Joseph Haydn’s Visit to Bonn
The greatest musical event of the year (1790) in Bonn occurred just at its close—the visit of Joseph Haydn, on his way to London with Johann Peter Salomon, whose name so often occurs in the preliminary chapters of this work. Of this visit, Dies has recorded Haydn’s own account:
In the capital, Bonn, he was surprised in more ways than one. He reached the city on Saturday [Christmas, December 25] and set apart the next day for rest. On Sunday, Salomon accompanied Haydn to the court chapel to listen to mass. Scarcely had the two entered the church and found suitable seats when high mass began. The first chords announced a product of Haydn’s muse. Our Haydn looked upon it as an accidental occurrence which had happened only to flatter him; nevertheless it was decidedly agreeable to him to listen to his own composition. Toward the close of the mass a person approached and asked him to repair to the oratory, where he was expected. Haydn obeyed and was not a little surprised when he found that the Elector, Maximilian, had had him summoned, took him at once by the hand and presented him to the virtuosi with the words: “Here I make you acquainted with the Haydn whom you all revere so highly.” The Elector gave both parties time to become acquainted with each other, and, to give Haydn a convincing proof of his respect, invited him to dinner. This unexpected invitation put Haydn into an embarrassing position, for he and Salomon had ordered a modest little dinner in their lodgings, and it was too late to make a change. Haydn was therefore fain to take refuge in excuses which the Elector accepted as genuine and sufficient. Haydn took his leave and returned to his lodgings, where he was made aware in a special manner of the good will of the Elector, at whose secret command the little dinner had been metamorphosed into a banquet for twelve persons to which the most capable musicians had been invited.
Was the young musician one of these “most capable musicians”? Sunday evening, March 6th, came the performance of Beethoven’s music to the “Ritterballet” before noticed; but without his name being known. Bossler’s “Musikalische Correspondenz” of July 13, 1791, contains a list of the “Cabinet, Chapel and Court Musicians of the Elector of Cologne.” Names designated by an asterisk were “solo players who may justly be ranked with virtuosi”; two asterisks indicated composers. Four names only—those of Joseph Reicha, Perner and the two Rombergs—have the two stars; Beethoven has none. “Hr. Ludwig van Beethoven plays pianoforte concertos; Hr. Neefe plays accompaniments at court and in the theatre and at concerts.... Concertante violas are played by virtuoso violinists”—that is all, except that we learn that the Elector is losing interest in the instrument on which Beethoven played in the orchestra: “His Electoral Highness of Cologne seldom plays the viola nowadays, but finds amusement at the pianoforte with operas, etc., etc.”
At Mergentheim, the capital of the Teutonic Order, a grand meeting of commanders and knights took place in the autumn of 1791, the Grand Master Maximilian Francis presiding, and the sessions continuing from September 18 to October 20, as appears from the records at Vienna. The Elector’s stay there seems to have been protracted to a period of at least three months. During his visit there of equal length two years before, time probably dragged heavily, so this time ample provision was made for theatrical and musical amusement. Among the visiting theatrical troupes was one called the “Häusslersche Gesellschaft,” which played in summer at Nuremberg, in winter in Münster and Eichstädt. The entrepreneur was Baron von Bailaux, the chapelmaster Weber, the elder; and among the personnel were Herr Weber, the younger, and Madame Weber. From Max Weber’s biography of his father it appears that these Webers were the brother and sister-in-law of Carl Maria von Weber, then a child of some five years. “The troupe,” says the reporter of the “Theater-Kalender,” “performs the choicest pieces and the grandest operas.” So the father, Franz Anton von Weber, must have found himself at length in his own proper element, and still more so a year later, when he himself became the manager.
This company for a time migrated to Mergentheim and resumed the title of “Kurfürstliches Hoftheater.” Beethoven soon came thither also. Did he, when in after years he met Carl Maria von Weber, remember him as a feeble child at Mergentheim? Had his intercourse there with Fridolin von Weber, pupil of Joseph Haydn, any influence upon his determination soon after to become also that great master’s pupil?
An Expedition up the Rhine
Simonetti, Maximilian’s favorite and very fine tenor concert-singer, and some twenty-five members of the electoral orchestra, with Franz Ries as conductor—Reicha was too ill—including Beethoven, the two Rombergs and the fine octet of wind-instruments, formed an equally ample provision for the strictly musical entertainments. Actors, singers, musicians—Simonetti and the women-singers excepted—most of them still young, all in their best years and at the age for its full enjoyment, made the journey in two large boats up the Rhine and Main. Before leaving Bonn the company assembled and elected Lux king of the expedition, who in distributing the high offices of his court conferred upon Bernhard Romberg and Ludwig van Beethoven the dignity of, and placed them in his service as, kitchen-boys—scullions. It was the pleasantest season of the year for such a journey, the summer heats being tempered by the coolness of the Rhine and the currents of air passing up and down the deep gorge of the river. Vegetation was at its best and brightest, and the romantic beauty of its old towns and villages had not yet suffered either by the desolations of the wars soon to break upon them or by the resistless and romance-destroying march of “modern improvement.” Coblenz and Mayence were still capitals of states, and the huge fortress Rheinfels was not yet a ruin. When Risbeck passed down the Rhine ten years before, his boat “had a mast and sail, a flat deck with a railing, comfortable cabins with windows and some furniture, and in a general way in style was built like a Dutch yacht.” In boats like this, no doubt, the jolly company made the slow and, under the circumstances, perhaps, tedious journey against the current of the “arrowy Rhine.” But a glorious time and a merry they had of it. Want of speed was no misfortune to them, and in Beethoven’s memory the little voyage lived bright and beautiful and was to him “a fruitful source of loveliest visions.”
The Bingerloch was then held to be a dangerous, as it certainly was a difficult pass for boats ascending; for here the river, suddenly contracted to half its previous width, plunged amid long lines of rugged rocks into the gorge. So, leaving the boats to their conductors, the party ascended to the Niederwald; and there King Lux raised Beethoven to a higher dignity in his court—Wegeler does not state what it was—and confirmed his appointment by a diploma, or letters patent, dated on the heights above Rüdesheim. To this important document was attached by thread ravelled from a sail, a huge seal of pitch, pressed into the cover of a small box, which gave to the instrument a right imposing look—like the Golden Bull at Frankfort. This diploma from the hand of his comic majesty was among the articles taken by the possessor to Vienna where Wegeler saw it, still carefully preserved, in 1796.
Beethoven’s Meeting With Sterkel