The Life of Ludwig van Beethoven, Volume III

by Alexander Wheelock Thayer

Beethoven read and remained silent; we looked at each other mutely, but a world of emotions surged in my breast. Beethoven, too, was unmistakably moved. He arose and went to the window, where he remained standing beside the pianoforte. To see him so near the instrument gave me an idea which I had never before dared to harbor. If he—Oh! he needed only to turn half way around and he would be facing the keyboard—if he would but sit down and give expression to his feelings in tones! Filled with a timid, blissful hope, I approached him and laid my hand upon the instrument. It was an English pianoforte by Broadwood. I struck a chord lightly with my right hand in order to induce Beethoven to turn around; but he seemed not to have heard it. A few moments later, however, he turned to me, and, seeing my eyes fixed upon the instrument he said: “That is a beautiful pianoforte! I got it as a present from London. Look at these names.” He pointed to the cross-beam over the keyboard. There I saw several names which I had not before noticed—Moscheles, Kalkbrenner, Cramer, Clementi, Broadwood himself.... “That is a beautiful gift,” said Beethoven looking at me, “and it has such a beautiful tone,” he continued and moved his hands towards the keys without taking his eyes off me. He gently struck a chord. Never again will one enter my soul so poignant, so heartbreaking as that one was! He struck C major with the right hand and B as a bass in the left, and continued his gaze uninterruptedly on me, repeated the false chord several times in order to let the sweet tone of the instrument reverberate; and the greatest musician on earth did not hear the dissonance! Whether or not Beethoven noticed his mistake I do not know; but when he turned his head from me to the instrument he played a few chords correctly and then stopped. That was all that I heard from him directly.

Rellstab had planned a short excursion to Hungary and then intended to leave Vienna for his home. Fearful that he might not see Beethoven on his return to the city he went to him to say farewell:

Beethoven spoke very frankly and with feeling. I expressed my regret that in all the time of my sojourn in Vienna I had heard, except one of his symphonies and a quartet, not a single composition of his in concert; why had “Fidelio” not been given? This gave him an opportunity to express himself on the subject of the taste of the Vienna people. “Since the Italians (Barbaja) have gotten such a strong foothold here the best has been crowded out. For the nobility, the chief thing at the theatre is the ballet. Nothing can be said about their appreciation of art; they have sense only for horses and dancers. We have always had this state of things. But this gives me no concern; I want only to write that which gives me joy. If I were well it would be all the same to me!”

On his departure Beethoven, who had been absent from his lodgings when Rellstab called for his final leavetaking, sent him a letter to Steiner and Co., containing a canon on the words from Matthison’s “Opferlied” of which he had made use on at least one earlier occasion (“Das Schöne zu dem Guten”).

An Utterance on Ecclesiastical Music

Karl Gottfried Freudenberg, a young musician who afterwards became Head Organist at Breslau and wrote a book of reminiscences entitled “Erinnerungen eines alten Organisten,” visited Beethoven in July of the year and has left a record which is none the less interesting because its lack of literary flourish is offset by succinct reports of the great composer’s estimate of some of his contemporaries, and his views on ecclesiastical music. Beethoven, according to Freudenberg, described Rossini as a “talented and a melodious composer; his music suits the frivolous and sensuous spirit of the time, and his productivity is such that he needs only as many weeks as the Germans do years to write an opera.” He said of Spontini: “There is much good in him; he understands theatrical effects and the musical noises of warfare thoroughly”; of Spohr: “He is too rich in dissonances, pleasure in his music is marred by his chromatic melody”; of Bach: “His name ought not to be Bach (brook) but Ocean, because of his infinite and inexhaustible wealth of combinations and harmonies. He was the ideal of an organist.” This led Beethoven into the subject of music for the church. “I, too, played the organ a great deal in my youth,” he said, “but my nerves could not stand the power of the gigantic instrument. I place an organist who is master of his instrument, first among virtuosi.” Pure church music, he remarked, ought to be performed only by voices, unless the text be a Gloria or something of the kind. For this reason he preferred Palestrina to all other composers of church music, but it was folly to imitate him unless one had his genius and his religious beliefs; moreover, it was practically impossible for singers to-day to sing the long-sustained notes of this music in a cantabile manner.

Karl August Reichardt, afterwards Court Organist in Altenburg, S. M. de Boer, a member of the Academy of Fine Arts in Amsterdam, Carl Czerny, Friedrich Kuhlau, Sir George Smart and Moritz Schlesinger were among the visitors to Baden in the summer to whose meetings with the composer the Conversation Books bear always interesting and sometimes diverting witness. Reichardt’s visit seems to have been brief, and it is safe to presume that the young man received scant encouragement to remain long, for his talk was chiefly about himself, his desire to get advice as to a good teacher and to have Beethoven look at some of his music. The man from Holland, who probably had used his predicate as a member of the Academy which had elected Beethoven an honorary member to gain an audience, must have diverted the composer with his broken German, which looks no more comical in the Conversation Book than it must have sounded; but a canon without words which he carried away with him may be said to bear witness to the fact that he made a good impression on Beethoven, to whom he gave information concerning the state of music in the Dutch country. Czerny, apparently, was urged by his erstwhile teacher to get an appointment and to compose in the larger forms. Beethoven was curious to learn how much Czerny received for his compositions and Czerny told him that he attached no importance to his pieces, because he scribbled them down so easily, and that he took music from the publishers in exchange.

The visit of the Danish composer, flautist and director, Friedrich Kuhlau, led to a right merry feast, for a description of which Seyfried found a place in the appendix of his “Studien.” That the boundaries of nice taste in conversation and story-telling may have been strained a bit is an inference from the fact that several pages of the Conversation Book containing the recorded relics of the affair are missing. After a promenade through the Helenenthal in which Beethoven amused himself by setting all manner of difficult tasks in hill-climbing, the party sat down to dinner at an inn. Champagne flowed freely, and after the return to Beethoven’s lodgings red Vöslauer, brought from his closet or cellar, did its share still further to elevate the spirits of the feasters. Beethoven seems to have held his own in the van of the revel. Kuhlau improvised a canon on B-a-c-h, to which Beethoven replied with the same notes as an opening motive and the words “Kühl, nicht lau” (“Cool, not lukewarm”)—a feeble play on the Danish musician’s name, but one which served to carry the music. Beethoven wrote his canon in the Conversation Book. The next day Kuhlau confessed to Schlesinger that he did not know how he had gotten home and to bed: Beethoven’s post-festal reflections may be gathered from the letter which accompanied a copy of the canon which he sent to Kuhlau by the hands of Holz:

Baden, September 3, 1825.