The Life of Ludwig van Beethoven, Volume III

by Alexander Wheelock Thayer

Karl van Beethoven—A Wayward Ward and an Unwise Guardian—Beethoven and His Nephew—An Ill-advised Foster-father and a Graceless, Profligate Nephew—Effect on Beethoven’s Character of the Guardianship—An Unsuccessful Attempt at Self-destruction—Karl is Made a Soldier.

We are now to learn of the calamitous consequences of Beethoven’s effort to be a foster-father to the son of his dead brother Kaspar. The tale is one that has been fruitful of fiction in most of the writings which have dealt with the life-history of the great composer; nor is the circumstance to be wondered at. There is still some obscurity in the story, and if there is anything in the melancholy lot of the great man, next to his supreme affliction, calculated to challenge the pity of the world, it is the manner in which his efforts to attach to himself the one human being for whom he felt affection were requited. There is no more pitiful picture in the history of great men than that presented by his devotion to the lad in whom, for a reason which must have seemed to him more inscrutable than his own physical calamity, he could not inspire a spark of love or a scintilla of gratitude. It was an unwise devotion and an ill-directed effort, but that does not alter the case. From the beginning, all of his friends recognized Beethoven’s unfitness for the office of guardian of his nephew. He was incapacitated for it by his occupation, his irregular mode of life, his lack of understanding of a child’s nature, his irresolute mind, his infirmities of temper, and the wretchedness of his domestic surroundings due to his ignorance of and indifference to the things essential to the amenities and comforts of social life. He did not assume the guardianship in a spirit of gentle obedience to a dying brother’s request; he violently wrested it unto himself alone in defiance of that brother’s last entreaties. There can be no doubt but that he believed that in doing so he was performing a pious duty toward his own flesh and blood and acting for the good of the child and the welfare of the community. He was proud of the boy’s intellectual gifts, which were out of the ordinary; he dreamed of seeing him great and respected in the eyes of the world; he wanted loving companionship now, and in his old age; he hungered for sympathy and for help which would not keep him in bonds of obligation to men whose disinterestedness he could not understand because of his suspicious disposition; he desired to see by his side and in his kin an incarnation of that polite learning and that practical knowledge of worldly affairs which had been denied to him. All his aims were laudable, all his desires natural and praiseworthy; but he was the last man in the world to know how to attain them. There can be no doubt that his stubborn insistence upon making himself the sole director of the welfare of his ward cost him the sympathy, perhaps also the respect and regard, of many of those whose counsel he was perforce compelled to seek. For a long time until the final and woeful trial came it separated him from the oldest and truest friend that he had in Vienna—Stephan von Breuning. It tested the patience and tried the forbearance of those who helped him in his mistaken zeal.

Beethoven’s Moral Nature Marred

Moreover, it may be said without harshness or injustice to his memory that its consequences to his own moral nature were most deplorable. In a mind and heart prone to equity and tenderness it developed a strange capacity for cruel injustice. Aided by his native irresolution it twisted his judgment and turned his conduct into paradox. To satisfy his own love for the boy he strove fiercely to stifle a child’s natural affection for its mother. He thought that love for himself would grow out of hatred of the woman, though the passion which he tried to evoke was abhorrent to every instinct of nature. It matters not that the mother of Karl was profligate and lewd. Once a glimmer of that fact dawned upon him. It was while he was struggling to prevent all intercourse between the widow and her child in the early years that he was compelled to admit that to a child under all circumstances a mother is a mother still; but he made the confession to extenuate the conduct of the boy, not to justify the solicitude of the woman. His memory of his own mother, the sweet, patient sufferer of Bonn, was to him like a benison his whole life long. “Who was happier than I when I could still speak the sweet word ‘mother’ and have it heard,” he wrote to Dr. Schade, who had helped him on his sorrowful journey from Vienna to Bonn in 1787. But from the time that his brother Kaspar died until he himself gave up the ghost he was unswervingly occupied in preventing communication between Kaspar’s widow and her son. After more than twelve years he found that what he had tried to eradicate in the child, still lived in the youth. He had fought against nature and failed; and the failure filled him with bitterness, added to his hatred of the woman and his disappointment with the son. Such intensity of malevolence, though it may have had its origin in the profoundest conviction of virtuous purpose, could not fail to be prejudicial to his own moral character. So, also, his solicitude for his ward’s material welfare, which extended to a time when he should no longer be able to make provision for him, seems to have warped his nature. It weakened his pride; distorted his moral view; subjected him, not always unjustly, to accusation of dishonesty in his dealings with his patrons and publishers; made him parsimonious, and at the last brought upon him the reproach of having begged alms of his English friends, though possessed of property which might easily and quickly have been converted into money to supply his last needs more than generously.

To protect him against indictment for these moral flaws, many of Beethoven’s biographers thought, and still think, it necessary or justifiable to veil the truth and magnify the transgressions of his kindred and friends. His earliest apologists may have had other reasons besides these for so doing; his present biographers have none. By his own decree the world is entitled to know the truth. Schindler was embittered against Holz; Holz against Schindler; both against Johann van Beethoven, the brother; Beethoven himself taught his nephew to despise his uncle Johann as well as Schindler; and all three—Schindler, Holz and Johann—commissioned to that end, reported their observations of the lad’s shortcomings to his guardian. He accepted everything they said against the boy as he did everything they said against each other; indeed, his suspicious nature made him prone to believe evil of everyone near to him; and we do not know of a certainty that their reports were always within the bounds of strict veracity. After the tragedy they were unanimous in condemnation of the misguided, wayward, wicked youth and in praise of Beethoven’s magnanimity and self-sacrifice; but the evidence of helpful advice, warning and admonition to the mariner who was sailing a craft on a sea full of dangers to which nature had made him blind is not plentiful. Holz was young. He had scarcely finished sowing his own wild oats, and he seems to have been more lenient in his judgment than his elders, though just as convinced of the dangers into which the young man was running during the fateful last two years; but the few practical suggestions which we find him making do not seem to have been accepted. He was himself, like everybody else, under suspicion in Beethoven’s mind.

Concerning the details of the always disgraceful and at the end tragical conduct of Beethoven’s nephew much obscurity is left after the most painstaking study of the evidence to be found in the contemporary documents which have been preserved; but it is to these documents that appeal must be made if the truth is to be learned, not to the generalizations of romancing biographers. Twenty-nine letters written by Beethoven to the youth came into the hands of Beethoven after the attempt at suicide and through Schindler into the Royal Library at Berlin. However they may be viewed, they are a pathetic monument. They are a deeply affecting memorial of his almost idolatrous love for one wholly unworthy to receive it; but they also help measurably to explain why Beethoven defeated his own benevolent intentions. In them the paradoxes in his nature are piled one on top of the other. Alternately they breathe tender affection, gentle admonition and violent accusation; pride in the lad’s mental gifts, hope for his future, and loathing of his conduct; proclamations of his own self-sacrificing devotion set off against his ward’s ingratitude; pleadings that the boy love him and hate his mother; proud condemnation and piteous prayers for forgiveness; petitions for the boy’s reformation and promises of betterment in his own conduct. They give out the light in which the story must be told, though they contribute but little to the record of concrete facts. They leave us to conjecture and surmise as to many of the nephew’s motives and actual doings. It is from the pages of the Conversation Books of 1825 and 1826 that practically all of the attested truth concerning the happenings, their causes and effects, must be learned. Letters and these records of conversations are at the base of the following recital.[159]

Study Becomes Irksome to Karl

Karl was taken from his studies at the Blöchlinger Institute in the fall of 1823 and matriculated at the University of Vienna, where he pursued studies in philology from that time until the summer of 1825. Though his gifts were unquestioned and his attainments such as to make Beethoven eager to exploit them, he was not an industrious student. He seems to have experienced a desire to abandon the career which his uncle wished him to follow—that of a professor of languages, no doubt—before he had sat under the university lectures a year. His zeal for study soon evaporated, he spent much time in idle amusements, neglected to visit his uncle with the regularity expected from him, and soon broached the subject of a change in his intended pursuits. As early as 1824 he expressed a desire to enter the army. The thought was little short of appalling to Beethoven, who was obliged, however, at last to listen to arguments in favor of a mercantile career. Karl pointed out that a bookkeeper earned a great deal more money than a professor, that trade was honorable, and that he intended to keep on with his study of the languages, especially Greek, for his own pleasure and intellectual profit. Meanwhile he had continued his attendance on the lectures at the university, and it was not until towards the end of the Easter semester of 1825 that Beethoven consented to the change, entered him in the Polytechnic Institute, and arranged to have the vice-director of the Institute, Dr. Reisser, appointed co-guardian in place of Peters, with whom he took counsel as he also did, in great likelihood, with Stephan von Breuning. There were two great admirers of Beethoven’s music in the Institute, Reisser and Dr. Ignaz von Sonnleithner, one of the teachers, and after Karl had been placed under the supervision of a government official named Schlemmer, who lived in the Alleegasse adjacent to the Karlskirche, with whom the lad took lodgings, all seemed again to be well. He entered the Institute about Easter, 1825, and, if his own statements are to be accepted (Dr. Reisser, too, makes favorable reports of him), he made a good beginning in his new studies. His Sundays and holidays during the ensuing summer were spent with his uncle at Baden, where he was kept at work, too assiduously perhaps, writing Beethoven’s letters, and filling numerous other commissions. But his zeal did not endure. He became negligent in his studies; work became irksome and the pleasures of the city alluring. He was drawn willingly into the maelstrom of Viennese life. He grew fond of billiards, dancing and the theatre; he kept low company. Of all this there can be no doubt. Beethoven kept himself informed as to his conduct through Holz, through his brother, and sometimes went to Vienna himself to make inquiries. When Karl comes to Baden, Beethoven charges him with his shortcomings and there are unseemly scenes between the two. At first Karl seeks to be conciliatory, but it is only too plain that he is not always frank and truthful in his replies. The chronological course of events as learned from the Conversation Books cannot be set down with exactitude; nor is it necessary that it should. A young rake’s progress can easily be imagined, but some incidents may be included in this narrative, as showing the changing attitude of guardian and ward, uncle and nephew, toward each other, and some of the steps which led to the final catastrophe.

At an early date in this period Beethoven had become suspicious of the character of some of Karl’s associates, particularly of a lad of his own age named Niemetz, whose acquaintance, it was said, he made at his mother’s. Whether or not this is true cannot be proved; but if Beethoven believed it that fact sufficed to convince him of the young man’s moral turpitude. Certain it is that the mother knew Niemetz and thought as well of him as the uncle thought ill, for one of her exclamations after the attempt at self-destruction, reported to Beethoven, was, “What will good Niemetz say!” Beethoven forbade the association and a violent quarrel ensued in Baden, where Karl introduced his friend to his uncle. It seems likely that the encounter took place in a public room and that Beethoven could not wait until he had reached the privacy of his lodgings before expressing his dissatisfaction with the young man; for his remarks to Karl as well as the latter’s replies are written in the book. Beethoven’s denunciations stir up a spirit of defiance in his ward; he finally declares flatly that Niemetz had cheered his unhappy hours at Blöchlinger’s and that he would not now lie by saying that he would cease loving his friend or admit that he had a bad character.

Beethoven Pleads with His Nephew