with the contrapuntal distractions of business, his brother's illness, and his own health had to have been grueling. Beethoven was as busy as a musician and impresario could be. He had just gotten an appointment as composer in residence of the new Theater an der Wien; he and Carl had moved into a cramped apartment there in January. The position came through its artistic director, Emanuel Schikaneder. Though he was not the owner as such, Schikaneder had essentially built the Theater an der Wien; over the entrance he placed a statue of himself as Papageno. He knew Beethoven from concerts in his old Theater an der Weiden and from the
Prometheus
ballet, and he knew a hot property when he saw one.

The arrangement between them was that Beethoven would compose an opera on a Schikaneder libretto and could use the theater for his own benefit concert in April.
¹⁵
(He had failed in an attempt to secure a theater for the end of 1802.) It appeared that the new position with Schikaneder happily addressed several issues: Beethoven's yen to write opera, his need for a venue to present his new works, and his anxiety over money given that his hearing threatened his performing and Austria was in the throes of inflation.
¹⁶

For his benefit concert he planned three major premieres. The last was to be a new oratorio written for the occasion:
Christus am Ölberge
(Christ on the Mount of Olives). It could serve the dual purposes of providing a grand finish for his concert and give him some practice in the direction of opera. To that end he had concluded his years-long desultory studies in Italian vocal composition with Antonio Salieri with a sort of graduation piece, the duet
Nei giorni tuoi felici
.
¹⁷
A good deal of what he had absorbed in those studies with Salieri would go, for better and for worse, into
Christus
.

In terms of his reputation and prosperity at that point, Beethoven had little to complain about (though he would always find something to complain about). In his thirty-second year he was well established, his music moved off the shelves, and he was generally understood to be the inheritor of the mantle of Mozart and Haydn as an instrumental composer. The attention paid to his work was rising in quantity and quality. An overview of the Viennese musical scene and Beethoven's reputation in 1803 came from a new polemical journal of the arts called the
Freymüthige
. It was founded by the politically reactionary playwright August von Kotzebue, who had been carrying on a public feud with Goethe. Kotzebue was director of the Burg Theater, the rival house to Schikaneder's. An article probably written by Kotzebue, “Amusements of the Viennese after Carnival,” surveyed many of the amusements involving music in the salons:

 

Amateur concerts at which unconstrained pleasure prevails are frequent. The beginning is usually made with a quartet by Haydn or Mozart, then follows, let us say, an air by Salieri or Paër, then a pianoforte piece with or without another instrument
obbligato
, and the concert closes as a rule with a chorus or something of the kind from a favorite opera. The most excellent pianoforte pieces that won admiration during the last carnival were a new quintet by Beethoven [probably the light op. 16 for piano and winds], clever, serious, full of deep significance and character, but occasionally a little too glaring . . . Beethoven has for a short time past been engaged, at a considerable salary, by the Theater an der Wien, and will soon produce at that playhouse an oratorio of his composition . . . Schuppanzigh performs quartets very agreeably . . . Great artists on the pianoforte are Beethofen [
sic
], Hummel, Madame Auernhammer and others.
¹⁸