II

In relation to the members of his family it cannot be said that Beethoven’s life was happy or even comfortable. Two amiable and gentle figures emerge from the domestic group, the fine old grandfather, Louis, and the mother. For these Beethoven cherished till his death a tender and reverent memory. In the autumn of 1787 he writes to the Councillor, Dr. von Schaden, at Augsburg, with whom he had become acquainted on his return journey from Vienna: ‘I found my mother still alive, but in the worst possible state; she was dying of consumption, and the end came about seven weeks ago, after she had endured much pain and suffering. She was to me such a good, lovable mother, my best friend. Oh! who was happier than I when I could still utter the sweet name of mother, and heed was paid to it.’ The gentle soul suffered much, not only in her last illness, but throughout her married life, for her husband, the tenor singer, was a drunkard and worse than a nonentity in the family life. He died soon after the composer’s removal to Vienna. The two brothers contributed little to his happiness or welfare. Johann was selfish and narrow-minded, penurious and mean, with a dash of egotistic arrogance which had nothing in common with the fierce pride of the older brother, Ludwig. Acquiring some property and living on it, Johann was capable of leaving at his brother’s house his card inscribed Johann van Beethoven, Gutsbesitzer (land proprietor). This was promptly returned by the composer who had endorsed it with the counter inscription, L. van Beethoven, Hirnbesitzer (brain proprietor). The brother Caspar Carl was a less positive character, and seems to have shown some loyalty and affection for Ludwig at certain periods of his life, sometimes acting virtually as his secretary and business manager. But, though he was more tolerable to Ludwig than the Gutsbesitzer, his character was anything but admirable. Both brothers borrowed freely of the composer when he was affluent and neglected him when he most needed attention. ‘Heaven keep me from having to receive favors from my brothers!’ he writes. And in the ‘Heiligenstadt Will,’ written in 1802, before his fame as a composer was firmly established, his bitterness against them overflows. ‘O ye men who regard or declare me to be malignant, stubborn, or cynical, how unjust are ye towards me.... What you have done against me has, as you know, long been forgiven. And you, brother Carl, I especially thank you for the attachment you have shown toward me of late ... I should much like one of you to keep as an heirloom the instruments given to me by Prince L., but let no strife arise between you concerning them; if money should be of more service to you, just sell them.’ This passage throws light on the characters of the brothers, as well as on Beethoven himself. It was at the house of the brother Johann, where the composer and his nephew Carl were visiting in 1826, near the end of his life, that he received such scant courtesy in respect to fires, attendance and the like (being also asked to pay board) that he was forced to return to his home in Vienna. The use of the family carriage was denied him and he was therefore compelled to ride in an open carriage to the nearest post station—an exposure which resulted in his fatal illness.

Young Carl, who became the precious charge of the composer upon Caspar’s death, was intolerable. Beethoven sought, with an almost desperate courage, to bring the boy into paths of manhood and virtue, making plans for his schooling, for his proper acquaintance, and for his advancement. Carl was deaf, apparently, to all accents of affection and devotion, as well as to the occasional outbursts of fury from his uncle. He perpetually harassed him by his looseness, frivolity, continual demands for money, and lack of sensibility; and finally he attempted to take his own life. This last stroke was almost too much for the uncle, who gave way to his grief. Beethoven was, doubtless, but poorly adapted to the task of schoolmaster or disciplinarian; but he was generous, forgiving to a fault, and devoted to the ideal of duty which he conceived to be his. But the charge was from the beginning a constant source of anxiety and sorrow, altering his nature, causing trouble with his friends, and embittering his existence by constant disappointments and contentions.

Some uncertainties exist concerning Beethoven’s relations with his teachers. The court organist, van den Eeden, was an old man, and could scarcely have taught the boy more than a year before he was handed over to Neefe, who was a good musician, a composer, and a writer on musical matters. He undoubtedly gave his pupil a thoroughly honest grounding in essentials, and, what was of even greater importance, he showed a confidence in the boy’s powers that must have left a strong impression upon his sensitive nature. ‘This young genius,’ he writes, when Beethoven was about twelve years old, ‘deserves some assistance that he may travel. If he goes on as he has begun, he will certainly become a second Mozart.’ During Neefe’s tutelage Beethoven was appointed accompanist to the opera band—an office which involved a good deal of responsibility and no pay—and later assistant court organist. His compositions, however, even up to the time of his departure for Vienna, do not at all compare, either in number or significance, with those belonging to the first twenty-two years of Mozart’s life. This fact, however, did not dampen the confidence of the teacher, who seems to have exerted the strongest influence of an academic nature which ever came into the composer’s life. Upon leaving Bonn, Beethoven expresses his obligation. ‘Thank you,’ he says, ‘for the counsel you have so often given me in my progress in my divine art. Should I ever become a great man, you will certainly have assisted in it.’[52]

His relations with Haydn have been a fruitful source of discussion and explanation. On his second arrival in Vienna, 1792, Beethoven became Haydn’s pupil. Feeling, however, that his progress was slow, and finding that errors in counterpoint had been overlooked in his exercises, he quietly placed himself under the instruction of Schenck, a composer well known in Beethoven’s day. There was at the time no rupture with Haydn, and he did not actually withdraw from his tutorship until the older master’s second visit to London, in 1794. Beethoven then took up work with Albrechtsberger, but the relationship was mutually unsatisfactory. The pupil felt a lack of sympathy and Albrechtsberger expressed himself in regard to Beethoven with something like contempt. ‘Have nothing to do with him,’ he advises another pupil. ‘He has learned nothing and will never do anything in decent style.’ Although in later years Beethoven would not call himself a pupil of Haydn, yet there were many occasions when he showed a genuine and cordial appreciation for the chapel master of Esterhàzy. The natures of the two men, however, were fundamentally different, and could scarcely fail to be antagonistic. Haydn was by nature and court discipline schooled to habits of good temper and self-control; he was pious, submissive to the control of church and state, kindly and cheerful in disposition. Beethoven, on the contrary, was individualistic to the core, rough often to the point of rudeness in manner, deeply affected by the revolutionary spirit of the times, scornful of ritual and priest, melancholy and passionate in temperament. Is it strange that two such diverse natures found no common ground of meeting?

Beethoven, however, aside from his formal instruction, found nourishment for his genius, as all great men do, in the work of the masters of his own and other arts. He probably learned more from an independent study of Haydn’s works than from all the stated lessons; for his early compositions begin precisely where those of Haydn and Mozart leave off. They show, also, that he knew the worth of the earlier masters. Concerning Emanuel Bach he writes: ‘Of his pianoforte works I have only a few things, yet a few by that true artist serve not only for high enjoyment but also for study.’ In 1803 he writes to his publishers, Breitkopf and Härtel: ‘I thank you heartily for the beautiful things of Sebastian Bach. I will keep and study them.’ Elsewhere he calls Sebastian Bach ‘the forefather of harmony,’ and in his characteristic vein said that his name should be Meer (Sea), instead of Bach (Brook). According to Wagner, this great master was Beethoven’s guide in his artistic self-development.

The only other art with which he had any acquaintance was poetry, and for this he shows a lifelong and steadily growing appreciation. In the home circle of his early friends, the Breunings, he first learned something of German and English literature. Shakespeare was familiar to him, and he had a great admiration for Ossian, just then very popular in Germany. Homer and Plutarch he knew, though only in translation. In 1809 we find him ordering complete sets of Goethe and Schiller, and in a letter to Bettina Brentano he says: ‘When you write to Goethe about me, select all words which will express to him my inmost reverence and admiration.’ At the time of his interest in his physician’s daughter, Therese Malfatti, he sends her as a gift Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister and Schlegel’s translation of Shakespeare, and speaks to her of reading Tacitus. Elsewhere he writes: ‘I have always tried from childhood onward to grasp the meaning of the better and the wise of every age. It is a disgrace for any artist who does not think it his duty at least to do that much.’ These instances of deliberate selection show the strong tendency of his mind toward the powerful, epic, and ‘grand’ style of literature, and an almost complete indifference toward the light and ephemeral. His own language, as shown in the letters, show many minor inaccuracies, but is, nevertheless, strongly characteristic, forceful, and natural, and often trenchant or sardonic.

In his relation to his friends, happily his life shows many richer and more grateful experiences than with his own immediate family. Besides the Breunings, his first and perhaps most important friend was Count Waldstein, who recognized his genius and was undoubtedly of service to him in Bonn as well as in Vienna. In the album in which his friends inscribed their farewells upon his departure from Bonn Waldstein’s entry is this: ‘Dear Beethoven, you are travelling to Vienna in fulfillment of your long cherished wish. The genius of Mozart is still weeping and bewailing the death of her favorite. With the inexhaustible Haydn she found a refuge, but no occupation, and is now waiting to leave him and join herself to someone else. Labor assiduously and receive Mozart’s spirit from the hands of Haydn. Your true friend, Waldstein. Bonn, October 29, 1792.’[53]

From the time of his arrival in Vienna, his biography is one long story of his connection with this or that group of charming and fashionable people. Vienna was then in a very special sense the musical centre of Europe. There Mozart had just ended his marvellous career, and there was the home of Haydn, the most distinguished living musician. Many worthy representatives of the art of music—Salieri, Gyrowetz, Eybler, Weigl, Hummel, Woelfl, Steibelt, Ries—as well as a host of fashionable and titled people who possessed knowledge and a sincere love of music, called Vienna their home. Many people of rank and fashion were pleased to count themselves among Beethoven’s friends. ‘My art wins for me friends and esteem,’ he writes, and from these friends he received hospitality, money, and countless favors. To them, in return, he dedicated one after another of his noble works. To Count Waldstein was inscribed the pianoforte sonata in C, opus 53; to Baron von Zmeskall the quartet in F minor, opus 95; to Countess Giulia Guicciardi the Sonata quasi una fantasia in C sharp minor (often called the Moonlight Sonata); the second symphony to Prince Carl Lobkowitz, and so on through the long, illustrious tale. He enjoyed the society of the polite world. ‘It is good,’ he says, ‘to be with the aristocracy, but one must be able to impress them.’

The old order of princely patronage, however, under which nearly all musicians lived up to the close of the eighteenth century, had no part nor lot in Beethoven’s career. Haydn, living until 1809, spent nearly all his life as a paid employee in the service of the prince of Esterhàzy, and even his London symphonies and the famous Austrian Hymn were composed ‘to order.’ Mozart, whose career began later and ended earlier than Haydn’s, had the hardihood to throw off his yoke of servitude to the archbishop of Salzburg; but Beethoven was never under such a yoke. He accepted no conditions as to the time or character of his compositions; and, although he received a maintenance from some of his princely friends, he was never on the footing of a paid servant. On the contrary, he mingled with nobility on a basis of perfect equality and shows no trace of humiliation or submission. He was furiously proud, and would accept nothing save on his own terms. Nine years before his death he welcomed joyfully a commission from the London Philharmonic Society to visit England and bring with him a symphony (it would have been the Ninth). Upon receiving an intimation, however, that the Philharmonic would be pleased to have something written in his earlier style, he indignantly rejected the whole proposition. For him there was no turning back and his art was too sacred to be subject to the lighter preferences of a chance patron. Though the plan to go to England was again raised shortly before his last illness (this time by the composer himself) it never came to a realization.

A special place among his friends should be given to a few whose appreciation of the master was singularly disinterested and deep. First among these were the von Breunings, who encouraged his genius, bore with the peculiar awkwardness and uncouthness of his youth, and managed, for the most part, to escape his suspicion and anger. It was in their house at the age of sixteen or seventeen that he literally first discovered what personal friendship meant; and it was Stephen von Breuning and his son Gerhart who, with Schindler, waited on him during his final illness. No others are to be compared with the Breunings; but more than one showed a capacity for genuine and unselfish devotion. Nanette Streicher, the daughter of the piano manufacturer, Stein, was among these. Often in his letters Beethoven declares that he does not wish to trouble anyone; and yet he complains to this amiable and capable woman about servants, dusters, spoons, scissors, neckties, stays, and blames the Austrian government, both for his bad servants and smoking chimneys. It is evident that she repeatedly helped him over his difficulties, as did also Baron von Zmeskall, court secretary and distinguished violoncellist, to whom he applied numberless times for such things as quills, a looking glass, and the exchanging of a torn hat, and whom he sent about like an errand boy. Schuppanzigh, the celebrated violinist and founder of the Rasoumowsky quartet, which produced for the first time many of the Beethoven compositions, was a trustworthy and valuable friend. Princes Lichnowsky and Lobkowitz, Count von Brunswick, the Archbishop Rudolph, Countesses Ertmann, Erdödy, Therese von Brunswick, and Bettina Brentano (afterward von Arnim)—the list of titled and fashionable friends is long and all of them seem to have borne with patience his eccentricities and delinquencies in a genuine appreciation of his fine character and genius. Among the few friends who proved faithful to the last, however, was a young musician, Anton Schindler, who for a time was Beethoven’s housemate and devoted slave, and became his literary executor and biographer. Schindler has been the object of much detraction and censure, but both Grove and Thayer regard him as trustworthy, in character as well as in intelligence. He had much to bear from his adored master, who tired of him, treated him with violence and injustice, and finally banished him from his house. But when Beethoven returned to Vienna from the ill-fated visit to Johann in 1826, sick unto death, Schindler resumed his old position as house companion. Both Schindler and Baron von Zmeskall collected notes, memoranda, and letters which have been of great service to later biographers of the composer.

Beethoven’s friendships were often marked by periods of storm, and many who were once proud to be in his favored circle afterward became weary of his eccentricities, or were led away to newer interests. It was hard for him to understand some of the most obvious rules of social conduct, and impossible for him to control his tongue or temper. Close and well-tried friends, falling under his suspicion or arousing his anger, were in the morning forbidden his house, roundly denounced, and treated almost like felons; in the afternoon, with a return of calmness and reason, he would write to them remorseful letters, beg their forgiveness, and plead for a continuance of their affection. Often the remorse was out of all proportion to his crime. After a quarrel with Stephan von Breuning he sends his portrait with the following message: ‘My dear, good Stephan—Let what for a time passed between us lie forever hidden behind this picture. I know it, I have broken your heart. The emotion which you must certainly have noticed in me was sufficient punishment for it. It was not a feeling of malice against you; no, for then I should be no longer worthy of your friendship. It was passion on your part and on mine—but mistrust of you arose in me. Men came between us who are not worthy either of you or of me ... faithful, good, and noble Stephan. Forgive me if I did hurt your feelings; I was not less a sufferer myself through not having you near me during such a long period; then only did I really feel how dear to my heart you are and ever will be.’ Too apologetic and remorseful, maybe; but still breathing a kind of stubborn pride under its genuine and sincere affection.

Although Goethe and Beethoven met at least once, they did not become friends. The poet was twenty-one years the elder, and was too much the gentleman of the world to like outward roughness and uncouth manners in his associates. He had, moreover, no sympathy with Beethoven’s rather republican opinions. On the other hand, Beethoven had something of the peasant’s intolerance for the courtier and fine gentleman. ‘Court air,’ he writes in 1812, ‘suits Goethe more than becomes a poet. One cannot laugh much at the ridiculous things that virtuosi do, when poets, who ought to be looked upon as the principal teachers of the nation, forget everything else amidst this glitter.’

In spite of his deafness, rudeness, and eccentricity Beethoven seems to have had no small degree of fascination for women. He was continually in love, writing sincere and charming letters to his ‘immortal Beloved,’ and planning more than once, with almost pathetic tenderness, for marriage and a home. There is a genuine infatuation, an ardent young-lover-like exultation in courtship that lifts him for a time even out of his art and leaves him wholly a man—a man, however, whose passion was always stayed and ennobled by spiritual bonds. License and immorality had no attraction for him, even when all his hopes of marriage were frustrated. Talented and lovely women accepted his admiration—Magdelena Willman, the singer, Countess Giulia Guicciardi, Therese Malfatti, Countess von Brunswick, Bettina Brentano, the ‘Sybil of romantic literature’—one after another received his addresses, possibly returned in a measure his love, and, presently, married someone else. Beethoven was undoubtedly deeply moved at these successive disappointments. ‘Oh, God!’ he writes, ‘let me at last find her who is destined to be mine, and who shall strengthen me in virtue.’ But, though he was destined never to be happy in this way, his thwarted love wrecked neither his art nor his happiness. He writes to Ries in 1812, in a tone almost of contentment and resignation: ‘All kind messages to your wife, unfortunately I have none. I found one who will probably never be mine, nevertheless, I am not on that account a woman hater.’ The truth is, music was in reality his only mistress, and his plans for a more practical domesticity were like clouds temporarily illumined by the sun of his own imagination, and predestined to be as fleeting.

As has been noted, toward the end of his life most of the intimacies and associations with the fashionable circles of Vienna gradually ceased. During the early part of his last illness the brother Johann, a few musicians and an occasional stranger were among his visitors, and until December of the year 1826 the nephew made his home with Beethoven. But Johann returned to his property, Carl rejoined his regiment, much to the added comfort of the sick man, and the visits from outsiders grew fewer in number. The friends of earlier days—those whom he had honored by his dedications or who had profited by the production of his works, as well as those who had suffered from his violence and abuse—nearly all were either dead or unable to attend him in his failing strength. Only the Breunings and Schindler remained actively faithful till the last.

With his publishers his relations were, on the whole, of a calmer and more stable nature than with his princely friends. It must be noted that Beethoven is the first composer whose works were placed before the public in the manner which has now become universal. Although music printing had been practised since the sixteenth century, the publisher in the modern sense did not arrive until about Beethoven’s time. The works of the eighteenth century composers were often produced from manuscript and kept in that state in the libraries of private houses, and whatever copies were made were generally at the express order of some musical patron. Neither Mozart nor Haydn had a ‘publisher’ in the modern sense—a man who purchases the author’s work outright or on royalties, taking his own risk in printing and selling it. The greater part of Beethoven’s compositions were sold outright to the distinguished house of Breitkopf and Härtel, and, all things considered, he was well paid. In those days it took a week for a letter to travel from Vienna to Leipzig, and Beethoven’s patience was often sorely tried by delays not due to tardiness of post. The correspondence is not lacking in those frantic calls for proof, questions about dates of publication, alarms over errors, and other matters so familiar to every composer and author. In earlier days, Simrock of Bonn undertook the publication of some of the master’s work, but did not come up to his ideas in respect to time. The following letter, concerning the Sonata in A, opus 47, shows that even the impatient Beethoven could bear good-naturedly with a certain amount of irritating trouble:

‘Dear, best Herr Simrock: I have been all the time waiting anxiously for my sonata which I gave you—but in vain. Do please write and tell me the reason of the delay—whether you have taken it from me merely to give it as food to the moths or do you wish to claim it by special imperial privilege? Well, I thought that might have happened long ago. This slow devil who was to beat out this sonata, where is he hiding? As a rule you are a quick devil, it is known that, like Faust, you are in league with the black one, and on that very account so beloved by your comrades.’

It is said that Nägeli of Zürich on receiving for publication the Sonata in G (opus 31, No. 1), undertook to improve a passage which he considered too abrupt or heterodox, and added four measures of his own. The liberty was discovered in proof, and the publication immediately transferred to Simrock, who produced a correct version. Nägeli, however, still retained and adhered to his own version, copies of which are still occasionally met with.

More than once Beethoven shows himself to be reasonable and even patient with troublesome conditions. In regard to some corrections in the C minor symphony he writes to Breitkopf and Härtel: ‘One must not pretend to be so divine as not to make improvements here and there in one’s creations’—and surely the following is a mild protest, considering the cause: ‘How in heaven’s name did my Fantasia with orchestra come to be dedicated to the King of Bavaria?’ This was no slip of memory on Beethoven’s part, for he was very particular about dedications. Again he writes to his publishers, after citing a list of errors: ‘Make as many faults as you like, leave out as much as you like—you are still highly esteemed by me; that is the way with men, they are esteemed because they have not made still greater faults.’ His letters reveal the fact, not that he was disorderly and careless, but that, on the contrary, when he had time to give attention, he could manage his business affairs very sensibly indeed. Usually he is exact in stating his terms and conditions for any given piece of work; but occasionally he was also somewhat free in promising the same composition to more than one publisher, and in setting off one bid against another in order to get his price. But it is impossible to see, even in such acts, any very deep-seated selfish or mercenary quality. Full of ideas, pushed from within as well as from without, he knew himself capable of replacing one composition with another of even richer value. He was always in need of money, not because he lived luxuriously, but because of the many demands made upon him from his family and by reason of the fact that absorption in composition, frequent illness, and deafness rendered him incapable of ordering his affairs with any degree of economy. Whenever it was possible he gave his services generously for needy causes, such as a benefit for sick soldiers, or for the indigent daughter of Bach. Writing to Dr. Wegeler, the husband of Eleanore von Breuning, he says: ‘If in our native land there are any signs of returning prosperity, I will only use my art for the benefit of the poor.’

In respect to other musicians Beethoven was in a state of more or less open warfare. Bitterly resentful of any slight, it was not easy for him to forgive even an innocent or kindly criticism, much less the open sneers that invariably attend the progress of a new and somewhat heretical genius. If, however, he considered other musicians worthy, he was glad of their recognition. Although he did not care for the subject of Don Giovanni, he writes that Mozart’s success gave him as much pleasure as if it were his own work. To his publishers he addresses these wise words concerning young musicians: ‘Advise your critics to exercise more care and good sense with regard to the productions of young authors, for many a one may become thereby dispirited, who otherwise might have risen to higher things.’