Of the archfather Johann Sebastian Bach the stock was a very small one except for a few motets which had been sung at the house of van Swieten; besides these the majority of pieces were those familiarly known, namely, the “Well-Tempered Clavichord,” which showed signs of diligent study, three volumes of exercises, fifteen inventions, fifteen symphonies and a toccata in D minor. This collection of pieces in a single volume is to be found in my possession. Attached to these was a sheet of paper on which, in a strange handwriting, was to be read the following passage from J. N. Forkel’s book “On the Life and Artwork of Johann Sebastian Bach”: “The pretence that the musical art is an art for all ears cannot be substantiated by Bach, but is disproved by the mere existence and uniqueness of his works, which seem to be destined only for connoisseurs. Only the connoisseur who can surmise the inner organization and feel it and penetrate to the intention of the artist, which does nothing needlessly, is privileged to judge here; indeed, the judgment of a musical connoisseur can scarcely be better tested than by seeing how rightly he has learned the works of Bach.” On both sides of this passage there were interrogation points from the thickest note-pen of Beethoven as a gloss on the learned historian and most eminent of all Bachians. No Hogarth could have put a grimmer look, or a more crushing expression, into an interrogation point.
Nägele, who professed long to have entertained the design to publish Bach’s “most admirable works,” issued his proposals in February, written with some degree of asperity against “the double competition” which, he had already learned, “was confronting” him. Of his edition of “The Well-Tempered Clavichord” Beethoven also possessed a part.
The names left blank in publishing this letter are easily supplied. Baron Carl August von Liechtenstein, the same to whom, from 1825 to 1832, was confided the management of the opera in Berlin, who died there in 1845, had been so extravagantly praised as head of the Princely Music at Dessau that he was called to assume the chapelmastership of the Imperial Opera in Vienna near the end of 1800. The contemporary reports of his efficiency as conductor are highly favorable. He deserves the credit of determining to add to the repertory of the Imperial Opera Mozart’s “Zauberflöte” which, till then, had been heard by the Viennese only in the little theatre Auf-den-Wieden. It is worth mentioning that Liechtenstein brought with him from Dessau poor Neefe’s daughter Felice, now Mme. Rösner, and that she was the Pamina of this performance. In the first new work produced (April 16th) upon the imperial stage after Beethoven’s “Prometheus” music, Liechtenstein introduced himself to the Vienna public in the character of a composer. It was in his opera “Bathmendi,” completely revised. The result was a wretched failure. Hoffmeister’s long and familiar acquaintance with Vienna, its musicians and its theatres, would cause him readily to appreciate the fun and wit of Beethoven’s remark that the newly engaged chapelmaster and composer of the Imperial Opera “seems to have taken for an ideal Mr. M. (Müller)”—the Offenbach of that time—but without reaching “even him.” Considering that the Baron was yet a young man, at the most but three years older than Beethoven, the somewhat bitter remark which follows the jest appears natural enough.
The Composer and His Early Critics
II. Beethoven had just cause for indignation in the treatment which he had received at the hands of the writers for the “Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung” (the “Leipsic oxen” of his letter of January 15th). Hoffmeister had evidently written him on the subject, and his reticence in confining himself in reply to a single contemptuous sentence, though writing in the confidence of private correspondence, is something unexpected; not less so is the manly, dignified and ingenuous style of his answer to Breitkopf and Härtel upon the same topic in the letter of April 22nd. The first number of that famous musical journal (take it for all in all, the noblest ever published) appeared October 3rd, 1798, edited by Rochlitz, published by Breitkopf and Härtel. In the second number, “Z...” eulogizes the Six Fughettos of the lad, C. M. von Weber; in the tenth young Hummel’s sonatas, Op. 3, are reviewed; in the fifteenth the name of Beethoven first appears, viz.: in the title of three sonatas dedicated to him by Wölffl. At length, in No. 23, March 17th, 1799, he is introduced to the readers of the journal as an author—not of one or more of the eight Trios, ten Sonatas, the Quintet and Serenade, which make up the opera 1 to 11 then published—but as the writer of the Twelve Variations on “Ein Mädchen oder Weibchen,” and eight on “Une fièvre brûlante.”
The criticisms are a perfect reflex of the conventional musical thought of the period and can be read now with amused interest, at least. There is no room here for their production in full. The writer, “M...,” recognizes the clever pianoforte player in the Variations but cannot see evidences in them of equal capacity as a composer. He likes some of them and “willingly admits” that those on “Une fièvre brûlante” are “more successful than those of Mozart, who in his early youth also treated the same subject.” But Mozart did not write the variations referred to, and when Grétry’s “Richard Cœur de Lion,” from which the theme was borrowed, was first performed in Paris, Mozart was not in his “early youth” but 28 years old. The critic descants with disapproval on “certain harshnesses in the modulations,” illustrating them; holds up Haydn as a model chooser of themes, and commends the comments of Vogler on a set of variations on “God save the King” printed in a little book on the subject. Thus Beethoven found, in the first recognition of himself as a composer in that journal, two compositions which he did not think worthy of opus numbers, to the neglect of all his better works, made the subject of censure and ridicule for the purpose of putting and advertising a pamphlet by Vogler. Were his own subsequent Variations on “God save the King” an effect of this article?
No. 23 of the “Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung” contains nearly two pages from the pen of Spazier on Liechtenstein’s opera, “Die steinerne Braut,” and a parallel between Beethoven and Wölffl as pianists. Then in the next number the beautiful Trio, Op. 6, finds a reviewer. Here is the whole of his article:
This Trio, which in part is not easier but more flowing than many other pieces by the same author, makes an excellent ensemble on the pianoforte with accompaniment. The composer with his unusual harmonic knowledge and love for serious composition would provide us many things which would leave many hand-organ things far in the rear, even those composed by famous men, if he would but try to write more naturally.
Could one say less?
The “Leipsic oxen” are now ruminating upon the noble Sonatas for Pianoforte and Violin, Op. 12, and No. 36 (June, 1799), contains the result: