The impatient Beethoven, vexed at the tardy improvement of his health under the treatment of Vering, made that change of physicians contemplated in his letter to Wegeler. This was done some time in the winter 1801-1802, and is all the foundation there is for Schindler’s story of “a serious illness in the first months of this year for which he was treated by the highly esteemed physician Dr. Schmidt.” The remarkable list of compositions and publications belonging to this year is proof sufficient that he suffered no physical disability of such a nature as seriously to interrupt his ordinary vocations; as is also the utter silence of Ries, Breuning, Czerny, Doležalek and Beethoven himself. The tone of the letters written at the time is also significant on this point.
Concerning the failure of his project to follow the example set in 1800 and give a concert towards the close of the winter in the theatre we learn all we know from a letter from his brother Carl to Breitkopf and Härtel dated April 22, 1802. Therein we read:
My brother would himself have written to you, but he is ill-disposed towards everything because the Director of the Theatre, Baron von Braun, who, as is known, is a stupid and rude fellow, refused him the use of the Theatre for his concert and gave it to other really mediocre artists; and I believe it must vex him greatly to see himself so unworthily treated, particularly as the Baron has no cause and my brother has dedicated several works to his wife.
When one looks down from the Kahlenberg towards Vienna in the bright, sweet springtime, the interesting country is almost worthy of Tennyson’s description:
It lies
Deep-meadowed, happy, fair with orchard-lawns
And bowery hollows, crown’d with summer sea.
Conspicuous are the villages, Döbling, hard by the city Nussdorfer line, and Heiligenstadt, divided from Döbling by a ridge of higher land in a deep gorge.
Beethoven at Heiligenstadt
Dr. Schmidt, having enjoined upon Beethoven to spare his hearing as much as possible, he removed for the summer to the place last named. There is much and good reason to believe that his rooms were in a large peasant house still standing, on the elevated plain beyond the village on the road to Nussdorf, now with many neat cottages near, but then probably quite solitary. In those years, there was from his windows an unbroken view across fields, the Danube and the Marchfeld, to the Carpathian mountains that line the horizon. A few minutes’ walk citywards brought him to the baths of Heiligenstadt; or, in the opposite direction, to the secluded valley in which at another period he composed the “Pastoral” symphony. The vast increase of Vienna and its environs in population, has caused corresponding changes; but in 1802, that peasant house seems to have offered him everything he could desire; fresh air, sun, green fields, delightful walks, bathing, easy access to his physician, and yet a degree of solitude which now is not easy to conceive as having been attainable so near the capital.
Part of a letter written hence to Breitkopf and Härtel, but no longer in the possession of that house, affords another illustration of Beethoven’s excellent common sense and discrimination in all that pertained to his art.