Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph (89 page)

But Bettina was not all high ideals. In January 1810, some two years after their meeting, she wrote her idol an only lightly veiled proposition: “The time will come when I will repay you, beloved Goethe; by repayment, I mean that I will embrace you with my warm loving arms.”
¹¹
To a poet friend, on the way to their first meeting, she had declared: “You know, Tieck, I have got to have a child by Goethe at all costs—why, it will be a demigod!”
¹²

In August of that year there was finally a heated encounter between them. As Bettina described it, they were standing at dusk before an open window. Her arms lay around his neck, she was looking deep into his eyes. Goethe said, “Why not open your breast to the evening breeze?” She did not resist as he undid her bodice and kissed her breast and laid his head on it. “He showered kisses on me, many, many violent kisses . . . I was frightened,” she recalled. Finally he said to her, “And will you remember that I should like to cover your bosom with as many kisses as there are stars in heaven?” And there it ended—or so Bettina told it.
¹³

Experienced in these matters, Goethe realized soon enough that for the sake of his marriage and his peace of mind he had better keep Bettina at a distance. Another writer who was not Bettina's friend wrote, “If I didn't resist, Bettina would turn me entirely into her slave . . . She always wants something from the man who is with her, she wants to admire him and use him and tease him, or be admired, used, teased by him . . . The charming, sensitive and brilliant Bettina is brazen and shameless in lying.”
¹⁴

Brother Clemens, perhaps more fascinated and alarmed by Bettina than anyone else, called her “[h]alf witch, half angel . . . half seeress, half liar; half cat, half dove; half lizard, half butterfly; half morning dew, half fishblood; half chaste moonlight, half wanton flesh,” and so on for a dozen more lines.
¹⁵
In Bettina's maturity, in a dark time, an observer of her own sex wondered, “What's the use of an elf in a commercial age? Who wants her trick dances, her treetop games and flowery palaces?”
¹⁶

 

This was the young woman who shouted in Beethoven's ear in May 1810. It was a meeting of two transcendently self-centered people, two forces of nature, from two eras. Beethoven had grown up in the Aufklärung and came of age in the revolutionary 1780s. He built on that foundation while the artistic world around him was engulfed in the Romantic tide that he observed from a distance. But Beethoven resonated with the zeitgeist all the same, and so he resonated with Bettina Brentano, who was the zeitgeist embodied. Like many liberals of his time, after Napoleon's betrayal, he had buried revolutionary dreams for the foreseeable future. Just out of her teens, Bettina mounted her own revolution and never gave up her dreams. Like Beethoven's old teacher Christian Neefe but more vibrant, she was a person of swarming enthusiasms, a
Schwärmer
of
Schwärmers
. Unlike Neefe, she set out to mold the world to her imagination.

If eventually Bettina alarmed Goethe, she never seems to have alarmed Beethoven. If he had some practice in the art of seduction, he did not have Goethe's practiced wariness. It never occurred to him to be frightened of anyone, least of all a small, shapely young woman with deep brown eyes, not so much beautiful in the usual way as riveting in her whole being.

Whatever her later adjustments to her encounters with Beethoven and others, Bettina had an acute eye and understanding of the people she dealt with. Beethoven talked to her about his music and his ideas and showed her his work. Soon after their meeting, she wrote a straightforward account to a friend:

 

I did not make Beethoven's acquaintance until the last days of my stay [in Vienna]. I very nearly did not see him at all, for no one wished to take me to meet him, not even those who called themselves his best friends, for fear of his melancholia, which so completely obsesses him that he takes no interest in anything and treats his friends with rudeness rather than civility . . .

His dwelling-place is quite remarkable: in the front room there are from two to three pianos, all legless, lying on the floor; trunks containing his belongings, a three-legged chair; in the second room is his bed which . . . consists of a straw mattress and a thin cover, a wash basin on a pinewood table, his night-clothes lying on the floor . . .

In person he was small (for all his soul and heart were so big), brown, and full of pockmarks. He is what one terms repulsive, yet has a divine brow, rounded with such noble harmony that one is tempted to look on it as a magnificent work of art. He had black hair, very long, which he tosses back, and does not know his own age, but thinks he is fifty-three.

 

This largely rings true except for the last detail, which Bettina misheard or misremembered. Beethoven might have guessed forty-three for his age; in fact, he was thirty-nine. In her later account of their meeting not all the pianos are legless, because he was playing one of them. She says that he accompanied her back to where she was staying with her half brother Franz Brentano and sister-in-law Antonie. They managed to induce him to play for them. Bettina hardly comments on the music. She goes on to report that for the rest of her stay in Vienna Beethoven came to see her every night.

In the letter she contrasts Beethoven's way of working with another composer she has been studying with: “He does not follow Winter's method, who sets down what first occurs to him; but [Beethoven] first makes a great plan and arranges his music in a certain form in accordance with which he works.”
¹⁷
Whether Beethoven had told her how he proceeded or she observed it herself, Bettina had grasped one of the central elements of his method: the plan for a piece was made early in the process, and the material he invented had to submit to it.

Before that matter-of-fact letter, though, Bettina had written Goethe in the rhapsodic mode she reserved for him:

 

When I saw him of whom I shall now speak to you, I forgot the whole world . . . It is Beethoven of whom I now wish to tell you, and how he made me forget the world and you . . . I am not mistaken when I say—what no one, perhaps, now understands and believes—he stalks far ahead of the culture of mankind. Shall we ever overtake him? . . .

Everything that he can tell you about is pure magic, every posture is the organization of a higher existence, and therefore Beethoven feels himself to be the founder of a new sensuous basis in the intellectual life . . .

He himself said: “When I open my eyes I must sigh, for what I see is contrary to my religion, and I must despise the world which does not know that music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy, the wine which inspires one to new generative processes, and I am the Bacchus who presses out this glorious wine for mankind . . . I know that God is nearer to me than to other artists; I associate with him without fear; I have always recognized and understood him and have no fear for my music . . . Those who understand it must be freed by it from all the other miseries which the others drag about with themselves . . .

“Speak to Goethe about me . . . tell him to hear my symphonies and he will say that I am right in saying that music is the one incorporeal entrance into the higher world of knowledge which comprehends mankind but which mankind cannot comprehend . . . The encased seed needs the moist, electrically warm soil to sprout, to think, to express itself. Music is the electrical soil in which the mind thinks, lives, feels. Philosophy is a precipitate of the mind's electrical essence; its needs which seek a basis in primeval principle are elevated by it . . . Thus every real creation of art is independent, more powerful than the artist himself and returns to the divine through its manifestation. It is one with man only in this, that it bears testimony of the mediation of the divine in him . . . Everything electrical stimulates the mind to musical, fluent, out-streaming generation. I am electrical in my nature.”

 

Bettina ends, “Last night I wrote down all that he had said; this morning I read it over to him. He remarked: ‘Did I say that? Well, then I had a
raptus!
'”

In time those lines written to Goethe became the most celebrated words Beethoven ever spoke about music, a cornerstone of the myth for which Bettina Brentano, E. T. A. Hoffmann, and other high Romantics were laying the foundation. But whose words were they? If they were Beethoven's, they have a tone of visionary
Schwärmerei
that he never, as far as history would know, quite wrote or spoke with anyone else: “I am the Bacchus who presses out this glorious wine for mankind.” As a matter of principle, he rarely spoke or wrote about his music at all. In some degree, then, all this has to be the Romantic spirit speaking through Bettina: music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy; it unifies the sensuous and the intellectual; it electrifies and liberates the spirit and the soul.

And yet, and yet: Bettina adjusted, she embroidered, but not as much as history accused her of. In his heart Beethoven was as extravagantly idealistic as the man she painted, but ordinarily he articulated it only in music. To Goethe she cites his
raptus
, a word Beethoven and his friends used for his creative seizures. Bettina could have learned about his
raptus
only from Beethoven, just as he told her about his compositional process. That raises still another provoking, unanswerable question: as Bettina claims, did he actually read over those words of his that she reported to Goethe? If he did not actually speak those high-flown phrases but signed off on them, was he letting her speak for him?
¹⁸

There is no way finally to know. When Bettina entered Beethoven's life, she brought an element of mystery that would endure. But again, while she had a creative sense of reality she did not tend to make up things out of whole cloth. A number of the letters she later published between her and Goethe, and two she said were written to her from Beethoven, did not survive; all of hers to Beethoven were lost. But the Goethe letters she published that did survive reveal that her adjustments were partly to make a better and more coherent story, partly to attribute to him some of her own politics, partly to weave in a fascination with herself more outspoken than Goethe actually expressed.
¹⁹
The one letter to her from Beethoven that survived is exactly as she published it. In other words, the essence of what she published, invented or not, was not so far from the truth.

All this is to say that Bettina's embroideries were founded on an uncommon understanding of the lives and minds of her subjects, interwoven with her conviction that she was born to be adored by great men. Did Beethoven imagine a new integration of the sensuous and the intellectual, or was that Bettina speaking? If those were her words and he read and consented to them, did they strike a chord in him?

Beethoven had made the acquaintance of an endlessly fascinating and ambitious young woman, a virtuoso muse. How did she feel at this point about him? Was he a friend, a lover, a prospective mate? What can be said for certain is that Bettina made it her project to bring together the two demigods of her acquaintance, Goethe and Beethoven. Beethoven was excited to meet the man he felt to be the greatest of Germans, because he believed poetry to be a higher calling than music. And he had more than one offering to Goethe, not only three lieder on Goethe lyrics but also a new overture and incidental music for the play
Egmont
. That summer Goethe wrote Bettina saying he and Beethoven might get together at the Karlsbad spa.
²⁰
“It would give me great joy,” he concluded, “if Beethoven were to make me a present of the two [
sic
] songs of mine which he has composed.” (They would be played for him by his friend and musical adviser, composer Carl Friedrich Zelter—in those days not the Beethoven admirer he later became.) Plans for a meeting of the titans went forward sporadically for the next two years.

Beyond achieving the opening to Goethe, had Beethoven fallen for Bettina? Ordinarily, men who were not frightened by her might well fall for her, and at the time she met Beethoven she was available. But when he met Bettina, in May 1810, Beethoven was not exactly available. He was still in the middle of courting Therese Malfatti, had just written
Für Elise
for her, was sending her warm letters, had asked Wegeler in Bonn to find his birth certificate in preparation for an offer of marriage. Not until July did he write Gleichenstein, who had been deputized to convey the marriage offer, “My pride is humbled . . . if you would only be more candid.” Around the end of that summer Stephan von Breuning wrote Wegeler, “I believe
his marriage project has fallen through
.”
²¹

All these frustrations and uncertainties contribute to an accumulating mystery. Even for Beethoven, whose emotions were as fickle as the breeze, it was not like him to fall in love with one woman while he was seriously courting another. At the same time, it is hard to imagine he was not fascinated by Bettina. However these questions took shape in his mind, however much Bettina had to do with it, that spring and summer he began an emotional odyssey that came to its bitter climax in the spa of Teplitz in the summer of 1812.

 

Another part of the emotional turmoil of those months was that through Bettina, Beethoven met another woman who would become important to him. He may already have known Antonie Brentano, Bettina's sister-in-law, through her family in Vienna.
²²
Antonie, called Toni, had been born Antonie Birkenstock, daughter of a distinguished Austrian statesman and art collector. As so often happened in those days, her father married her off to a prosperous man fifteen years older, Frankfurt merchant Franz Brentano. He was half brother of Bettina and Clemens, to both of whom Antonie became close. As corollary of the familiar, sad story, Antonie's was a largely loveless marriage, though it amounted to less of a disaster than Beethoven's old love Josephine Deym's two marriages, or the misery of the womanizing Prince Lichnowsky's home life.