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(b Bonn, bap. 17 Dec 1770; d Vienna, 26 March 1827)
German composer. His early achievements, as composer and performer, show him to be extending the Viennese Classical tradition that he had inherited from Mozart and Haydn. As personal affliction -- deafness, and the inability to enter into happy personal relationships -- loomed larger, he began
to compose in an increasingly individual musical style, and at the end of his life he wrote his most sublime and profound works. From his success at combining tradition and exploration and personal expression, he came to be regarded as the dominant musical figure of the 19th century, and scarcely
any significant composer since his time has escaped his influence or failed to acknowledge it. For the respect his works have commanded of musicians, and the popularity they have enjoyed among wider audiences, he is probably the most admired composer in the history of Western music.
Ludwig van Beethoven on Kunst der Fuge
List of pages:
1. Family background and childhood.
Three generations of the Beethoven family found employment as musicians at the court of the Electorate of Cologne, which had its seat at Bonn. The composer’s grandfather, Ludwig (Louis) van Beethoven (1712–73), the son of an enterprising burgher of Mechelen (Belgium), was a trained musician with
a fine bass voice, and after positions at Mechelen, Leuven and Liège accepted in 1733 an appointment as bass in the electoral chapel at Bonn. In 1761 he was appointed Kapellmeister, a position which – although he seems not to have been a composer, unlike other occupants of such a post – carried with
it the responsibility of supervising the musical establishment of the court.
With his wife Maria Josepha Poll, whom he had married in 1733, and who later took to drink, he had only one child that survived. Johann van Beethoven (c1740–1792) was a lesser man than his father. He, too, entered the elector’s service, first as a boy soprano in 1752, and continuing after
adolescence as a tenor. He was also proficient enough on the piano and the violin to be able to supplement his income by giving lessons on those instruments as well as in singing. In November 1767 he married Maria Magdalena (1745–87), daughter of Heinrich Keverich, ‘overseer of cooking’ at the
electoral summer palace of Ehrenbreitstein, and already the widow of Johann Leym, valet to the Elector of Trier; she was not yet 21. The couple took lodgings in Bonn at 515 Bonngasse. Their first child Ludwig Maria (bap. 2 April 1769) lived only six days; their second, also called Ludwig and the
subject of this narrative, was baptized on 17 December 1770. Of five children subsequently born to the couple only two survived infancy: Caspar Anton Carl (bap. 8 April 1774) and Nikolaus Johann (bap. 2 October 1776). Both brothers were to play important parts in Beethoven’s life.
Inevitably the early years of the son of an obscure musician in a small provincial town are themselves sunk in obscurity, and though speculation and myth-making have both been productive, facts are rather scarce. It is clear that at a very early age he received instruction from his father on the
piano and the violin. Tradition adds that the child, made to stand at the keyboard, was often in tears. Beethoven’s first appearance in public was at a concert given with another of his father’s pupils (a contralto) on 26 March 1778, at which (according to the advertisement) he played ‘various
clavier concertos and trios’. A little later, when he was eight, his father is said to have sent him to the old court organist van den Eeden, from whom he may have received some grounding in music theory as well as keyboard instruction. He appears also to have had piano lessons from Tobias Friedrich
Pfeiffer, who lodged for a while with the family, and informal tuition from several local organists. A relative, Franz Rovantini, gave the boy lessons on the violin and viola. His general education was not continued beyond the elementary school, but this was in accordance with the usual custom in
Bonn at that time, only a few children going on to a Gymnasium (high school). The comparative brevity of Beethoven’s formal education, combined with the fact that most of his out-of-school hours must have been devoted to music, explains some of the gaps in his academic equipment, such as his
blindness to orthography and punctuation and his inability to carry out the simplest multiplication sum.
In 1779 a musician arrived in Bonn who was to be Beethoven’s first important teacher. This was Christian Gottlob Neefe, who came as the musical director of a theatrical company that the elector took into his establishment. The point at which he began instructing Beethoven is not known. But in
February 1781 Neefe succeeded to the post of court organist, a position that evidently required an assistant, and by June 1782, when Neefe left Bonn for a short period, Beethoven was acting as deputy in his absence; he was then 11½. Neefe’s estimate of his pupil is contained in a communication to
Cramer’s Magazin der Musik dated 2 March 1783 – the first printed notice of Beethoven:
Louis van Beethoven, son of the tenor singer already mentioned, a boy of 11 years and of most promising talent. He plays the piano very skilfully and with power, reads at sight very well, and I need say no more than that the chief piece he plays is Das wohltemperirte Clavier of Sebastian
Bach, which Herr Neefe put into his hands … So far as his other duties permitted, Herr Neefe has also given him instruction in thoroughbass. He is now training him in composition and for his encouragement has had nine variations for the piano, written by him on a march [by Ernst Christoph
Dressler], engraved at Mannheim. This youthful genius is deserving of help to enable him to travel. He would surely become a second Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart if he were to continue as he has begun.
The reference to Mozart was presumably to the child prodigy and not to the mature composer whose years of fame in Vienna were yet to come; but Neefe’s affection for his young pupil and confidence in his ability are plain. The variations on Dressler’s march (woo63), published by Götz of Mannheim,
were Beethoven’s first published work.
Further experience came to Beethoven via Neefe in 1783 when his teacher, overburdened with the work of the temporarily absent Kapellmeister Lucchesi, employed him as ‘cembalist in the orchestra’, not only a position of some responsibility but also one that will have enabled him to hear all the
popular operas of the day. The autumn saw the publication of his first significant composition, the three piano sonatas dedicated to the Elector Maximilian Friedrich (woo47). Towards the close of the year Beethoven undertook a trip to Holland, where he is reported to have performed on numerous
occasions, notably including an orchestral concert at The Hague (at which he probably played his Concerto in E flat, woo4).
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2. Youth.
Although Beethoven by now enjoyed a sturdy reputation as a virtuoso in the regions surrounding Bonn, he still drew no salary from the court for his duties as Neefe's assistant. His petition (in February 1784) for an official position as assistant to the court organist was granted, but the elector
died before his salary, if any, could be fixed. But the new elector, Maximilian Franz, brother of the Habsburg Emperor Joseph II, instituted economies on his accession in 1784 that transferred some of Neefe's salary to his pupil. Beethoven’s salary as organist was thus fixed at 150 florins.
Increased attention to his activities as a performer may have been a factor in his diminished output as a composer in the years from 1785 to 1789. Apart from a set of three piano quartets from 1785 (woo36), possibly intended for dedication to the new elector but not published until after Beethoven’s
death, there exists little evidence of compositional activity during these years. About this time, too, he seems to have had violin lessons from Franz Ries, a good friend of the family, and to have begun giving piano lessons himself.
Neefe, as quoted above, had declared that the young genius should be given the chance to travel, and in the spring of 1787 Beethoven visited Vienna. In the absence of documents much remains uncertain about the precise aims of the journey and the extent to which they were realized; but there seems
little doubt that he met Mozart and perhaps had a few lessons from him. It seems equally clear that he did not remain in Vienna for longer than about two weeks. The news of his mother’s deteriorating health precipitated his sudden journey back. He returned to Bonn to find his mother dying of
tuberculosis, and his first surviving letter, to a member of a family in Augsburg that had befriended him on his way, describes the melancholy events of that summer and hints at his own ill-health, depression and lack of financial resources.
For the fortunes of the Beethoven family were in decline. This was not always the case. It is now known that Beethoven did not spend his early childhood in great poverty, as most biographers have assumed. Johann van Beethoven managed to support his family in reasonably moderate circumstances
until the mid-1780s, when a series of misadventures severely reduced his capacity as breadwinner.
This is perhaps the place for a word or two about Beethoven’s parents. The personality of the mother whom he now mourned (she had died on 17 July 1787) does not emerge in very distinctive terms; the accounts speak in conventional phrases of her piety, gentleness and kindness, and of her gravity
of manner. This is contrasted, again somewhat conventionally, with Johann van Beethoven’s harsher and perhaps even violent temperament. In these years the talents on which he relied to support his family, at no time outstanding, seem to have been observed to decline. An official report of 1784
described his voice as ‘very stale’, and for some time before his wife’s death he had begun to drink heavily, as his mother had done. In 1789, therefore, Beethoven – who was not yet 19 – took the extraordinary step of placing himself at the head of the family by petitioning for half his father’s
salary to enable him to support his brothers; this was granted, and the old tenor’s services were dispensed with. The psychological significance of this act of self-assertion has not escaped his biographers.
The next four years, the last that Beethoven spent in Bonn, can be portrayed in a sunnier light. From 1789, when the musical life of the town under the new elector was fully resumed, Beethoven played the viola in the orchestras both of the court chapel and of the theatre, alongside such fine
musicians as Franz Ries and Andreas Romberg (violins), Bernhard Romberg (cello), Nikolaus Simrock (horn) and Antoine Reicha (flute); some of these were to remain almost lifelong friends. He also began to be active again as a composer, producing, among other works, the most impressive composition of
the Bonn years, the cantata on the death of the Emperor Joseph II (woo87).
Joseph II was not merely the elector’s elder brother but a powerful symbol of those intellectual, social and political ideas of the 18th century known as the Enlightenment (Aufklärung). His reformist ideas found a ready welcome in Bonn among Beethoven’s contemporaries and immediate superiors in
age, so that the grief caused by the emperor’s death in Vienna on 20 February 1790 was no doubt more than merely formal. On hearing the news four days later the literary society (Lesegesellschaft) of Bonn at once planned a memorial celebration for 19 March. Beethoven was commissioned to produce a
cantata, but for unknown reasons the work was not performed. It may be that there was insufficient time to rehearse it; that it was found unimpressive seems unlikely, since in the autumn a second cantata ‘On the Accession of Leopold II to the Imperial Dignity’ (woo88) was commissioned and completed
– though that too seems not to have reached performance.
One further commission was undertaken to please Beethoven’s talented and powerful friend Count Ferdinand Waldstein: on 6 March 1791 the count produced a ballet in old German costume, performed by the local nobility, and the music for this Ritterballett (woo1) was by Beethoven, though his name was
not made public. The dedication to the Countess von Hatzfeld of 24 variations for piano on the theme of Righini’s arietta ‘Venni amore’ (woo65), published in the summer of 1791, indicates another aristocratic connection.
But for Beethoven the chief excitements of this year may have been outside Bonn itself. As Grand Master of the Teutonic Order, the elector had to preside for many weeks over its sessions at Mergentheim, and he saw to it that he had his orchestra with him. The players’ journey up the Rhine was
accompanied by much revelry and clowning; in later years Beethoven retained many happy memories of this, as well as one curious memento (a mock diploma). An ambitious series of concerts was given at Mergentheim, and Beethoven also seized the opportunity of going with friends to Aschaffenburg, a
summer palace of the Electors of Mainz, to visit the famous pianist Sterkel. It is said that Sterkel’s light touch and graceful, fastidious style were a revelation to Beethoven. But when Sterkel challenged him to play his own Righini variations, doubting his ability to do so, it was Beethoven’s turn
to cause amazement, particularly since he improvised extra variations in a style that imitated Sterkel’s.
By this time, it is clear, it was not only other professional musicians who recognized his worth or valued his friendship. He had formed a considerable circle of friends, drawn from some of the most discerning, progressive and respected families in Bonn. A few at least deserve mention here. Count
Waldstein, eight years older than Beethoven, had come to Bonn from Vienna in 1788. A close associate of the elector and highly musical himself, he proved a devoted friend and patron of Beethoven, whom he came to know in the cultivated circle of the von Breuning family. Frau von Breuning, whose
husband had died in a fire in 1777, had four children, all slightly younger than Beethoven: Eleonore, later to marry another friend of Beethoven’s Bonn and early Vienna years, Franz Gerhard Wegeler; Christoph; Stephan, a lifelong friend; and Lorenz, who died young. The young widow herself became
something of a second mother to Beethoven and seems to have had a keen insight into his character. She used her authority to dissuade him from neglecting duties that he found tedious, while evidently recognizing his tendency to self-absorption, since she would often remark: ‘He has his raptus
again’. She exercised some control, too, over his friendships; of the less suitable ones he remarked in later years: ‘She understood how to keep insects off the flowers’. This kindly supervision, and the provision of what became almost a second home, meant much to Beethoven, who in spite of his many
admirers remained in some ways a solitary youth, and on occasion a painfully shy one.
There were other opportunities for agreeable social life in Bonn. The elector was often absent, leaving Beethoven free for musical activities unconnected with the court. He spent much of his time in a circle of aristocratic friends and prosperous citizens such as the Westerholts, the Eichhoffs
and the Kochs. The Kochs ran a kind of social and political club, the Zehrgarten, that was a centre for intellectual life in Bonn, and a number of Beethoven’s early compositions were written for members of this circle.
It may have been Waldstein whose voice was decisive in the proposal that Beethoven should now go to Vienna to study with Haydn. When Haydn had passed through Bonn on his way to England in December 1790 he had met some of ‘the most capable musicians’, but it is not known whether Beethoven was
among them. (Neefe, Beethoven's enthusiastic mentor, must surely have been.) But in July 1792, according to Wegeler, the electoral orchestra assembled at Godesberg to give a breakfast for Haydn, now on his journey back to Vienna, and Wegeler adds that on this occasion Beethoven showed him a cantata
(doubtless woo87 or 88) and received Haydn’s commendation. More probably that had happened earlier, on Haydn’s outward journey. But it was now that the matter of Beethoven becoming Haydn’s pupil was no doubt raised; the elector, to whom it fell to pay for the journey and the living expenses in
Vienna, in due course sanctioned the arrangement. Beethoven’s departure was fixed for the beginning of November. An album amicorum from this time records the good wishes of a large number of his friends, who had no reason to expect that he would be leaving Bonn for ever. None of the entries was more
prophetic than that of Waldstein:
Dear Beethoven: You are going to Vienna in fulfilment of your long-frustrated wishes. The Genius of Mozart is still mourning and weeping over the death of her pupil. She found a refuge but no occupation with the inexhaustible Haydn; through him she wishes once more to form a union with
another. With the help of assiduous labour you shall receive Mozart’s spirit from Haydn’s hands. Your true friend, Waldstein.
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3. 1792–5.
Beethoven arrived in Vienna, the city that was to be his home for the rest of his life, in the second week of November 1792. He was not quite 22. His entry into Viennese circles was unobtrusive, and the sporadic entries in the little diary that he had started on his journey and kept at least
until 1794 are the best guide to his immediate preoccupations. They show him looking for a piano and for a wig-maker, buying clothes, noting the address of a dancing-master, and the like. Later entries are concerned with the renting of some lodgings. And on the same page that records ‘on Wednesday,
12 December [1792], I have 15 ducats’, there is a variety of small sums of money set against the name of ‘Haidn’. Within weeks of his arrival, therefore, the instruction from Haydn which had been the purpose of his journey had already begun. Of another event of the same month, the death of his
father in Bonn on 18 December, there is no mention in the diary.
Haydn’s tuition lasted for no longer than about a year; in January 1794 he left Vienna for his second London visit. The arrangement proved a disappointment to Beethoven, but he concealed this at the time from Haydn, and throughout 1793 the relations between pupil and teacher were outwardly
cordial. Haydn appears to have had no corresponding misgivings – at any rate until later, when Beethoven had some very harsh things to say about him. Temperamentally, however, they were set for conflict. The childless Haydn no doubt wished for affection and even love from his most brilliant pupil –
but that was the one thing that Beethoven was too mistrustful to give. Though he could write to the only moderately gifted (and no longer present) Neefe, ‘If ever I become a great man, yours will be some of the credit’, he was almost bound to feel the genius of ‘Papa’ Haydn standing in his way, one
more father to be defied or circumvented. Beethoven’s unease crystallized into the groundless suspicion that his teacher ‘was not well minded towards him’ and was neglecting or perhaps even sabotaging his tuition. (The formal side of the instruction can be seen from the surviving exercises, which
consist of strict species counterpoint; they are in Beethoven’s handwriting, with somewhat intermittent corrections by Haydn.) The lack of thoroughness on Haydn’s part formed one of Beethoven’s grievances. According to the composer Johann Schenk (whose testimony has, however, been contested),
Beethoven secretly enlisted Schenk's help with these exercises.
It is not clear whether Haydn also instructed him in free composition. A clue here is provided by an episode that seems to reflect better on Haydn than on his pupil. Since leaving Bonn Beethoven had found himself with insufficient money for his living expenses. He continued, it is true, to
receive his Bonn salary each quarter, and after his father’s death he had successfully petitioned the elector to double it; but some part of this must have gone to support his brothers, who were still in Bonn. For his subsistence in Vienna he had only 100 ducats (nearly 500 florins) per annum. He
had hoped to receive the whole of it on his arrival in Vienna, at which time he had to make considerable outlays, but it seems to have been paid quarterly. The result was that he had to borrow. On 23 November 1793 Haydn wrote on his behalf to the elector, enclosing five pieces of music,
‘compositions of my dear pupil Beethoven’, whom he predicted would ‘in time fill the position of one of Europe’s greatest composers’. He added (with characteristic generosity): ‘I shall be proud to call myself his teacher; I only wish that he might remain with me a little while longer’. Haydn’s
letter next turned to the question of Beethoven’s subsidy; it described the elector’s 100 ducats as a sum quite inadequate to Beethoven’s needs, pointed out that he himself had had to lend him 500 florins, and ended by suggesting that the elector might do well to increase the subsidy to 1000 florins
in the coming year. The elector’s reply was both accurate and icy. Four of the five submitted works had been composed and performed in Bonn long before the move to Vienna, and were therefore no evidence of progress. Moreover Beethoven was being paid not only the 100 ducats but also his ordinary
salary of 400 florins, so had no reason to be in particular difficulty. The elector concluded:
I am wondering if he would not do better to begin his return journey, in order to resume his duties here; for I very much doubt whether he will have made any important progress in composition and taste during his present stay, and I fear he will only bring back debts from his journey, just as
he did from his first trip to Vienna.
It looks as though Beethoven had misled Haydn in respect of his total income, and thus exposed Haydn to the elector’s withering reply. He may also have misled Haydn as to the dates of the works the latter submitted to the elector, although it is hard to know whether Haydn actually thought that
they were new works or knowingly submitted them as newly revised works. In any event, this suggests that Beethoven completed hardly anything new under Haydn’s immediate supervision, though he seems to have revised and polished several of the later Bonn works.
When Haydn left for England in 1794, he passed Beethoven on to another tutor, Johann Georg Albrechtsberger, the Kapellmeister at the Stephansdom and the best-known teacher of counterpoint in Vienna. The lessons, three times a week, started after Haydn’s departure and continued throughout 1794 to
the spring of 1795. They were more thorough-going than Haydn’s had been, and covered not only simple counterpoint but contrapuntal exercises in free writing, in imitation, in two-, three- and four-part fugue, choral fugue, double counterpoint at the different intervals, double fugue, triple
counterpoint and canon – at which point they were broken off. Albrechtsberger proved a most conscientious, though at the same time very dry, teacher.
A third name is often linked with Haydn’s and Albrechtsberger’s: that of the imperial Kapellmeister Antonio Salieri. It was Salieri’s genial custom to offer free tuition to impecunious musicians, especially in the setting of Italian words to music; and it is usually stated that Beethoven availed
himself of this informal help soon after his arrival in Vienna. The only surviving evidence of any serious study with Salieri, however, dates from the years 1801–2, when he set a large number of unaccompanied partsongs with Italian words and a scena and aria for soprano and string orchestra
(woo92a). These were followed in 1802 by two final pieces scored for orchestra, the terzetto Tremate, empi, tremate (op. 116) and the duet Ne’ giorni tuoi felici (woo93). They are more than exercises and may have been intended for a concert. In spite of Salieri’s help Beethoven never fully mastered
Italian prosody, though something had no doubt been gained in the skill of setting words by the time that he turned in the direction of opera.
But that is to jump far ahead. Aside from his studies, Beethoven’s first task in Vienna was to establish himself as a pianist and composer. This was something that he achieved both rapidly and with remarkable success. His gifts apart, there were at least two reasons for this, and they not only
helped to launch him but continued to sustain him after he had gained an ascendant position. The first was his immediate contacts with aristocratic circles. He had arrived from Bonn as the court organist and pianist to the Emperor Franz’s uncle, and with a reputation already spread by high-born
Viennese who had heard him while visiting the elector; he was a protégé of Count Waldstein, who was connected by birth or by marriage with several of the greatest houses of the Austrian, Bohemian and Hungarian nobility; and he was the pupil of Haydn. Thus he was in the strongest possible position to
be introduced into the best aristocratic circles.
The second reason had to do with the character of the circles themselves. The aristocracy based on the Austrian capital surpassed all others of Europe in its devotion to music, and much of its time and a considerable part of its fortunes – a ruinous amount in some cases – was spent in the
conspicuous indulgence of this taste. Not only did these aristocrats welcome virtuosos to their town palaces and country estates, but some of them, such as Prince Lobkowitz, kept private orchestras and even – like the Esterházys – opera companies as well. If their support was not on quite so lavish
a scale, at least they employed a wind band or, like Prince Karl Lichnowsky and the Russian Count Rasumovsky, a quartet of string players. The Court Councillor von Kees was among the many who organized private concerts; a large library of music was assembled by the Baron van Swieten, a patriarch
whose distinction it was to cultivate the music of Bach and Handel and introduce it to Viennese audiences. The names of van Swieten and some of these others are found in the records of Mozart’s and Haydn’s lives; and they now gave a welcome to Beethoven.
He certainly needed more than their mere approval. His salary from Bonn was paid only until March 1794, and in a list of the elector’s musicians from the autumn of the year he was entered as ‘Beethoven, without salary in Vienna, until recalled’. (The elector now had his own difficulties as a
result of the military victories of the neighbouring French. He had visited Vienna in January 1794, and Beethoven may have called on him and discussed his position.) Since many of the aristocracy had spacious accommodation or several houses, it was natural for them to provide Beethoven with lodging.
One of the first houses in Vienna (if not the very first) in which he had rooms was owned by Prince Lichnowsky, who soon established himself as a leading patron of the composer. Both he and his wife Princess Christiane (née Thun) were intensely musical, and lavished a steady stream of kindnesses on
him. But others were scarcely less generous or hospitable, so that it is no surprise to find Beethoven setting off in June 1793 for Eisenstadt, where Haydn was staying; doubtless the Esterházys looked after him. Another early supporter who became a lifelong friend was the Hungarian Nikolaus Zmeskall
von Domanovecz. A capable amateur cellist and composer of quartets, he ardently promoted performances of Beethoven’s music and continually rendered him small services, including the provision of quill pens, which Beethoven could never cut properly himself.
Beethoven’s instant and striking successes as a virtuoso were at first confined to performances in private houses. Regular public concerts of the sort given throughout the season in London and Paris were not then a feature of Viennese musical life; there were only a few annual charity concerts
and an occasional subscription concert of a virtuoso or Kapellmeister. But in the salons the stunning effect of Beethoven’s solo playing, and particularly perhaps of his improvising, was immediately recognized. A glimpse of what this aspect of his life was like to Beethoven is to be found in one of
his letters to Eleonore von Breuning in Bonn, to whom – because of a quarrel before his departure from there – he did not write until he had been in Vienna for almost a year. He had dedicated to her the first of his works to be published in Vienna (composed in part in Bonn), his variations for
violin and piano on Mozart’s ‘Se vuol ballare’ (woo40), and in alluding to the difficult trills in the coda confessed to her:
I should never have written down this kind of piece, had I not already noticed fairly often how some people in Vienna after hearing me extemporize one evening would next day note down several peculiarities of my style and palm them off with pride as their own. Well, as I foresaw that their
pieces would soon be published, I resolved to forestall those people. But there was another reason, too; my desire to embarrass those Viennese pianists, some of whom are my sworn enemies. I wanted to revenge myself on them in this way, because I knew beforehand that my variations would here and
there be put before the said gentlemen and that they would cut a sorry figure with them.
The pugnaciousness of the virtuoso is characteristic, and it was not long before he displayed his powers before wider audiences.
An early opportunity came at a charity concert in the Burgtheater on 29 March 1795. Beethoven appeared as composer as well as virtuoso, for he played a piano concerto of his own, probably the work in B flat, later published as the Second Concerto (op. 19). His old friend from Bonn, Franz Gerhard
Wegeler, who was in Vienna from October 1794 to the summer of 1796, witnessed the preparations for this concert – or it may have been the one nine months later in December and the concerto may have been the First (op. 15) in C – and relates how Beethoven completed the finale only at the very last
moment while suffering from severe abdominal pains. At a second charity concert the next day Beethoven again appeared on the platform; this time he gave an improvisation. And on 31 March he played for the third time in three days at a performance of Mozart’s La clemenza di Tito organized by his
widow; this time the concerto was one of Mozart’s.
Apart from the variations dedicated to Eleonore von Breuning he had not yet published anything in Vienna. The decision was deliberate, for his op. 1 was intended to be an event. He chose a set of three piano trios, a genre dear to aristocratic devotees of chamber music, and he dedicated it to
Prince Lichnowsky. The trios had already been heard and admired, possibly in earlier versions. There is a well-known story of what purports to have been their first performance at a soirée of Lichnowsky’s at which Haydn was present; although he praised them, he is said to have advised Beethoven not
to publish the third of them, in C minor. If this story is true down to the details, the soirée must have taken place before Haydn’s departure for England in January 1794, for when he returned to Vienna in August 1795 op. 1 had just been published. But it seems more likely that he heard the trios
only on his return, and expressed regret about the inclusion of the C minor one. Since the third trio ultimately proved the most successful, Beethoven suspected malice on Haydn’s part; years later Haydn confirmed that he had had misgivings about its publication, adding that he had not believed it
would be understood and received so well. Beethoven published his op. 1 by subscription, the edition being produced by the publisher Artaria. The subscription list contained 123 names (many of them recruited by Lichnowsky), and the subscriptions amounted to 241 copies at one ducat (roughly four and a
half florins) each; since Beethoven paid the publisher only a florin per copy he made a handsome profit.
According to Wegeler, Haydn’s return to Vienna was marked by the performance at Lichnowsky’s of another substantial composition by Beethoven: the three piano sonatas that he subsequently published in March 1796 as his op. 2 and dedicated to Haydn. It is said that Haydn had hoped Beethoven would
append to his name on the title-pages of his earliest works the words ‘pupil of Haydn’ – a common enough custom – and that Beethoven declined to do so, privately declaring that although he had had some lessons from Haydn he had never learnt anything from him. At all events the sonatas (like the
trios before them) were published without any acknowledgment of pupillage.
Outwardly, however, relations between the two did not appear to be strained. On 18 December 1795 Beethoven made his second public appearance in Vienna as a composer-virtuoso, playing a piano concerto at a concert which Haydn organized and which included three of his latest symphonies, written for
London. It is probable that this was the first performance of the C major concerto. Another sign of Beethoven’s growing popularity was the invitation this year to write the minuets and German dances for the November ball held in the Redoutensaal by the Pensionsgesellschaft Bildender Künstler.
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4. 1796–1800.
Beethoven’s sights were now set on still wider audiences. His youngest brother Nikolaus Johann had arrived from Bonn at the very end of 1795 and had found employment in an apothecary’s shop; and Caspar Carl, the other brother, had been in Vienna from the middle of 1794, apparently supporting
himself by giving music lessons. With his brothers thus established in Vienna, Beethoven now felt able to embark on a concert tour. In February 1796 he set out for Prague, travelling (as Mozart had done seven years earlier) with Prince Lichnowsky. Writing from Prague to his brother Johann in Vienna
he announced his intentions of visiting Dresden, Leipzig and Berlin, and added: ‘I am well, very well. My art is winning me friends and respect, and what more do I want? And this time I shall make a good deal of money’. On 11 March he gave a concert in Prague; on 29 April he played before the
Elector of Saxony in Dresden. On reaching Berlin, he appeared several times before the King of Prussia (Friedrich Wilhelm II), and with the king’s first cellist, Jean Louis Duport, he played the two op. 5 cello sonatas, written for this performance. Another pièce d’occasion was the set of 12
variations for cello and piano on a theme of Handel; the cello was of course the king’s instrument, and the choice of theme (‘See the conqu’ring hero comes’) may have contained a courteous nod towards the throne. The king gave Beethoven a gold snuffbox filled with louis d’ors: ‘no ordinary
snuffbox’, Beethoven later declared with pride, ‘but such a one as it might have been customary to give to an ambassador’. He seems to have stayed for about a month in Berlin, making the acquaintance of the Kapellmeister, Himmel, as well as of Zelter and Fasch, and twice giving improvisations before
the Singakademie.
By the time that Beethoven returned to Vienna his friend Wegeler had gone back to Bonn, together with Christoph von Breuning, though Christoph’s brother Lorenz remained in Vienna. Beethoven and Wegeler – who completed his studies in medicine, married Eleonore von Breuning in 1802, and set up
practice in Koblenz – never met again, but they remained friends and exchanged letters from time to time. Wegeler’s contribution to the Biographische Notizen über Ludwig van Beethoven that he compiled with Ferdinand Ries after Beethoven’s death and published in 1838 (with a supplement, 1845) is a
valuable source of information on Beethoven’s childhood and adolescence in Bonn and on his life in Vienna up to 1796.
At the end of 1796 Beethoven again travelled. He played at a concert at Pressburg (now Bratislava) on 23 November. The next year, 1797, is almost devoid of incidents that have left any record. At the end of May he wrote to Wegeler that he was doing well – in fact, better and better; on 1 October
he penned some warm lines in the album of Lorenz von Breuning, who was leaving Vienna to return to Bonn. Between those dates nothing is known, and it is even possible that he was seriously ill at that time. One source assigns such an illness to the second half of the previous year, where there is
also a gap in the records (from July to November). The year 1797 saw the publication of several compositions: his opp.5–8, the most important of which were the E flat Piano Sonata (op. 7) and the cello sonatas written for Berlin (op. 5), as well as the song Adelaide (op. 46), dedicated to the author of
its words, the poet Matthisson. The publications of 1798 were even more assured, including the three op. 9 string trios, his most impressive Chamber music to date, and the three op. 10 piano sonatas. The trios were dedicated to Count Johann Georg von Browne, a patron whom Beethoven described in the
dedication as the ‘first Maecenas of his Muse’, while op. 10 was dedicated to Browne’s wife.
Early in 1798 considerable interest was aroused by the arrival in Vienna of the emissary of the French Directoire, General Bernadotte; in his retinue was the violinist Rodolphe Kreutzer. Both were only a few years older than Beethoven, whose acquaintance they made. Bernadotte’s sojourn in Vienna
was brief, but he is said to have suggested to Beethoven the idea of writing a ‘heroic’ symphony on the theme of the young General Bonaparte.
Later in the year (the exact date is unknown) Beethoven visited Prague and gave two public concerts, as well as a private recital. They were attended and described in some detail by the Bohemian composer Václav Tomášek (Wenzel Tomaschek). He heard Beethoven play the Adagio and Rondo from the
Piano Sonata in A op. 2 no. 2, improvisations on ‘Ah perdona’ from Mozart’s Tito and on ‘Ah vous dirai-je maman’, and both the B flat and C major piano concertos (Tomášek described the former as having just been written for Prague, so it was probably a revised version that was performed). For Tomášek,
who by the end of his life had heard all the outstanding virtuosos from the age of Mozart to the 1840s, Beethoven remained the greatest pianist of all – though Beethoven the composer came in for more criticism. Only in 1798–9, in fact, did Beethoven’s virtuosity, which seems until then to have had
no serious rivals in Vienna, come under challenge from the Salzburg-born pianist Joseph Wölfl (with whom Beethoven directly engaged in a piano duel) and from Johann Baptist Cramer of London; both were about his age. The stimulus of competition from two such excellent players, whose strengths were
nevertheless rather different from his own, could only have had a salutary effect on his playing, which he was to describe in 1801 (to a correspondent who had not heard him for two years) as having ‘considerably improved’.
It was probably a living composer whose challenge Beethoven was finding more dispiriting. In 1795–6 he had reacted to the brilliant symphonies that Haydn had brought back from London by attempting to write a symphony of his own in C major, but although he worked at it vigorously it remained
unfinished and was abandoned. Now, in April 1798, Haydn gave private performances of his new oratorio Die Schöpfung (The Creation), and Beethoven might well be excused for believing his old teacher’s confession that the inspiration for some passages was more than human. Furthermore, Haydn continued
to produce masterly string quartets with unabated vigour: six had been written in 1793 and six more in 1797. Although all the works with opus numbers that Beethoven had so far published in Vienna, apart from the piano sonatas, could loosely be called Chamber music, the particular genre that was most
closely associated with Haydn, and indeed with Mozart as well – the string quartet – was noticeably unrepresented. That Beethoven was only too aware of their formidable example there can be no doubt, and he copied out movements from several of their quartets in score for closer study. Still, the
challenge was one for which he now felt himself ready, and in the second half of 1798 and through the winter and spring he worked on a set of quartets.
It is tempting to draw a connection between the selfconsciousness of this undertaking and a change in his working methods which coincided with it. Beethoven had always made sketches of the compositions that he was engaged in writing, and as time went on they became more voluminous. But hitherto
they had been written on loose single leaves or bifolia of music paper. From the middle of 1798 he began to make his sketches in books of music paper. The first two of the sketchbooks contain sketches for four of the quartets that he was now writing, as well as for a considerable number of other
works that he completed, revised or attempted to write in the same months. (The completed works include a song, La tiranna woo125, which he wrote to English words, working in part from a phonetic transcription.) The sketchbooks evidently retained some value for him long after they had been filled
up, for he kept them by him and preserved most of them in a growing pile for the rest of his life. Some aspects of their importance, a particular preoccupation of Beethoven scholarship in recent years, are discussed below in §19.
In 1798 Karl Amenda, a student of theology and a competent violinist, arrived in Vienna from his native Courland (Latvia), and became tutor to Prince Lobkowitz’s children and music teacher at the home of Mozart’s widow. He and Beethoven soon became fast friends; indeed they were almost
inseparable. But in the late summer of 1799 Amenda was obliged to depart again for Courland, and on 25 June 1799 Beethoven gave him a copy of a quartet ‘as a small memorial of our friendship’. This quartet was later published in a somewhat altered form as the first of the op. 18 quartets. It is not
clear how many of the six quartets had been completed by the end of 1799; but the ones written first were in any case revised later before being sent to the publisher.
Other friendships formed around this time were ultimately more fateful for Beethoven. In May 1799 the Countesses Therese and Josephine von Brunsvik, then 24 and 20, came to Vienna from Hungary on a short visit with their widowed mother, who wished them to take lessons from Beethoven. He was
charmed by them, proved a very attentive teacher, and for their album composed a ‘musical offering’ consisting of a song with some variations for piano duet (woo74). Through them he became friends with the other members of the family, their brother Franz and their youngest sister Charlotte; Julie
(Giulietta) Guicciardi, who came to Vienna from Trieste with her parents in 1800, was their very young cousin. Beethoven was soon a welcome guest on visits to their estates in Hungary. But the short trip to Vienna had unhappy consequences for Josephine. The family made the acquaintance of Count
Joseph Deym (or Herr Müller; he had been exiled after a duel and returned under a pseudonym); Deym was the proprietor of a famous museum of waxworks, and although he was almost 30 years older than Josephine, her mother pressed his claim as a suitable husband for her, partly no doubt in an attempt to
redeem the family fortunes. Josephine reluctantly assented, and they were quickly married; but Deym was in fact badly in debt, so that even financially the match had nothing to be said for it. The visits of Beethoven to the wing of the 80-room museum house in Vienna in which the Deyms lived must
have afforded some consolation to the unhappy young countess.
On 2 April 1800 Beethoven gave his first concert for his own benefit, in the Burgtheater. The music included, besides a Mozart symphony and numbers from Haydn’s Creation, two new works by Beethoven, the Septet (op. 20) and the First Symphony. The former soon became one of his most popular works;
the reception of the latter was appreciative, although the heavy scoring for the wind was remarked on. His piano playing was on display in an improvisation and a piano concerto – probably the C major. No doubt he had planned to produce a new concerto, the Third, in C minor, written around this time
but not performed until the spring of 1803 (the score, with a heavily revised solo part, is dated ‘1803’). Perhaps, then, the C minor concerto could not be completed in time for the concert. For his appearance later in the same month with the Bohemian horn player Johann Wenzel Stich (or ‘Giovanni
Punto’, the name that Stich preferred to use) he very rapidly wrote a horn sonata (op. 17); they gave a second concert three weeks later in Pest. Beethoven may have spent part of the summer of 1800 with the Brunsvik family in Hungary.
The second half of 1800 was outwardly uneventful; it doubtless saw the final revision of the op. 18 string quartets, and the writing of the Bflat Piano Sonata (op. 22) and of the A minor and F major violin sonatas (opp.23, 24). There was less inducement to prepare new works for a possible concert
in the following spring, since he had received an important commission for the court stage: he was to write the music for a ballet designed by the celebrated ballet-master Salvatore Viganò, Die Geschöpfe des Prometheus (op. 43). This was given its first performance at the Burgtheater on 28 March 1801
and was successful enough to be repeated more than 20 times. Only a sketch of the scenario survives. In the finale Beethoven used a melody that evidently came to assume a certain emotional importance for him, perhaps even embodying something of his spirit of determination and heroism in battling
against difficulties, for he used it again as the theme for two important and challenging sets of variations completed in 1802 and 1803: the op. 35 piano variations and the variation-finale of the ‘Eroica’ Symphony.
By this time several publishers were competing for Beethoven’s newest works, and though a number of important compositions had lately appeared – the highly individual Sonate pathétique (op. 13), for instance, dedicated to Prince Lichnowsky, at the very end of 1799 – others had not yet found a
buyer. An entertaining correspondence with the publisher Franz Anton Hoffmeister, who had lately moved from Vienna to Leipzig, dates from around this time. Hoffmeister finally bought several works beginning with the First Symphony, the Second Piano Concerto, the Septet and the Bflat Piano Sonata.
It comes as a surprise to find that Beethoven was intending to dedicate the symphony to his former overlord and employer, the Elector of Cologne. The preceding years had been harsh to Maximilian Franz. After being forced by French military successes to leave Bonn in October 1794, and having
stayed for a while in various cities, he had finally returned to Vienna in April 1800 and settled in Hetzendorf just outside the city. Beethoven is believed to have spent some time in summer 1801 in and around Hetzendorf, and may well have called on the elector and paid his homage or made his peace
with him, for the instructions for the symphony’s dedication are contained in a letter to Hoffmeister written about 21 June 1801. Beethoven’s wishes were not to be carried out, for the elector died on 26 July and the symphony was subsequently dedicated to Baron van Swieten.
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5. 1801–2: deafness.
At a time of personal crisis it was natural for Beethoven’s thoughts to turn to his last years in Bonn and to the friends he still had there. One of these – his friend of longest standing, trained in medicine, discreet, remote from Vienna – was particularly suited to be the first recipient of a
secret that Beethoven had kept to himself for some years and that had not yet been guessed by his circle of friends in the capital: the appalling discovery that he was going deaf. These tidings were now conveyed to Wegeler in Bonn in a letter of 29 June 1801, and to another absent friend, Karl
Amenda in Courland, two days later.
Exactly when Beethoven first detected some impairment in his hearing cannot be determined. Perhaps he did not quite know himself, for no doubt its onset was insidious, and he probably did not regard any temporary periods of deafness or diminished hearing as sinister, especially since he had long
become used to spells of fever, abdominal pain and episodes of ill-health. A young man does not expect to go deaf, and although in one account he implied that he had noticed the first symptoms in 1796, other statements set the date somewhat later, and the crisis came only with the growing
realization that his deafness was progressive and probably incurable. From the descriptions of his symptoms there is general agreement among modern otologists that his deafness was caused by otosclerosis of the ‘mixed’ type, that is, the degeneration of the auditory nerve as well – by no means a
rare condition.
At this time Beethoven had not yet given up hope that his doctors could do something for his hearing, but he could already foresee incalculable troubles both for his professional life and – what it is easy to forget was equally important to him – for his social life. As he wrote to Wegeler:
I must confess that I am living a miserable life. For almost two years I have ceased to attend any social functions, just because I find it impossible to say to people: I am deaf. If I had any other profession it would be easier, but in my profession it is a terrible handicap. As for my
enemies, of whom I have a fair number, what would they say?
To Amenda he wrote in similar terms: ‘Your Beethoven is leading a very unhappy life, and is at variance with Nature and his Creator’, but he added that when he was playing and composing his affliction still hampered him least – it affected him most when he was in company. A curious feature of
these letters, in fact, is that each includes not only a melancholy account of the despair which his deafness had brought about but also an almost lyrical portrait of his professional and financial successes. Lichnowsky had agreed to pay him an annuity of 600 florins for some years; six or seven
publishers were competing for each new work; he was often producing three or four works at the same time; his piano playing had considerably improved: ‘why, at the moment I feel equal to anything’.
Four and a half months later Beethoven again wrote at length to Wegeler: his doctors had been unable to help his hearing, but he was leading a slightly more pleasant life.
You can scarcely believe what an empty, sad life I have had for the last two years. My poor hearing haunted me everywhere like a ghost; and I avoided all human society. I was forced to seem a misanthrope, and yet I am far from being one. This change has been brought about by a dear charming
girl who loves me and whom I love … and for the first time I feel that marriage might bring me happiness. Unfortunately she is not of my class.
This letter is similar to the earlier ones in containing phrases that are very exalted in tone: ‘I will seize Fate by the throat; it shall certainly not crush me completely – Oh it would be so lovely to live a thousand lives’. Such passages, and their more gloomy counterparts, are characteristic
of his conflicting moods as he faced the prospect of permanent deafness and the quite unexpected threat to what had hitherto been a triumphant career. An attitude of pious resignation, with which he tried to master such unruly feelings, did not come easily to him but found expression in the six
hymn-like settings of sacred poems by Gellert (op. 48), which he completed at about this time.
The ‘dear charming girl’ who was brightening Beethoven’s days was no doubt the Countess Giulietta Guicciardi. She was now not quite 17: too young, and perhaps too spoilt, to take Beethoven’s devotion very seriously, though no doubt she was flattered for a time by the attentions of a famous
composer, a man much admired by her cousins. Much, probably too much, has been made of the fact that it was to her that he dedicated the ‘Moonlight’ Sonata (op. 27 no. 2), written in 1801. But it is clear that for a time he was under her spell – she even boasted of this – and he must have had mixed
feelings when in November 1803 she married Count Wenzel Robert Gallenberg, a prolific composer of ballet music, who was only a year older than herself.
By the end of 1801 Ferdinand Ries, the son of Franz Anton Ries who had befriended the Beethoven family in Bonn, was living in Vienna, and Beethoven agreed to take him as his piano pupil. Ries was then just 17 and he remained with Beethoven until the autumn of 1805, when he had to return to Bonn
for military service. During those four years he had unrivalled opportunities for observing Beethoven at his work, on his walks in the countryside, with his brothers and his friends, or at the social functions of the aristocracy. His recollections of this time, set down somewhat artlessly in the
Biographische Notizen which he compiled in collaboration with Wegeler in the 1830s, form a valuably unsentimental picture of Beethoven. A recurring theme in Ries’s account is Beethoven’s unwillingness, or inability, to conform to the normal conventions of social punctilio, and especially to play the
courtier and to oblige by performing to a private audience when requested to do so. These last attitudes, indeed, hardened in later life into a stance in which he felt himself a prince of art and entitled to behave as one.
One particular aspect of Beethoven’s behaviour that obviously baffled Ries was his relations with his brothers: he was appalled to see grown men come to blows in the street in the middle of an argument. In ascribing to the scheming of his brothers many of the difficulties that Beethoven was
experiencing both in his relations with friends and in his practical arrangements, Ries may have been loyally taking his teacher’s side. There is no doubt, however, that Caspar Carl in particular then played an important part in Beethoven’s business affairs. For several years, starting in 1802, he
was entrusted with the offer of new compositions to publishers, and with the subsequent negotiations. But on 25 May 1806 he married Johanna Reiss, the daughter of a well-to-do upholsterer; their only child, Karl, was born on 4 September. After that Beethoven largely dispensed with his brother’s
help, but his nephew later assumed a position of great importance in his life.
The summer of 1802 was spent just outside Vienna in the village of Heiligenstadt. It was there, no doubt, that Beethoven put the finishing touches to the Second Symphony and completed several other works of this prolific year: the three op. 30 violin sonatas, the op. 33 bagatelles, and perhaps the
first two of the op. 31 piano sonatas. He had gone to Heiligenstadt in the spring, perhaps with the thought of spending longer in the country than usual for the sake of his health and hearing. Now in October, as he prepared to return to the city, he wrote out a strange document with carefully crafted
rhetoric, addressed to his two brothers (though wherever his brother Johann’s name was implied there was a blank space). Found among his papers after his death and known as the ‘Heiligenstadt Testament’, it is dated 6 October 1802 at the beginning and 10 October at the end, and its contents mark it
as representing a trough of despondency in his fluctuating moods. His hearing had shown no improvement in the country, and he recognized that his infirmity might be permanent; he defended himself against the charge of misanthropy, and taking leave of his brothers declared that though he had now
rejected the notion of suicide, he was ready for death whenever it might come. The Testament has always been recognized as a poignant witness to the despair that often overwhelmed Beethoven at this time.
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6. 1803–8.
From that nadir of despondency Beethoven seems to have recovered quickly, and probably by his usual means: hard work. His next activities certainly indicate a firm repudiation of the notion that his deafness would handicap him professionally. Caspar Carl wrote to Breitkopf & Härtel on 12 February
1803:
You will have heard by now that my brother has been engaged by the Wiedener Theater [i.e. Theater an der Wien], he is writing an opera, is in charge of the orchestra, can conduct if necessary, seeing that there is a director already available there every day. He has assumed the chief
direction mostly so as to have a chorus for his music.
Although Beethoven had already gained a reputation throughout Europe as a composer of instrumental music, opera was still the royal road to fame. At the time there was something of a dearth of local talent in opera at Vienna, but from the spring of 1802 the importation of operas from Paris had
more than compensated for this. Those of Cherubini and to a lesser extent of Méhul became extremely popular; so great indeed was the clamour for Cherubini’s music that one of his operas (Les deux journées) was staged at rival theatres on successive nights. Like the other Viennese, Beethoven
responded enthusiastically to these operas from revolutionary France, with their contemporary realism and heroic plots (copied in some cases from recent political history). Thus he eagerly took up the invitation to write an opera for Schikaneder’s theatre and moved his lodgings to the Theater an der
Wien.
An immediate bonus for this appointment was the opportunity to give a concert. He quickly wrote his oratorio Christus am Oelberge, and it was performed on 5 April 1803 together with the First and Second Symphonies and the Third Piano Concerto (with Beethoven as soloist), all but the First
Symphony being new to the audience. The oratorio, which tells of the Agony in the Garden (and is known in English-speaking countries as The Mount of Olives), marked Beethoven’s first appearance in Vienna as a dramatic vocal composer. Another rapidly written piece was occasioned by the arrival in
Vienna of the young violinist George Polgreen Bridgetower: the Kreutzer Violin Sonata (op. 47) was played by Bridgetower and the composer on 24 May. He may also have started to look at the opera, Vestas Feuer, with a libretto by Schikaneder.
But something else was evidently pressing: the inner demand to complete a great instrumental work. The writing of the Third Symphony, the Sinfonia eroica, was the major effort of the summer of 1803, which was spent in Oberdöbling. The symphony was originally entitled simply ‘Bonaparte’, in
tribute to the young hero of revolutionary France, who was almost exactly Beethoven’s age. But this idealization of Napoleon as a heroic leader gave way to disillusionment when the First Consul proclaimed himself Emperor in May 1804. The story of Beethoven’s rage when the news of this reached Vienna
is well known: he went to the table where the completed score lay, took hold of the title-page and tore it in two. On its publication in 1806 the symphony was given its present title of ‘heroic symphony’, and was described as having been ‘composed to celebrate the memory of a great man’. The ‘great
man’ may well have been Prince Louis Ferdinand of Prussia, who was an esteemed friend of the symphony's dedicatee, Prince Lobkowitz, and who in fact died a hero's death in 1806.
The ‘Eroica’ Symphony was not the only work by Beethoven from these years that appears to reflect or embody extra-musical ideas of heroism. A similar spirit pervades the so-called Waldstein Sonata (op. 53), for instance, composed immediately after the symphony in the last months of 1803, and the
‘Appassionata’ Sonata (op. 57), begun in the following year. Even the string quartets of this period, the three of op. 59 completed in the summer of 1806 and dedicated to Count Rasumovsky, are cast in the same mould.
In comparison with the exhilarating work on these instrumental pieces, the opera dragged: by the end of 1803 Beethoven had completed less than two scenes of Vestas Feuer, and he abandoned it. For a more attractive operatic libretto had come his way, and was to capture his imagination to a
profound extent. This was J.-N. Bouilly’s Léonore, ou L’amour conjugal. The plot – the tale of a political prisoner’s rescue from a Spanish Bastille, engineered by his wife disguised as a man – is said to have been based on a real incident in the French Revolution. At first, no doubt, Beethoven was
drawn by the opportunity that it afforded of writing a grand ‘rescue’ opera similar to those of the admired Cherubini, and on 4 January 1804 he informed the Leipzig critic Rochlitz that he was beginning to work on it. But the profounder implications that the story held for his own psychology will
have emerged as the labour progressed; oppressed and isolated by his undeserved deafness, it was easy for him to identify with the unjustly imprisoned Florestan who lay alone in the dark with no apparent hope of rescue. (In the same way Christ’s ‘cup of sorrow’ in the oratorio of 1803 seems to have
been linked in Beethoven’s mind with his own affliction.) And it was surely another side of his nature that could feel empathy with the spirited and ever-devoted Leonore; sustained by her vision of hope and longing, and following her ‘inner drive’, she is in some ways an even more Beethovenian
figure than Florestan.
A change in the ownership of the Theater an der Vienna in February 1804 rendered void Beethoven’s contract to write an opera for the house. It may also have obliged him in due course to find new lodgings; at all events he arranged to share rooms with Stephan von Breuning, but a serious quarrel –
induced mainly by Beethoven, it seems – broke out between the two friends, and by July Beethoven had moved for some weeks to Baden, a resort some 16 miles south of Vienna. Breuning reacted philosophically and with forbearance, and in November wrote to Wegeler, who knew them both well: ‘You cannot
conceive what an indescribable, I might say fearful, effect the gradual loss of his hearing has had on him’. The breach was made up, but in spite of some invigorating events, such as the first (private) performance of the ‘Eroica’, this was not a happy summer for Beethoven, and for a time he may
have thought of leaving Vienna altogether – perhaps for Paris. But towards the end of the year his contract for the opera was renewed, and he set to work on it again.
Apart from the opera there was another reason for Beethoven to remain in Vienna. In January 1804 Count Deym, the husband of Josephine von Brunsvik, had died; the young widow, who now had four small children, continued to spend much of her time in Vienna, and by the autumn Beethoven, who had
remained in touch with the family, became a frequent visitor to the house. He gave Josephine piano lessons. An intense relationship soon developed between them, the nature and course of which must be inferred from the contents of 13 letters that Beethoven wrote to Josephine between the autumn of
1804 and the autumn of 1807, and from drafts of some of her replies (these documents were first published in 1957). Beethoven, it is clear, was passionately in love; Josephine, though moved by his devotion and keenly concerned with his happiness, his ideals and his art, retained a certain reserve
throughout and rejected any intimacy closer than that of warm friendship. It would not be hard to find reasons why, after one unhappy marriage and with a young family now claiming her concern, she should be reluctant to throw in her lot with someone of Beethoven’s uncontrolled nature, his want of
much that passed for conventional good manners, and his unimpressive social standing. In the view of her sentimental unmarried sister Therese (writing many years after these events) it was consideration for her children that proved the decisive factor with Josephine. But a social barrier surely
worked to keep the pair apart as well; it is noteworthy both that they were anxious to conceal the extent of their intimacy from the Brunsvik relatives, and that in addressing each other they used the formal ‘Sie’, not the more intimate ‘du’, which he kept for her brother, Count Franz Brunsvik.
The most intense period of the relationship was at the end of 1804 and in the first months of 1805: close to the time at which Beethoven was composing the triumphant finale of his opera, a paean to the accomplishments of a virtuous wife and to ‘married love’. It came to an end by the autumn of
1807, with rueful scenes and misunderstandings, and with Beethoven still asking for closer contact than Josephine was prepared to concede. The following summer she left Vienna, and in 1810 married a Baron von Stackelberg; her second marriage, like her first, was not a happy one. She died in 1821.
By the summer of 1805 the opera was complete, but censorship difficulties postponed its first performance until 20 November. This had unfortunate consequences for its success, for in the preceding weeks the conquering French armies were advancing on Vienna. On 9 November the empress departed, and
four days later Napoleon’s troops entered the city. Thus the audience for the opera’s first night consisted not of the Austrian nobility and moneyed classes, Beethoven’s natural supporters and admirers, who had mostly fled from the capital, but of a miscellaneous crowd that included a sprinkling of
French officers. Its reception was not enthusiastic, and after the third performance it was dropped. But with the return of Beethoven’s friends to Vienna and the resumption of normal conditions there was pressure for the opera’s revival, though also a general agreement that it had failed in part
from its excessive length and in particular from the slowness of some of the earlier scenes. Beethoven was persuaded to make drastic cuts, which he did only with the greatest reluctance, for while some of these undoubtedly speeded the dramatic pace, others were mutilating. For the new version he
provided an overture, Leonore no. 3, which was itself a revision of the first production’s overture (Leonore no. 2). In its altered form the opera was now given two performances (29 March and 10 April 1806); then Beethoven was involved in a dispute with the director of the theatre, Baron Braun, and
withdrew his score. It was not for another eight years that the opera was again seen on the stage. It had always been Beethoven’s intention for the opera to be known as Leonore; but in both 1805 and 1806 it was billed as Fidelio, and for the 1814 production (see below) he acquiesced in that name.
(The title Leonore is nowadays often used to distinguish the 1805 and 1806 versions from the more familiar 1814 one.)
The twin distractions of his opera and of his love for Josephine, and perhaps (at a deeper level) his slow adjustment to the fact of his deafness, may have led to some falling off in the quantity of new compositions during 1804 and 1805. But the period from the spring of 1806 to the end of 1808
must be regarded as one of prodigious fertility, with a steady stream of completed works, many of them on the largest scale. A comment that he wrote down among the sketches that date from the summer of 1806, some of which was spent in Silesia at the country seats of Prince Lichnowsky and Count
Oppersdorff, reveals something of his optimistic and resolute mood: ‘Just as you plunge yourself here into the whirlpool of society, so in spite of all social obstacles it is possible for you to write operas. Your deafness shall be a secret no more, even where art is involved!’.
Among the works completed before the end of the year were the three string quartets dedicated to the Russian ambassador Count Rasumovsky, the ‘Appassionata’ Sonata, some at least of which had been composed earlier, the Fourth Symphony, the Violin Concerto (op. 61), and in all essentials the Fourth
Piano Concerto. They were quickly introduced to the public. The Violin Concerto, a work completed very rapidly, was performed by Franz Clement on 23 December 1806, and the Fourth Symphony and Fourth Piano Concerto were included at two concerts given at the palace of Prince Lobkowitz in March 1807,
together with a new overture, to Collin’s tragedy Coriolan. A further overture, apparently written for a planned production of his opera at Prague, was also composed around this time but never performed in public; it came to light only after Beethoven’s death and is now known by the illogical title
of ‘Leonore no. 1’ (op. 138).
With the exception of the first two Rasumovsky quartets, which were at first found ‘difficult’, these great works delighted the discerning Viennese audiences and enhanced Beethoven’s fame throughout Europe. There were many signs of this. In April 1807 Muzio Clementi, then head of a prominent
London firm of music publishers and piano makers, called on Beethoven in Vienna and secured the exclusive English rights to some of his newest compositions. And, nearer home, he received an invitation from Prince Nicolaus Esterházy II, Haydn’s last patron, to produce a mass in celebration of his
wife’s name day in September 1807. This was a commission that made Beethoven unusually nervous. The type of composition required was not merely one in which he was inexperienced; it was one that had been mastered with special excellence by Haydn, who in the years up to 1802 had written six such
masses for the princess’s name day. Comparisons between Haydn’s works and that of his one-time pupil were therefore inevitable. And in the event the Mass in C (op. 86) was not well received, though Beethoven himself regarded it highly. After passing the summer in Baden working on the mass, he went to
Eisenstadt for its first performance, on 13 September; later he spent some time at Heiligenstadt, no doubt completing the Fifth Symphony and his A major Cello Sonata (op. 69) in the next few months. Some of the ideas for the symphony had been jotted down as early as the first months of 1804, but 1807
was the year that the main writing was done – and probably not before the mass was out of the way. Nor was there any slackening in the pace of composition in the next year, 1808. In fact that summer (which he again spent at Heiligenstadt) saw the writing of one of his largest and most characteristic
works, the Sixth Symphony, called Sinfonia pastorale. He followed this directly with the two op. 70 piano trios.
Yet behind all this flurry of creative activity there was one problem to which Beethoven had not yet found a satisfactory solution. He had no regular or dependable source of income. He could of course count on the generosity of the aristocratic circles that continued to admire him, on the fees
payable for dedications, and on the sales of his music to publishers. Yet this was little enough to rely on; he was, after all, living in the city in which Mozart had died in poverty a decade and a half earlier, partly no doubt from having no adequately paid position. It was not easy for him to
arrange a concert from which he could secure the receipts, since most concerts were private aristocratic affairs, or they were given for charity – at which Beethoven usually offered his services. There was occasionally the opportunity of obtaining one of the theatres for a benefit performance at a
time when they were otherwise closed (Holy Week or around Christmas), but this often led to disappointments – in 1802, for instance, and again in 1807. In the latter year, therefore, he petitioned the Directors of the Imperial Theatres for a commission to compose an opera every year, for an income
of 2400 florins; and he urged strongly his claim, whether this petition was granted or not, for an annual benefit day at one of the theatres. The petition contained a hint that otherwise he might have to leave Vienna. The reply (if any) of the Directors has not survived. No operatic commission
followed, but after several postponements the Theater an der Vienna was finally put at his disposal for the night of 22 December 1808, partly in just recognition of his services to charity; so he arranged to give an enormous benefit concert.
The working out of that evening contained many features characteristic of Beethoven. The programme was injudicious, consisting as it did of four hours of music, virtually all of it unfamiliar: first performances of the Fifth and Sixth Symphonies, and first public performances in Vienna of the
Fourth Piano Concerto (with Beethoven as soloist) and portions of the Mass in C, as well as a piece written in Prague 12 years before, the scena and aria Ah! perfido (op. 65); in addition Beethoven was to improvise. As if that were not enough for the audience, he decided the evening needed a finale;
and since a chorus was already available, he rapidly threw together the work now known as the ‘Choral Fantasy’ (op. 80). This consisted of an introduction for piano solo (extemporized by Beethoven at the first performance), several variations for piano and orchestra on a simple song melody that he
had written in the 1790s, and a short choral conclusion.
Written at the last minute, the work was under-rehearsed; the orchestra, already on bad terms with Beethoven after a dispute in rehearsals for an earlier charity concert, broke down in the middle of the Fantasy and had to be restarted; Beethoven had quarrelled with the original soprano for the
aria and her very young replacement was inadequate; and the theatre was bitterly cold. Thus the success of the evening was very mixed. The financial results are not known.
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7. 1809–12.
Even before the concert took place Beethoven had received the offer of a regular position: that of Kapellmeister at Kassel, where Napoleon’s youngest brother Jerome Bonaparte, a youth in his early 20s, had been installed as ‘King of Westphalia’. But although Beethoven usually had some sharp words
for the Viennese, and continued to criticize them for the rest of his life, it is plain that he had no intentions of leaving Vienna if that could possibly be avoided. The Kassel appointment, with few obligations attached, was worth 600 ducats, plus 150 ducats travelling expenses: a total
corresponding to about 3400 florins annually; moreover it was for life, or at any rate for as long as the ‘king’ retained his throne. Beethoven now used it to obtain a matching offer from Vienna. Although his initial conditions for remaining there included the guarantee of an annual concert and
contained a strong desire for the title of Imperial Kapellmeister, their essence was a yearly salary of 4000 florins. And this after a month or two of negotiation he was able to obtain. A document dated 1 March 1809 guaranteed that its three signatories would provide Beethoven with an annuity for as
long as he remained domiciled in Vienna; since it covered accidents and old age it also amounted to an insurance policy and a pension. The signatories were the Archduke Rudolph (1500 florins) and the Princes Lobkowitz (700 florins) and Kinsky (1800 florins). There were, as will be seen, difficulties
in ensuring the regularity and the full value of the payments, but once those problems were overcome Beethoven was relieved from any rational grounds for financial worry.
Something must be said here about the Archduke Rudolph, the Emperor Franz’s youngest brother, and not only the highest born but the most devoted of Beethoven’s patrons. Born in 1788, he was destined for the church. As a boy he showed an aptitude for music, and at some time in his teens – perhaps
in the winter of 1803–4, when he became 16 – he chose Beethoven as his piano teacher. Later he became Beethoven’s only pupil in composition. The relationship, which lasted without interruption until Beethoven’s death (Rudolph himself died four years later at the age of 43), was characterized by
genuine respect on both sides. Rudolph treated Beethoven with consideration and humorous understanding; and Beethoven, though irked and sometimes provoked into ill-behaviour by the inevitable court protocol that surrounded a royal archduke, showed an almost childlike devotion to Rudolph, to whom he
dedicated several of his greatest works. There are, it is true, many letters that show him begging off giving a lesson because of particularly pressing business or ‘illness’; most of those pleas were accepted by the benevolent Rudolph as polite fictions.
The warmth of this relationship was to be highlighted by several incidents in the months that followed the signing of the annuity. For the second time within four years a French army bore down on Vienna, causing the imperial family, including Rudolph, to leave the city. Nevertheless it was
decided that Vienna should be defended. As a result the city was bombarded by French howitzers throughout the night of 11 May and the following morning. Beethoven is said to have taken refuge in the cellar of Caspar Carl’s house, and to have covered his head with pillows. On the afternoon of 12 May
the city surrendered, and there was a second French occupation; it lasted for two months and proved a heavy drain on the inhabitants’ pockets.
The summer of 1809 was a miserable one for Beethoven. Almost all his friends had, like the court, fled from the city, and communication with the outside world was greatly restricted. Nor could he search for inspiration and recreation in the countryside. He spent some weeks therefore in copying
extracts from the theoretical works of C.P.E. Bach, Türk, Kirnberger, Fux and Albrechtsberger, as part of a course of instruction that he was preparing for the Archduke Rudolph. But his thoughts about his absent patron were expressed more touchingly in the programmatic ‘Lebewohl’ or ‘Les adieux’
Sonata (op. 81a), the three movements of which depict his sorrowful farewell (‘Das Lebewohl’) to Rudolph on his departure from Vienna on 4 May 1809, his sadness at Rudolph’s absence (‘Abwesenheit’), and his rejoicing at seeing him again (‘Wiedersehn’) on his return on 30 January 1810. (Beethoven
intended not only the titles but the dates to be inserted in the published work.) The sonata seems to have been completed in 1809 in anticipation of Rudolph’s return, and was dedicated to him. Earlier in the year, before the French invasion, Beethoven finished the greater part of the Fifth Piano
Concerto, also dedicated to Rudolph. The third important work of the year – like the concerto and the ‘Lebewohl’ Sonata in Eflat – was the so-called ‘Harp’ String Quartet (op. 74). Several other smaller pieces were also completed before the end of the year: not only the Fflat major Piano Sonata
(op. 78), a work of which he himself thought very highly, but also the Sonata in G (op. 79), the Piano Fantasia (op. 77) and a number of songs. Beethoven’s productivity even in one of his less productive years could be formidable.
Towards the end of the year a highly congenial commission came Beethoven’s way, since it brought him in touch with the theatre once more, and since the play in question was by Goethe, whom he admired above all writers then living. It had been decided to furnish Goethe’s Egmont with incidental
music, and Beethoven was invited to supply it; he completed it by June 1810 and it was immediately performed. Apart from the excitement of the plot itself, in which Count Egmont foresees the liberation of the Netherlands from Spanish rule but dies as a result of his own brave stand, it is possible
to suggest a deeper reason behind Beethoven’s heartfelt response to it: it may represent his own delayed reaction to the conquest and occupation of his adopted city by the French, and his hopes of being delivered from them. In the spring or summer of 1810 he also wrote three songs (op. 83) to words
by Goethe, and he learnt about the poet’s character through the friendship that he now formed with the very young, talented and seductive Bettina Brentano, a friend of Goethe – whom in turn she kept informed by letter about Beethoven.
Bettina obviously charmed Beethoven; rather less is known about another woman with whom he had been more seriously involved only a little earlier. For it seems clear that in the spring of 1810 Beethoven was more or less solemnly considering marriage. Not only did he turn his attention to his
wardrobe and personal appearance; he even wrote to his old friend Wegeler in Bonn for a copy of his baptismal certificate, necessary evidence of his exact age. The woman who was the object of these concerns was a certain Therese Malfatti, the niece of Dr Johann Malfatti who had become his physician
for a short while after the death of the trusted Dr Schmidt in 1808 (his doctor since about 1801). It looks as though Beethoven made a proposal of marriage and it was turned down. No doubt it was radically misconceived; there is no evidence that the family of Therese, who was not yet 20, would have
found Beethoven, then in his 40th year, an acceptable suitor, and the one surviving letter from him to her, though warm enough, is not particularly intimate. Beethoven’s disappointment is hard to gauge. He was urged to travel, perhaps because of his distracted state, but instead he merely moved to
Baden for two months. The compositions on which he worked that summer include the String Quartet in F minor (op. 95) – the ‘quartetto serioso’ – and the so-called ‘Archduke’ Piano Trio in Bflat (op. 97); although their autograph scores bear dates of October 1810 and March 1811 respectively, it is
possible that both works were completed later than the dates suggest. The earlier months of 1811 seem to have been a time of comparative inactivity in composing, though a number of larger works, including the Choral Fantasy and the oratorio written several years earlier, had to be seen through the
press.
Beethoven’s health was still not satisfactory, and in the summer of 1811, on Dr Malfatti’s orders, he visited the Bohemian spa Teplitz (now Tepliče) to take the cure. While there he wrote the incidental music to two stage works by Kotzebue, König Stephan (op. 117) and Die Ruinen von Athen
(op. 113), designed as prologue and epilogue to the ceremonial opening of the new theatre at Pest. He evidently returned to Vienna refreshed and began work on the Seventh Symphony, which he completed in the spring of 1812, going on without a break to the Eighth Symphony. (To judge from the sketchbook
used for work on these symphonies, he at one time considered following them with a third, probably in D minor.) For the second year running Beethoven decided to visit Teplitz, travelling via Prague and arriving there on 5 July. Next morning he started to write a love-letter to an unknown woman,
which – since it has been discussed almost as much as any music he ever wrote – will be considered shortly. Because of the international situation (Napoleon’s invasion of Russia was just getting under way), Teplitz, which was neutral territory, became the meeting-place of many imperial personages
and diplomats. But what was even more interesting to Beethoven was the presence there of Goethe, and the long-awaited meeting between them finally took place. The contact was a cordial one, the reactions of the two men predictable. To his friend Zelter, Goethe confided:
His talent amazed me; unfortunately he is an utterly untamed personality, who is not altogether in the wrong in holding the world to be detestable but surely does not make it any the more enjoyable either for himself or for others by his attitude. He is easily excused, on the other hand, and
much to be pitied, as his hearing is leaving him, which perhaps mars the musical part of his nature less than the social.
Beethoven’s somewhat more censorious comment in a letter to Breitkopf & Härtel was: ‘Goethe delights far too much in the court atmosphere, far more than is becoming in a poet’. In fact Beethoven’s admiration for his fellow men usually flourished best at a distance.
From Teplitz he went, allegedly on a new doctor’s advice, to Karlsbad (now Karlovy Vary), and from there to Franzensbrunn, where he participated in a charity concert held for the victims of a fire at Baden that had destroyed a large part of the resort. He then revisited Karlsbad, and finally
returned once more to Teplitz, still apparently in search of improved health. At the beginning of October he was in Linz, where he started the score of the Eighth Symphony; he stayed with his brother Johann, who had bought an apothecary’s shop there in 1808. But this was less of a visit than a
visitation, for the principal purpose of his journey to Linz was to interfere in his brother’s private life. Johann had let part of his house to a physician from Vienna, whose wife’s unmarried sister, one Therese Obermeyer, later joined them. Subsequently Therese became Johann’s mistress, and
Beethoven now descended to expostulate with his brother and to attempt to end the relationship. He applied both to the bishop and to the civil authorities, and ultimately obtained a police order to have the girl expelled from Linz. But before it could be effective Johann played a trump card by
marrying Therese, on 8 November. Beethoven’s extravagantly high-handed behaviour had ended in defeat, and he retired angrily to Vienna. Nothing more is heard of him that year apart from the preparations for a concert with the French violinist Pierre Rode on 29 December, for which he completed the G
major Violin Sonata (op. 96).
The rebuff by his brother was the second emotional crisis of 1812, a year that represented some sort of watershed for Beethoven. To return to the letter of 6–7 July: usually known as the letter to the ‘Immortal Beloved’ (‘unsterbliche Geliebte’), it was found among Beethoven’s papers after his
death, and first published in 1840. There is no direct indication to whom this passionate love-letter, the only one of his to a woman that uses the intimate ‘du’ throughout, was addressed. Even the year in which it was written (it refers only to ‘Monday, 6 July’) was for long uncertain. Thus the
names of many women known to have been admired by Beethoven were proposed by his early biographers; but nearly all of them have had to be ruled out, since 1812 is now established as the correct date of the letter, Teplitz as its place of origin and Karlsbad (‘K’ in the letter) as its addressee’s
temporary residence.
Maynard Solomon showed in the 1970s that she was Antonie Brentano, an aristocratic Viennese lady ten years younger than Beethoven who at 18 had married a Frankfurt businessman, Franz Brentano, Bettina Brentano’s half-brother (As there are no explicit letters from Antonie Brentano to Beethoven,
some do not accept that the case is closed; but no plausible alternative has been presented.). The Brentanos were in Vienna in the years 1809–12, so that Antonie could be with her dying father and subsequently wind up his estate. It is clear not merely that she disliked the idea of returning to
Frankfurt, where she was most unhappy, but that she did everything possible to postpone it, delaying the event until the last months of 1812. Beethoven had been introduced to the family by Bettina in 1810, and became a warm friend not only of Antonie but of her husband Franz and their ten-year-old
daughter Maximiliane – for whom in June 1812 he wrote an easy piano trio in one movement (woo39). Since the Brentanos had not only been in close contact with Beethoven in Vienna shortly before his departure at the end of June, but were also in Prague while he was there (2–4 July) and moved on to
Karlsbad on 5 July, Antonie Brentano fulfils all the chronological and topographical requirements for being the addressee of the famous letter.
Although in many ways a dutiful wife, Antonie's admiration of Beethoven was profound, and she may have become emotionally dependent on him, especially when the return to Frankfurt seemed inevitable. And there is no doubt that Beethoven, though vociferous in his condemnation of adulterous
relations, was especially attracted to women who were married or who were in some other way already involved with a man. Beethoven's letter is not only passionate but also confused, agitated and more than a little ambiguous. Beethoven describes his harrowing trip to Teplitz from Prague, where the
relationship reached a crisis; Antonie may have known or suspected that she was pregnant (she gave birth on 8 March 1813). Mingled with the ardently expressed desire for complete union with the beloved (‘I will arrange it with you and me that I can live with you’) there are many phrases expressing
resignation or acceptance of the lack of fulfilment, and it is possible to read it as a cautious rejection of a shared domesticity: ‘At my age I need a steady, quiet life – can it be so in our connection?’. Doubtless the ambiguities were clarified when, later in the month, Beethoven joined the
Brentanos at Karlsbad. The family duly returned to Frankfurt in the autumn; Beethoven never saw them again, though he remained in touch with them, calling on Franz’s services as a businessman in 1820 and dedicating important works to Antonie (op. 120, in 1823) and Maximiliane (op. 109, in 1821).
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8. 1813–21.
However the turmoil of the summer of 1812 is to be understood, it proved to be a profound turning-point in Beethoven’s emotional life. It initiated a long period of markedly reduced creativity, and there is evidence that he became deeply depressed. Henceforth Beethoven accepted the impossibility
of achieving a sustained relationship with a woman and entering into a shared domestic routine, though he was scarcely reconciled to it; even in 1816, as will be seen, he had by no means overcome his longing. Some of the hints contained in the letter are stated more baldly in diary entries made
about this time. As in past crises, a dedication to art was evidently to replace a commitment to a human being: ‘Thou mayst no longer be a man, not for thyself, only for others, for thee there is no longer happiness except in thyself, in thy art – O God, give me strength to conquer myself, nothing
must fetter me to life’. ‘13 May 1813. To forgo a great act which might be and might remain so … O God, God, look down on the unhappy B., do not let it continue like this any longer’.
But by a stroke of irony that may contain an inner truth, at this very time he pledged himself to a responsibility that was increasingly to encroach on the exercise of his art and indeed to dominate his emotional outlook in the last 12 years of his life. Caspar Carl became seriously ill with
tuberculosis, and on 12 April 1813 he signed a declaration appointing Beethoven guardian of his son Karl, then aged six, in the event of his death. This, it will emerge, came ultimately to involve Beethoven profoundly; but for the moment Caspar Carl’s health improved, though Beethoven was obliged to
help him to borrow money.
At this time Beethoven too was financially embarrassed. The severe depreciation of the Austrian currency as a result of the war, leading to an official devaluation in February 1811, had reduced the value of his annuity of 4000 florins to little more than 1600 florins. It was open to the princes
to restore the intended income, and they were prepared to do so; but unfortunately Prince Kinsky was killed by a fall from his horse at the end of 1812 before he could leave clear instructions, and Prince Lobkowitz’s payments were suspended for four years from 1811 owing to the mismanagement of his
affairs. So although Beethoven was ultimately to receive the full amount from Kinsky’s heirs, from Lobkowitz and from the Archduke Rudolph, it was only the last-named whose subventions continued without interruption or depreciation.
This may be one reason why Beethoven, even though he was still nursing secret sorrows, nevertheless became more of a public and social figure in the next year or so, reaching for popular acclaim by way of the concert hall and the theatre. He not only engaged a servant, but appears to have kept
him for three years. And he entered with some zest into the proposal of Johann Nepomuk Maelzel, the inventor of a mechanical organ called the ‘panharmonicon’ (and later, inventor of a metronome), for the two of them to collaborate on a piece that both celebrated and depicted Wellington’s military
victory at Vittoria on 21 June 1813. This bombastic piece of programme music, with its fanfares, cannonades, and fugal treatment of God Save the King, was thunderously acclaimed at two charity concerts on 8 and 12 December 1813 – together with the Seventh Symphony, which had not been heard before.
The ‘Battle Symphony’ had to be repeated three weeks later, and again on 24 February 1814. On that occasion the Eighth Symphony was one of its companion pieces.
The most gratifying (and unexpected) consequence of this sudden popularity was a request from the Kärntnertortheater for permission to revive the opera Fidelio. Beethoven agreed but stipulated that there would have to be a good many changes. The poet G.F. Treitschke was then stage manager at the
theatre, and he undertook to make the necessary alterations in the libretto. Some weak numbers were omitted, the two finales were rewritten, Leonore’s aria was supplied with a new recitative (‘Abscheulicher!’) and Florestan’s with a new final section, and there were many smaller changes throughout.
Beethoven also furnished the revival with a new overture in E major, called today the ‘Overture to Fidelio’. Although he grumbled at the labour and claimed in a letter to Treitschke that the opera would win him a martyr’s crown, the revision was effective, and the work’s success dates from this
production, first given on 23 May 1814 (fig.6). The new overture, not ready for the opening night, was given at the second performance, on 26 May.
The vocal score of the opera was prepared by the young pianist Ignaz Moscheles, then just 20. Since he worked under Beethoven’s supervision, the task brought him for a time into regular contact with someone he had for long ardently admired. And March 1814 was the date at which another
enthusiastic follower of Beethoven later said he had first been introduced to him: this was the 18-year-old Anton Schindler, at the time a law student and a good violinist. For Schindler the claims of music proved stronger than those of the law, and by 1822 he was leader of the orchestra at the
Theater in der Josefstadt. From about that time he began to spend many of his leisure hours in Beethoven’s company, and for a while he virtually became his unpaid secretary and servant. Beethoven found his ‘factotum’ useful in practical matters, though Schindler’s obsequiousness used to irritate
him. Some years after Beethoven’s death, in 1840, Schindler published a hastily written biography – translated into English a year later, with notes by Moscheles – in which uncritical devotion to ‘the master’ was combined with polemics against many of the others who had been close to him. Thus it is
unfortunately unreliable even in its account of the years after 1821 during which Schindler was often in very close contact with the composer; the material of value that it contains is hard to distinguish from his fabrications. A later (1860) edition of his biography, although greatly expanded and
indeed largely rewritten, was no more accurate.
In the summer of 1814 excitement began to mount in Vienna as preparations were made to welcome the crowned heads of Europe for the Congress of Vienna. This gave Beethoven the opportunity for producing more ‘occasional pieces’. But before starting work on anything of that nature, he quickly
completed a piano sonata (op. 90), his first in four years. The earliest of the congress works was a short chorus of welcome to the visiting sovereigns, Ihr weisen Gründer (woo95). Next, he made a strenuous attempt to complete an overture in C that he had taken up and worked on at various times in
the previous five years; it was planned for the celebration of the emperor’s name day on 4 October and is now known as the Namensfeier Overture (op. 115). But the score could not be completed in time, and Beethoven put it aside until the spring of 1815, setting to work instead on a cantata
celebrating the present ‘glorious moment’ in the destiny of Europe. The fawningly inflated text of Der glorreiche Augenblick (op. 136) was by a distinguished surgeon from Salzburg, Alois Weissenbach, who had come to the capital for the festivities. Beethoven could not have had a more enthusiastic
admirer than Weissenbach; when the two men met, they took a great liking to each other, and the cantata was a result of their collaboration. They had more than music in common, for Weissenbach too was deaf. The cantata was announced for a concert on 20 November, but it was postponed three times and
finally given before the assembled royalty on 29 November, with the ‘Battle Symphony’ and Seventh Symphony forming the rest of the programme.
From the point of view of Viennese popular acclaim and fame the year 1814 must be regarded as the high-water mark in Beethoven’s life. Not only were his compositions applauded by large audiences, but he also received in person the commendations of royal dignitaries. This last aspect is typified
in one final congress piece, the little Polonaise (op. 89) that he wrote in December 1814 in honour of the Empress of Russia, who was especially generous to him. And 1814 was also a more sombre turning-point for Beethoven, for two performances of the ‘Archduke’ Trio in April and May marked his last
appearance in public as a pianist (except as accompanist). His deafness had latterly become much more severe.
Beethoven now found himself possessed not only of fame but of a good deal of money, which he invested in bank shares. Moreover, as a result of a settlement reached with the Kinsky family and the goodwill of Prince Lobkowitz, most of the original value of the annuity had now been restored and the
arrears made up. In spite of this, his worries about his financial situation continued to be voiced in letters to publishers and friends abroad (such as his former pupil Ries, now resident in London), whom he was trying to interest in the large number of his more recent works that were still
unpublished. But towards the end of 1815 an unhappy event occurred that immediately focussed all his concerns and anxieties. His brother Caspar Carl’s health suddenly deteriorated; the tuberculosis had evidently made inconspicuous but rapid progress, and he collapsed and died on 15 November. The
will, dated 14 November, appointed Beethoven sole guardian of his only child, the nine-year-old Karl, but a codicil of the same day cancelled this and made the boy’s mother co-guardian:
Having learnt that my brother ... desires after my death to take wholly to himself my son Karl, and wholly to withdraw him from the supervision and training of his mother, and inasmuch as the best of harmony does not exist between my brother and my wife, I have found it necessary to add to my
will that I by no means desire that my son be taken away from his mother, but that he shall always and so long as his future career permits remain with his mother, to which end the guardianship of him is to be exercised by her as well as by my brother ... for the welfare of my child I recommend
compliance to my wife and more moderation to my brother. God permit them to be harmonious for the sake of my child’s welfare. This is the last wish of the dying husband and brother.
The dying man’s anxieties were all too prophetic. It proved a tragedy for Beethoven that he could not do what his brother asked. It was not simply that he was unable to achieve any ‘harmony’ with his sister-in-law Johanna. The situation in which he found himself was one that aroused deep passions
and longings that he doubtless did not fully understand. Frustrated in his several attempts – however ambiguously conceived and executed – to marry and have a family of his own, he began to feel that if he had sole responsibility for Karl he could combine the discharge of a sacred duty to his
brother with some of the satisfactions and fulfilments of parenthood. But for that to be possible, he had first to convince himself and others that Johanna was quite unfit to have the custody of Karl and should be excluded from the guardianship. The struggle for possession of the nephew lasted some
four and a half years, to be followed by another six in which his care and upbringing weighed heavily upon Beethoven. As will be seen, the burdensome intensity of the relationship between uncle and nephew – or as Beethoven preferred to see it, between father and son – led to something near disaster
in the summer of 1826. Before then an incalculable number of hours had been spent by Beethoven in litigation, letter-writing, quarrels, reconciliations and private agony of mind.
On 22 November 1815 the Imperial and Royal Landrechte of Lower Austria appointed Johanna guardian and Beethoven ‘co-guardian’. Six days later Beethoven appealed to the court requesting the guardianship to be transferred to himself. In a later court appearance he claimed he could produce ‘weighty
reasons’ for the total exclusion of the widow from the guardianship: four years earlier Johanna had been convicted and jailed on a charge of embezzlement. The result of Beethoven’s submissions was that on 9 January 1816 he was assigned sole guardianship by the court. He took vows for the performance
of his duties on 19 January. On 2 February Karl was taken from his mother and entered the private school of a certain Cajetan Giannatasio del Rio as a boarder.
Beethoven seems to have had little difficulty in persuading himself that Johanna was morally quite unfit to have charge of Karl, and he was ready to denounce her character and her way of life on every possible occasion, calling her the ‘Queen of Night’ and insinuating that her allegedly deviant
behaviour included prostitution and theft. She was certainly no moral exemplar, and some time after her husband’s death she took a lover and gave birth in 1820 to an illegitimate daughter. But Viennese society was permissive in sexual matters. Few of her contemporaries saw her in the same lurid
light as her brother-in-law, in spite of the forceful and relentless way that he marshalled the case against her.
Although convinced of Johanna’s unsuitability for bringing up the child, Beethoven felt rather guilty about restricting them from seeing each other. Yet that is what he now asked the Landrechte to put in his control, and the court agreed that Johanna should visit her son only at hours and places
that Beethoven sanctioned – which at times was liable to mean once a month, or even less frequently. An uneasy truce was maintained between Beethoven and Johanna through 1816 and 1817, although he suspected her of making clandestine visits to Karl’s school. At the end of January 1818 he withdrew
Karl from Giannatasio’s care and took him into his own home, engaging a private tutor; then in May he moved with Karl to Mödling and placed him in a class taught by the village priest, named Fröhlich. But after a month, to Beethoven’s indignation, Fröhlich expelled Karl for his bad behaviour. This
seems to have consisted of a series of minor offences against discipline, but Karl particularly shocked the priest by speaking of his mother in abusive terms – a breach of the Fifth Commandment in which, it was later noted, Beethoven had gleefully encouraged him.
It was at this point in the summer of 1818, when Beethoven was taking preparatory steps to enter Karl in the Vienna Gymnasium, that Johanna made a further effort to gain some control of her son’s education and welfare. With the help of a relative with legal training, Jacob Hotschevar, she
presented a series of petitions to the Landrechte. The first two were rejected, but after Karl had run away from Beethoven’s lodgings to his mother on 3 December – he was returned later by the police – she used the incident as the basis of a third appeal, supporting it by a careful summary of the
whole situation from Hotschevar and appending a statement from Father Fröhlich on the boy’s neglected physical state and moral lapses. In the course of giving evidence in court on 11 December Beethoven incautiously let slip the fact that Karl was not of noble birth. He was then forced to concede
that neither he nor his late brother had ever had documents to prove their own nobility; ‘van’ was a Dutch prefix that was not restricted to those of noble birth. Thereupon the Landrechte, which were courts confined to the nobility, woke up to the fact that the case should never have come before
them and transferred the whole matter to the Vienna Magistracy or commoners’ courts.
How severe a blow this was to Beethoven’s pride has been debated; but even from a practical point of view it was very inconvenient. From the start the Magistracy seems to have been more sympathetic to Johanna than to Beethoven. Its first action was to suspend him temporarily from the
guardianship. Karl returned for a time to his mother, being instructed by a tutor and also being taught at an institute run by one Johann Kudlich. From March to July Beethoven resigned the guardianship in favour of a Councillor Tuscher, and applied for a passport to enable Karl to be educated in
Bavaria. This was refused, and his right to resume the guardianship in July was also challenged; on 17 September the court decided, reasonably enough, that Karl (who had meanwhile been moved to yet another school, one run by a Pestalozzi disciple, Joseph Blöchlinger) had been ‘tossed back and forth
like a ball from one educational institution to another’. The mother, therefore, should remain as legal guardian in collaboration with a certain Leopold Nussböck, the municipal sequestrator.
This was of course a defeat for Beethoven. His first move was to protest at the decision; this was rejected by the Magistracy on 4 November. Next, with the help of a legally qualified friend, Johann Baptist Bach, he proposed as a substitute for Nussböck his friend Karl Peters, who was tutor to
the children of Prince Lobkowitz. This application too was rejected. He now had recourse to the Court of Appeal, for whose benefit he prepared a 48-page draft memorandum (the longest extant document in his handwriting). This denounced in turn Johanna, a certain Herr Piuk who was a member of the
Magistracy, and Father Fröhlich, and defended his own conduct and educational policies in great detail. It is unlikely that the memorandum was ever submitted in the form in which it survives. Beethoven’s case was shrewdly and discreetly presented by Dr Bach; less discreet were Beethoven's attempts
to influence the Court by making known his connection to the Archduke Rudolph. Demanding the guardianship of Karl and requesting Karl Peters as associate guardian, Beethoven asked at the same time for Johanna and Nussböck to be deposed. After further scrutiny these claims were upheld by the Court of
Appeal on 8 April 1820; a petition by Johanna to the emperor against the decision was rejected three months later. Thus in July 1820 Beethoven found that he had finally won in a struggle that had lasted for over four years.
Beethoven’s preoccupation with the care of his nephew – especially in the period from the end of 1815 to the beginning of 1818 – can be regarded as a continuation, and in some ways as an attempted solution, of the unresolved matrimonial crisis of 1812. At that time he had decided, however
confusedly and irresolutely, that his creative activity was incompatible with having a wife; now he was testing whether it could be reconciled with caring for a child. The cost of those years to Beethoven is reflected in the paucity of valuable music completed in them. Productively the years 1813–15
were lean; apart from two cello sonatas (op. 102) written in the second half of 1815, most of the compositions were ‘occasional pieces’ such as the ‘Battle Symphony’ and the works written for the Congress of Vienna. This trend was continued in the following years. 1816 at least brought two important
compositions, the song cycle An die ferne Geliebte (op. 98, April) and the Piano Sonata in A (op. 101, November), but 1817 was completely barren in respect of completed major works. Instead, Beethoven during these years contented himself with elegant trivia, such as the polished march that he wrote in
June 1816 for the Vienna artillery corps (woo24), as well as continuing to compose the instrumental and vocal settings of Scottish airs that he provided for George Thomson of Edinburgh (from the years 1809 to 1820 he worked intermittently on close to 200 such settings). He also refurbished some
variations for piano trio that he had written many years earlier on a theme from one of Wenzel Müller’s Singspiele, and he revised and to some extent rewrote an arrangement for string quintet made by someone else of his youthful C minor trio from op. 1 (these were subsequently published as his
op. 121a and his op. 104). And, even more significantly, he toiled hard on a number of new compositions without managing to complete them; they included a piano concerto in D, a piano trio in F minor, and a string quintet in D minor. Scores of these three works were in fact begun.
These were indeed unhappy years for Beethoven. He was now thoroughly out of sympathy with the kind of music being written and being applauded in Vienna. The aristocratic milieu that had welcomed and sheltered him in his earlier years in Vienna had been shattered by the military, political and
financial upheavals of the Napoleonic wars, with the result that he had lost or broken with almost all his high-born friends apart from the Archduke Rudolph. In spite of his popular successes in 1813 and 1814, his general acceptance as the greatest living composer, and a resurgence of Viennese
performances of his works from 1816 onwards (testifying to their growing status as part of the standard repertory), Beethoven found no wide public in Vienna that he could respect, and daydreams of journeys abroad – to England, even to Italy – filled his mind. Nor should it be supposed that the
attachment to Antonie Brentano, though he had not seen her for some years, was forgotten. The best informant here is Fanny, one of Giannatasio’s daughters, who observed Beethoven at this time with a sensitivity sharpened by her own unavowed devotion to him. In September 1816 she recorded in her
diary a confession of Beethoven to her father that she had overheard. Five years before, he had wanted a more intimate union with a woman, but it was ‘not to be thought of, almost impossible, a chimera. Nevertheless, it is now as on the first day, I have not been able to get it out of my mind’. Some
months earlier, on 8 May 1816, Beethoven had ended a letter to Ries in London with the words: ‘My best greetings to your wife. Unfortunately, I have no wife. I found only one whom I shall doubtless never possess’. This nostalgic retrospection forms the background to the song cycle on the subject of
the ‘distant beloved’ that he wrote in April 1816.
There were also difficulties of a more practical kind. Beethoven was consumed with misgivings as to his ability to look after his nephew and to run an orderly household. The year 1817, in particular, is marked by an immense number of letters to the kindly Nannette Streicher, a pianist and wife of
the piano maker Johann Andreas Streicher, on the minutiae of domestic administration, the cost |
