Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph (3 page)

I'll finish with one more personal detail. Some years ago I ordered a used copy of the rare Schiedermair
Junge Beethoven
and received a nearly century-old book. Only months later did I open to the first page and discover it was once owned by Elliot Forbes. I like to call that a good omen.

1

As he lay dying, he remembered Bonn
.

 

I
N THE FREEZING
entrance of St. Remigius, the family watches the priest make the sign of the cross on the baby's head and on his breast as he mewls in his grandfather's arms. It is the newborn's name day, when his name is registered in the book of the church and eternally in the book of heaven.

The priest breathes three times on the face of the infant to exorcize the Demon, acknowledging the presence of original sin. After the first exorcism, the blessed salt is placed in the mouth of the child, so he may relish good works and enjoy the food of divine wisdom. Prayers, the second exorcism. “Credo in Deum,” the priest chants, “Patrem omnipotentem, Creatorem caeli et terrae.” I believe in God, the Father almighty, Creator of heaven and earth.

The family shuffles into the chapel behind the priest. To complete the third exorcism he moistens his right thumb with spittle and, in the form of the cross, touches the right and left ear of the child, proclaiming, “Adaperire.” Be opened.

The group arrives at the massive marble christening font. This is not the first Ludwig van Beethoven to be baptized in this family; it is the third. The elder Ludwig van Beethoven stands as godfather to his newborn grandson and namesake. Both grandfather and godfather, the older man is the distinguished figure among them. As godmother stands not old Ludwig's sad wife, the baby's grandmother, but a neighbor's wife. The mother Maria, the father Johann shift on their feet in the cold as the priest drones on, his hands moving over the child, weaving ancient spells.

Inescapably the family feels hope and also fear for this baby. Half or more of one's children will die in infancy. The year before, there had been another baptism, of Ludwig Maria van Beethoven, named both for the patriarch of the family and for the baby's mother and grandmother. That second Ludwig lived six days. When Maria was seventeen, her first child had died before his first birthday, followed a year later by her first husband. Three deaths. Now with hope and fear Maria watches the christening of her third child, the second Ludwig, with her second husband. In two days, Maria van Beethoven will be twenty-four years old.

The first anointing, the profession of faith, the holy water poured three times: “Ludovicus, ego te baptizo in nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spritus Sancti.” I baptize thee in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. The second anointing, the lacy baptismal cap placed on the infant's head. “Go in peace,” the priest concludes, “and the Lord be with thee.”

 

The name day of the composer Ludwig van Beethoven is December 17, 1770. The mother is Maria Magdalene van Beethoven, born Keverich, formerly Leym. The father is Johann van Beethoven, thirty, tenor in the court chapel choir under his father,
Kapellmeister
Ludwig van Beethoven. The date of the composer's birth, a day or two before his name day, is lost to a history that will be interested in everything to do with this child. He will grow up nominally Catholic and, in his fashion, close to God, but he will be no lover of priests, ritual, or magic. Near the end, through the words of the liturgy, Beethoven will proclaim his credo in the maker of heaven and earth that, like everything else in his life, is an image of his own imagining.

 

The first Ludwig (or Louis, or Lodewyck, or Ludovicus) van Beethoven that history documents, grandfather of the composer, was Flemish, born in the town of Malines, or Mechelen, in the duchy of Brabant. His father Michael van Beethoven began his career as a baker but then developed a prosperous business in luxury goods. Michael and his wife had four sons, of whom Ludwig and brother Cornelius survived. Backward from that point the family history is uncertain.

In Brabant the name Beethoven was common in assorted spellings: Betho, Bethove, Bethof, Bethenhove, Bethoven.
¹
Most of those bearing the name were tradesmen, tavern keepers, and the like. The origin of the name is obscure. An area near the town of Tongeren was called Betho, which might account for it. In Flemish,
beet
means “beetroot” and
hof
, “garden,” so the name could mean “beet garden,” a farmer's name. It could be derived from Flemish words meaning “improved land.”
²
The Flemish
van
means “from,” implying a place one hails from. So the Flemish
van
nominally means the same as the German
von
. But the German word implies “from the house of” and therefore indicates nobility, which
van
does not. One day that difference in one letter would cause the composer Ludwig van Beethoven a great deal of trouble.

The youth of the elder Ludwig van Beethoven is traced in church records starting in many-steepled Malines, a town celebrated in his time for the blaze of its carillons and the glory of its church music.
³
This Ludwig was baptized at St. Katherine's Church on January 5, 1712. At age five he became a choirboy in the cathedral of St. Rombaut. When Ludwig was thirteen, his father hired the town's leading organist to give the boy keyboard lessons.
⁴
Ludwig must have demonstrated impressive ability in both music and leadership; at nineteen he became a singer and substitute
Kapellmeister
—music director—at St. Peter's in Louvain. A year later he was listed as a singer at St. Lambert's in Liège, where his admirers may have included Clemens August, Archbishop Elector of Cologne, Lord of the Electoral Residence in Bonn.
⁵

In 1733, Elector Clemens August summoned Ludwig van Beethoven to become a singer with his court chapel in Bonn. In September of that year, settling into his new home, the first Ludwig married a young woman from an old Bonn family, Maria Josepha Poll. Then twenty-one, Ludwig would serve the Bonn court under two Electors for the next forty years.

A fine bass singer, able keyboard player, formidable presence in the chapel or on an opera stage, Bonn's first Ludwig van Beethoven became a fixture at the palace, where music had a long history as part of the splendor of the Electoral Court. When Ludwig arrived in Bonn, the town was undergoing a glorious makeover under the reign of his employer, the gracious and sublime Prince-Archbishop Elector of Cologne, Clemens August.

 

The title Elector meant that the Archbishop of Cologne, residing in Bonn, belonged to the group of traditionally seven princes granted the privilege of voting for the emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, whose throne lay in Vienna. Though the Holy Roman emperor was therefore elected and not hereditary, the throne had been held by Habsburgs in all but a few years since 1438. The polyglot Habsburg Empire included Hungary, lands in Italy, and in the future Belgium and Yugoslavia.

In the eighteenth century there had never been a country of Germany or Austria. Rather there was a mélange of three hundred mostly small German-speaking states ruled by 250 sovereigns. These states contained around twenty million German speakers, some Catholic and some Protestant. The Holy Roman Empire, which geographically had nothing to do with its name, was a regime based in Vienna that mediated among and protected the German states but exercised little control over them. Most of the states ruled themselves and took pride in their own history and heritage, their food and wine and traditional dress. Most minted their own currencies, maintained their own police and armies. Most considered themselves specially smiled upon by God.

For centuries the sovereigns of each German state had possessed the privilege to spend and enjoy, to erect and tear down, to exalt and execute, tax and torture their subjects, as they pleased. The Holy Roman Empire traced its lineage back to Charlemagne in the ninth century; the Electorate of Cologne dated from the thirteenth century. As the prince-bishop of little Speyer instructed his people, “The commanding will of his majesty is none other than the commanding will of God himself.” Outside their territories, few of these proud princes ever had any power at all.
⁶
A progressive spirit emanating from Vienna challenged traditional staples of the social order like torture and feudalism; but no more than anyone challenged the church did anyone question the existence of the thrones or the expenditures of the ruling princes.

All the same, the patchwork of states that constituted Germany under the banner of the Holy Roman Empire never constituted any kind of rational order. The welter of small German states were like bubbles on the surface of history. They existed because they apparently had always existed, so surely they were there by the will of God. Of the German states, sixty-three were ecclesiastical, ruled by an abbot, bishop, or archbishop. These prince-bishops had the same sorts of privileges and powers as secular rulers of the Holy Roman Empire.

The most prominent ecclesiastical states lay on the Rhine, the main trade artery of German lands: the electorates of Mainz, Trier, and Cologne. The latter city had thrown out its archbishop in 1257, to preserve its status as a “free city.” The archbishop's successors had since ruled their lands and cities from nearby Bonn, upriver to the south. For centuries the people of sunny and progressive Bonn and those of conservative and priest-ridden Cologne (which gave its name to the Electorate) had despised each other. The atmosphere of old Cologne was captured in a bit of doggerel by an English visitor, Samuel Taylor Coleridge:

 

In Köhln, a town of monks and bones,

And pavements fang'd with murderous stones,

And rags, and hags, and hideous wenches;

I counted two and seventy stenches.

 

Because there could be no legitimate heirs to thrones held in the ecclesiastical states by Catholic clerics, the Archbishop Electors, all of noble birth, were placed in power not by vote or by rising through the ranks but through the machinations of powerful families and ministers. Elector Clemens August, the first Ludwig van Beethoven's employer, had from childhood been groomed for power by his family, the Wittelsbachs of Bavaria, who had supplied the previous four Electors of Cologne.

Clemens's forebears were distinguished, and his immediate family remarkable: his mother was the daughter of King Jan Sobieski of Poland, who defeated the Turks at the gates of Vienna in 1683, whom the pope then hailed as “the savior of Western European civilization.” Clemens's father was Elector of Bavaria, his uncle Elector of Cologne. He was educated in Rome by Jesuits, learned something of music and astronomy and architecture in addition to his numbers and letters.
⁷
At age sixteen, he was invested as Bishop of Regensburg, at nineteen Bishop of Münster and Paderborn, at twenty-three Archbishop Elector of Cologne, and so on.
⁸

None of this had anything to do with the man's talent, intelligence, or reason. In each of his exalted posts, Clemens August was splendidly brainless and incompetent, not the least interested in governing anything. As Elector in Bonn, his attention would be given largely to pleasure in the forms of ladies, music, dancing, and erecting monuments to his glory and munificence. A 1754 report to the papal nuncio noted that if you wanted to get anywhere with the Bonn court, you had to deal with the ministers. As for the Elector: “In short, prattle and yet more prattle.”
⁹
Clemens did enjoy or at least tolerate the endless round of court and church ceremonies; he played viola da gamba, presided over Mass in his chapel every morning.
¹⁰

History remembers the reign of Clemens August as the most glittering of its time in western Germany, and ranks his orchestra among the finest German princely ensembles. In his court theater Clemens watched Italian operas, French plays, concerts and ballets; he threw epic masked balls during Karneval.
¹¹
If he was not gifted in policy, statesmanship, or brains, Clemens was not idle. He had traveled Europe and had seen Versailles; he imported French art and architects and demanded the same style at home. Most of the buildings worthy of being seen in Bonn for the next two centuries would be his doing. On foundations laid by his predecessor, he finished and grandly decorated the Electoral Residence facing the Rhine; built the multicolored Rathaus (Town Hall) presiding over the market square; built Michael's (later Koblenz) Gate; enlarged the Poppelsdorf Palace (aka Clemensruhe, “Clemens's Rest”) for his summer residence; and built the high-rococo Holy Steps on the Kreuzberg Church, where the pious would ascend on their knees to the top of the stairs, which led nowhere but back down.

The creation closest to Clemens August's heart was his country palace, the Augustusburg, in nearby Brühl, like a miniature Versailles flanked by French gardens, the palace classical and stately outside but writhing with rococo ornament inside. In Brühl an alley of trees led out to Falkenlust, one of Clemens's several grand hunting lodges.

 

Clemens August was determined to make Bonn glorious. It had long been called beautiful, part of a storied landscape spreading from the banks of the storied Rhine. Travelers arriving on the tree-lined river saw the grand Electoral Residence presiding over spreading French gardens, behind the palace the spires of churches, in the distance a windmill looming over the town. Poppelsdorf Allée, the tree-lined walk from the residence to the summer palace of Poppelsdorf, was declared by a visitor “the most pleasant [walk] in lower Germany. Quiet joy seems to permeate the whole landscape and a sweet pleasure fills the soul.”
¹²