Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph (77 page)

By the end of the exposition the music has turned pealingly triumphant. That triumph, however, is the last for a while. The development section is largely quiet, minor key, undramatic except for a
furioso
­E-minor outburst in the middle. (The autograph of the development is a maze of scribbling out. Beethoven essentially wrote a revised version of the development on top of the first one, improvising on the page.)
²¹
The recap is expanded and recomposed, developmental, yet for much of it the tone is still quiet and introspective. By the end the music has taken on a quality of reflection and retreat.

The scherzo in A minor is rhythmically quirky, ironically demonic, irresistible. In the main theme the piano and cello seem unable to agree on the downbeat. It ends nearly inaudibly in sighs and fragments. An aria-like slow movement suddenly breaks off, and we find it was an introduction to the Allegro vivace last movement, which begins with a broad, serene A-major theme that echoes the opening of the first movement. Once again, much of the music is quiet where we expect otherwise. Has the moment of triumph from the first movement vanished for good? No: after a muted and expectant opening of the development, the music finds that tone again. In the coda racing joy is unleashed and prevails to the end, with an introspective
pianissimo
before the crashing last chords.

 

Around this time Beethoven tested the possibilities of a genre he had not touched on since op. 1. His first piano trio in a decade, op. 70, no. 1 in D Major begins precipitously with an energetic unison stride ­downward on a four-note motif, slams to a halt on an out-of-key ­F-natural, then picks up into a quiet, coiled-spring whirlwind notably vehement even for a major-key movement. Beethoven's response to D major, from the model in his op. 10, no. 3, piano sonata, had been a mixture of traditional and personal. That key, wrote a theorist of the time, “is suited to noisy, joyful, warlike, and rousing things.” So it would be in opp. 10 and 70, but the later work is richer in its emotional and thematic profile. In both pieces Beethoven contrasts the comic ebullience of the outer movements with a radical shift in the middle: the op. 10 slow movement keeningly tragic, the ghostly op. 70 slow movement in D minor another of his sui generis essays. His D-minor mood tended toward deep darkness.

He had lived and learned a great deal since the op. 10 D Major, one of the finest of his early piano sonatas. In the op. 70 Trio, the tight motivic relations of the early work have been expanded into underlying patterns of rhythm, melodic shape, gesture, psychological consistency. With the F-natural on the first line of the trio he foreshadows tonal excursions throughout the piece to F major, B-flat major, and D minor (so the ebullient first line of the piece is already haunted by a touch of D minor).
²²
The first movement's exposition is compact, but it ends up expansive because at the end of the recap it repeats back to the spiky and relentless development. That expansiveness prepares the immense slow movement that occupies the middle of the trio. Early on, that movement gave the work its subtitle of
Ghost
.

To say it again, in background and temperament Beethoven was no Romantic, even if in practice he was by 1808 the essential composer
for
Romantics. If the tone of the weird and the uncanny was central to Romanticism, it was not central to Beethoven. But in the Largo of the
Ghost
Trio, he set the mark for the weird and uncanny. Much as in the op. 10 Sonata, a downward-fourth motif from the first movement is taken up and made into something a world away. This movement, with its obsessive concentration on one motif, its strange whisperings and flutterings, its spare and bizarre textures, its utterly eerie ending, may have originated as an idea for Collin's libretto of the Shakespeare
Macbeth
. If so, this music would have been for the witch's-cauldron scene that begins the play. It would have made that scene as darkly unforgettable as Florestan's dungeon in
Fidelio
.

In the sketches he took much trouble to make an ending for the ghostly movement that would not resolve the tension but carry it into the finale that follows—no scherzo would fit this piece.
²³
With a flowing and lighthearted finale the music appears to escape the shades, but in a uniquely organic way: the genial main motif echoes the slow movement's theme. Dark obsession turned into sunny escape might be an example of Beethovenian dramatic shape, but the reality is not so simple. In the finale something lingers from the shivery second movement, a tone gay on the surface but unsettled beneath. It ends with a triplet fillip echoing the obsessive theme of the “ghost” movement. Ghosts haunt the gaiety. Here Beethoven returns to the psychological subtlety of the op. 18 Quartet in B-flat, where a dancing finale cannot entirely banish
La Malinconia
.

If op. 70, no. 1 became famous for its weird middle movement, the whole of no. 2, in E-flat, is quietly, subtly enigmatic. Its color and character are unique in Beethoven, and it lies at a far remove from a heroic E-flat major. The introduction begins with a spare four-part canon, setting up a work with much imitative material and a sometimes archaic tone. An emotional ambiguity hovers, moving unpredictably between tension and warmth. The tone has partly to do with a peculiarity of the violin part: hardly at all in the first movement and only occasionally later does the violin make it up to the bright E string. Beethoven keeps the cello mostly in its low to medium register as well. (Both trios confirm the emancipation of the cello from the bass line that he began in op. 1.) The register of the strings gives the whole piece an oddly subdued effect. At the same time the piano has a good deal of high passagework, making for striking textures of low strings and high, brilliant piano. The first movement turns to deep-flat keys, including E-flat and A-flat minor and C-flat major, all unbrilliant in the strings. So even what would seem to be the bouncy and happy 6/8 of the first movement's main theme is strangely inflected by the instrumental coloration.

The two middle movements are both marked Allegretto, in C major and A-flat major. The second movement is double variations on contrasting themes that still share material, including a “Scotch snap” figure. The first theme flows, the second has a bit of driving “Turkish” tone. Structured like a scherzo but muted and introspective, the third movement is in a flowing three-beat, with two appearances of a trio. The dashing finale returns to brilliant piano figures but remains mostly low and subdued in the strings. A dashing, full-throated coda ends what is, in its subtle way, one of the more unusual pieces of Beethoven's life.

A cello sonata and two piano trios, each a distinct personality. All these chamber pieces form an illustration of something Beethoven said more than once: he based all his pieces on a story or an image and wrote the music to fit it. Recall the
Romeo and Juliet
backstory in his first string quartet. But in all but a few cases, Beethoven as a matter of policy did not tell the world what his model stories were. They were his own business, another part of his workshop that he did not want the world snooping in. He wanted his listeners to write their own stories, their own poems, to his work. Which is to say that he was too wise in his art to compromise one of the important things about music, perhaps the most important of all: its mystery.

 

Summer 1808 found Beethoven on Kirchengasse in Heiligenstadt, his main project to finish the Sixth Symphony. (He did not hold his crisis of 1802 against the rural spa town.) He seems to have finished the Fifth Symphony early that year, after nearly four years of off-and-on work on it. His room looked out to the street. The inner rooms, around a garden, were rented to the Grillparzer family, whose son Franz was a budding poet. He had encountered Beethoven before, at the home of his uncle, Beethoven's librettist Joseph Sonnleithner. Grillparzer recalled that in this summer his mother took to standing in the courtyard listening to Beethoven play as he composed. When he caught her at it, he did not play another note aloud all summer.
²⁴
This female enthusiast became another victim of Beethoven's iron unforgivingness.

Just as he always had pieces in progress, he also generally had schemes going. He returned to his dogged campaign to sell pieces to Breitkopf & Härtel. “
The tutor of the young Count Schönfeld
,” he wrote Gottfried Härtel in June, “. . . assures me that you would again like to have some of my works—Although, since our relations have been broken off so frequently, I am almost convinced this resumption . . . will again lead to nothing.” He offers them the two new symphonies, the cello sonata, the Mass in C. Other publishers would be happy to take them, he says, but “I would prefer your firm to all others.” On one point he is particularly insistent: “You must take the Mass or else I can't give you the other works—for I pay attention not only to what is profitable but also to what brings honor and glory.”
²⁵
The particular honor and glory he may have had in mind was putting his mass up against Haydn's—a delusional idea, if he hoped to challenge their popularity.

At that point Härtel was not remotely interested in the mass. He would take a great deal of convincing. In another letter Beethoven offered it to him for nothing and said he would pay to have it copied. Härtel did not budge. (He finally published it, grudgingly, in 1812.) Soon Beethoven gave up on the mass. Breitkopf & Härtel received the Fifth and Sixth Symphonies, the op. 69 Cello Sonata, and the two Piano Trios op. 70—every one of them among the greatest examples of their genre. The price Beethoven asked was 600 florins; he got a little over 400, three months' living at best.
²⁶
Later when he received the proofs of the Cello Sonata from Härtel, he discovered they were unbelievably infested with mistakes. In a letter he meticulously corrected them. The corrections were ignored.

That summer he wrote Collin hoping for another opera libretto, only “I should like this time a libretto without dancing and recitatives.” He may have been sketching on Collin's
Macbeth
, but that never got far, though the ideas perhaps served for the
Ghost
Trio. He had gently put off the playwright's
Bradamante
because it had magical elements, which appealed to him even less than dancing and recitatives. “I cannot deny that on the whole I am prejudiced against this sort of thing,” he wrote, “because it has a soporific effect on feeling and reason.” (True, Mozart's
Zauberflöte
, the definition of a magical opera, was his favorite. But he had no intention of competing with Mozart in that kind of story, still less in his trademark sex comedies.) “In any case,” he sighed, “I think that we shall probably have to wait a bit; for that is what those worshipful and high and mighty theatrical directors have decreed—I have so little reason to expect anything favorable from them that the thought that I shall certainly have to leave Vienna and become a wanderer haunts me persistently.”
²⁷

 

Back in Vienna he moved into the Krügerstrasse apartment of another patron, the Hungarian countess Anna Marie Erdödy. Lichnowsky had an apartment in the same building, but the resentments of their 1806 quarrel lingered and they saw little of each other. There seems to have been nothing romantic between Beethoven and the countess—they would have been more circumspect if there had been. But they were on easy terms and stayed that way, except for the usual quarrel that arose sooner or later with anyone in Beethoven's proximity. Erdödy gave him a patient and sympathetic ear; he called her his
Beichtvater
, his father confessor. He gave her the dedication of the op. 70 Trios, finished at her house. In many ways, the countess's story was similar to Beethoven's other aristocratic patrons, only more so: she was a fine amateur pianist and a grand eccentric, having been relieved by separation of an unhappy marriage to a Hungarian count, and with three children to rear.

Like Josephine Deym, this countess was a celebrated beauty. Unlike Josephine, she was comfortably rich, and more or less an invalid. A chronic condition swelled her feet and kept her often in bed. Much of her activity involved limping painfully from one piano to another, often to play Beethoven in musical soirees at her house. She was reported to be, in spite of everything, cheerful and high-spirited. Police reports of the time, however, describe her as “depraved.” That may have meant something as simple as her being denounced by a spy for criticizing the government. Or Erdödy may have taken opium, a common painkiller in those days.
²⁸

Around October Beethoven suddenly received an offer to become
Kapellmeister
for the soi-disant king of Westphalia in Cassel, which lay in northwestern Germany. This king was none other than Jérôme Bonaparte, youngest brother of the French conqueror, who had established his family in similar positions all over the map. Jérôme had led a rambling youth. Sent off to sea by Napoleon in 1800, he stopped for two years in the United States and, to the consternation of his family, married the daughter of a Baltimore millionaire. (He was expected to marry into the European nobility.) Napoleon had the marriage annulled and banned the woman from any of his territories. Jérôme protested, to no avail; his American wife bore his son in London and never saw him again.

Effective service in the Prussian campaign of 1806 got Jérôme back in Napoleon's good graces. He was installed in Westphalia and supplied by his brother with a more appropriate mate, Princess Catherine of Württemberg, a cousin of Tsar Alexander I. “The wellbeing of your people is important to me,” Napoleon wrote him in a cautionary letter, “not only for the influence that it will have on your glory and mine, but also for the prospect of Europe as a whole.” (Note the order of values.) “It is essential that your people enjoy a liberty, an equality, a wellbeing unknown to the people of Germany.” Jérôme remained something of a loose cannon. Even for a ruler of the time, he was excessively fond of military pomp and finery, of parties and mistresses. His subjects dubbed him
König Lustig
, “King Merry.” But his imposition of Napoleonic reforms, including the Civil Code and a parliament, made him popular, for a time, with his people.