The old order of princely patronage, however, under which nearly all musicians lived up to the close of the eighteenth century, had no part nor lot in Beethoven’s career. Haydn, living until 1809, spent nearly all his life as a paid employee in the service of the prince of Esterhàzy, and even his London symphonies and the famous Austrian Hymn were composed ‘to order.’ Mozart, whose career began later and ended earlier than Haydn’s, had the hardihood to throw off his yoke of servitude to the archbishop of Salzburg; but Beethoven was never under such a yoke. He accepted no conditions as to the time or character of his compositions; and, although he received a maintenance from some of his princely friends, he was never on the footing of a paid servant. On the contrary, he mingled with nobility on a basis of perfect equality and shows no trace of humiliation or submission. He was furiously proud, and would accept nothing save on his own terms. Nine years before his death he welcomed joyfully a commission from the London Philharmonic Society to visit England and bring with him a symphony (it would have been the Ninth). Upon receiving an intimation, however, that the Philharmonic would be pleased to have something written in his earlier style, he indignantly rejected the whole proposition. For him there was no turning back and his art was too sacred to be subject to the lighter preferences of a chance patron. Though the plan to go to England was again raised shortly before his last illness (this time by the composer himself) it never came to a realization.
A special place among his friends should be given to a few whose appreciation of the master was singularly disinterested and deep. First among these were the von Breunings, who encouraged his genius, bore with the peculiar awkwardness and uncouthness of his youth, and managed, for the most part, to escape his suspicion and anger. It was in their house at the age of sixteen or seventeen that he literally first discovered what personal friendship meant; and it was Stephen von Breuning and his son Gerhart who, with Schindler, waited on him during his final illness. No others are to be compared with the Breunings; but more than one showed a capacity for genuine and unselfish devotion. Nanette Streicher, the daughter of the piano manufacturer, Stein, was among these. Often in his letters Beethoven declares that he does not wish to trouble anyone; and yet he complains to this amiable and capable woman about servants, dusters, spoons, scissors, neckties, stays, and blames the Austrian government, both for his bad servants and smoking chimneys. It is evident that she repeatedly helped him over his difficulties, as did also Baron von Zmeskall, court secretary and distinguished violoncellist, to whom he applied numberless times for such things as quills, a looking glass, and the exchanging of a torn hat, and whom he sent about like an errand boy. Schuppanzigh, the celebrated violinist and founder of the Rasoumowsky quartet, which produced for the first time many of the Beethoven compositions, was a trustworthy and valuable friend. Princes Lichnowsky and Lobkowitz, Count von Brunswick, the Archbishop Rudolph, Countesses Ertmann, Erdödy, Therese von Brunswick, and Bettina Brentano (afterward von Arnim)—the list of titled and fashionable friends is long and all of them seem to have borne with patience his eccentricities and delinquencies in a genuine appreciation of his fine character and genius. Among the few friends who proved faithful to the last, however, was a young musician, Anton Schindler, who for a time was Beethoven’s housemate and devoted slave, and became his literary executor and biographer. Schindler has been the object of much detraction and censure, but both Grove and Thayer regard him as trustworthy, in character as well as in intelligence. He had much to bear from his adored master, who tired of him, treated him with violence and injustice, and finally banished him from his house. But when Beethoven returned to Vienna from the ill-fated visit to Johann in 1826, sick unto death, Schindler resumed his old position as house companion. Both Schindler and Baron von Zmeskall collected notes, memoranda, and letters which have been of great service to later biographers of the composer.
Beethoven’s friendships were often marked by periods of storm, and many who were once proud to be in his favored circle afterward became weary of his eccentricities, or were led away to newer interests. It was hard for him to understand some of the most obvious rules of social conduct, and impossible for him to control his tongue or temper. Close and well-tried friends, falling under his suspicion or arousing his anger, were in the morning forbidden his house, roundly denounced, and treated almost like felons; in the afternoon, with a return of calmness and reason, he would write to them remorseful letters, beg their forgiveness, and plead for a continuance of their affection. Often the remorse was out of all proportion to his crime. After a quarrel with Stephan von Breuning he sends his portrait with the following message: ‘My dear, good Stephan—Let what for a time passed between us lie forever hidden behind this picture. I know it, I have broken your heart. The emotion which you must certainly have noticed in me was sufficient punishment for it. It was not a feeling of malice against you; no, for then I should be no longer worthy of your friendship. It was passion on your part and on mine—but mistrust of you arose in me. Men came between us who are not worthy either of you or of me ... faithful, good, and noble Stephan. Forgive me if I did hurt your feelings; I was not less a sufferer myself through not having you near me during such a long period; then only did I really feel how dear to my heart you are and ever will be.’ Too apologetic and remorseful, maybe; but still breathing a kind of stubborn pride under its genuine and sincere affection.
Although Goethe and Beethoven met at least once, they did not become friends. The poet was twenty-one years the elder, and was too much the gentleman of the world to like outward roughness and uncouth manners in his associates. He had, moreover, no sympathy with Beethoven’s rather republican opinions. On the other hand, Beethoven had something of the peasant’s intolerance for the courtier and fine gentleman. ‘Court air,’ he writes in 1812, ‘suits Goethe more than becomes a poet. One cannot laugh much at the ridiculous things that virtuosi do, when poets, who ought to be looked upon as the principal teachers of the nation, forget everything else amidst this glitter.’
In spite of his deafness, rudeness, and eccentricity Beethoven seems to have had no small degree of fascination for women. He was continually in love, writing sincere and charming letters to his ‘immortal Beloved,’ and planning more than once, with almost pathetic tenderness, for marriage and a home. There is a genuine infatuation, an ardent young-lover-like exultation in courtship that lifts him for a time even out of his art and leaves him wholly a man—a man, however, whose passion was always stayed and ennobled by spiritual bonds. License and immorality had no attraction for him, even when all his hopes of marriage were frustrated. Talented and lovely women accepted his admiration—Magdelena Willman, the singer, Countess Giulia Guicciardi, Therese Malfatti, Countess von Brunswick, Bettina Brentano, the ‘Sybil of romantic literature’—one after another received his addresses, possibly returned in a measure his love, and, presently, married someone else. Beethoven was undoubtedly deeply moved at these successive disappointments. ‘Oh, God!’ he writes, ‘let me at last find her who is destined to be mine, and who shall strengthen me in virtue.’ But, though he was destined never to be happy in this way, his thwarted love wrecked neither his art nor his happiness. He writes to Ries in 1812, in a tone almost of contentment and resignation: ‘All kind messages to your wife, unfortunately I have none. I found one who will probably never be mine, nevertheless, I am not on that account a woman hater.’ The truth is, music was in reality his only mistress, and his plans for a more practical domesticity were like clouds temporarily illumined by the sun of his own imagination, and predestined to be as fleeting.
As has been noted, toward the end of his life most of the intimacies and associations with the fashionable circles of Vienna gradually ceased. During the early part of his last illness the brother Johann, a few musicians and an occasional stranger were among his visitors, and until December of the year 1826 the nephew made his home with Beethoven. But Johann returned to his property, Carl rejoined his regiment, much to the added comfort of the sick man, and the visits from outsiders grew fewer in number. The friends of earlier days—those whom he had honored by his dedications or who had profited by the production of his works, as well as those who had suffered from his violence and abuse—nearly all were either dead or unable to attend him in his failing strength. Only the Breunings and Schindler remained actively faithful till the last.
With his publishers his relations were, on the whole, of a calmer and more stable nature than with his princely friends. It must be noted that Beethoven is the first composer whose works were placed before the public in the manner which has now become universal. Although music printing had been practised since the sixteenth century, the publisher in the modern sense did not arrive until about Beethoven’s time. The works of the eighteenth century composers were often produced from manuscript and kept in that state in the libraries of private houses, and whatever copies were made were generally at the express order of some musical patron. Neither Mozart nor Haydn had a ‘publisher’ in the modern sense—a man who purchases the author’s work outright or on royalties, taking his own risk in printing and selling it. The greater part of Beethoven’s compositions were sold outright to the distinguished house of Breitkopf and Härtel, and, all things considered, he was well paid. In those days it took a week for a letter to travel from Vienna to Leipzig, and Beethoven’s patience was often sorely tried by delays not due to tardiness of post. The correspondence is not lacking in those frantic calls for proof, questions about dates of publication, alarms over errors, and other matters so familiar to every composer and author. In earlier days, Simrock of Bonn undertook the publication of some of the master’s work, but did not come up to his ideas in respect to time. The following letter, concerning the Sonata in A, opus 47, shows that even the impatient Beethoven could bear good-naturedly with a certain amount of irritating trouble:
‘Dear, best Herr Simrock: I have been all the time waiting anxiously for my sonata which I gave you—but in vain. Do please write and tell me the reason of the delay—whether you have taken it from me merely to give it as food to the moths or do you wish to claim it by special imperial privilege? Well, I thought that might have happened long ago. This slow devil who was to beat out this sonata, where is he hiding? As a rule you are a quick devil, it is known that, like Faust, you are in league with the black one, and on that very account so beloved by your comrades.’
It is said that Nägeli of Zürich on receiving for publication the Sonata in G (opus 31, No. 1), undertook to improve a passage which he considered too abrupt or heterodox, and added four measures of his own. The liberty was discovered in proof, and the publication immediately transferred to Simrock, who produced a correct version. Nägeli, however, still retained and adhered to his own version, copies of which are still occasionally met with.