Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph (66 page)

Even if you had not fettered me again to life, yet you would have meant everything to me—
³

 

How could Josephine answer this delirium? How reply when a man like Beethoven says she is saving his life? (In the Heiligenstadt Testament it had been his art. Now it is Josephine.) His art and his well-being meant a great deal to her. At the same time, her morals, her position in the aristocracy, her children, her lack of attraction to him all made an affair unthinkable. Marrying him could be disastrous, not only personally but legally. She had to keep him at bay. At first she tried an affectionate but firm tack:

 

You have long had my heart, dear Beethoven; if this assurance can give you joy, then receive it—from the purest heart. Take care that it is also entrusted into the purest bosom. You receive the
greatest
proof of my love [and] of my esteem through this confession, through this confidence! . . . I herewith [give] you—of the . . . possession of the noblest of my
Self
. . . will you indicate to me if you are satisfied with it[?] Do not tear my heart apart—do not try to persuade me further. I love you inexpressibly, as one gentle soul does another. Are you not capable of this covenant? I am not receptive to other [forms of] love for the present.
⁴

 

This got her nowhere. His passion was more than words on paper. There were anger, accusations, probably wretched fumbling moments with her having to push him away. His accusations had to do with a shadowy count who had been courting her—egregiously enough to prompt sister Therese to warn her about “keeping two cavaliers on a string.”
⁵
Later, Therese would write that the relationship deteriorated because Beethoven “did not know how to act” with women. She may not have understood that he never really knew how to act with anyone.

When notes resisted him or life resisted him, Beethoven's response was anger and attack—and when it came to people, suspicion and accusation. All this trouble broke over Josephine in a time when she was trying to recover from a nervous breakdown in the wake of losing her husband, having to assume his debts and run his business and rear their children. She became desperate herself: “Even before I knew you, your music made me
enthusiastic
for you—the goodness of your
character
, your affection increased it. This preference that you granted me, the pleasure of your acquaintance, would have been the finest jewel of my life if you could have loved me less sensually. That I cannot satisfy this sensual love makes you angry with me, [but] I would have had to violate solemn obligations if I gave heed to your longings.”
⁶

His longings did not ebb. Finally Josephine was also at her wit's end:

 

You do not know how you wound my heart—you treat me entirely wrong—

You do not know
what
you often do!—How deeply I feel—If my life is dear to you, then treat me with more consideration, and above all,
do not doubt me
. I cannot express how deeply hurtful it is, with my inner consciousness, with so much sacrifice for virtue and duty, to be compared to lowly creatures, if only in [your] thoughts and quiet suspicion.

Believe me, d[ear] k[ind] B, that I
suffer
much more, much more
than you do—
much more!

It is this suspicion that you so often, so hurtfully intimate to me, that pains me beyond all expression. Let this be far from me—I abhor these low, extremely low devices of our species. They are far below me . . .
⁷

 

I love you and value your moral character. You have shown much love and kindness to me and my children; I shall never forget that, and as long as I live, I shall constantly take interest in your destiny, and contribute what I can to your success.
⁸

 

Beethoven may not have understood the last letter for what it was, a respectful fare-thee-well. There, apparently, for the moment, it rested. In the fall Josephine left Vienna at the approach of the French and spent the winter in Budapest, out of reach.
⁹
None of this appears to have interrupted his work on
Leonore
, his concern with publication, his other initiatives. Nothing in love or war or illness, nothing short of death could slow the tide of his art in those years.

Still, he wrote another song that appears to relate to Josephine:
Als die Geliebte sich trennen wollte
(When the Beloved Wished to Part), with its lines “The last ray of hope is sinking” and “Ah, lovely hope, return to me.”
¹⁰

 

A quietly historical moment was caught in an
Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung
of March 1805: “Last winter a musical institute was formed . . . which in its way is truly perfect. These are quartets, which are played in a private house in such a way that the listener always pays five gulden in advance for four productions. Schuppanzigh, the entrepreneur, knows how to enter precisely into the spirit of the composer with his superb quartet performance and how to bring that which is fiery, powerful, or finer, tender, humorous, lovely or playful so significantly to the fore that the first violin [part] could hardly be better occupied.”
¹¹
Here was the formation of the first professional string quartet presenting a more or less public subscription series. The rest of the group were musicians who had been performing with Schuppanzigh for years. The series later moved out of the private house to a restaurant, a common venue of the time. Given the size of the spaces, audiences numbered less than a hundred.
¹²
The subscription series did not last long, but change was coming to the way chamber music was presented. Haydn's string quartets had been directed to players as much as to audiences.
¹³
Schuppanzigh was intruding on the long-standing tradition of private amateur quartet playing; Beethoven's contribution to that evolution would be his first quartets in years.

Publication remained an ongoing necessity and misery for him. For months he had been pushing Breitkopf & Härtel to publish his backlog of large works; he sent them three sonatas, the Third Symphony, the perhaps-still-unperformed Triple Concerto, and
Christus am Ölberge
. They balked at the oratorio and were not offering what he wanted for the rest. Moreover, Gottfried Härtel was fed up with brother Carl's machinations and rudeness. In June, Härtel washed his hands of the current business: “Approximately nine months have passed since your first negotiation with us concerning the five new works that you offered us, without reaching our goal . . . Although our esteem for your art remains great, this dubious situation has become very unpleasant for us . . . Hence we prefer to relinquish these works . . . We repeatedly assure you that it will give us honor and pleasure to publish your works, only we must request . . . that it be done without the intercession of a third party.”
¹⁴
In other words, no Carl. Beethoven replied with due heat but still, for him, great restraint:

 

Though I can fully understand the connection between your Paris letter and the long delay in your latest reply—Yet the whole procedure is altogether far too humiliating for me to waste even one word on it . . . If any mistake was made, then it was due to the fact that my brother was wrong
about the time
which the copying took—The
fee
is much lower than what I usually accept—Beethoven is no braggart and he despises whatever he
cannot obtain solely
by his art and his own merits—Send me back, therefore, all the manuscripts you have had from me . . . I cannot and will not accept a lower fee.
¹⁵

 

All the pieces but
Christus
went to the Bureau des arts et d'industrie, owned partly by Beethoven's friend and operatic collaborator Joseph Sonnleithner. This earned the short-lived publishing company its place in history. Breitkopf & Härtel dropped out of contention for the moment but still hoped to secure something. Critics of its journal, the
Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung
, were still boggling at Beethoven's bolder productions, as seen in a virtually schizophrenic August 1805 review of the newly published
Kreutzer
Sonata:

 

This strange work . . . has extended the boundaries of the type . . . The reviewer believes, after becoming carefully acquainted with this composition, that one has to have limited one's love of art to just a certain realm of the more ordinary, or be strongly prejudiced against Beethoven if one does not recognize this piece of music . . . as a new demonstration of the artist's great genius, his vivid, often glowing fantasy, and his broad knowledge of deeper harmonic art. Also, however, one must be possessed by a type of aesthetic or artistic terrorism or be won over to Beethoven to the point of blindness, if one does not find in the work a new, blatant proof . . . that for some time now this artist had indeed been dead-set on using the most exquisite gifts of nature and his diligence to simply shift toward the greatest arbitrariness, but above all else to be entirely different from other people.
¹⁶

 

This review could not have improved Beethoven's mood, given that he was temperamentally incapable of enjoying critical incomprehension.

After a period of avoiding people because of his deafness, he was getting sociable again. He wrote on a manuscript this year, “Just as you are now plunging into the whirlpool of society—just so is it possible to compose works in spite of social obstacles. Let your deafness no longer be a secret—even in art.”
¹⁷
At a Sonnleithner soiree in July, he met his current operatic hero, Luigi Cherubini. One report of the meeting said he doted on the French master, but Cherubini told ­Czerny that he had not gotten a friendly reception.
¹⁸

Just before Beethoven left Vienna for the summer, he met another celebrated figure in old Ignaz Pleyel, a publisher and piano maker in addition to a composer, considered by some a rival of his teacher Haydn. At a Lobkowitz soiree, Beethoven listened to new Pleyel string quartets, after which some ladies dragged him to the piano. Annoyed as usual in those situations, he did the same thing he had once done to his would-be rival Daniel Steibelt: on the way to the piano, he picked up a Pleyel second-violin part and based his improvisation on a few notes chosen at random. Czerny was present and reported it as one of his more remarkable efforts. Meanwhile, Czerny said, “Throughout the whole improvisation the quite insignificant notes . . . were present in the middle parts, like a connecting thread or a cantus firmus, while he built upon them the boldest melodies and harmonies in the most brilliant [concerto] style.”

It was another demonstration of how Beethoven composed on the page as well as how he improvised: never lose sight of
das Thema
, and emphasize its elements in the playing; but what it gives birth to, the whole of the piece, is more important than the
Thema
itself. The last time he pulled that trick before a composer at a party, his rival Daniel Steibelt had left in outrage. This victim responded quite otherwise. Czerny recalled that Pleyel “was so amazed that he kissed Beethoven's hands. After such improvisations, Beethoven used to break out laughing in a loud and satisfied fashion.”
¹⁹
Beethoven wrote Zmeskall of the occasion, “I wanted to entertain Pleyel in a musical way—But for the last week I have again been ailing . . . and in some ways I am becoming more and more peevish every day in Vienna.”
²⁰

He was generally less peevish in the country, and friends liked to visit him there. For his summer sojourn in 1805, he headed to Hetzendorf, another suburb of Vienna, where his main project was to finish
Leonore
. One frequent visitor was Ferdinand Ries, who came for lessons and for company. In early 1805, Beethoven may have finished work on the op. 57 Piano Sonata that would be named (by a later publisher)
Appassionata
.

The previous summer in Baden, Ries had watched him at work on it. He arrived at his teacher's door for a lesson and heard Beethoven inside playing short passages at the piano over and over with improvised adjustments. When he got up from the keyboard to open a window, Ries knocked and entered, finding his master in a fine mood. “We won't have a lesson today,” Beethoven said. “Instead let's take a walk together, the morning is so beautiful.” They were soon strolling in the hills around Baden, enjoying the day and letting the words and the paths find themselves. Then Beethoven stopped talking, began humming tunelessly to himself, the swirling contours reminding Ries of what he had heard earlier from the piano.

They sat down in a meadow, Beethoven sunk in thought. Suddenly from the opposite hillside rose the keening of a shawm, an oboe-like folk instrument. A herder or a shepherd was playing it. Moved by this unexpected rough music, Ries called Beethoven's attention to it. He watched as Beethoven listened intently, clearly not able to hear a thing. It was the first time Ries witnessed his teacher's deafness, though he had suspected it. To try to protect Beethoven's feelings, Ries declared the playing had stopped, though in fact he still heard it clearly. They returned home, Beethoven once again humming and singing to himself, Ries feeling oppressively sad. When they reached the house, Beethoven sat down at the keyboard and said, “Now I'll play something for you.” With what Ries remembered as “irresistible fire and mighty force,” he tore through the vertiginous last movement of the
Appassionata
, which he had just pulled together in his head. It was a moment Ries never forgot.
²¹