Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph Read online

  At home he played with his brothers and the Fischer children and sat for hours with his mother. He could talk more easily and happily to her than to anyone else. Father Johann was his manager and promoter, but otherwise Ludwig was slipping away from him. In his art he gained applause and praise, a chorus of admiration that would continue to the end of his life. He seems to have taken it for granted as his due. Eventually his admirers in Bonn drew him out to a degree; at last he learned to make friends. Even then, on his own path with its own horizon, praise hardly reached him.

  Early on, he took for granted that he was destined to be somebody. Once when Cäcilie Fischer lectured him, “How dirty you’re looking again! You ought to keep yourself properly clean,” he told her, “What’s the difference? When I become a gentleman nobody will care.”3

  Once, Johann van Beethoven had been derided by his father as “Johnny the runner” for his restless wandering. In adulthood he did not lose his wanderlust. Every summer, when the Elector went on his annual visit to Westfalen in his capacity as prince-archbishop of Münster, the Bonn court Kapelle had its vacation. During the break of 1781, Johann made another of his escapes from home, taking with him Ludwig and the boy’s string teacher, violinist Franz Rovantini.

  If Ludwig had not inherited Johann’s mediocrity, neither did he inherit his father’s sociability. A lot of people liked Johann van Beethoven, and most of his friends appear to have been musicians and music lovers. In the fair weather of 1781, father and son and violinist wandered from town to town and house to house in the Rhineland, on the lookout for music fanciers with influence, money, and a clavier in the house. Back home, Maria van Beethoven told Cäcilie Fischer that with the men and their commotion out of the way, she was a happy straw widow and could do what she liked.4

  These summer jaunts of father and son were working vacations. Ludwig’s instinctive love of nature burgeoned as they traveled in slow rattling wagons from one sleepy town to another: Flamersheim, Ahrweiler, Bad Neuenahr, Ersdorf, Odendorf, Röttgen.5 Ludwig and Rovantini played in hoary, creaking half-timbered houses and in country palaces. Among those visited on this and later trips was the wealthy and aristocratic banking family Meinertzhagen of Oberkassel, whose patriarch frequented the boy’s performances in Bonn. In Bensberg, Ludwig played for C. J. M. Burggraf, who owned the second-largest Baroque palace north of the Alps. The boy became accustomed to being welcomed in great houses. As the weather turned toward autumn, it became the season for Johann’s most beloved dish (later one of his son’s as well): Krammetsvögel, made from a thrush whose flesh was infused by the juniper berries it had fattened on.6

  In autumn 1781, they returned home to a city in the grip of a dysentery epidemic. Soon the illness claimed their traveling companion and the boy’s teacher, the much-admired Franz Rovantini. Johann and Maria did what they could for him, but the day came when Rovantini told Maria he’d dreamed of his grave and was resigned. “Dreams are foolishness!” Maria exclaimed. Back at the house her report was grim. In the hour Rovantini died, Cäcilie Fischer, whom he had loved, heard a familiar step behind her in the kitchen and turned to find no one. In affectionate fun, Rovantini had often sneaked up behind Cäcilie and hoisted her into the air. The Kapelle gave him a musical send-off. Maria wrote the news to Rovantini’s sister, a cousin of Maria’s, in Rotterdam.7 Eventually, that connection was to produce another adventure for Ludwig.

  The 1780s witnessed the height of Enlightenment and Aufklärung optimism and activism. Above all, at the end of the decade the widespread revolutionary fervor climaxed with revolution in France. The year 1781 alone was extraordinary. It saw the premiere of Schiller’s cathartic drama Die Räuber, which embodied the turbulent spirit of Sturm und Drang. In Vienna, Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II issued decrees that abolished serfdom in Austria and proclaimed religious tolerance. Immanuel Kant published Critique of Pure Reason, which turned a page in the history of philosophy. Haydn published his Russian String Quartets; Mozart premiered his finest tragic opera, Idomeneo. And that year a new esoteric society calling itself the Order of Illuminati issued its general statutes. As a significant footnote in history, around 1781 Beethoven began his studies with Christian Gottlob Neefe.

  A native of Chemnitz in Saxony, Neefe (pronounced Nay-feh) had come to Bonn in 1779, at age thirty-one, to serve as music director of his friend G. F. W. Grossmann’s theater troupe, which was installed at the theater of the Electoral Residence. The cosmopolitan, enlightened, highly musical atmosphere of Leipzig had shaped Neefe. The son of a poor and devout tailor, he spent seven years getting a law degree at the University of Leipzig to satisfy his parents. But music was Neefe’s passion; he had composed since age twelve, teaching himself from books. After finishing his law examinations, Neefe turned entirely to music. His particular interest lay in the theatrical side of the art, which brought together a mixture of his musical and literary passions.8 His first works, from the early 1770s, were comic operas and operettas.

  Neefe’s mentor in Leipzig was composer and writer on music J. A. Hiller, a successor of J. S. Bach as cantor of St. Thomas Church and founder of the historic Gewandhaus concerts. The city was a breeding ground of progressive social and artistic ideas. Mentor and student shared a vision of creating a German national opera and reforming musical pedagogy, bringing to their agenda an exalted idealism about music, theater, literature, Aufklärung, and personal growth. Duty was a relentless imperative that Neefe preached, the point being to serve God by serving humanity.

  Neefe’s enthusiasms were equally literary, and his taste began with the pious lyrics and ingenuous moral fables of Christian Fürchetegott Gellert, whose homely inspirational works were at the time second in popularity only to the Bible in Germany. A leading voice of the Aufklärung, Gellert was both symptom of and contributor to the burgeoning German obsession with the Good, the True, and the Beautiful, which aspired to be a kind of science of morality and ethics. As Gellert also demonstrates, music and the other arts of the Aufklärung were marked by a populist sensibility and a deliberate artlessness: even the highest art should aim for the direct, the natural, the broadly communicative. In keeping, Neefe was an enthusiast for German folk poetry and song, composing his own faux-naïf imitations of both: “The Saxon maids are sweet and smart; / But I’ll take no Saxon Maiden to wife” begins his lyric To the Bonn Girls. After a tour of Bavarian, Swabian (“A Swabian maid, a delightful thing! / She’ll trip in a dance hop sie sa sa!”), and other flavors of the fair sex, he concludes, “So only a Bonn girl will I marry / A Bonn maid alone will make me tarry.”9 (Neefe’s actual wife was a singer from Leipzig.)

  Central to Neefe’s influence on Beethoven was Leipzig’s living memory of two towering composers who had lived and worked in the city: J. S. Bach, some of whose students were still active when Neefe studied in the city, and his son C. P. E. Bach. During his later years in Berlin and Hamburg, C. P. E. became the prime musical representative of the aesthetic called Empfindsamkeit, a cult of intimate feeling and sensitivity. Along with his brother J. C. Bach, C. P. E. helped create the early Classical style in music, but his introverted sensibility and capricious imagination made him also a prophet of Romanticism. In his treatise Toward the True Art of Clavier Playing, C. P. E. declared that moving the heart was the chief aim of music, and to do that one had to play from the heart and soul. Haydn called that book “the school of schools.” While outside Leipzig J. S. Bach’s reputation languished in the shadow of his famous sons, Neefe understood the elder Bach’s stature and the importance and the synoptic quality of his Well-Tempered Clavier, a work in those years known only to a cultish few.

  The voices and ideals of Hiller and C. P. E. Bach, more than any others, echo in Neefe’s music and aesthetic writings. Through him, those passions touched his student Beethoven. At the same time, Neefe promoted new literature; he read Goethe and Schiller and the poets and dramatists of the Sturm und Drang.10

  An echt Aufklärer, Neefe declared himself “no friend of ceremony and etiq
uette . . . detestable flatterers and informers . . . The great men of earth I love when they are good men; I honor their laws when they work best in civil society.” In his youth he scorned religion, but finally he became Calvinist and declared he hoped “to die a proper Christian.”11 (Not lacking in practicality, he had his children who were born in Bonn baptized as Catholic, to pacify local sensibilities.) Neefe’s writings range from idealistic to pedantic. Believing poetry should be a kind of national institution to promote virtue, he wrote music and lyrics for a Song in Praise of Potatoes. His Song for Those Looking for a Job warned against “the dire consequences of idleness.”12

  Which is all to say that Neefe’s enthusiasms were diffuse, likewise his creativity: he was a composer of sonatas, concertos, singspiels, and operas; writer of inspirational homilies, biographies, and autobiographies; critic and aesthetician of music; journalist; translator of librettos; and poet. Everything Neefe did was worthy and engaging, if a bit fearfully earnest. If nothing close to an original genius, he was one of the more interesting German creators of his time. By the end of his career he had a considerable reputation in Germany, both musically (his “Turkish” opera, Adelheit von Veltheim, was performed widely) and literarily (Goethe’s mother was one of his admirers). Carl Friedrich Cramer’s Magazin der Musik, to which Neefe contributed, listed him along with C. P. E. Bach, Hiller, and a few others as one of “our Matadors in tonal art.”13

  A portrait of Neefe captured him as well as, years before, a painter had captured Ludwig van Beethoven the elder. The painter of old Ludwig pictured an imposing figure looking the viewer in the eye. The painter of Neefe pictured a dreamer. The face is mild and pleasant, the feelings shrouded, the eyes intelligent, the gaze searching somewhere beyond the viewer. In life, Neefe was depressive and hypochondriacal; he leaned and limped from a deformity. His description of himself: “a small, dry, gaunt little man.”14 Yet he was insatiably involved with life, an intellectual and spiritual man of action, curious about everything.

  In a word, Neefe was the definition of what Germans call a Schwärmer, one swarming with rapturous enthusiasms. The breadth of his outlook on life, art, and ideas was unique in Bonn and rare among musicians anywhere. Like many in his time, he was intoxicated with hope for a humanity living in the new age of science and freedom, and he dedicated his life to the service of enlightened ideals. As for himself, he wrote in a poem:

  I wish only

  To be a man among men, and to be clear in head and heart,

  And to find my happiness in good deeds.15

  His pupil Beethoven was to echo those thoughts and many others of Neefe’s—always in his own fashion. Like Neefe too, Beethoven grew up a man of the Enlightenment. At the same time he became a creator unlike his teacher, broad and rich enough to galvanize the musical reaction against the Enlightenment.

  What is Enlightenment? Near the end of his life as the most visible representative and court jester of the Enlightenment, after his famous cry of “Crush infamy!” after his declaration “If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent Him,” Voltaire felt hopeful. In the article on God for his Philosophic Dictionary, he wrote, “Year by year the fanaticism that overspread the earth is receding in its detestable usurpations . . . If religion no longer gives birth to civil wars, it is to philosophy alone that we are indebted; theological disputes begin to be regarded in much the same manner as the quarrels of Punch and Judy at the fair. A usurpation odious and injurious, founded upon fraud on one side and stupidity on the other, is being at every instant undermined by reason, which is establishing its reign.” Shortly before he died, Denis Diderot, editor of the revolutionary Encyclopedia, prophesied that everywhere, the eons of submission to religion and princes were about to end once and for all.16

  Of course, these French philosophes could not have been more wrong. Reason would not reign, princes did not depart, the Punch-and-Judy quarrels of theology endured. But for a few decades in the eighteenth century, an overwhelming sense of hope gave the Enlightenment a singular radiance. The age envisioned the end of fanaticism and tyranny, when not only would the understanding of nature be completed by science and reason, but government, society, humankind itself would be perfected. Philosophers spoke of the “science of government,” the “science of man.” When humanity illuminated by reason was free of the chains of superstition and submission to tyranny both secular and sacred, when every individual was free to find his or her way to happiness, then, as Schiller and Beethoven sang, earth would become an Elysium.

  In the 1780s, that spirit reached a climax. There was a fever of revolution in the air, an intoxication of hope, a conviction that humanity was about to turn a corner into an exalted age, the birth of true civilization and a final understanding of the universe.17 Hope and excitement vibrated everywhere, in philosophy and literature and poetry and in the pages of the Intelligenzblatt, the town paper in Bonn.

  Just after Immanuel Kant published Critique of Pure Reason, in 1781, which set philosophy on a new course of asking what is possible to truly know on earth, the philosopher wrote a popular article on the topic, “What Is Enlightenment?” He answered:

  Enlightenment is mankind’s exit from its self-incurred immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to make use of one’s own understanding without the guidance of another. Self-incurred is this inability if its cause lies not in the lack of understanding but rather in the lack of the resolution and courage to use it without the guidance of another. Saper aude! Have the courage to use your own understanding! is thus the motto of Enlightenment.

  Kant continued: “Rules and formulas, these mechanical instruments of a rational use (or rather misuse) of [humankind’s] natural gifts, are the fetters of an everlasting immaturity.”18 Could “a society of clergymen,” he asked, demand an unquestioning obedience to dogma?

  I say that this is completely impossible. Such a contract, concluded for the purpose of closing off forever all further Enlightenment of the human race, is utterly null and void even if it should be confirmed by the highest power . . . It is absolutely forbidden to unite . . . in a permanent religious constitution that no one may publicly doubt, and thereby to negate a period of progress of mankind toward improvement.

  Beyond this resounding credo that freedom of thought and rejection of religious dogma are the essence of Enlightenment, Kant in his work put an end to the traditional muddling of philosophy and natural science. He made the declaration, at once radical and commonsensical, that while the objective world certainly exists, we can never truly comprehend it, because as human beings, we are limited in the means we possess to grasp reality. We can think only in appearances that make sense to us. We can make representations of the world only in terms of time, space, causality, and our other human categories, which may or may not apply to any Ding an sich, thing-in-itself.19

  The implications of these ideas were epochal not only in philosophy but also in the realm of ethics, aesthetics, and morals. The essence of the things outside ourselves that humanity cannot understand is God. “The desire to talk to God is absurd,” Kant wrote. “We cannot talk to one we cannot comprehend—and we cannot comprehend God; we can only believe in Him.” For that reason, we also cannot accept the unquestionable authority of scripture or any other dictates divine or earthly. We must live by our own free and individual understanding, discover our own rules for ourselves. As Beethoven later put it, “Man, help yourself!” If we are believers, then, how do we serve God? When men “fulfill their duties to men, they fulfill thereby God’s commandments; that they are consequently always in the service of God, as long as their actions are moral, and . . . it is absolutely impossible to serve God otherwise.”

  So as individuals on our own, Kant asked, what can we truly know, and how can we know it? By what ethics and morals can we find our way for ourselves? What are the Good, the True, the Beautiful? For Kant, the moral part came down to what he called the “categorical imperative”: every person must “act only in accordance with that
maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law.” Every act should be done with the conviction that if everyone did likewise, life would be good. Each person’s actions become a mirror of all moral law, and thereby each finds freedom and happiness apart from the dictates of gods or princes. And to serve humanity is to serve God.

  Kant touched off a revolution in humanity’s sense of itself and its imperatives. In Bonn, as in other German intellectual centers, Kant was in the air thinkers and artists breathed. The people around Beethoven were aflame with these ideas. In the end, Kant the man of the eighteenth century became the bridge between the Enlightenment and the Romantic era—which is to say, in the early nineteenth century, Kant occupied the position in philosophy that Goethe did in literature and Beethoven in music.

  The first practical political fruit of the Enlightenment was the American Revolution, its eternal expressions of enlightened ideals laid out in Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” That sentence distilled the secular and humanistic ethos of the age. Jefferson’s words echoed philosopher David Hume: “Every man . . . proceeds in the pursuit of happiness, with as unerring a motion, as that which the celestial bodies observe.” “The entire pursuit of reason,” wrote Kant, “is to bring about . . . one ultimate end—that of happiness.” This made human well-being a joining of head and heart, a spiritual quest for joy not in heaven but on earth.20