Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph (67 page)

As revolutionary as the
Waldstein
in its expression, its pianism, its relentless power, its dramatic unity from tragic beginning to malevolent end, the
Appassionata
, op. 57, is the shadowed counterpart to the earlier sonata. The
Waldstein
ended at the height of joy music can contain; here it comes to the deepest anguish. The
Appassionata
is a story of voids, abysses, dashed hopes. In those years, in the middle of his all-but-superhuman productivity, holding at bay the gnawing miseries of his health and deafness and his frustrated love for Josephine Deym, incipient despair was Beethoven's most intimate companion. But he had vowed to live for his art, and as long as his art ran strong he never contemplated breaking that vow. Now as with all artists, his own suffering became grist for the mill.

A
pianissimo
F-minor arpeggio plunges down to the bottom note of his keyboard and rises back up, answered by a little ambiguous turn figure. Together these constitute the essential
Thema;
the whole
Appassionata
flows from them, along with a fateful four-note tattoo on D-flat–C in the bass.
²²
From the beginning this piece neither sounds nor looks on the page like any other work for piano. While the
Waldstein
filled up the texture with brilliant figuration, much of the
Appassionata
first movement is involved in emptying out the texture with ominous silences, murmurs, pulsations with enigmatic wisps of gestures above and below. There are three themes in the exposition: call them fateful in F minor, briefly hopeful in A-flat major, driving and demonic in A-flat minor. For the first time in a Beethoven sonata, there is no repeat of the exposition, as if such sorrows would be unbearable to revisit. The end is a stride up to the top of the keyboard, then back down to the abyss, and a whispering exhaustion. (One sketch had been for a
fortissimo
conclusion, but likely that seemed too defiant, too hopeful for this piece.)

As happens other times in Beethoven (the
Pathètique
an example), the response to suffering is a noble, hymnlike middle movement, this one Andante con moto variations on a somber and almost immobile D-flat-major theme. The four variations describe an upward rise to the brilliant top of the keyboard, but after a coda returning to the opening theme there is no harmonic resolution. Instead the slow movement flows into the finale, which begins with an angry, dissonant pounding on a diminished-seventh chord. Then a consuming whirlwind rises and seems to steadily gather momentum in its rush deathward.
²³

Beethoven had an incomparable skill for raising a movement to what seems an unsurpassable peak of excitement or tension, then to surpass it. He did that at the end of the
Waldstein
finale; he will do it in the coda of the Fifth Symphony's first movement. So it is at the end of the
Appassionata
as well. In the coda a weird, stamping dance breaks out, like a maddened attempt at defiance, but the whirlwind rises again, more furious than ever, as if it were beating the piano to pieces. With that, the last hope is snuffed out.
²⁴
There ends one of the supreme tragic works in the piano literature: the dark side of the heroic. Beethoven would have read a relevant sentiment in his Shakespeare, from
King Lear:
“As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; / they kill us for their sport.” The critic of the
Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung
seemed divided between shock and awe regarding this piece:

 

In the first movement of this sonata [Beethoven] has once again let loose many evil spirits, such as are already familiar from other grand sonatas of his. In truth, however, it is here worth the effort to struggle not only with the wicked difficulties, but also with many a sudden impulse of indignation over learned peculiarities and bizarreries! These oddities of the master's fancy have been discussed so often, however, that the reviewer does not wish to say another word more about them. He will only remark that precisely for that reason he also can say nothing about the details of this entire long movement, because almost everything is saturated by these oddities.
²⁵

 

In relation to the new piano music and in all else, Beethoven's own self-criticism was as relentless as his creativity. On a
Leonore
sketch of this period he wrote, “Finale always simpler. All pianoforte music also. God knows why my pianoforte music always makes the worst impression [on me], especially when it is badly played.”
²⁶

 

On August 9, 1805, England, Russia, and Austria formed a Third Coalition and declared war. It was destined to be the shortest and, for the allies, the most humiliating of eight coalitions against the French. Quickly the fighting bore down on the Viennese, the price of food going up and availability going down. In Vienna a mob stormed a bakery, breaking down the fence and door and cleaning out the shop. On August 25, Napoleon's army left Boulogne for Germany. Poet Heinrich Heine remembered the spectacle of troops marching through Düsseldorf that he saw at age five: “The drumming in the streets continued, and I stood before the house door and looked at the French troops marching, those joyous and famous people who swept over the world singing and playing, the merry serious faces of the grenadiers, the bearskin shakoes, the tricolor cockades, the glittering bayonets.”
²⁷

To his horror Ferdinand Ries, as a citizen of Bonn now under French rule, found himself conscripted into the French army. Beethoven wrote a letter to Princess Josephine, wife of Field Marshal von Leichtenstein, asking her to help: “
Poor Ries
, who is a pupil of mine, must shoulder his musket in this unfortunate war and—as he is a foreigner, must also leave Vienna in a few days . . . He is compelled to appeal for help
to all
who know him.”
²⁸
He asks her to give the young man some money. Ries reported for duty as ordered but, to his immense relief, was turned down because childhood smallpox had claimed the sight in one eye. Soon he fled to Paris, where he subsisted for nearly three years in poverty and depression.
²⁹

Out in rural Hetzendorf, Beethoven kept his attention on
Leonore
. In late summer of 1805, he prodded librettist Sonnleithner: “I'm quite ready now—and am waiting for the last
four verses
—for which I have already thought out the theme provisionally—It is my
definite purpose
to write the overture during the rehearsals and not until then.” (This in fact was the usual procedure for opera composers.) He returned to Vienna in September, the opera nominally ready for rehearsal. He arrived in no better mood than he had left in, and he had not forgotten his anger at Ries over the
Andante favori
joke. One day after a breakfast including Lichnowsky, Ries, and Beethoven, the company retired to Beethoven's flat to hear him play through the opera. Once there, he refused to play until Ries left the room. Ries, about to leave for Bonn and an uncertain fate, exited in tears. Lichnowsky followed Ries and told him to wait, he'd settle the matter, but his angry remonstrations with Beethoven had no effect.
³⁰

All the same, next month Beethoven wrote Josephine, “My dear L[ichnowsky] is leaving tomorrow—In spite of many rough passages which we are encountering on the path of this friendship, yet now that he is leaving Vienna I feel how dear he is to me—and how much I owe him.” He ends on a note of affection and hope: “
Tomorrow evening
I shall see my dear, my beloved J[osephine]—Tell her that to me she is far more dear and far more precious than anything else—.”
³¹

 

Uncertain fate was the motif of these weeks. Before the court opera production of
Leonore
could go forward, as with every opera in Austria, every play, novel, poem, painting, any artistic production involving words or stories or images, the libretto had to be approved by the censors. Their rules were many and intricate. There were to be no religious or current political themes. The military must be treated in a positive manner; the very mention of cowards and deserters was forbidden. A couple could not leave the stage together without a chaperone. Certain words, such as
freedom, equality
, and
enlightenment
, could be permitted only in particular and rare circumstances.
³²
Everyone involved knew that
Leonore
was going to be a hard sell, given that it had to do with prisoners, tyranny, liberation, climaxes on the word
Freiheit
(“freedom”), and other subversive elements. Inevitably, the setting of Bouilly's original story was changed from France to Spain.

Sure enough, the change didn't help. The censors banned the production. At that point librettist Sonnleithner, who was Imperial Royal Court Theater secretary at the time, pulled strings as Beethoven surely counted on him to do. Sonnleithner submitted a petition to the censors with a series of points, starting with his best: the empress herself knew the libretto and “had found the original very beautiful and assured me that no opera subject had ever given her so much pleasure.” Second, the Paer version of the story had already been given in Prague and Dresden. Third, “Herr Beethoven has spent over a year and a half with the composition of my libretto and . . . has already held rehearsals, and all other preparations have been made, since this opera is supposed to be given on the Name Day of Her majesty the Empress.” Fourth, the story after all took place in Spain in the sixteenth century. Fifth, it presented “the most touching description of wifely virtue, and the malicious governor exercises only a private revenge.”
³³

At the same time, Sonnleithner went over the censors' heads with an urgent plea to a well-placed friend, State Councillor von Stahl, concluding, “This piece, which is moral in the highest degree, will make a good impression, and recommend it to your love of justice.”
³⁴
On October 5, the censors approved the production. They decreed minor changes in “the most offensive scenes,” which Beethoven and Sonnleithner duly made. They had no choice. A police official would be present at all performances, libretto in hand, to make sure the text was performed to the word as the censors approved it (no alteration of any text was allowed on a public stage). The holdup had set back the copying, rehearsals, and other preparations, so it forced a delay of five weeks for the production. Beethoven kept working on the music. In November, he wrote stage manager (and first Pizarro) Friedrich Meyer: “The quartet in the third act is quite correct now . . . I'll send again for Acts I and II because I also want to go through these myself—I can't come, because since yesterday I have been suffering from
colic pains
—
my usual complaint
.”
³⁵

Eight days after the ban on
Leonore
was lifted, the French army reached Vienna. It had taken Ulm and Salzburg at the end of October, and the city was left essentially undefended. At the approach of the French, the court and the aristocracy packed up and left, “sending everything away,” wrote a diarist, “even bedwarmers and shoe-trees. It looks as if they have no intention of ever coming back.” The emperor provided a hundred horses in the Josephsplatz to pull carriages loaded with the possessions of the wealthy; eventually he added a fleet on the Danube for the same purpose, and guaranteed they would be protected.

On November 13, fifteen thousand French troops marched into the city in ranks with banners flying and bands playing. The Viennese turned out to watch as if it were a holiday parade. They found the grenadiers grand with their high caps and breastplates, but it was noticed that the common soldiers were shabby, and many of them marched with strips of confiscated lard, hams, and chunks of meat dangling from their belts.
³⁶
On the fifteenth, Napoleon issued the usual proclamation from the emperor's palace at Schönbrunn, where he had taken up residence. His troops generally behaved well, but they were allowed to appropriate every bit of food they could find and every horse in town.

Hundreds of officers were billeted inside the city walls and thousands of ordinary soldiers in the suburbs, all in commandeered private homes. The markets emptied and the banks closed. Most of the population stayed home. The rattle of coaches and throngs of pedestrians disappeared and a strange calm reigned, the streets populated mostly by French soldiers.
³⁷
Baron Braun announced to the performers and employees of the court theaters that, by imperial order, the theaters were to remain open unless there was a bombardment, in which case everyone was permitted to run for their lives.
³⁸

Under those conditions, rehearsals for
Leonore
resumed in an atmosphere far worse than the usual pre-premiere anxiety. At one point Beethoven was fuming about a missing third bassoon and Prince Lobkowitz made a joke about it. Passing the prince's palace on his way home, Beethoven was heard to shout, “Lobkowitzian ass!”
³⁹
A week after the occupation began, the opera premiered at the Theater an der Wien. The title role was handled by twenty-year-old Anna Milder, for whom Beethoven had written the part. She was talented, also young and inexperienced.
⁴⁰
Over Beethoven's protest the title was given as
Fidelio
, to avoid confusion with the Paer version.

The circumstances of launching a serious and ambitious opera low in action and high in ideals could hardly have been worse. For three nights, it played to almost empty houses made up mainly of French officers, a few Beethoven friends including Lichnowsky, and a smattering of tourists and brave souls willing to leave their homes. “Except for whores,” wrote one theatergoer, “one sees very few women at the theaters.”
⁴¹