Life of Beethoven

by Ludwig Nohl

THE EROICA AND FIDELIO.

Music in Vienna—Society in Vienna—Beethoven’s Dedications—Lichnowsky—The Eroica and Fidelio—Beethoven’s First Great Exploits—Plans for Future Work—Decides to Remove to the North—New Compositions—His Improvisations—Disappointment in North Germany—Prince Louis Ferdinand—Makes His Home in Austria—Neglects His Health—His Deafness—Origin of the Eroica—Napoleon I—Bernadotte—The Symphony in C Minor—His Deafness Again—Thoughts of Marriage—The Guicciardi Family—Meaning of His Music—His “Will”—Disappointment—Meaning of the Eroica and Fidelio—The Lenore Overture—Other Compositions.

The golden age of music in Vienna had not passed away when Beethoven came to that city. Not the court, but the wealthy nobility, and a great many circles of the cultured found in music the very soul of their intellectual life and of a nobler existence. A consequence of this was that more attention was paid to chamber music than any other; and we accordingly find that the greater number of Beethoven’s compositions, written at this period, are of that style of music. Their very dedications tell us much of the social circles of Vienna, and of the persons who graced them.

First of all, we have the three trios op. 1, dedicated to Prince Karl von Lichnowsky. The man who had been the pupil and friend of Mozart might be glad, indeed, to see a substitute found so soon for that departed genius. A quartet consisting of the able artists Schuppanzigh, Sina, Weiss and Kraft, played at his house every Friday. Dr. Wegeler informs us that Beethoven, in 1794, lived with the Prince, who, at a later date, paid him a salary of twelve hundred marks. The variations on Seht er Kommt, (See he comes) 1797, were dedicated to his consort, the Princess Christiane, nee Thun. She prized Beethoven very highly, and, as he once said of her himself, would have liked to encase him in glass, that he might be screened from the defiling breath and touch of the unworthy. The first three sonatas op. 2 are dedicated to J. Haydn, and they introduce us to his special patron, the Prince Esterhazy, with whom Beethoven was not very intimate, although the commission to write the mass op. 86 was given by Nicholas Esterhazy. The quartet op. 4, as well as the sonatas for violin, op. 23 and 24 (1800), and the string quintet op. 29 (1801), are dedicated to Count Fries. There is much in Beethoven’s life to show that he was on terms of close friendship with this rich “merchant.” The sonata op. 7 (1797), is dedicated to Countess Keglevics. The first concerto, which was finished in 1794, is dedicated to the same person, then known as Princess Odescalchi. The trios op. 9, as well as the brilliant sonata op. 22, belong, by right of dedication, to the Russian Count Browne, whom Beethoven himself called le premier Mecene de sa muse, and the sonatas op. 10 (1798), to his consort. To the Countess von Thun, he dedicated the trio op. 11, composed the same year, and the sonatas op. 12, to Salieri, one of his teachers in Vienna.

How highly Beethoven esteemed Lichnowsky is evidenced by the dedication to him of op. 14, the Pathetique (1799). In it we find the earliest expression of Beethoven’s view of music as a voice speaking to man’s innermost nature, calling to him to live a higher life. To Lichnowsky, likewise, was dedicated the sonata op. 26 with the beautiful funeral march (1802). The two lovely sonatas op. 14 of the year 1799, as well as the sonata for the horn, op. 17 (1800), are dedicated to the Countess Braun, whose husband gave Beethoven, some years after, the commission for the Fidelio; and the quintet op. 16 which was finished in 1797 to Prince Schwarzenberg. When we connect the name of Prince Lobkowitz with the first quartets op. 18, composed in 1797-1800; that of Baron von Swieten the lover of the well-tempered clavichord with the first symphony op. 21 (1800), that of the learned von Sonnenfels with the so-called pastoral sonata op. 28 (1801), we can see the force of the remark made by J. F. Reichart, that the Austrian nobility of this period loved and appreciated music better probably than any other in the history of the world. That they did not continue to do so is due entirely to the fact of the general disturbance of their pecuniary circumstances consequent on the wars which came to an end only in 1815, and which diminished their favorable influence on the cultivation of the art of music. But our artist had all the advantages of this noble patronage. He spared no pains nor sacrifice to profit by it. But his mind could not rest in the mere enjoyment of music. It sought other and higher spheres. His art was destined to absorb into itself the whole world of culture, to take an active part in the march of history and co-operate in giving expression to the ideas of life. The first real exploits of our artist were the Eroica and the Fidelio with the Leonore overture; but the path which led to them was one on which those immediately surrounding him could not very well follow him, and one which subsequently isolated him personally more and more from his fellow men.

It was an ill-defined longing for this starry path of a higher intellectual existence which brought him to the north of Germany, to Berlin, after he had finished the principal parts of the course in music under Haydn, Schenk and Albrechtsberger. Not that he did not meet with recognition and remuneration in his new home. But, after all, the recognition and remuneration he met with there were such as a virtuoso might expect. For the present, neither the public nor music publishers would have much to do with his compositions. Writing to Schiller’s wife, the young Bonn professor, Fischenich, says of him: “So far as my acquaintance with him goes, he is made for the great and the sublime. Haydn has said that he would give him great operas, and soon be compelled himself to stop composing.” He informs her, at the same time, that Beethoven was going to set her husband’s Hymn to Joy—Freude schoener Goetterfunken—to music. We thus see that he, even now, harbored those great ideas which engaged him at the close of his labors, in the composition of the Ninth Symphony. There were as yet but few traces to be found in Vienna of the intellectual awakening to which Germany is indebted for its earliest classical literature, and the period of its great thinkers in the west and the north. On the other hand, Beethoven’s own mind was too full of the “storm and stress” to be able to appreciate the beautiful harmony and the warmth which had made such phenomena as Haydn and Mozart possible in South-German Austria. But in the North, the memory of “old Fritz” still lived; there the stern rule of mind and conscience, generated by Protestantism, still prevailed, while the firm frame-work of his own art, the counterpoint of the great Bach, the “first father of harmony,” as he calls him himself, was there preserved, apparently, in its full strength. In addition to all this, the court there was fond of music, and King Frederick William II had endeavored to keep Mozart, the greatest master of his time, in Berlin; while Beethoven, since the Elector’s flight from Bonn, had no further prospects in his home on the Rhine. He, therefore, decided to remove to the North.

We find him on his journey thither at the beginning of 1796. “My music secures me friends and regard—what more do I want?” he writes from Prague to his brother Johann, who, in the meantime, had entered into the employment of an apothecary in Vienna. He here composed the aria Ah Perfido (op. 65). On his way to Berlin he passed through Dresden and Leipzig, but of his stay in these two cities, we have no information. The king received him very graciously; he played a few times at court and composed the sonatas for cello, op. 5, because the king himself played the violincello. The very first impression received by Beethoven seems to have been decisive. K. Czerny, to whom he taught the piano, tells us something from his own recollection and observation about him, which is very characteristic of the man, and shows how sorely disappointed he felt in his most ardent expectations in Berlin. He says: “His improvisation was very brilliant, astonishing in the highest degree.... No matter in what society he was thrown, he made such an impression on all his hearers that it frequently happened that not a dry eye was to be seen, while many broke into sobs. There was something wonderful in his expression, besides the beauty and originality of his ideas, and the highly intellectual way he had of presenting them. When he had finished an improvisation of this kind he could break out into a fit of loud laughter and ridicule his hearers on the emotions he had excited. At times he even felt injured by those signs of sympathy. ‘Who,’ he asked, ‘can live among such spoiled children?’ and for that reason alone he once declined an invitation extended to him by the king of Prussia, after an improvisation of this kind.”

Beethoven was doomed to a disappointment of a very peculiar kind here. Instead of the manliness of character which he, coming from the softer South, expected to find in the North, he was confronted with a voluptuous luxury to which his art was only a handmaid, and with an apparent surfeit of music, the natural outgrowth of the French influence due to Voltaire’s residence in Berlin. Such was not the spirit of the new era which animated himself, and for the operation of which he was seeking a proper theater of action. The king himself did all in his power to make Gluck and Mozart settle in Berlin, and Handel’s oratorios were played even at the court concerts. But how could a man like Beethoven have worked side by side with the ruling leaders in music—with a Himmel and a Rhigini? The only person in Berlin who seemed to Beethoven a man, in the full sense of the word, was Prince Louis Ferdinand. With genuine frankness, he remarked of the prince’s playing that “it was not kingly or princely, but only that of a good piano player.” But it is probable that from the prince he borrowed the chivalric and, at the same time, poetico-enthusiastic character found in his third concerto (op. 37), which was finished in 1800 and dedicated to the prince, “the most human of human beings.”

He played twice in the Singing Academy before its conductor, Fasch, and his successor, Zelter, Goethe’s well-known friend, when he again brought the tears to the eyes of his hearers. But he clearly saw from the example of these two principal representatives of the more serious taste for music in Berlin, that it was not Bach’s spirit which he was in search of that ruled there, but only a caricature of it; and this last was by no means a counterpoise to the Italian style of music, which still held absolute sway. He returned to Vienna disappointed in every respect, but with all the greater confidence in himself. He never again left Austria for good. It became the scene of his grandest achievements, and it was not long before their history began.

In a small memorandum book used by Beethoven on his journey from Bonn to Vienna, we find the following passage: “Take courage. Spite of all physical weakness, my mind shall rule. I have reached my twenty-fifth year, and must now be all that I can be. Nothing must be left undone.” The father always represented Beethoven to be younger than he really was. Even in 1810, the son would not admit that he was forty years of age. The words quoted above must, therefore, have been written in the winter of 1796 or 1797; and this fact invests them with a greater significance than they would otherwise possess; for our artist now saw that, without the shadow of a doubt, Austria and Vienna were to be his abiding places; and he, therefore, strained every nerve, regardless of what the consequences might be, “to be a great man sometime;” that is, to accomplish something really good in music. This regardlessness of consequences manifested itself especially in the little care he seemed to take of his physical well-being. A friend, who had every opportunity to observe him, Baron von Zmeskall, informs us that “in the summer of 1796, he came home almost overpowered by the heat, tore open the doors and windows of the house, took off his coat and vest and seated himself at an open window to cool himself. The consequence of his imprudence was a dangerous illness, which ultimately settled on the organs of hearing. From this time his deafness kept on increasing.” It is possible that the first symptoms of his deafness did not appear as early as 1796; but certain it is, that it dates back into the last decade of the last century, that it was brought about by heedlessness of his health, and that it became a severe tax on his moral courage. His genius was so absorbed in his music, that he too frequently forgot to take care of the physical man. In November, 1796, Stephan von Breuning remarked of him, that “his travels had contributed to mature his character; that he was a better judge of men, and had learned to appreciate the value, but, at the same time, the rarity of good friends.” The hard trials of life had added to the earnestness of his disposition, and he was awakening to a full sense of what his own duty in this world was. This leads us to the first great and memorable work of his genius—to the Eroica, followed soon after by the symphony in C minor.