Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph (104 page)

Here
Fidelio
shows itself to be a descendent of Mozart's
Zauberflöte
.
⁷⁹
That opera, steeped in Masonry and its humanistic ideals, is a fairy tale of love in all its manifestations: the earthy love of Papageno and Papagena, the exalted love of Tamino and Pamina, the divine love of Sarastro for all humanity. All contribute to the triumph over the tyrannous Queen of the Night. At the end of
Die Zauberflöte
Sarastro exalts the lovers as the crown of humanity: love between two people as the answer, the representative of divinity on earth. Beethoven in his own way, full of grand abstractions but animating them with all his powers in shaping tones, says the same in
Fidelio
. For listeners, much of what lingers in the mind from the opera are words and phrases he underlines in the music: “O what joy”; “Farewell, warm sunlight”; “What darkness here”; “May you be rewarded in better worlds”; “Savior!”; and above all “Freedom.”

In the Ninth Symphony he would return to these matters again.
Fidelio
is another link in the chain of thought stretching from the Aufklärung spirit Beethoven imbibed in Bonn to the
Eroica
and
Fidelio
and the Fifth Symphony, to end in the Ninth, where all despots are put away. In its stylistic reach
Fidelio
stretches from the eighteenth-century buffa elements through the voice of the
Eroica
and Fifth Symphonies to prophecies of the Ninth and the
Missa solemnis
.
⁸⁰
In other words, for Beethoven the final version of
Fidelio
became the bridge between the heroic and the post-heroic styles.

At the close of the performance in Vienna at the beginning of the congress, the cheers went on and on. The performance, conducted by Beethoven, was well done;
Kapellmeister
Umlauf again sat behind his back to deal with problems en route caused by Beethoven's deafness. Soprano Anna Milder, now Milder-Hauptmann, had been the first ­Leonore as a teenager with a big voice but little experience. Now as a mature singer and actress, she became the first great Leonore. Pizarro was Johann Michael Vogl; he went on to be an important champion of Schubert's songs.

It was librettist Treitschke who wrote the final and splendid new conclusion to Florestan's scene. He got a rare view of Beethoven composing when he presented him with the text:

 

What I am now relating will live forever in my memory. Beethoven came to me about seven o'clock in the evening . . . [and] asked how matters stood with the aria. It was just finished, I handed it to him. He read, ran up and down the room, muttered, growled, as was his habit instead of singing—and tore open the pianoforte. My wife had often vainly begged him to play; today he placed the text in front of him and began to improvise marvelously . . . Out of it he seemed to conjure the motive of the aria. The hours went by, but Beethoven improvised on. Supper . . . was served, but—he would not permit himself to be disturbed. It was late when he embraced me, and declining the meal, he hurried home. The next day the admirable composition was finished.
⁸¹

 

The key element here is music arrived at by improvisation in a deep
raptus
, when Beethoven forgot his mental and physical travails in the same way that he forgot to eat.

 

He had no time to rest after his labors finishing the new
Fidelio
and putting it onstage. Immediately he got to work on a cantata called
Der glorreiche Augenblick
(The Glorious Moment), a paean to the congress and its luminaries. Its text was by Salzburg surgeon and writer Alois Wiessenbach. He left his impressions of Beethoven at age forty-three:

 

Beethoven's body has a strength and rudeness which is seldom the blessing of chosen spirits . . . The sturdiness of his body, however, is in his flesh and bones only; his nervous system is irritable in the highest degree and even unhealthy. How it has often pained me to observe that in this organism the harmony of the mind was so easily put out of tune. He once went through a terrible typhus and from that time dates the decay of his nervous system and probably also his melancholy loss of hearing . . . It is significant that before that illness his hearing was unsurpassably keen and delicate, and that even now he is painfully sensible to discordant sounds . . . His character is in complete agreement with the glory of his talent. Never in my life have I met a more childlike nature paired with so powerful and defiant a will; if heaven had bestowed nothing upon him but his heart, this alone would have made him one of those in whose presence many would be obliged to stand up and do obeisance. Most intimately does that heart cling to everything good and beautiful by a natural impulse which surpasses all education . . . There is nothing in the world, no earthly greatness, nor wealth, nor rank, nor state can bribe it.
⁸²

 

The two men found some mutual sympathy partly because Wiessenbach was about as deaf as Beethoven. They conversed in shouts. In the same period came pianist Wenzel Tomaschek's visit to Vienna and Beethoven, about which he wrote a memoir. Tomaschek transcribed a bit of shoptalk, most of it devoted to putting down young Giacomo Meyerbeer as a pianist and composer—and timid bass drum player in
Wellington's Victory
. Tomaschek recalled Beethoven saying, “It has always been known that the greatest pianoforte players were also the greatest composers; but how did they play? Not like the pianists of today, who prance up and down the keyboard with passages which they have practiced—
putsch, putsch, putsch;
—what does that mean? Nothing! When true pianoforte virtuosi played it was always something homogeneous, an entity; if written down it would appear as a well-thought-out work. That is pianoforte playing; the other thing is nothing.”
⁸³
What Beethoven was talking about was not playing from score but rather improvisation. Czerny noted that Beethoven's more formal improvisations sounded like a published piece, just as Beethoven here said they should.

The triumphs kept coming. At the end of November there was a gala performance before dignitaries including the king of Prussia (he left early) and Tsar Alexander and his wife.
Wellington's Victory
and the Seventh Symphony were given another whirl, but the main event was the premiere of
Der glorreiche Augenblick
, the cantata Beethoven had whipped up over the previous month or so. If in moments here and there it presages the Ninth Symphony and the
Missa solemnis
, the cantata is mostly another testament to Beethoven's professionalism. When the occasion calls for bombastic hosannas to the ruling class, he is ready to oblige.

“Europe arises!” the cantata begins. A sample of its wretched couplets: “And Karl of Habsburg, ancient line, / Battled with trust in God divine. / Where Habsburg struck on the Danube's strands / There struck he him—and Austria stands.”
⁸⁴
Much brass and percussion, children adding their innocent voices to the rejoicing, “a wonderful, crowned figure bathed in light,” figures representing Genius and Vienna in its moment of greatness, and so on. One listener was impressed by the music but found the text of the cantata “extremely mediocre”: “All that it really contains is the fact that there are now many sovereigns in Vienna; exactly like so many poems written for occasions.”
⁸⁵
This was a charity concert, with a packed audience. It was repeated twice in December, first in a program for Beethoven's benefit, only half full, then again for charity, again packed.

Beethoven's old patron Count Razumovsky, Russian plenipotentiary to the congress, presented Beethoven to the assembled monarchs at the palace of Archduke Rudolph. Among them were the tsar and tsarina. Afterward Beethoven's physician friend Joseph von Bertolini suggested that he write a polonaise for the tsarina, since that dance was in fashion. Beethoven sat down and improvised several dances and asked Bertolini to pick one. The result was the op. 89 Polonaise for piano, which he presented to the tsarina at an audience. Delighted by the dedication, she in turn presented Beethoven with an equally welcome 50 ducats (about 450 florins). She asked if her husband, years before, had acknowledged Beethoven's dedication of the op. 30 Violin Sonatas. The tsar had not, Beethoven humbly admitted. The tsarina dutifully handed over another hundred ducats.
⁸⁶

In relating all this later, Beethoven scornfully noted that at the concert for his own benefit, the king of Prussia had done nothing but buy a 10-ducat ticket, while the tsar paid for his with 200 ducats.
⁸⁷
The tsarina later received the dedication of the piano arrangement of the Seventh Symphony. He wrote a Baron von Schweiger, as a go-between, “Since the grand symphony in A can be regarded as one of the happiest products of my poor talents . . . I would take the liberty of presenting to Her Majesty the pianoforte arrangement of this work together with the polonaise . . . Should Her Majesty desire to hear me play, that would be the highest honor for me.”
⁸⁸

The rampant gaiety of the congress inevitably led to disasters small and large. On the last day of 1814, Beethoven's patron Count Razumovsky gave a dinner in honor of the tsar for seven hundred guests in his almost-completed palace filled with almost-inconceivable fineries. At the congress Razumovsky was at the zenith of his prestige, at the top of his world. For days an army of cooks worked around the clock preparing the banquet. While they labored, a baking oven overheated unnoticed and fire got into the heating system. As the guests were eating, the palace erupted in flames.

By the time all the fire engines of Vienna arrived along with thousands of Viennese, who enjoyed a good fire, there was nothing to be done. Gone were three blocks of mansion, the great stables and riding school, the chapel, the carpets and tapestries, the old-master paintings, the hall of sculptures by Canova. Razumovsky was found sitting stunned on a bench on his grounds, wrapped in sables and wearing a velvet cap. Emperor Franz appeared to say what he could. When Razumovsky tried to kiss his hand, Franz snatched it away.
⁸⁹
The tsar gave Razumovsky a loan of some 700,000 florins to recover, but he never did resurrect his palace, his fortunes, or his spirit. His string quartet headed by Schuppanzigh lingered for a while, but soon he had to give them up.

 

From late 1813 to the end of the next year, Beethoven had written two big patriotic potboilers,
Wellington's Victory
and
Der glorreiche Augenblick
, and a small one,
Germania
. He began 1815 with an ambitious slate of serious works planned: a sixth piano concerto in D major; an oratorio commissioned by the new Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde (Association of the Friends of Music); an opera
Romulus and Remus
on a Treitschke libretto; a symphony; and a piano trio. The symphony, or something of that order, was the D-minor one he had been thinking about. On a sketch he wrote, “Freude schöner Götterfunken Tochter” (“Work out the overture!”). (At this point the idea may have been for a freestanding piece on Schiller's ode.) With the piano concerto he got nearly half a first movement in full-score draft and then gave up on it.
⁹⁰
He finished no more concertos. None of the other planned pieces got far, either. His health, which had tormented him for years, was getting worse and likewise his hearing. If he had found ideas and directions that seized him, nothing would have stopped him from working, and the enthusiasm of the public for his music was the highest it had ever been. But nothing seized him.

In January 1814, the final settlement with the Kinsky estate returned to him the largest share of his annuity. Lobkowitz followed suit in April. The latter, fallen on hard times but still one of Beethoven's oldest and most devoted patrons, had no illusions left. In a rueful letter to Archduke Rudolph, Lobkowitz wrote, “Although I have reason to be anything but satisfied with the behavior of Beethoven toward me, I am nevertheless rejoiced, as a passionate lover of music, that his assuredly great works are beginning to be appreciated. I heard ‘Fidelio' here and barring the book, I was extraordinarily pleased with the music, except the two finales, which I do not like very much. I think the music extremely effective and worthy of the man who composed it.”
⁹¹
The gentle prince, who had nearly bankrupted himself because of his passion for music, died at the end of 1816, but his estate kept up the payments. No surviving letters of Beethoven memorialize either Prince Lobkowitz or Lichnowsky, the leading patrons of his first decades in Vienna.

That April Beethoven received a letter from his old friend and patron Countess Marie Erdödy, a peace offering after some quarrel had kept them apart for years. He responded: “I have read your letter with great pleasure, my beloved Countess, and also what you say about the renewal of your friendship for me. It has long been my wish to see you and your beloved children once again. For although I have suffered a great deal, yet I have not lost my former love for children, the beauties of nature and friendship.” His brother Carl had apparently written her an entreaty. “I beg you,” Ludwig wrote her, “to make allowances for him, because he is really an unhappy, suffering man.”
⁹²
He was bereft of many old friends now, and moved to hear from one of them. At the same time, he had to cultivate any potential patrons he had. Far gone were the brash days when he told off Prince Lichnowsky and laughed at losing an annuity. A note in his
Tagebuch
shows that the countess had sent a more tangible peace offering: “34 bottles [of wine] from Countess Erdödy.”

Beethoven arranged a 1,500-florin loan to brother Carl from publisher Steiner, which was to be paid back in the form of rights to future pieces.
⁹³
But even with his dying brother, Ludwig's capacity for rage had not mitigated. One day around this time, he burst into Carl's house at mealtime shouting, “You thief! Where are my notes?” He was referring to some score he thought Carl had lifted. Outraged, Carl took a pile of music from a drawer and threw it down on the table. Ludwig calmed down and apologized, but when he left Carl said he never wanted “that dragon” in the house again. All this was observed by the little boy Karl, seven then, who recalled the scene years later. Soon after, Ludwig saw his brother in town, looking very ill. Ludwig embraced him, covered him with kisses, and took him home in a cab, kissing him all the way.
⁹⁴
His paroxysms erupted uncontrollably and passed. His later friend the playwright Franz Grillparzer said that in his rage “Beethoven became like a wild animal.”