I can not possibly remain silent concerning the future fate of Karl. He is abandoning all activity and, grown accustomed to this life, the longer he lives as at present, the more difficult will it be to bring him back to work. At his departure Breuning gave him a fortnight to recuperate in, and now it is two months. You see from Breuning’s letter that it is his decided wish that Karl shall hasten to his calling; the longer he is here the more unfortunate will it be for him, for the harder will it be for him to get to work, and it may be that we shall suffer harm.
It is an infinite pity that this talented young man so wastes his time; and on whom if not on us two will the blame be laid? for he is still too young to direct his own course; for which reason it is your duty, if you do not wish to be reproached by yourself and others hereafter, to put him to work at his profession as soon as possible. Once he is occupied it will be easy to do much for him now and in the future; but under present conditions nothing can be done.
I see from his actions that he would like to remain with us, but if he did so it would be all over with his future, and therefore this is impossible. The longer we hesitate the more difficult will it be for him to go away; I therefore adjure you—make up your mind, do not permit yourself to be dissuaded by Karl. I think it ought to be by next Monday, for in no event can you wait for me, inasmuch as I cannot go away from here without money, and it will be a long time before I collect enough to enable me to go to Vienna.
How Beethoven received this letter must be left to the imagination. Its wisdom temporarily disarmed Schindler, who forgot all of his frequently wicked charges against Johann long enough to admit that the document proved that he was not utterly without good qualities of character. He adds that he was in a position to assert that Ludwig took his brother’s suggestion with bad grace and that before his departure from Gneixendorf there was an exceedingly acrimonious quarrel between the brothers, growing out of Ludwig’s demand that Johann make a will in favor of Karl, thus cutting off his wife. It is to this that the penciled endorsement on the letter refers. This subject, Schindler says, was the real cause of the estrangement between the brothers during the last five or six years of Ludwig’s life. The blame, he adds, rested with Ludwig, who, “constantly at odds with himself and all the world, loved and hated without reason.” Weeks afterward, while he lay dying in Vienna, Beethoven’s thoughts were still occupied with the purpose of persuading his brother to make a will in Karl’s favor.[162] A moment’s reflection on a single fact will serve to give the quietus to Schindler’s insinuation as to improper relationship between the young man of 19 and his aunt of 40; at the time that Karl is pleading to stay in the country, Johann is urging his brother to send him about his duty, and Beethoven is halting in irresolution, the woman is in Vienna.
The Fateful Journey from Gneixendorf
It must be assumed that the Monday referred to in Johann’s letter was Monday, November 27; but several days must have elapsed between this date and the time when Beethoven and Karl set out on the fateful journey to Vienna. A determination seems to have been reached when the Book shows Johann as saying: “If you are to start on Monday the carriage must be ordered on Sunday.” There is no recorded conversation touching the use of Johann’s carriage, which, so far as anything is known to the contrary, may have still been in Vienna, whither, it is safe to assume, it had carried Johann’s wife, and whither it was to carry its owner as soon as he could make a satisfactory adjustment of his financial affairs. That means of conveyance were discussed is proved by Johann’s remark and also by a report made by Karl to the composer: “There is no postchaise to Vienna, but only to St. Pölten.... From here there is no opportunity except by a stagecoach.”
Exactly when and how the travellers set out it is not possible to determine. Schindler says that owing to Johann’s refusal to let his brother use his closed carriage, Beethoven was obliged to make the journey in an “open calash.” This is his statement in the first edition of the biography, but in the third, for an unexplained reason, the “open calash” is the vehicle used from Gneixendorf to Krems only, a distance which was easily traversed on foot inside of an hour. If Dr. Wawruch, Beethoven’s attending physician during the illness which ended in his death, is correct, Beethoven told him that he had made the journey “in the devil’s most wretched vehicle, a milk-wagon.” Later Dr. Wawruch calls the vehicle in which he arrived in Vienna a “Leiterwagen,” from which we might gather, which is utterly preposterous, that it was a rack vehicle. Beethoven arrived in Vienna on Saturday, December 2, and as there is a reference to only one night spent in transit (as there had been one on the journey from Vienna to Gneixendorf), it is likely that he left Gneixendorf early in the morning of Friday, December 1. “That December,” says Dr. Wawruch, “was raw, wet and frosty; Beethoven’s clothing anything but adapted to the unfriendly season of the year, and yet he was urged on by an internal unrest and a gloomy foreboding of misfortune. He was compelled to spend a night in a village tavern where, besides wretched shelter, he found an unwarmed room without winter shutters. Towards midnight he experienced his first fever-chill, a dry hacking cough accompanied by violent thirst and cutting pains in the sides. When seized with the fever he drank a few measures of ice-cold water and longed, helplessly, for the first rays of the morning light. Weak and ill, he permitted himself to be lifted into the Leiterwagen and arrived, at last, weak, exhausted and without strength, in Vienna.” Wawruch derived his information from Beethoven, possibly in part also from Karl, the only witness from whom a succinct and absolutely correct account was to have been expected; unhappily the tale, which Karl must have been called upon to tell many times, was never reported. The untrustworthiness of Schindler’s statements about the incidents of which he had no personal knowledge is emphasized by obvious efforts made to falsify and emasculate the record in the Conversation Books, concerning which it will soon become necessary to speak.
One Of Schindler’s Slanders Refuted
It was Saturday, December 2nd, 1826, then, that Beethoven arrived in Vienna from Gneixendorf and went to his lodgings in the Schwarzspanierhaus. It does not appear that he considered himself seriously ill, for in a letter to Holz which must have been written two, or more likely three, days later, he says merely that he is “unpässlich,” that is, indisposed. The letter was the second of its kind, the first having been mislaid. In this letter he asked Holz to come to him. It was written from dictation, but before appending his signature Beethoven wrote, “Finally, I add to this ‘We all err, only each in a different way’,” setting the quoted words to music for a canon. This canon, of which an autograph copy on a separate sheet of paper is preserved in the Royal Library at Berlin, points to a possibility that some misunderstanding had arisen between Beethoven and Holz just before the former started for Gneixendorf. Inasmuch as Holz is at Beethoven’s side at least ten days before Schindler appears there, and gives his services to the sick man until the end, though not to the extent that Schindler does after his coming, the latter’s efforts to create the impression that Beethoven had sent Holz away from him is disingenuous, to say the least. Holz’s first act convicts Schindler of an error which can scarcely be set down as an innocent one. The story involves one of the slanders against Karl which has been repeated from Schindler’s day to this, although its refutation needed only a glance into the Conversation Books of December, 1826. Schindler says that he did not learn of Beethoven’s condition until “several days” after his return to Vienna. That he then hurried to him and learned that neither Dr. Braunhofer nor Dr. Staudenheimer, though sent for by Beethoven, had answered the summons and that Dr. Wawruch’s coming was due to something only a little better than an accident. Karl, though charged with the duty of summoning a physician, had forgotten, or neglected, to so do, for several days. His commission occurred to him while playing at billiards, and he incidentally asked a marqueur (scorer) in the billiard-room to send a physician to his uncle. The marqueur, not being well, could not do it at the time, but mentioned the matter some time later to Dr. Wawruch at the hospital to which he had been taken. This story of unexampled heartlessness, to which Dr. Gerhard von Breuning also gave currency, Schindler said he had heard from Dr. Wawruch; but it is branded as a shameless fabrication by Dr. Wawruch’s published statement and the evidence of the Conversation Book. Dr. Wawruch wrote a history of Beethoven’s illness entitled “Ärztlicher Rückblick auf Ludwig van Beethoven’s letzte Lebensepoche” under date of May 20, 1827, which was published by Aloys Fuchs in the “Wiener Zeitschrift” of April 30, 1842. In this report Dr. Wawruch says, “I was not called in until the third day.” This third day would be December 5th, and the date has twofold confirmation in the Conversation Book. A fortnight after Beethoven’s return to Vienna there is an entry in Karl’s handwriting of the physician’s visits beginning with December 5th and ending with December 14, which shows that within this period Dr. Wawruch made daily visits and on one day came twice. Schindler’s name does not appear until some time after this entry, and it is recorded in a manner which indicates plainly that it was his first meeting with the sick man. As the book was folded and renumbered by Schindler the page on which this entry appears is made to look as if it preceded others which are filled with evidences of Holz’s helpfulness, but the records of the first call of the physician are plain and undisputable. It was Holz who sent for him and he did so on December 5, the day on which the first visit is noted. Evidently Holz had hastened to Beethoven on receiving the letter asking him to come which Karl seems to have delivered to him on the 4th or 5th. What passed at the first meeting does not appear, but this remark in the handwriting of Holz does:
I have had Professor Wawruch called for you; Vivenot is himself sick. I do not know Wawruch personally, but he is known here as one of the most skillful physicians.—He is Bogner’s doctor.—He is professor in the hospital.—He will come after dinner.