Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph (6 page)

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M
OST OF THE
time the extraordinary begins in the ordinary. The son reared in the family business. The father who has extravagant dreams for his child. The father who is mediocre in his trade and discovers his son is talented, so drives him all the harder. The father who expects his son to realize his own frustrated dreams. The father who drinks and lashes out. The son who is helpless to resist. The father who does not know how to express love. The mother who watches and tries to soften the blows. The wife who makes her accommodations with the wrong husband and preserves herself and her children as best she can. The wife and mother who wishes none of it had happened. All these are old, ordinary stories.

When a child is reared in a supremely difficult discipline such as music, the great plan, the impetus, usually comes from a parent.
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The child will do this and that, will do it when he is told, and will excel—or else. There is only the question of method. Johann van Beethoven knew one way to keep his son in line, and that was with shouts, threats, beatings, locking the little scamp in the basement. Perhaps his own father had trained the young Johann in music with the same hardness. In any case, Johann had the impatience and the explosive temper of his father, as would his son. The Fischer children remembered a small boy standing on a low bench to reach the keyboard, crying as he played while his father loomed over him.
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Johann began teaching his son, beating music into him, when Ludwig was four or five. First, history says, the boy was taught “clavier.” Given that this word encompasses any kind of keyboard instrument, which one is meant is not certain. The pianoforte was still expensive and relatively undeveloped when Ludwig was a child, though soon it would push the old harpsichord into obsolescence. But Bonn was still a backwater, not a center of piano development like Vienna, so Ludwig learned his notes on harpsichord or clavichord.

In those days children often started on the smaller and quieter clavichord, which had a particular advantage: whereas the mechanism of the harpsichord plucked the strings always at the same volume, each key of the clavichord was joined to a small metal hammer that struck the string, so subtleties of touch and volume were available on the clavichord that were not possible on the larger instrument. If Ludwig started on clavichord, he was already learning nuances of touch that would translate to the pianofortes of that time, which were no larger than a harpsichord and had a far more delicate touch than the instruments of a century later.

Clearly Johann's idea was to rear Ludwig as a court musician so he would be employable as soon as possible and earn his keep. Johann had been reared to that same end by his father. As it had been with Johann, musical teenagers from the families of court musicians might have to work for years before being paid—but if Ludwig could become a clavier soloist by his teens, he might command a salary right away.
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When the boy had learned his notes at the clavier, Johann began to teach him violin and viola so he could play in the court orchestra. Eventually, most likely, the goal was that Ludwig would become
Kapellmeister
, like his grandfather—the post his father had failed to achieve.

Early on, the boy wanted to make up his own music. Once when his father caught Ludwig improvising on violin, he was heard to shout, “What stupid stuff are you scratching at now? You know I can't stand that. Scratch on the notes or you'll never get anywhere!” But the boy kept at it; again Johann caught him playing his own tunes. “Haven't you heard what I said?” he demanded.

On his fiddle the boy played a phrase he had invented and asked, “But isn't this beautiful?”

“That's another matter entirely,” Johann said. “This is just something you made up yourself. You're not to do that. Keep at your clavier and violin and play the notes correctly, that's what will get you somewhere. When you've learned enough then you can and you will play from your head. But don't try it now. You're not ready for it.”
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Inevitably the boy continued making up music, but now in secret, as something private and forbidden.
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As a musician, at least, Johann was no fool. Before long he would have realized that this son was remarkably gifted. At that point it appears his plans broadened toward a splendid new horizon. He began to imagine that Ludwig might be in the same category as the most famous musical phenomenon of the age, a child of freakish talent named Mozart.

 

More benignly, there were memories of Ludwig sitting on his father's lap at parties, and accompanying while Johann sang. A lot of people liked Johann van Beethoven, or at least enjoyed his and the family's hospitality. Musicians and court figures were in the house constantly. From the cradle, Ludwig heard music all the time, from the songs and keyboard and chamber works of famous masters to folk music and dances and hunting songs and wedding songs.
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Holidays were celebrated with food, drink, and lots of music.

Every year saw a family festival on Maria van Beethoven's name day. On that day, at least, she was coddled and adored. Court musicians showed up with music stands from the
Kapelle
, and chairs were lined up along the walls in one of the large street rooms of the Beethoven flat. The men set up a canopy decked with laurel branches and flowers and foliage; inside the canopy they hung the portrait of the patriarch, old Ludwig. Maria was ushered in, and the celebration began with a burst of music. Then came more than enough food and wine, and dancing late into the night in stocking feet so as not to wake the neighbors.
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At Christmas, Johann ordered a pig slaughtered and had a court butcher make holiday wurst. The court musicians served at midnight Mass in the chapel, the Archbishop Elector presiding, the bodyguards and the regiment appearing in full dress, the choir hoping to shine on the most joyous of holidays. After the services ended with volleys of muskets and cannons, Johann and his friends tramped home in the cold and sat down to wine, punch, coffee, a table heaped with food, and singing and playing.
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One thing seems to have been appreciated about Johann and Maria van Beethoven: they knew how to throw a party.

 

Johann's schemes and machinations, of course, had to do with money. To support a family, his pay as a minor member of the court
Kapelle
was modest (by then about 315 florins),
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and while he busied himself teaching private students, there was not much profit in it. Meanwhile, by the time Ludwig was six there were five mouths in the family to feed.

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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.)
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Among the spectators, court musician Candidus Passavanti was heard to cry, “Oh, my poor contrabass, that I brought with me from Venice!”
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