The Years 1820 and 1821—End of the Guardianship Litigation—A Costly Victory—E. T. A. Hoffmann—Financial Troubles—Adagios and English Hymn-tunes—Arrested as a Vagrant—Negotiations for the Mass in D—The Last Pianoforte Sonatas.
Departure of Old Friends
Almost involuntarily, in passing in review the incidents of the year whose story has just been told and projecting a glance into the near future, the question arises: Where, in these moments of doubt, ill-health, trial, vexation of spirit and torment of body were the old friends of Beethoven who in the earlier years had stood by him faithfully and lovingly? Where was Stephan von Breuning? Alas! he seems to have been an early sacrifice to Beethoven’s obstinate course in respect of his nephew. Schindler says that he had advised against the adoption of the boy and thus wounded Beethoven in his most sensitive part. The temporary estrangement began in 1817. Some others of the old friends may have been rebuffed in like manner; some, like the faithful seneschal, Zmeskall, were ill; some were absent from Vienna—Count Brunswick, Schuppanzigh; some were dead; in some the flames of friendship may have died down because there was so little in Beethoven’s public life to challenge their sympathy and support. Count Lichnowsky has dropped out of the narrative and does not appear for some years. What had happened to the ardent friend of the youthful days, Count Waldstein? There is no answer. Once a Conversation Book awakens curiosity and a hope. Somebody warns Beethoven in a public place not to speak so loud, as everybody is listening. “Count Waldstein is sitting near; where does he live?” Beethoven’s answer is unrecorded and thus passes the only opportunity which the known material offers from which might have been learned what caused the death of that beautiful friendship. Bernard, Schindler, Oliva, Peters and Bach were near to him, and the last was of incalculable value to him in his great trial. But could they replace those who were gone?
Beethoven was become a lonely man—an enforced seeker of solitude. No doubt many who would have been glad to give him their friendship were deterred by the wide-spread reports of his suspicious, unapproachable, almost repellant nature. But a miracle happens. Driven in upon himself by the forces which seem to have been arrayed against him, introspection opens wider and wider to him the doors of that imagination which in its creative function, as Ruskin tells us, is “an eminent beholder of things when and where they are not; a seer that is, in the prophetic sense, calling the things that are not as though they were; and for ever delighting to dwell on that which is not tangibly present.” Now he proclaims a new evangel, illustrates a higher union of beauty and truthfulness of expression, exalts art till it enters the realm of religion.
In the Tagebuch there stands a bold inscription written in February of the year 1820: “The moral law in us, and the starry sky above us—Kant.”[24] This and two other citations, the first of which Beethoven surely culled from some book, also deserve to be set down here as mottoes applicable to the creative work which occupied his mind during the year and thereafter:
’Tis said that art is long and life is fleeting:—
Nay; life is long and brief the span of art!
If e’er her breath vouchsafes with gods a meeting,
A moment’s favor ’tis of which we’ve had a part.
The world is a king and desires flattery in return for favor; but true art is perverse and will not submit to the mould of flattery. Famous artists always labor under an embarrassment;—therefore, first works are the best, though they may have sprung from dark ground.
We can only record the fact that Beethoven began the year 1820, as he had begun its immediate predecessor, by sending a New Year’s greeting to the august pupil who was now almost continually in his mind—Archduke Rudolph, soon to be Archbishop and Cardinal[25]—before taking up the story of the incubus which oppressed the composer’s mind, the clog which impeded his creative activities during much of the year—the legal proceedings concerning the guardianship of nephew Karl. Fortunately for the tinge of these pages the end is not distant.
Two applications made by Beethoven to the Court of Magistrates had been denied and he now asked for a review of these decisions by the Court of Appeals. The action of the Magistracy had grievously pained him, so he informed the superior tribunal, and not only had his rights been set aside, but no regard had been shown for the welfare of his nephew. Against this he now sought relief, and he set forth his grievances: (1) He was testamentary appointee and the Landrecht had confirmed him and excluded the mother; circumstances compelling his absence from Vienna, he had arranged that Herr Nussböck should be appointed guardian ad interim; back permanently in the city, his nephew’s welfare required that he resume the guardianship; (2) The higher education which his nephew’s talents demanded neither the mother nor Nussböck could direct—the former because she was a woman and had conducted herself in a manner which had led the Landrecht to exclude her, Nussböck because he was too much occupied with his duties as Municipal Sequestrator and, having been no more than a paper-maker, he did not possess the insight and judgment essential to the scientific education of the ward. (3) Having no child of his own, his hopes were set on the boy, who was unusually talented, yet he had been told that he had been held back a year in his studies and that owing to a lack of funds he was to be taken from the institution in which he had been placed and given in the care of his mother; by her mismanagement the boy would be sacrificed, it being the aim of the mother to expend his share of the pension money on herself. He had declared to the Magistracy his willingness to defray the costs at the institute and also to engage other masters for the boy. Being “somewhat hard of hearing” communication with him was difficult and therefore he had asked that a co-guardian be appointed in the person of Herr Peters, Prince Lobkowitzsian Councillor, whose knowledge and moral character would assure such a training and education as were justified by the boy’s capacity. “I know of no more sacred duty than the care and education of a child,” he observes. He would offer no objection to the mother’s having a “sort of joint-guardianship,” but its duties and privileges should be limited to her visiting him and learning what plans were making for his education; to permit more would be to compass the ruin of the boy.[26]