Diabelli agrees to wait until the tardy answers have been received before opening the subscription. But he is not willing to wait a whole year.
And in April:
Are you agreed? The only question is whether you give Diab. the privilege of announcing the subscription a month before he pays. It is his wish not to put the Mass in hand until he has paid. About Diabelli then—do you want to leave the matter to me or consider the publication by yourself? Diabelli wants the Mass by July 1 in order to have it ready by the St. Michael Fair.
Later, August 1 and September 1 are mentioned. Beethoven was firm in his determination to keep faith with his subscribers. He writes to Schindler: “There are only two courses as regards the Mass, namely, that the publisher delay the publication a year and a day; or, if not, we can not accept a subscription.” Later he writes: “Nothing is to be changed in the Diabelli contract except that the time when he is to receive the Mass from me be left undetermined.” The contract in question which was thus to be amended concerned the Variations, but presumably the Mass also. Beethoven writes:
From my little book I see that you have doubts in the matter of the Mass and Diab., wherefore, I beg you to come soon, for in that case we will not give him the Var. either, as my brother knows somebody who wants to take them both. We are therefore in a position to talk to him.
Either this disagreement or some other in a matter in which Schindler acted as Beethoven’s agent brought out a letter from the latter to the former in which he expresses a belief that the business, “so disagreeable to you,” might be brought to a conclusion soon: “moreover I was not, unfortunately, entirely wrong in not wholly trusting Diab.” Schindler, in a gloss on this note, says that the disagreeable business concerned the Mass. Diabelli had made plans which were not only harmful to the work but humiliating as well to Beethoven. Schindler pointed this out and Diabelli became violent and declared that since the contract was as good as closed he would summon Schindler before a court of law if it were not kept. “But,” says Schindler, “the threat did no good; he had to take back the document.” The numerous notes to Schindler about this period are undated and the times at which they were written have been only approximately fixed by Schindler; there is also some vagueness touching the time and order of the written conversations, but the evidence thus far presented, together with a significant remark in a billet to Schindler, to the effect that he had thought of a project which would “act like a pistol-shot on this fellow,” would seem to justify the assumption that Beethoven had entered into the same kind of obligation with Diabelli as he had with Simrock and Peters so far as the Mass was concerned, and that before the execution of a formal contract, which seems to have been considered necessary in this case, which was to include the Variations on the Diabelli Waltz theme, Beethoven had embarked on his enterprise with the sovereigns, which made the speedy publication of the Mass in the ordinary way impossible with honor; further, that a threat to withhold the Variations had been used to bring the irate publisher to terms. In the April Conversation Book Schindler says: “Won’t Diabelli make wry faces when your brother demands the document back almost as soon as he has received it!”
Dubious Aspect of the Negotiations
To the commercialized mind of to-day it is possible that the picture which has just been presented here of a superlatively great artist hawking his creations in the courts of Europe, appealing to his friends and patrons among the great to act as his go-betweens, railing against the tardy and permitting those who were prompt in payment to wait unconscionable periods for their property, may seem to present as little of the aspect of debasement of genius and its products as it did at a time when great musicians were menials in the households of the highborn, and thrift could only follow fawning. But Beethoven had done much to exalt art and emancipate the artist, and what would have caused little comment in the case of his predecessors amongst court musicians was scarcely venial in him who preached a new ethic as well as artistic evangel. And so, to minds untainted by trade and attuned to a love of moral as well as æsthetic beauty, the spectacle which Beethoven presents in 1823 must be quite as saddening as that disclosed by his dealings with the publishers in the years immediately preceding. A greater measure of commiseration goes out to him now, however, because of the evidence that the new phase cost him greater qualms of conscience and that the exigencies which impelled him were more pressing. His physical ailments were increasing; his deafness had put a stop to his appearances in public as an artist; his eyes were troubling him; there was no lessening of his concern about his ward, but an increase in the cost of his maintenance; his income was continually dwindling because of his lessening productivity, notwithstanding that the fees which he could command for new works (and even the remnants of his youthful activity) had reached dimensions of which he had never dreamed in the heyday of his powers; he felt the oppressive burden of his debts more and more as his unreasoning love for his foster-son prompted him to make provision against the future. The royal subscription was, no doubt, a welcome scheme which, if not suggested by his advisers, was certainly encouraged by them; but it must have cost his proud soul no little humiliation to have his application rejected after he had so deeply bent “the pregnant hinges of the knee.” The publishers gave him less concern. They were his natural enemies and he theirs—“hellhounds who licked and gnawed his brains,” as he expressed it in a letter to Holz in 1825; yet he knew that he would need them, and he knew also that as soon as he went to them, and the mass appeared in print, the manuscript copies which he had sold would be all but worthless. But this may have troubled him little, as he, in all likelihood, shared Schindler’s conviction that there was no permanency of interest in the work on the part of the crowned heads and that they would not be troubled by the appearance of the work in print. Patronage of art is part of the obligation which rests upon royalty, and it would have been little less than a crime to withhold the Mass from the public; but what of the exclusiveness of right which was implied, if not expressed, in the letter to Zelter and presumably also in that to the Cæcilia Society of Frankfort? He had informed the kings, who might not even deign to glance at the Mass, that he had no “present” intention to print the work, leaving them to gather that he would do so later; but he plainly gives Zelter to understand that it is to remain a manuscript. Here, too, the advice of his friends, who could see his need but did not feel the moral responsibility which he may, or ought to, have felt, must have been persuasive and also comforting.[79] The world has too long enjoyed the great work to distress itself about the circumstances of its creation and publication; but the historian and moralist may yet as deeply deplore them as pity the conditions which compelled the composer to yield to them.
Dealings with the London Philharmonic