Life of Beethoven

by Ludwig Nohl

In one of the accounts of it that have come down to us, we read: “Never in my life did I hear such tempestuous and at the same time such hearty applause. At one place—where the kettle-drums so boldly take up the rhythmic motive alone—the second movement of the symphony was totally interrupted by the applause; the tears stood in the eyes of the performers; Beethoven, however, contrived to wield the baton until Umlauf called his attention to the action of the audience by a motion of his hand. He looked at them and bowed in a very composed way.” At the close the applause was greater still. Yet, strange to say, the man who was the cause of it all again turned his back to the enthusiastic audience. At this juncture, the happy thought occurred to Unger to wheel Beethoven about towards the audience, and to ask him to notice their applause with their waving of hats and handkerchiefs. He testified his gratitude simply by bowing, and this was the signal for the breaking forth of a jubilation such as had scarcely ever before been heard in a theater, and which it seemed would never end. The next day, we read, in his conversation leaves, what some one said to him: “Everybody is shattered and crushed by the magnitude of your works.”

And now, what of the pecuniary success of the performance? It was measured by about one hundred and twenty marks. The expenses attending it had been too great. Besides, regular subscribers, entitled to their seats in boxes, did not pay a farthing for this concert. The court did not send in a penny, which, however, they were wont not to fail to do on the occasion of the commonest benefits. When Beethoven reached his home, Schindler handed him the account of the receipts. “When he saw it, he broke down entirely. We took him and laid him on the sofa. We remained at his side until late in the night. He asked neither for food nor for anything else. Not an audible word did he utter. At last, when we observed that Morpheus had gently closed his eyes, we retired. His servant found him next morning in his concert toilette (his green dress coat) in the same place, asleep.” This account is by Schindler, who, together with the young official, Joseph Huettenbrenner, one of Franz Schubert’s intimate friends, had taken him home on this occasion.

This was the first performance of the Missa Solemnis (op. 123) and of the Ninth Symphony (op. 125). It took place on the 7th of May, 1824. The fact that when the performance was repeated on the 24th of May, spite of the additional attraction of the “adored” tenor, David, who sang Rossini’s Di tanti palpiti, (after so much pain), the house was half empty, shows that, after all, it was more curiosity to see the celebrated deaf man than real taste for art which had filled it the first time. Like Mozart, Beethoven did not live long enough to pluck even the pecuniary fruits of his genius. Not till 1845 did the magnanimous liberality of one who was really permeated by his spirit bring it to pass that a monument was erected to him in his native city, Bonn, as that same liberality has brought it to pass that one has been erected to him, in our own day, in his second home, Vienna. We have reference to the royal gift and to the equally rich playing of Franz Liszt.

It now became more imperative for him to give his attention to those compositions which promised him some immediate return, to the quartets, to write which he had received a commission from persons as noted for their generosity to him as for their love of art. These and the op. 127 occupy the first place in this brilliant constellation of art. “I am not writing what I should prefer to write. I am writing for the money I need. When that end is satisfied, I hope to write what is of most importance to myself and to art—Faust.” He thus expressed himself when engaged in the composition of the Ninth Symphony, and there was some talk of his writing an “Oratorio for Boston.” And so, likewise, the German Melusine and an opera for Naples, the Requiem, the tenth symphony, and an overture on B-A-C-H remained projects and no more. But they were also a great prospect for the future while he was engaged in the labors of the day; and they exercised no inconsiderable influence on the composition of the quartets themselves. The more he became interested in these works—and what works were better calculated to interest a composer of such poetic power—the more did these ideas become interwoven into the works themselves. They generated the peculiarly grand style and the monumental character which distinguish these last quartets. The soul-pictures from Faust especially are here eloquently re-echoed in the most sublime monologues. And, indeed, the Prince, who had given him the commission to write them, seemed to be the very man to induce Beethoven to achieve what was highest and best in art, even in such a narrow sphere. For he had so arranged it that, even before its production in Vienna, that “sublime masterpiece,” the Mass, was publicly performed. He informs us that the effect on the public was indescribable; that he had never before heard anything, not even of Mozart’s music, which had so stirred his soul; that Beethoven’s genius was centuries in advance of his age, and that probably there was not among his hearers a single one enlightened enough to take in the full beauty of his music. On the other hand, there reigned in Vienna that weak revelry of the period of the restoration, with its idol Rossini, a revelry which had driven all noble and serious music into the background. Besides, the Prince had ordered that the costs for musical composition should be curtailed “to any desired sum.”

Beethoven now went to work in earnest, and this composition was destined to be his last.

He had already made a great many drafts of the works above mentioned, one for op. 127 in the summer of 1822, one for the succeeding quartet in A minor (op. 131), in the year 1823, when he was completing the Ninth Symphony. Both op. 127 and the quartet in A minor remind us, in more ways than one, of the style of the Ninth Symphony—the latter by its passion so full of pain, the former, with its adagio, where the longing glances to the stars have generated a wonderful, melancholy peace of soul. The immediately following third quartet (op. 130) stands out before us like a newly created world, but one which is “not of this world.” And, indeed, the events in Beethoven’s life became calculated more and more to liberate him, heart and soul, from this world, and the whole composition of the quartets appears like a preparation for the moment when the mind, released from existence here, feels united with a higher being. But it is not a painfully happy longing for death that here finds expression. It is the heartfelt, certain and joyful feeling of something really eternal and holy that speaks to us in the language of a new dispensation. And even the pictures of the world here to be found, be they serious or gay, have this transfigured light—this outlook into eternity. There is little in the world of art, in which the nature of the religious appears so fully in its substance and essence without showing itself at any time otherwise than purely human, and therefore imperishable—never clothed in an accidental and perishable garb. This explains how a people not noted for any musical genius, but who are able to understand the spirit and meaning of music, the English, whom Beethoven himself esteemed so highly, considered his music “so religious.” And, indeed, his music is religious in its ultimate meaning and spirit. This character of his music finds its purest and most striking expression in the last quartets; and these quartets enable us to understand the saying of Richard Wagner, Beethoven’s truest pupil and successor, that our civilization might receive a new soul from the spirit of this music, and a renovation of religion which might permeate it through and through.

We now pass to an account of the details of the origin of these works.

The bitterness which Beethoven was destined henceforth to taste proceeded for the most part from his own relatives. “God is my witness, my only dream is to get away entirely from you, from my miserable brother, and from this despicable family which has been tied to me,” he writes, in 1825, to his growing nephew. We cannot refrain from touching on these sad things, because now, especially, they exercised the greatest influence on his mind and on his pecuniary circumstances, and because they finally led to a catastrophe which played a part in bringing about his premature death.

His weak and “somewhat money-loving” brother, Johann, had, indeed, in consequence of Beethoven’s own violent moral interference, married a silly wife. He found it impossible to control her course, or even to get a divorce from her, because he had made over to her a part of his property, and was “inflexible” on this very point. And so the brother was not able, spite of many invitations, to induce Beethoven to visit him even once on his estate of Wasserhof, near Gneixendorf, on the Danube. Ludwig wrote him, in the summer of 1823: “O accursed shame! Have you not a spark of manhood in you? Shall I debase myself by entering such company?” Yet, his sister-in-law was “tamed” by degrees. But the mother of the boy continued, now that he was beginning to mature, to draw him into her own baneful circle, and, as Beethoven wrote in the summer of 1824, into the poisonous breath of the dragon; and levity, falsehood and unbecoming behavior towards his uncle, who was at the same time a father to him, followed. Carried away by the impulses of his moral feelings, the latter was severe even to harshness with the boy, and yet could not dispense with the young man’s company because of his increasing age and isolation. The natural craving for love, moral severity and the consciousness of paternal duty, wove the texture of which our artist’s shroud was made.

The correspondence of this year, 1824, turns principally upon the pecuniary realization from his new, great works; for he wanted to be in London in the fall without fail. We have also a letter of his about his will, to his lawyer, Dr. Bach, dated in the summer. He writes: “Only in divine art is the power which gives me the strength to sacrifice to the heavenly muses the best part of my life.” We hear also the celestial sounds of the adagio, op. 127, ringing in our ears. He was himself filled with this true “manna;” for he exclaims in these same summer days, “Apollo and the muses will not yet allow me to be delivered over to the hands of death, for I yet owe them what the Spirit inspires me with and commands me to finish. I feel as if I had written scarcely a note.” And we even now find the sketches of those pieces expressive of a happiness more than earthly, or else, in gay irony, of contempt for the existing world, or of the mighty building up of a new world; the alla danza tedesca and the poco scherzando of op. 130, as well as the great fugue, op. 133, which was intended to be the original finale of op. 130, and which, by its superscription, “overture” and the gigantic strides in its theme, reminds us of the plan of the Bachouverture. Even the unspeakably deep melancholy and, at the same time, blissful, hopeful cavatina of the same third quartet op. 130, blossoms forth now from the feeling of his heart, which has taken into itself the full meaning of the eternal, and is filled with a higher joy. We here find, as in the last tones of Mozart’s soul, the germs of a new and deep-felt language of the heart, a real personal language, acquired to humanity for the expression of its deepest secrets, and which, in our own day, has led to the most touching soul-pictures in art—to the transfiguration of Isolde, and to Bruennhild’s dying song of redeeming love.