Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph Read online

  In the end, everyone in the house seems to have been fond of Tobias Pfeifer except the Beethovens’ maid, who complained that at all hours he ordered coffee, wine, beer, and brandy, which she was convinced he mixed and drank together. Ludwig’s lessons were as irregular as his teacher, taking place whenever Pfeifer was in the mood. Sometimes he felt in the mood after midnight, when he and Johann arrived home from the tavern. They would shake the boy awake and drag him to the keyboard, where he was forced to play into the early hours. Ludwig also began to play chamber music with Pfeifer on flute and court violinist Franz Georg Rovantini, a man shy and religious, the opposite of the flighty insomniac Pfeifer. Rovantini, who was distantly related to Maria van Beethoven, gave Ludwig violin and viola lessons. (He was another of Cäcilie Fischer’s admirers.) As the three played trios in a front room of the Beethoven flat, passersby would stop in the street, exclaiming that they could listen for hours.32

  The widespread musicality of Bonners that struck visitors like writer Madame de Staël had its roots in a lower Rhine musical culture that went back centuries.33 The court added more impetus and professionalism to the picture. At the Electoral Residence, music was required in the chapel, theater, concert room, and ballroom; the town calendar included some twenty high holidays with special services and music. Max Friedrich allowed the court orchestra to give two public concerts a week in the Rathaus, where they also played for the all-night Shrovetide balls.34 If in the larger world Bonn was too much a backwater for a musician to find wide fame, it was still a town as good as any in which to learn the art. Beethoven was not the only virtuoso to emerge from Bonn as if out of nowhere to dazzle the capitals of music.

  In those days, the pursuit of music was perceived in a pair of dichotomies. Listeners were divided into amateurs and connoisseurs, performers into dilettanti and virtuosi. As in C. P. E. Bach’s keyboard sonatas for Kenner und Liebhaber, composers generally wrote with those divisions in mind. In 1782, Mozart wrote his father about his new concertos, “[H]ere and there connoisseurs alone can derive satisfaction; the non-connoisseurs cannot fail to be pleased, though without knowing why.”35 That defined the essentially populist attitude of what came to be called the Classical style: composers should provide something for everybody, at the same time gearing each work for its setting, whether it was the more intimate and complex chamber music played by enthusiasts in private homes, or public pieces for theater and larger concerts, which were written in a more straightforward style.

  In Bonn, music was heard in houses from low to high, and often the skills of dilettantes rivaled those of professionals. Chief Minister Belderbusch employed a wind quintet of his own; his nephew’s wife was an able keyboard player.36 A daughter of the Viennese ambassador Count Metternich was called the best clavier player in town.37 (This was the Metternich family whose son later rose to power in Vienna and gave his name to a political era.)

  Finance Minister J. G. von Mastiaux was among the most perfervid of the aristocratic music fanciers at court. He maintained a Haydn cult, corresponding with the master, acquiring all the Haydn scores he could get his hands on including eighty symphonies and thirty quartets, and he had a huge library of music by a range of contemporary composers.38 Mastiaux and his five children all played; his instrument collection included a pyramid-shaped piano that people came from miles around to admire.39 There were regular concerts in his music room, which had space for a small orchestra and dozens of listeners.

  In those days, private houses were the primary venue where secular music was heard. Public concerts in large halls were less common, largely reserved for orchestral and large choral works.40 From childhood on, Beethoven made his reputation as a performer mainly in the setting of house music, and that situation hardly changed through his career. Solo pieces and chamber music, in other words, were played in chambers, much of the time by amateur musicians for audiences of family and friends. Programs were a mélange of genres and media; a concerto might be followed by a solo piece, followed by an aria, the musicians alternately playing and listening. The audience typically wandered in and out of the room, sometimes chatted and played cards. This pattern for concerts both private and public also lasted through Beethoven’s lifetime—though he demanded to be listened to attentively. Only once in his life was one of his piano sonatas played in a public concert.41

  Elector Max Friedrich was well on in his seventies when Belderbusch turned his thoughts and intrigues toward a successor. Bonn had traditionally been oriented toward France, but Belderbusch hated the French and they hated him in return.42 To secure the next Elector, he decided on a bold move toward Vienna. Maximilian Franz von Habsburg-Lothringen, the youngest sibling of Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II, had as yet no throne to his name. Securing Max Franz for Elector would make a profitable connection between Bonn and Vienna and would also bring the influence of Joseph himself, one of the most progressive “benevolent despots” of the age.

  Belderbusch began to lobby in Vienna and succeeded on his usual scale. Max Franz would become “coadjutor” of the Electorate of Bonn, the appointed heir to the throne. Besides agreeing to the electoral scheme, Vienna promised the Bonn court a yearly subsidy of 50,000 florins and a one-time “present” of 100,000 florins. Meanwhile, another 100,000 florins was allocated to Belderbusch himself, plus the title Graf (Count) for him and his three nephews.43 (Again, a basic year’s salary for a court musician was 250 florins.)

  News of the (pro forma) election of the coadjutor was celebrated in Bonn with cannons and bells, a solemn Te Deum in the minster, an illumination of the whole city that His Electoral Grace “condescended to view,” a great banquet at the Electoral Residence, and a masked ball open “to all respectably dressed citizens” that went on until 7 o’clock in the morning.44 All that would be as nothing compared to the celebration when Max Franz made his first appearance.

  So it came to pass that in October 1780, Bonn witnessed the triumphal entry of the coadjutor. The arrival of Max Franz was chronicled in a series of pictures by the court painter: the coadjutor’s fleet of boats is greeted with gunfire and trumpets and drums on the river; his carriage and train progress through the market before the eyes of the town, whose citizens are dressed in multicolored finery, many waving handkerchiefs and weeping for joy; Max Franz greets Elector Max Friedrich and his retinue outside the Electoral Residence. There followed a two-week whirl of masked balls, banquets, hunting, operettas, comedies, galas, grand promenades, dinners “with ladies,” and church ceremonies.45 Despite his impressively portly frame, future Elector Max Franz held up manfully under it all.

  For the Beethovens, the beginning of 1779 climaxed with the birth of the family’s first daughter, Anna Maria Franziska, in February. Violinist and family friend Franz Rovantini served as her godfather. The baby died in four days, the first death in the family that the boys had to witness.

  Johann kept at his daily round of singing and lessons. If he was no longer Ludwig’s main teacher, he was still the enforcer. Now it was younger brother Caspar Carl undergoing their father’s regime. Carl grew up playing and eventually taught a little piano, but he never amounted to much as a musician. There is no indication that youngest brother Nikolaus Johann was taught music. He was remembered as mild and good-natured—unique in that family—and a bit dim. In the end, however, Nikolaus Johann made more money than the rest of his family put together.

  Johann van Beethoven was recalled as much for his merrymaking as for his professionalism. The Fischers remembered him and his prime drinking companion, fishmonger Klein, across the way, toot-tooting through their fists at each other from the windows. With a few glasses in him, Johann could be jolly or mean, and the children knew he was always ready with the back of his hand. Theodor Fischer recalled that on hot days Johann went to a tavern next door and ordered a flask each of wine and water, then returned and strolled about swigging from them, singing away, to a mixture of amusement and scorn from his wife.46

  Maria van Beethoven was remembered as
a good and kindly woman, though like the rest of the Beethovens she had a formidable temper. When she died, her son Ludwig called her his best friend. She knew how to handle a troublesome husband, how to talk to those both high and low, how to give a clever comeback. She managed the household, the endless bills, and the knitting and sewing, though cleanliness was not her strong suit with either the house or the children. The boys were often grubby.

  Maria was her children’s mentor in morals. “From childhood on,” Beethoven later wrote, “I learned to love virtue.”47 One of Maria’s sayings comes close to a prophecy of the life of her composer son and his ethos: “Without suffering there is no struggle, without struggle no victory, without victory no crown.”

  Family friends remembered Maria’s thin face full of care, her serious eyes. She endured. Above all, she felt a rankling sense of regret. Working with Cäcilie Fischer one day, Maria told the teenager that their violinist friend Franz Rovantini was enamored of her and would like to marry her. And he was a fine man. But, Maria continued, “[i]f you want my good advice, stay single. Then you’ll have the best, most peaceful, most beautiful, most enjoyable life you can have. Because what is marriage but a little joy, then afterward a chain of sorrows. And you’re still so young . . . So many sorrows come that unmarried people have no idea of . . . One should weep when a girl is born into the world.”48

  Having buried a well-to-do husband and a child before she was twenty, now Maria had to live with a husband who drank too much and was never going to prosper. Her mother had died impoverished and mad. Maria knew she would most likely bury half or more of her children before they came of age. Maria van Beethoven had a ready wit and enjoyed a party, but Cäcilie Fischer could not remember ever seeing Maria laugh.

  Maria seemed more amused than outraged at her husband’s flirting with Cäcilie Fischer. As she fended Johann off, Cäcilie would protest, “I’m not a girl for kissing! You have your wife to kiss!” Once, there was enough of a tussle in the kitchen that they fell onto the stove and knocked the pipe out of the wall. It clattered to the floor, at which everyone broke up laughing. Johann declared he’d learned his lesson; Maria told Cäcilie she’d handled it well.49

  None of it seemed to interfere with the easy relations of the Beethovens and the Fischers. Cäcilie was so named because she had been born on the festival day of the patroness of music, St. Cecilia. On Cäcilie’s name day, the Beethovens would come to offer their congratulations, and in honor of the saint all would retire to a tavern with Johann’s musical friends and get merry enough that the children would have to help their father home.50

  So a marriage endured with its ordinary sorrows and tragedies and passing amusements and guilty pleasures. The stories of Ludwig and his brothers in childhood are no less ordinary. The maids take them to play in the garden of the Electoral Residence. From there they can run over to the rampart of the Old Toll and look out over the Rhine to the Siebengebirge. When guests are in the house, Johann dispatches the boys to the ground-floor bakery, where the young ones crawl around the stone floor unsupervised and Nikolaus cracks his head, developing the aforementioned abscess, which leaves him scarred. Ludwig steals eggs from Frau Fischer’s chickens and gets caught. The boys steal a neighbor’s chicken and have the maid cook it; they don’t get caught but beg a Fischer son who’d figured it out, “Don’t tell Papa and Mama or we’ll have to run away from home.”

  When Gottfried Fischer was little, the Beethoven boys naturally tormented him. “Listen, Gottfried, your father is a fisher.”

  “My father is not a fisher, he’s a baker! He bakes bread!”

  “Listen, Gottfried, your father catches fish at night and bakes fish.”

  “No, my father is a baker, not a fisher! My mother bakes fish in the kitchen, not my father.”

  “Listen, Gottfried, you and your father, both of you fishers, when you’re big you’ll have to catch fish at night and bake them.”

  “No, when I’m big I’m going to be a baker, not a fisher!” This kept up until Gottfried was furious and hitting at them; then they’d relent and reassure him that his papa was a baker after all.51

  From the big attic of the Fischer house, you could see down the Rhine in one direction and the Siebengebirge in the other. In the attic stood two telescopes owned by the landlords. In youth, Ludwig spent much time there alone, peering at the landscape up and down the river and over to the hills. “The Beethovens,” Gottfried recalled, “loved the Rhine.”52

  At Easter 1780, the family said goodbye to Tobias Pfeifer, who was leaving town after less than a year. The grand eccentric had proved an able teacher for Ludwig and a reliable drinking companion for Johann. Now, at age nine (and still advertised as a year younger), Ludwig was starting to attract attention from connoisseurs, had become the star of house concerts, and in that capacity was ready to make money.53

  Having suggested Pfeifer as teacher for the boy, Johann’s actor friend Grossmann provided another one, a man who had recently arrived in Bonn to become music director of the court theater. This teacher turned out to be an irreplaceable figure in Ludwig’s life: ­Christian ­Gottlob Neefe, a composer, organist, writer, poet, biographer, and enthusiast for Aufklärung. No one person shaped the child who grew up into Ludwig van Beethoven, but Neefe would be his most important mentor.

  Much of what this teacher would have to work with was already settled. A pattern had formed in Ludwig’s childhood. From his fourth or fifth year, music was beaten into him. It was misery, but whether he chose it or not, music had been from early on what his life was about. Childhood brought good times as well as bad, times when his father was laughing and proud of him, and when he received the steady wisdom and solace of his mother. He enjoyed tramps in the lovely landscape and pranks and games with his brothers and the Fischer children. It was at least a measure of an ordinary childhood. His early years also laid the foundation of a phenomenal resilience and courage.

  On the other side of the misery of his training, there was the ecstasy of music itself. When he escaped from his father’s regime and found better teachers and discovered his own ambitions, the teenage Beethoven still sought solitude, hours when he could be alone with music and pore over his own creations. Even though he was performing constantly in public, the rest of the world and everybody in it could not reach him in that solitude.

  Music was the one extraordinary thing in a sea of the disappointing and ordinary. Reared as he was in a relentless discipline, instinctively responsive to music as he was, the boy never truly learned to understand the world outside music. Nobody ever really demanded that of him until, disastrously, near the end of his life. Nor did he ever really understand love. He could perceive the world and other people only through the prism of his own consciousness, judging them in the unforgiving terms he judged himself.

  Otherwise Beethoven had little grasp of the world at all. In childhood he did not truly comprehend the independent existence of other people. He never really did. He reached maturity knowing all about music, from writing notes to selling them, but otherwise he did not know how to live in the world. In the ideals he lived by in his solitude, instead of human beings there would be an exalted abstraction: ­Humanity.

  3

  Reason and Revolution

  WHEN AT ABOUT ten years old he began studying with Christian Neefe, Ludwig van Beethoven was already a musician people noticed. They paid to hear him play in the house concerts his father produced in the front rooms of the Fischer house. Johann had dropped his objections to the boy’s making up his own notes; Ludwig was teaching himself to compose, following where his ears and his inner singing took him. He understood harmony instinctively. “I never had to learn how to avoid mistakes,” he later wrote. “From my childhood I had so keen a sensibility that I wrote correctly without knowing it had to be that way, or could be otherwise.” None of his earliest creative attempts would survive, but at ten he was not far from his first publication, and it was not the work of a beginner. Still, Beethoven’
s reputation then and for a long time after was founded on his playing.

  After his lessons with van den Eeden and Pfeifer on keyboard and Rovantini on strings, Ludwig began to study organ with Franciscan Friar Willibald Koch. Soon he was playing organ for the 6 a.m. mass at the Minorite Church. One of the Minorite order, an organist named Father Hansmann, was taken by the boy’s playing and followed him home, haunting the Beethoven house concerts. Unaccustomed to devotees and their usefulness, Ludwig was only annoyed. He told Fischer daughter Cäcilie, “That monk who’s always coming around, he’d be better to stay in his cloister and pray over his breviary.”1

  Ludwig was attending a Latin school called the Tirocinium, reaping the benefit of the progressive educational initiatives of the Max Friedrich regime. After the reign of the Jesuits in education ended, the teaching of children became more secular and enlightened, less dogmatic and brutal. In school, Beethoven absorbed a little French and Latin and learned to write in an elegant hand that he retained into his twenties, only then lapsing into a skittering scrawl. In school he learned to add but never to divide or multiply. To the end of his life, if he needed to multiply 62 by 50, he did it by writing 62 in a column 50 times and adding it up.

  To schoolmates, Beethoven at age ten appeared a cipher: grubby, taciturn, and withdrawn, always walking angled forward as if impatient to get away from wherever he was. He had no friends at school. Because of his dark complexion, his family and neighbors took to calling him der Spagnol, “the Spaniard,” painting him with a touch of the exotic. When the boy was not quite eleven, Johann decreed he was learning nothing useful and took him out of school—as most Bonn parents did at about that age, as Johann had been himself.2 At eleven, it was time for a boy to concentrate on a trade. From here on, Ludwig was expected to think and do little but music. That suited him fine.