Beethoven's Eroica Read online

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  THE BOY FROM BONN

  It used to be customary to present Beethoven’s family background and boyhood almost as a contrast to Mozart’s, as though to show how a heroic genius could dispense with the advantages of being a child prodigy painstakingly groomed by a father who was both an accomplished professional musician and extremely ambitious for his son. In fact Beethoven’s father, Johann, was also a professional musician (although much less accomplished than Leopold Mozart) and ambitious enough for his son occasionally to shave a year or two off the boy’s age just as Leopold did with Wolfgang. The market for child musical celebs was very lively in the latter half of the eighteenth century.

  Young Beethoven was certainly not a child prodigy to the same degree as Mozart or Mendelssohn, but it was obvious early on that he had quite exceptional musical talent. Music did after all run in the family. His grandfather Ludwig (1712–1773), who died when Beethoven was not quite three, came from what today is Belgium and was a trained singer who accepted a post in the Elector of Cologne’s chapel at his court in Bonn. That he must also have been a thorough musician as well as having a notable voice is proved by his subsequent appointment there as Kapellmeister in 1761 with responsibility to supervise all the court’s music. Such a post normally went to a composer, which the elder Ludwig never was.

  Ludwig’s son Johann (1740–1792) also joined the Elector’s chapel as a singer, first as a boy and then staying on as a tenor. Johann had enough ability on both the violin and the harpsichord to give basic lessons to eke out his stipend but his musical talents were much more modest than his father’s. He married in 1767, and his second surviving son, Ludwig, was born in December 1770. Two younger brothers also survived, Carl and Johann, both of whom were to figure prominently in Beethoven’s later life.

  Having spotted Ludwig’s early talent Beethoven’s father did his best to foster it by giving him basic keyboard and violin lessons. The boy was then sent to various teachers in Bonn and gave his first concert when he was seven, playing ‘various concertos and trios’, which surely argues rapid progress. But under his father’s bullying the boy Beethoven was soon as overworked as the boy Mozart had been some fifteen years earlier, but with none of that little showman’s satin suits, miniature court dress and periwigs. On the contrary, as a child of what the current British euphemism would call a ‘troubled family’ young Ludwig bore clear signs of neglect, undernourishment and, on occasion, welts and bruises from his father’s beatings. His younger brothers, showing no signs of musical precocity, probably escaped the worst consequences of their father’s ambitiousness. Outside the house Johann was convivial and not unpopular but occasionally showed the effects of heavy drinking, his voice and court attendance already beginning to suffer.

  Maria, the boys’ mother, was a kindly soul, although she could flare up suddenly with formidable outbursts of temper, as could all the Beethovens. Somehow she dealt with her difficult husband, but trying to hold the family together was taxing and at school her children were noted for being generally unkempt and grubby. Ludwig’s formal education never progressed even as far as Gymnasium level (secondary school, in British terms) but stopped at Bonn’s Tirocinium, or primary school, from which he was removed in 1781 in order to concentrate on music. He was not quite eleven. Years later one of his fellow pupils at the Tirocinium remembered the boy they called either ‘Luis’ or ‘der Spagnol’, the Spaniard, because of his dark complexion and haughtiness:

  Apparently his mother was already dead at the time, for Luis v. B. was distinguished by uncleanliness, negligence, etc. Not a sign was to be discovered of that spark of genius which glowed so brilliantly in him afterwards.1

  In fact poor Maria was not dead, merely ill with the early stages of tuberculosis and ever more exhausted with maintaining the household and keeping her three children fed and presentable.

  In leaving school so young Ludwig was not exceptional for the times. Eleven was considered an appropriate age for a boy in a needy family to get out into the world and become apprenticed to a worthwhile trade, earning being much preferred to learning. Ludwig self-selected for the trade of music: he was as brilliant at that as he was backward in such basic skills as even the most elementary mathematics. In the vast archive of manuscripts, notes, diaries, conversation books and scribbles he was to leave behind are various touching efforts at accountancy that betray this lack. He never learned how to multiply, for example. If he needed to multiply a sum of money by forty he wrote it out forty times and added the column up, not always reaching the same total twice running.

  The first music teacher to have a far-reaching influence on the young Beethoven was Christian Gottlob Neefe, who was appointed court organist in Bonn in 1781. It was Neefe who introduced the boy to J. S. Bach’s 48 Preludes and Fugues in all the keys at a time when the Baroque master’s music had fallen out of fashion. In the thirty-one years since Bach’s death, his legacy was kept alive by a comparative handful of enthusiasts. (It would be almost another half-century before Mendelssohn resurrected the St Matthew Passion from total obscurity to astonish audiences then firmly in music’s Romantic age and re-establish Bach in his rightful place.) Bach’s ‘48’ proved the perfect grounding for a more advanced piano technique, as it did for Beethoven’s own later and highly idiosyncratic brand of fugue. At eleven Ludwig was already accomplished enough to act as Neefe’s deputy as court organist, and Neefe himself admiringly described his prize pupil in a magazine article as being a skilled keyboard player and sight-reader, as well as having had a composition published. This was a set of nine piano variations on a march by the minor composer Ernst Christoph Dressler. (In the context of the ‘Eroica’ Symphony, with its famous funeral march in C minor, it is a curious coincidence that the theme of Dressler’s that the boy Beethoven chose for his first published piece was also a funeral march in C minor). Neefe’s article ended: ‘This young genius deserves help to enable him to travel. He would surely become a second Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart if he were to continue as he has begun.’2

  Before he turned thirteen Beethoven had risen to be deputy continuo player in the Elector Maximilian Friedrich’s orchestra with three published sonatas judiciously dedicated to his employer. The continuo player’s chief task had long been that of accompanying from the keyboard the singers of recitatives in operas and cantatas. By this time the traditional harpsichord was slowly being replaced by the fortepiano, and in those pre-conductor days the continuo player also helped keep the orchestra together. The job was a considerable test of sight-reading from scores as well as time-keeping and would have been invaluable for familiarizing Beethoven with ensemble playing. The following year the Elector died and was succeeded by Archduke Maximilian Francis, Empress Maria Theresa’s youngest son. His title might have been Archbishop and Elector-Spiritual of Cologne, but his court was in Bonn, as it had been for all the Electors of Cologne for centuries. The new Elector was keen to make Bonn an artistic centre to rival Vienna, the city of his birth. Knowing his keen interest in music, Neefe put forward his prize pupil for the post of assistant court organist, to which the thirteen-year-old Beethoven was duly appointed at a salary of 150 gulden. The relief in the Beethoven household must have been immense. The boy was making good. It is hard to imagine that Johann went to bed sober that night. The Elector soon began to take a personal interest in his young organist, recognizing the ferocious nature of the boy’s talent.

  From Beethoven’s point of view the next few years were perfect for his musical education in that his duties were not onerous and left him with plenty of time for perfecting his keyboard technique. Better still, he had the court orchestra from which to learn the range of each instrument, its uses, its tonal limitations and ability to blend in or stand out in an ensemble. From his father he had learned the basics of violin technique and turned himself into a viola player good enough to take his place in the opera orchestra, but he was never a natural string player. Such skills were merely what any practical musician picked
up along the way. Haydn, for example, claimed to be able to play any instrument in the orchestra, none brilliantly but all of them quite well enough for him to be able to deputize at the desk of an absent player.

  Two scholars who wrote outstanding Beethoven biographies in the early 1930s, Marion M. Scott (Beethoven) and Richard Specht (Bildnis Beethovens), referred to an incident from this period that later biographers have ignored, although this might be for lack of a reliable source. In Marion Scott’s version the story goes:

  Beethoven, during the course of his duties… had to accompany on the piano those portions of the Lamentations of Jeremiah which are sung on a reciting note in Holy Week. In Holy Week, March 1785, the singer was Ferdinand Heller, an excellent musician who, when Beethoven asked leave to try to put him off his note, assented very readily. [The boy], while persistently striking the reciting note with one finger, improvised such daring harmonic excursions in the accompaniment that Heller became too bewildered to find the closing cadence… The musicians of the chapel were dumbfounded at Beethoven’s skill, Heller was furious to the extent of complaining to the Elector, and the triumphant youngster was ‘very graciously reprimanded’ by that exalted person.3

  The composer’s grandfather, Ludwig van Beethoven, at the age of sixty-one in a portrait by Amelius Radoux, a fellow Belgian. It was painted in 1773 when Ludwig was Kapellmeister at the Elector’s court in Bonn. Earlier that year the old musician had had a stroke and he would die on Christmas Eve.

  CREDIT: THE ART ARCHIVE / BEETHOVEN HOUSE BONN / GIANNI DAGLI ORTI

  The story sounds likely enough since there are plenty of well-attested accounts from only very little later of Beethoven’s prodigious skill as an improviser, especially when challenged to work from a mere handful of notes. It also contains a plausible germ of the arrogance that was to remain a characteristic of most of the subsequent musical challenges he accepted, especially later in Vienna where competitions between keyboard players were keenly fought.

  At the age of fourteen Beethoven published the first compositions to have his precocious personal stamp: the three Piano Quartets WoO 36 (a great many of his early and uncollected works were marked thus as works without an opus number). The music inevitably shows the influence of Mozart, partly because he was the composer who most inspired the young Beethoven but also because each quartet was modelled on one of Mozart’s violin sonatas. Despite that, these compositions betray surprising individuality and a depth of controlled feeling quite unexpected in anyone so young. Beethoven obviously wrote these quartets with himself as pianist in mind, and as such they are a testimonial to the keyboard technique he had acquired, since they are much more demanding for the pianist than Mozart’s violin sonatas. The second movement of the E flat major Quartet (WoO 36 No. 1) is not only in the stormy, passionate mode that later became one of his trademarks when he set up in Vienna; it is in the tonic minor—the rare key of E flat minor, the six flats presenting difficulties to all the players: to the strings in terms of intonation and to the pianist because having to deal with so many black keys was seldom encountered outside Bach’s ‘48’ (a difficulty related to that of tuning keyboard instruments in the remoter keys). Beethoven’s familiarity with Bach’s work surely facilitated this logical but unusual choice.

  All three of these piano quartets show clear pointers towards later works. In particular he was to adapt the slow movement of No. 3 in C major ten years later as the Adagio of the first of his thirty-two piano sonatas, the F minor, Op. 2 No. 1; while a G minor passage in the quartet’s first movement was to re-appear in the Piano Sonata in C major, Op. 2 No. 3. More importantly in the present context, though, in two of these quartets there are remarkable suggestions in embryonic form of the ‘Prometheus’ theme that in fifteen and more years’ time Beethoven was to use in four separate works, culminating with the last movement of the ‘Eroica’.*

  Were these prophetic hints, not yet fully realized, of a tune that was to become famous in twenty years’ time or were they just a musical commonplace, more fragments of a tune than a tune itself? Musicologists have also pointed to two of Muzio Clementi’s piano sonatas as possible influences for this theme, especially his F minor Sonata, Op. 13 No. 6, dating from 1784.4 Its last movement begins with the first few notes of the ‘Prometheus’ theme, albeit in a minor key, but later in the movement it appears in the major and does sound convincingly similar. Clementi was perhaps the first virtuoso of the early piano, and later on his numerous sonatas undoubtedly had some influence on Beethoven, who certainly had copies in his library as an adult and also had business relations with the Italian. That Beethoven could have seen a sonata written only the year before his own piano quartets seems doubtful, and in any case too much can be made of these apparent musical cross-references and presagings.

  A handful of notes that might have foreshadowed an entire later tune seem of little significance, particularly as Beethoven never felt himself remotely challenged by Clementi either as a performer or as a composer. Unknown to his fourteen-year-old self in 1785, of course, it was precisely the use and expansion of such motivic fragments that was to become the trademark of his maturity. At the time, composers such as Mozart and Haydn tended to favour self-contained tunes they would develop in ways that usually left them still identifiable. Beethoven was to invent a method of either starting with bald rhythmic motifs (like the opening of the Fifth Symphony) that could be expanded into tunes, or else doing the opposite: starting with a tune and reducing it to its component parts (as in the last movement of the Eighth). These techniques became a salient feature of his mature compositions and not least of the ‘Eroica’ Symphony. Whatever its origins, this particular germ of the later ‘Prometheus’ tune clearly had a long genesis.

  Hearing these early quartets, no musician in the new Elector’s court in Bonn could have been in any further doubt about young Beethoven’s great gifts and promise. Archduke Maximilian took particular notice of him, not merely as an ornament to his court but as a potential inheritor of Mozart’s laurels. This interest in his promising organist’s future was all of a piece with his plan to convert Bonn from an ecclesiastical Rhenish backwater into a seat of the arts and learning. He was very much a man of the Enlightenment, encouraging science and laying out botanical gardens, opening a public reading room in the library of his palace and inaugurating the new university his predecessor had planned. Ignorant of the awful changes that lay in wait for Bonn at the hands of Napoleon following the French Revolution of 1789, for a few brief but exciting years the city basked in a springlike regeneration that attracted artists and intellectuals. It was this period and this progressive atmosphere that Beethoven was to retain for the rest of his life as an image of civilized orderliness that epitomized his birthplace, his locus of homesickness.

  Beethoven the teenager might have been ill educated in a formal sense and often socially uncouth, but in other respects he was the beneficiary of a good deal of extra-musical intellectual stimulus. His teacher and mentor, Christian Neefe, was a creature of the Enlightenment with pronounced egalitarian views that verged on the mystical. He was a Freemason as well as a member of the more secretive and politically radical Bavarian Order of Illuminati. Such interests were very much in the spirit of the times. Many of the leading artists and intellectuals of the day were Masons, from Benjamin Franklin and George Washington in America to Goethe and Frederick the Great, not to mention Gluck, Mozart and Haydn closer to home. The playwright Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, author of Nathan the Wise (1779), was also a Mason. Nathan made a powerful plea for the peaceful co-existence of Christianity, Judaism and Islam, and this parable of the brotherhood of man was already famous throughout Europe. He described the central belief of Freemasonry thus:

  By the exercise of Brotherly Love we are taught to regard the whole human species as one family, the high and the low, the rich and the poor, created by one Almighty Being and sent into the world for the aid, support and protection of each other. On these principles Masonry unites men
of every country, sect and opinion, and by its dictates conciliates true friendship among those who might otherwise have remained at a distance.5

  From Neefe and others of his circle Beethoven would have heard such ideas and no doubt internalized them as a vindication of his own humble origins, together with the implied reassurance that lowly birth was no bar to future greatness. From its first publication and wide circulation in 1786, Schiller’s poem ‘Ode to Joy’ must also have deeply impressed the teenager. Although Schiller was not himself a Freemason, many of the poem’s sentiments (Alle Menschen werden Brüder: ‘All men shall be brothers’) perfectly echoed the Masonic ideals. Indeed, once Beethoven had finally settled in Vienna in the next decade he decided he would set the poem to music, although it was thirty years before he got around to it for the last movement of the Ninth Symphony. It might seem surprising that Beethoven never became a Freemason himself: he was to have many friends in Vienna who were, several of them aristocrats. But he was never a joiner. Constitutionally unclubbable as Beethoven was, it is impossible to visualize him as a member of any organization. Any oaths and rules in his life were exclusively his own. Despite all his invocations of the brotherhood of man, he powerfully felt himself a loner, often belligerently so.

  Meanwhile he concentrated on honing his piano technique and was giving lessons to various aristocratic children in Bonn until, in the late spring of 1787, Archduke Maximilian sent for him and announced he was sending him to Vienna, all expenses paid. The sixteen-year-old travelled alone and it is not known exactly what the purpose of the trip was. Since the Archduke was himself a keen amateur musician and his brother Joseph II was Holy Roman Emperor in Vienna, there was no one in that city to whom Beethoven might not have been given an introduction, and doubtless he left home with a sheaf of appropriate letters with impressive wax seals. Certainly he longed to meet Mozart and Haydn, although at that time Haydn was an almost permanent fixture at Eszterháza Palace, about fifty miles southeast of Vienna just over today’s Hungarian border, where he was Kapellmeister, seldom coming to Vienna except for short visits at Christmas.