Three Purchasers Fail to Get the Mass
So far as Peters is concerned the matter must be dropped for a space; he published none of the works sent to him, did not receive the Mass, and, refusing to take a quartet in return for the 360 florins which Beethoven collected in advance, placing the blame on him, got the money back from Beethoven some time after November, 1825. Peters did not get the Mass; nor did Simrock; nor did Schlesinger; nor did Probst, another Leipsic publisher with whom Beethoven carried on negotiations for it and the Ninth Symphony, as will appear later; nor did Artaria, Beethoven’s old publisher who, in all likelihood, was one of the “two other men” of whom Beethoven wrote in the letter last quoted. On August 23, 1822, Artaria received a letter which, as it seems to stand alone so far as the Mass is concerned, may well be printed in full:
Being just now overwhelmed with work, I can only say briefly that I have always returned your favors whenever possible. As regards the Mass I have been offered 1000 florins, C. C. for it. The state of my affairs do not permit me to take a smaller honorarium from you. All that I can do is to give you the preference. Rest assured that I do not take a heller more from you than has been offered me by others. I could prove this to you in writing. You may think this over but I beg of you to send me an answer by to-morrow noon as to-morrow is postday and my decision is expected in other places.
I will make a proposition to you concerning the 150 florins C. C. which I owe you, but the sum must not be deducted now, as I am in urgent need of the 1000 florins. In addition I beg of you to keep everything secret about the Mass.
It must long ago have been observed by the studious reader of these pages that a great deal of illuminative material in the life-story of Beethoven is found in the correspondence between the composer and his publishers; but these letters in the later years of his life, and especially in the period with which we are now concerned, were but sorry guides to the state of forwardness in which compositions found themselves at any stated time. Frequently they offer for publication works which, so far as they had been fixed on paper at all, existed only in the form of detached sketches; also some which, so far as we know, existed only in the plans or purposes of the composer of which the letters themselves are the only surviving records. It seems also to be a fair deduction from them that Beethoven’s attitude towards his publishers with reference to them depended to a considerable extent on his temporary financial condition, and sometimes they are an index of that consecration to high artistic ideals of which he remains an unapproached exemplar. The Mass in D is almost always ready for delivery when he is in financial extremities; but when he has helped himself with loans or the collection of advances, or the sale of old manuscripts or potboilers, his insatiable desire to revise, amend and improve his great work takes possession of him, and the vast amount of rewriting and recopying thus entailed pushes its ultimate completion into the future and precipitates another period of distress. He borrowed money from Brentano on the strength of the deposit which Simrock had made in Frankfort; collected the honorarium which Peters had advanced on the purchase of long undelivered songs, bagatelles and marches; postponed the evil day of liquidation with Steiner; finally borrowed money from his brother Johann, and to secure the debt practically hypothecated to him all the manuscripts which lay finished and unfinished in his desk by placing their sale in his hands, subject to his instructions and advice. This circumstance brings Johann van Beethoven back significantly into this history and invites an inquiry into his character and his conduct with reference to his famous brother. That, contemptible as his character may have been, he has yet been maligned and his conduct towards Beethoven falsified by Schindler and the romance writers who have accepted Schindler’s misrepresentations and embellished them with the products of their own unscrupulous imaginations, is scarcely open to doubt.
Something of the earlier history of Johann van Beethoven has been told in the chapters of this biography which deal with the incidents of the years 1808 and 1812. The brother, whose association with a woman obnoxious to him because of her frivolousness and moral laxity Beethoven sought to prevent by police methods and thereby only precipitated a marriage, had grown rich enough in the interim to buy some farm property near Gneixendorf and to make his winter residence in Vienna. There we find him in the spring of 1822 living in the house of his brother-in-law, a baker named Obermayer, at the intersection of Koth- and Pfarrgassen. Thenceforward for a number of years, because of his relationship to his famous brother, his idiosyncrasies, habits and public behavior (and to a smaller number, the conduct of his wife), he became a conspicuous and rather comical figure in Vienna. Gerhard von Breuning described him thus:[55]
His hair was blackish-brown; hat well brushed; clothing clean but suggesting that of a man who wishes to be elegantly clad on Sundays; somewhat old-fashioned and uncouth, an effect which was caused by his bone-structure, which was angular and unlovely. His waist was rather small; no sign of embonpoint; shoulders broad; if my memory serves me rightly, his shoulders were a trifle uneven, or it may have been his angular figure which made him look unsymmetrical; his clothing generally consisted of a blue frockcoat with brass buttons, white necktie, light trousers (I think corn color), loose linen-thread gloves, the fingers too long so that they folded at the ends or stuck out loosely. His hands were broad and bony. He was not exactly tall of stature, but much taller than Ludwig. His nose was large and rather long, the position of his eyes, crooked, the effect being as if he squinted a little with one eye. The mouth was crooked, one corner drawn upwards giving him the expression of a mocking smile. In his garb he affected to be a well-to-do elegant, but the role did not suit his angular, bony figure. He did not in the least resemble his brother Ludwig.
Character of Johann van Beethoven
Breuning also says in his book “Aus dem Schwarzspanierhause,” that he was sometimes seen driving in the Prater with two or four horses in an old-fashioned phaeton, either handling the reins himself or lolling carelessly in the seat with two gallooned servants on the box. Beethoven’s friends used to ridicule his brother to his face. In a Conversation Book of 1822-23 Count Moritz Lichnowsky writes: “Everybody thinks him a fool; we call him only the Chevalier—all the world says of him that his only merit is that he bears your name.” No doubt there was something, even a good deal, of the parvenu in Johann’s character. He had neither the intellectual nor moral poise to fit him for the place which he thought he was entitled to fill by virtue of his wealth and his relationship to one of the most famous men of his age. Nor could he command respect from a social point of view. How far from above reproach his wife was, Beethoven showed by his unjustifiable conduct when he sought to have her ejected from Linz in order to separate her from his brother. That conduct Ludwig’s letters, soon to be quoted, show had been condoned by him, but a memorandum found among Schindler’s papers discloses that her conduct in Vienna was such that Beethoven again thought of invoking the police.[56]