No; it’s the same in winter. What is there for them to hear? “Fidelio”? they can’t perform it and do not want to hear it. The symphonies? For these they have no time. The concertos? Everybody grinds out his own productions. The solos? They’re out of fashion long ago—and fashion is everything. At the best, Schuppanzigh occasionally digs up a quartet, etc.
Rochlitz is here probably helping out his memory by drawing a bit on his fancy; Schuppanzigh was at this time still in Russia, having started on a tour through Germany, Poland and Russia in 1815, from which he did not return till 1823. Rochlitz is interesting, but it is well to revise his utterances by occasional appeals to known facts. He goes on: Beethoven asked him if he lived in Weimar and Rochlitz shook his head. “Then you do not know the great Goethe?” Rochlitz nodded violently in affirmation that he did know the great Goethe. “I do, too; I got acquainted with him in Carlsbad—God knows how long ago!” (But it was not in Carlsbad that Beethoven met Goethe; it was in Teplitz and ten years “ago.”) Beethoven continued: “I was not so deaf then as I am now, but hard of hearing. How patient the great man was with me!... How happy he made me then! I would have gone to my death for him; yes, ten times! It was while I was in the ardor of this enthusiasm that I thought out my music to his ‘Egmont’—and it is a success, isn’t it?” A success, surely; but Beethoven is not likely to have forgotten that the music to “Egmont” was two years old when he met Goethe. Rochlitz, it is to be feared, is indulging his imagination again; but he is probably correct on the whole. Let Beethoven proceed with his monologue:
Since that summer I read Goethe every day, when I read at all. He has killed Klopstock for me. You are surprised? Now you smile? Aha! You smile that I should have read Klopstock! I gave myself up to him many years,—when I took my walks and at other times. Ah well! I didn’t understand him always. He is so restless; and he always begins too far away, from on high down; always Maestoso, D-flat major! Isn’t it so? But he’s great, nevertheless, and uplifts the soul. When I did not understand I divined pretty nearly. But why should he always want to die? That will come soon enough. Well; at least he always sounds well, etc. But Goethe:—he lives and wants us all to live with him. That’s the reason he can be composed. Nobody else can be so easily composed as he.
Rochlitz had sought Beethoven with a commission from Härtel:—that he compose music for Goethe’s “Faust” like that written for “Egmont.” The psychological moment for broaching the subject was arrived and Rochlitz made the communication on the tablet.
He read. “Ha!” he cried, and threw his hands high in the air. “That would be a piece of work! Something might come out of that!” He continued for a while in this manner, elaborating his ideas at once and with bowed head staring at the ceiling. “But,” he continued, after a while, “I have been occupied for a considerable time with three other big works; much of them is already hatched out—i. e., in my head. I must rid myself of them first; two large symphonies differing from each other, and an oratorio. They will take a long time; for, you see, for some time I can’t bring myself to write easily. I sit and think, and think. The ideas are there, but they will not go down on the paper. I dread the beginning of great works; once begun, it’s all right.”
Most of this is in harmony with what we know from other sources. We have seen how laboriously Beethoven developed the works of large dimensions in this period; we know that he had thought of “Faust” as a subject for composition as early as 1808[62] and that it pursued him in his last years. But Härtel’s proposition sent through Greisinger in the same year was for an opera, and it seems likely that the “Faust” idea was independent of it and possibly an original conceit of Rochlitz’s. Be that as it may, Rochlitz did make one proposition in which his interest was personal. After his return to Leipsic he wrote a letter to Haslinger on September 10, 1822, in which he expressed the wish that Beethoven would give a musical setting to his poem “Der erste Ton,” and, if Schindler is correct, he suggested to Beethoven himself that he write music for his “Preis der Tonkunst.” Nothing came of the suggestions, though it would appear that Rochlitz had discussed both poems with Beethoven. There was a third meeting at which the two, in company with another friend of Beethoven’s (Rochlitz says it was Gebauer), made a promenade through a valley which lasted from ten o’clock in the forenoon till six o’clock in the evening. Beethoven enlivened the walk with conversation full of tirades against existing conditions, humorous anecdotes and drolleries. “In all seriousness, he seems amiable, or, if this word startle you, I say: The gloomy, unlicked bear is so winning and confiding, growls and shakes his hairy coat so harmlessly and curiously, that it is delightful, and one could not help liking him even if he were but a bear and had done nothing but what a bear can do.”
Beethoven’s Opinion of Rossini
The meeting between Rochlitz and Beethoven took place in Baden; but as we have seen, the latter did not begin his sojourn there until September 1, and Rochlitz’s letter is dated July 9; so it would appear that Beethoven had come from Oberdöbling on a visit to Baden; Schindler says nothing to the contrary. Earlier in 1822 Beethoven received a visit from a man who lies considerably nearer the sympathies of the generation for which this book is written than Rochlitz. This man was Rossini. His operas had been on the current list in Vienna for several years, and with the coming of the composer in person, in the spring of 1822, the enthusiasm for him and his music had grown into a fanatical adoration. Beethoven had seen the score of “Il Barbiere” and heard it sung by the best Italian singers of the period. Moreover, he had a high admiration for the Italian art of song and a very poor opinion of German singers. In Barbaja’s troupe were Lablache, Rubini, Donzelli and Ambroggio, and the Demoiselles Sontag, Ungher, Lalande and Dardanelli. Rossini was on his wedding trip, having but recently married Colbran, and his elegant manners and brilliant conversation had made him the lion of aristocratic drawing-rooms in the Austrian capital. “Zelmira” had been written especially for the Vienna season, though it had been tried at the Teatro San Carlo in Naples in the preceding December. It had its first performance at the Kärnthnerthor Theatre on April 13.[63] Several of Beethoven’s utterances concerning the musician, who no doubt did much to divert the taste of the masses away from the German master’s compositions, have been preserved. Seyfried recorded that in answer to the question. “What is Rossini?” Beethoven replied, “A good scene-painter,” and Seyfried also makes note of this utterance: “The Bohemians are born musicians; the Italians ought to take them as models. What have they to show for their famous conservatories? Behold their idol—Rossini! If Dame Fortune had not given him a pretty talent and pretty melodies by the bushel, what he learned at school would have brought him nothing but potatoes for his big belly!” Schindler says that after reading the score of “Il Barbiere” Beethoven said: “Rossini would have been a great composer if his teacher had frequently applied some blows ad posteriora.” To Freudenberg at Baden in 1824 he remarked: “Rossini is a talented and a melodious composer; his music suits the frivolous and sensuous spirit of the times, and his productivity is so great that he needs only as many weeks as the Germans need years to write an opera.”
The Rossini craze was no doubt largely responsible for some of Beethoven’s outbreaks concerning the taste of the Viennese, but on the whole he does not seem seriously to have been disturbed by it. Schindler cites him as remarking on the change in the popular attitude: “Well, they can not rob me of my place in musical history.” As for the Italian singers he thought so much of them that he told Caroline Ungher that he would write an Italian opera for Barbaja’s company.
As for Rossini, he had heard some of Beethoven’s quartets played by Mayseder and his associates, and had enjoyed them enthusiastically. It was therefore natural enough that he should want to visit the composer. Schindler says that he went twice with Artaria to call upon him, after Artaria had each time asked permission, but that on both occasions Beethoven had asked to be excused from receiving him—a circumstance which had given rise to considerable comment in Vienna. The story is not true, but that it was current in Vienna four years afterward appears from an entry in a Conversation Book of August 1826 where somebody asks: “It is true, isn’t it, that Rossini wanted to visit you and you refused to see him?” There is no written answer. We repeat: the story is not true, though both Nohl and Wasielewski accepted it without demur. Twice, at least, Rossini publicly denied it. In 1867 Dr. Eduard Hanslick visited him with two friends in Paris. Concerning the interview, Hanslick wrote:[64]