Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph Read online

  Ludwig’s brother Caspar Anton Carl had been christened on April 8, 1774, Nikolaus Johann on October 2, 1776. Caspar was named for Chief Minister Caspar Anton von Belderbusch, who agreed to serve as godfather for his namesake. As godmother stood the chief minister’s mistress, Caroline von Satzenhoven, abbess of a home for elderly gentlewomen in Vilich. (The abbess also generously served as mistress of Maximilian Friedrich, the current Elector). To the actual christening of Caspar Anton Carl van Beethoven the distinguished godparents naturally sent deputies of lower rank.10

  As Ludwig van Beethoven of five and six years old occupied his time with clavier and violin and viola practice and started school, outside there were signs of change everywhere. The indolent and pleasure-loving new Elector, Max Friedrich, nevertheless abstained from the kind of extravagance for which his predecessor Clemens August was famous. There were no more grand new building projects in Bonn; the books were heading toward balance.

  The governing style of Max Friedrich and Belderbusch was at least partly philosophical. For centuries, the lives of all people under feudalism had existed to serve the prosperity and pleasure of their superiors, that obligation starting from the serf’s toward the lord of the manor, the lord’s toward his count or duke, and so on in a ladder of fealty rising through the ranks to the divinely ordained throne, which answered to no one but God. In the middle of the eighteenth century, the first of the German “enlightened despots,” Frederick the Great of Prussia, began to mediate those centuries of privilege, changing the ancient paradigm of the state as essentially the vassal of the sovereign. Frederick denied that he ruled by divine right and called himself “the first servant of the state.” A rationalistic and humanistic spirit was gathering across Europe and across the Atlantic. Enlightenment—in German, Aufklärung—was the name for the spirit of the times.

  In the Electorate of Cologne, the reign of Max Friedrich by way of Belderbusch amounted to a transition from the old model of absolute power to the progressive model of an enlightened ruler, a process the next Elector would complete.11 An English traveler of 1780 described the government of Bonn as “the most active and most enlightened of all the ecclesiastical governments of Germany. The ministry of the court in Bonn is excellently composed . . . The cabinet . . . is singularly happy in the establishment of seminaries of education, the improvement of agriculture and industry, and the extirpation of every species of monkery.”12

  In 1773, the pope dissolved the Jesuits, ending their traditional monopoly on education, after several countries had already banned them. The dissolution of the order was seen as a triumph of the Enlightenment. (Like many other triumphs of Enlightenment, it was short-lived, and the Jesuits eventually revived.)13 Chief Minister Belderbusch oversaw turning the Jesuit school in Bonn into a new state school, the Academy, and the regime began to enact reforms—part of the movement around Germany to restrain the power of the clergy and to put education in secular hands.

  Outside backwater Bonn, after centuries of slumber in literature and thought, by the 1770s Germany was awakening in a precipitous flowering of drama, fiction, and philosophy. Francophile Frederick the Great wrote in 1780, “The Germans up to now know nothing except to eat, drink, make love, and fight . . . We have no good writers whatever: perhaps they will arise when I am walking in the Elysian Fields.”14

  But Frederick did not have to die for German literature to flourish. In the 1770s, the language’s first important playwright, Gottfried Ephraim Lessing, was in his prime, his plays including Nathan der Weise, which preached tolerance toward Jews. The fame of young poet, novelist, and playwright Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was rising toward the point that an entire period in Germany would be remembered as the Goethezeit, the age of Goethe. In spring 1775, Bonn’s newspaper, the Intelligenzblatt, published a review of “Herr Goethe’s newest tragedy Clavigo . . . One will know from the earlier plays of this author that . . . his pieces will transgress against once-accepted rules in almost every respect, but the reader will be compensated by many inimitable beauties.” The paper tracked the course of the American Revolution, the first political fruit of the Enlightenment.

  At the same time, every age contains the seeds of its own destruction. If the Enlightenment and its cult of science and reason was the triumphant ideology of the eighteenth century, in Germany of the 1770s a literary countercurrent flowered that exalted the violent, excessive, and subjective. In 1774, Goethe published his epochal novel The Sorrows of Young Werther, whose hero kills himself over a frustrated love. The work that gave the anti-Enlightenment movement its name came from a Friedrich Maximilian Klinger play about the American Revolution: Sturm und Drang (Storm and Stress).

  It was a movement of angry young men, determined to follow not chilly reason but their inner convictions, their personal storms and stresses. They idealized lonely and even violent outsiders.15 Perhaps the climax of Sturm und Drang came with the 1782 premiere of Friedrich Schiller’s play Die Räuber (The Robbers). Its hero is a son who is cheated of his inheritance and, in a transport of fury both moral and nihilistic, determines to become a king of robbers. In the premiere, after the horrifying denouement, an eyewitness recalled, “The theater was like a madhouse—rolling eyes, clenched fists, hoarse cries in the auditorium. Strangers fell sobbing into each other’s arms, women on the point of fainting staggered towards the exit.”16

  The spirit of Sturm und Drang was too frenzied and irrational to last long. It flared and dimmed in little more than a decade. Its traces turned up for a few years in Haydn’s music, among that of other composers. Goethe and Schiller both washed their hands of Sturm und Drang, and it never really challenged the Aufklärung. But its echoes helped create the period that came to be called Romantic, which loved the demonic and excessive, and which would endure. That was the atmosphere in which the grown Ludwig van Beethoven created, following his own singular star.

  One episode of storm and stress the six-year-old Beethoven witnessed was not a literary but a literal firestorm. During the night of January 15, 1777, the Electoral Residence, the Elector’s palace, lit up in flames. Fueled by heavy winds, the conflagration raced to the powder magazine, which exploded thunderously.17 The town fire drum began to beat. It beat continuously for two days as fire consumed most of the palace, whose massive, stately front commanded the southern border of the city.18

  In their flat next to the palace, the Beethovens heard the cries, the drums, the explosion. Like most of the town, they came out to watch the spectacle: amid roaring flames, frantic figures ran with water while others dashed in and out of the building attempting to save papers and valuables. The injured and dead were laid out in the courtyard. Dozens of court servants and officials risked their lives to pull art, furniture, clocks, and vases from the building.19 Among the spectators, court musician Candidus Passavanti was heard to cry, “Oh, my poor contrabass, that I brought with me from Venice!”20

  Hofrat Emanuel Joseph von Breuning collected eleven men and with them was hauling state documents out of the burning palace when a wall collapsed on them. All but Breuning died on the spot. Terribly injured, Breuning was brought to his house, where the next day, at age thirty-seven, he slipped away in the circle of his family, leaving his wife, Helene, twenty-seven, and four small children. The Breunings had been one of the most literary and cultured families in Bonn. Under the widow they continued to be so, and a number of townspeople, including Beethoven, were the better for it.

  The ruins of the Electoral Residence were still smoldering five days later. By then, the town rumor mill had flared up, its theme apparently that the fire was welcomed by, perhaps even started by, the all-powerful Belderbusch to obliterate the evidence of his embezzlements and intrigues, and that the valuables salvaged from the residence ended up gracing the palace of Belderbusch in town. Elector Max Friedrich decreed the rebuilding of the residence, but on a more modest scale, with less lavish gardens.

  In the three years since old Ludwig van Beethoven died, the family had changed
its lodgings three times. With inheritance in hand, Johann had moved the family out of the modest house on Bonngasse, where young Ludwig was born, to a spacious flat on Dreieckplatz. From there, they had returned to baker Theodor Fischer’s house on Rheingasse, where Johann had lived with his father. Then, shortly before the fire, Maria had insisted that they move to a smaller flat on Neugasse, because it was close to the market and church and Electoral Residence.

  When the residence caught fire, Johann appeared at the door of the Fischer house in tears, begging to come back because the Beethovens’ flat was threatened by the conflagration. On Fischer’s agreement, Johann rounded up men to spirit the family belongings out of Neugasse and back to Rheingasse while the flames raged behind them. For the Beethoven children, the spectacle of those days must have been thrilling. Gottfried Fischer recalled the boys declaring it was good to come back to Rheingasse, because there was plenty of water in the river to put out a fire.21

  Ludwig van Beethoven spent most of his childhood in the tall, narrow Fischer house, Zum Walfisch. There his father supervised his lessons, his mother did her sewing and her other daily chores, the maids cooked and washed and watched the children. In the small area of the inner city, Johann van Beethoven’s face was familiar, seen on the go every day: his broad forehead, scarred but not unpleasant face, round nose, hair gathered into a thin pigtail, serious eyes, and air of being perennially late for something.22 Although the family was not prosperous, they generally got by in the flat at the Fischers’, their flat spacious with two rooms on the street, four in the back, plus a kitchen and servant’s room. It seems that Johann kept up with his bills. Old Ludwig’s inheritance may have leaked away, but there is no record that in those years the family fell into serious debt.23

  The bustling street that the Fischer house fronted on, Rheingasse, was the town’s main commercial avenue from the river. Goods came in at the Rhine Gate and were hauled to the market in the middle of town, where at the Rathaus they were weighed, taxed, and offered for sale in the square. The inside of the Beethoven house bustled with music and family, the outside bustled with wagons and horses and men. Maria van Beethoven and Frau Fischer, Theodor’s wife, consulted on matters of child rearing. Frau Fischer provided a remedy for Ludwig’s bed-wetting and advised about treating an abscess on Nikolaus’s head (he grew up crooked in face and frame). The Beethoven and Fischer children played piggyback in the courtyard, alternated on the swing. (Theodor Fischer and his wife had nine children, of whom five died early—a normal percentage.)

  With Johann usually out of the house and Maria busy, their three boys were often left to the care of servants. It was Frau Fischer who alerted Maria that the maids carelessly let the boys play in the street, where the commercial traffic from the Rhine flowed past. Maria, like the rest of the family, had a temper, and sometimes she flared at suggestions about, for example, how she should rear her children. Usually, soon after a ruckus Johann and Maria would turn up together to apologize to the Fischers.24

  Most days, Johann ran from appointment to appointment, sang tenor in the court choir, taught voice and clavier to Bonn children and the children of English and French and German envoys.25 On days when he had to sing at court, he sucked a raw egg or ate prunes for his throat.26 As a musician and teacher, despite his well-known propensity for carousing, Johann in those years was, on the whole, hardworking and respected. Still, his modest talent and the mediocrity of his voice meant that his career would go only so far.

  Johann did a great deal more for his son than drumming keyboard and violin into him. He became a canny promoter of Ludwig’s embryonic career as a soloist. From early on, Johann had the boy playing at court, and he made it his business to see that everyone musical in Bonn knew about his child. In 1778, Johann made a bid to establish Ludwig as a marketable prodigy.

  His inspiration was Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, the prodigy of prodigies. Wolfgang and his sister had been trained from early childhood by their violinist father, Leopold. The boy composed his first pieces at five, and by age six, with his father and nearly equally talented sister, he toured Europe giving performances that quickly slipped into legend: improvising on given themes, playing blindfolded and with a cloth over the keys. The Mozart family had appeared in Bonn in 1763, and it is unlikely that Johann and his father missed the show.27 In 1770, the year Ludwig was born, Mozart, at age fourteen, was in the middle of another tour of the musical capitals of Europe.

  If Johann had a conception of what he was doing with his son, it was surely that he imagined himself to be another Leopold Mozart, who reared a phenomenon and made sure the world heard about it. Johann was determined to do whatever was necessary to foster the gift he saw in his son and cash in on it. With visions of glory dancing in his mind, Johann rented a hall in Cologne to present one of his pupils, the teenage contralto Helene Averdonk, and Ludwig. The newspaper notice ran thus:

  Today, March 26, 1778, in the musical concert-room in the Sternengass the Electoral Court Tenorist, BEETHOVEN, will have the honor to produce two of his scholars; namely, Mdlle. Averdonc, Court Contraltist, and his little son of six years. The former will have the honor to contribute various beautiful arias, the latter various clavier concertos and trios, in which he flatters himself that he will give complete enjoyment to all ladies and gentlemen, the more so since both have had the honor of playing to the greatest delight of the entire Court.28

  At that point, Ludwig was seven. Johann advertised him as a year younger to enhance the aura of prodigy—and maybe to remind readers of Mozart, who was six when he came to fame.29 Ludwig, a little figure sitting confidently at the keyboard, likely looked the age he was advertised to be. No report survives of whether Ludwig played harpsichord or pianoforte at the concert, or how the performance was received. The overall results can be seen in the absence of any report. The boy was wonderfully talented, a budding prodigy of Mozartian dimensions, but his father was no Leopold Mozart.

  Johann’s premature bid for fame and money for his son having come to nothing, he turned to less dramatic endeavors to promote Ludwig’s career. He had him perform in the house, in court, and in the great houses of the town, and showed him off on jaunts around the region.

  Johann knew that eventually his son needed more sophisticated keyboard and violin teachers than his father. In the next years under those teachers, Ludwig would ascend extraordinarily in skill and in reputation, and in the process he would make his escape from his father’s ambitions into his own. Then, unlike Mozart, who remained loyal and more or less compliant to his father, Ludwig would feel scant loyalty or love toward his first mentor and teacher. From others, the grown-up Beethoven did not countenance criticism of his father or any of his family; others had no right to that. He did his duty as oldest son, whatever it cost him; to Beethoven, family was family. But he had been reared harshly by a father whose own father had more or less done the same, and his resentments were inevitable. Beethoven’s relation to his brothers conformed to the pattern he had learned: fierce loyalty, blind rage, and the occasional motivation of a fist.

  Around 1778, Johann van Beethoven began to mine his musical acquaintances as teachers for his son. The first appears to have been ancient Gilles van den Eeden, a Fleming born in Liège. At that point, van den Eeden had been a court organist for some fifty-five years and had been acquainted with the Beethoven family at least since he witnessed old Ludwig’s wedding, in 1733. For a short while, van den Eeden gave young Ludwig keyboard lessons.30

  From early on, Ludwig was a pianist rather than a harpsichordist, becoming one of the first generation to grow up as pure pianists from close to the beginning of their studies. Van den Eeden may also have taught the boy his first lessons in thoroughbass, giving him a foundation in harmonic practice by way of learning to read the numerical figures that indicate the chords to be played above a bass line.31 Most solo works of that time consisted simply of a melody and figured bass, the keyboardist improvising an accompaniment from the given harmonies. Learning t
he art of harmony via thoroughbass was a foundation of both composition and improvisation.

  Among Johann’s circle of friends was actor and theater manager Gustav F. W. Grossmann, who came to Bonn in 1778 to run the court’s new National Theater. Grossmann was a sophisticated artist and man, and he was fond of or at least amused by Johann van Beethoven. The two became friends. As a teacher for Ludwig to replace the aged and ailing van den Eeden, Grossmann recommended a broadly talented, also splendidly eccentric young newcomer named Tobias Friedrich Pfeifer. He was something of an unclassifiable man. As part of Grossmann’s theatrical company, Pfeifer served in the capacities of actor, pianist, oboist, and flutist (appropriately, his name means “piper”). He took up residence in the Beethovens’ flat at the Fischer house and started teaching Ludwig clavier, meanwhile carousing with Johann. The two endeavors mingled in ways that created new miseries for the boy, but Ludwig seems to have made considerable progress under Pfeifer.

  The Fischer family was tormented by Pfeifer pacing around his room through the night in heavy boots. When Theodor Fischer complained, Pfeifer responded by removing one boot at night but not the other. One day, the house was startled by the sound of a barber hurtling down the stairs, whence Pfeifer had thrown him. Pfeifer and Johann were both given to flirting with teenage Cäcilie, the fetching Fischer daughter. Pfeifer would cry, “Here comes my darling girl! I love you, you’ll be my wife, I’ll take you with me to Saxony!” Cäcilie replied that her father had told her musicians were people who blew with the wind.