Exercises

Beethoven

by Anne Pimlott Baker

Beethoven arrived in Vienna on 10 November 1792, not yet twenty-two and eager to begin composition lessons with Haydn. He found himself an attic room but he had scarcely had time to settle in before he received the news that his father had died suddenly, in Bonn, on 18 December. Interestingly, Beethoven did not mention his father's death in his diary, but he wrote to the Elector pointing out that he still needed to support and educate his two young brothers. As a result, the Elector doubled his salary. These quarterly payments continued until March 1794, and his brothers were soon to follow him to Vienna, Carl in 1794 and Johann at the end of 1795.

Beethoven soon attracted the attention of Prince Carl Lichnowsky, and moved into his apartments as a guest, remaining there for about two years. Lichnowsky became an important patron and Beethoven often played at his Friday morning chamber music concerts. Lichnowsky retained his own string quartet, led by Ignaz Schuppanzigh, who was still a teenager when Beethoven first moved there. Several of Beethoven's compositions had their first performances there, and Beethoven later dedicated his piano sonata op. 13, the Pathetique, to Lichnowsky.

Beethoven began lessons with Haydn at once and these continued throughout 1793, but he seems to have found them disappointing. "Papa" Haydn was enjoying enormous success at this time and evidently devoted very little attention to his pupil. He set Beethoven to work on counterpoint, using the standard text book, Fux's Gradus ad Parnassum (1725), but Beethoven complained (though not to Haydn) that he was not making any progress because Haydn was much too busy to correct the exercises properly and it seems that for that year the composer Johan Schenk secretly helped Beethoven with the exercises, even going so far as to get Beethoven to copy out any corrections in his own hand so that Haydn would not realize what was going on. Haydn wanted Beethoven to put "pupil of Haydn" on the title page of any works published during these early years in Vienna, but Beethoven refused, telling his friends that although he had had lessons from Haydn, he had learned nothing from him. However, Beethoven kept his grievances to himself, and accompanied Haydn to Eisenstadt, the summer residence of Prince Nikolaus Esterhazy, in the summer of 1793. According to Neefe, Beethoven's former teacher in Bonn, Haydn had asked Beethoven to accompany him on his second concert tour to London, planned for 1794, but before then an embarrassing episode soured their relationship. Although the Elector of Cologne had doubled Beethoven's salary earlier in the year and was sending him an additional 500 florins a year to cover his living expenses, Beethoven still felt short of money, and he got Haydn to write to the Elector on his behalf in November 1793. Haydn pointed out that Beethoven was in debt, and had had to borrow money from him, and asked the Elector to increase Beethoven's salary. He sent copies of five compositions and reported that his pupil had made great progress since coming to Vienna, predicting that Beethoven would become one of the greatest composers in Europe. But in fact, of the five works, only one had been composed in Vienna ─ the others were revisions of pieces written, and performed, while, he was still in Bonn. The Elector noticed this and replied coolly, "I very much doubt that he has made any important progress in composition during his present stay, and I fear that, as in the case of his first journey to Vienna, he will bring back nothing but debts," and suggested that Beethoven return to Bonn, since he had not composed anything new while studying with Haydn. It looks as though Beethoven had been deceiving Haydn, both about his compositions and his income, and this may well explain why he did not after all accompany Haydn to London in January 1794.

Relations between the two men remained strained for some years. There is a story that when Beethoven's three Piano Trios, op. 1, were first performed at one of Prince Lichnowsky's soirees, Haydn liked them, but advised Beethoven not to publish the third, the C minor trio, because it was too difficult for the public. Beethoven, who thought it the best, evidently believed this was because Haydn was jealous (although this is unlikely, as Beethoven was very much in Haydn's shadow as a composer at this time), and in fact the trios sold well, and Beethoven made a large profit out of them. However, he dedicated his first three piano sonatas, op. 2, to Haydn, and they were performed at Prince Lichnowsky's house in the early autumn of 1795, just after Haydn's return from England. In the following years, the two men often appeared together in concerts, with Haydn conducting and Beethoven playing the piano, as when Beethoven played his own piano concerto in BI , op. 19, in December 1795, and although Beethoven continued to make carping remarks about Haydn in private, after his death in 1809 Beethoven talked of him in the same breath as Handel and Mozart, and in 1815 wrote in the Tagebuch (his journal) that "portraits of Handel, Bach, Gluck, Mozart and Haydn are in my room ... They can promote my capacity for endurance."

After Haydn went to England, Beethoven began to feel more secure, and began to compose new works. In Haydn's absence he had lessons with Johann Georg Albrechtsberger, Kapellmeister at St. Stephan's Cathedral, and the most famous teacher of counterpoint in Vienna. It is also likely that he later had lessons in Italian song writing from Salieri. But Beethoven was far more famous at this point as a virtuoso pianist than as a composer and as early as 1793 word was buzzing round Vienna that such playing had not been heard since Mozart. The virtuoso Joseph Gelinek complained that "he is no man; he's a devil. He will play me and all of us to death. And how he improvises!" According to Joseph Mahler, writing in 1803, when Beethoven played, his hands were very still, and seemed to glide over the keys, with his fingers doing the work—there was no tossing around or bending over the keyboard. Carl Czerny noticed that when he played, Beethoven's bearing was very quiet, and noble. No doubt this was the style of playing taught him by Neefe, who trained him in clavichord technique, and Beethoven himself stressed the position of the fingers in his teaching. Beethoven played in the palaces and town houses of the Viennese aristocracy, and his improvisation at the piano was renowned. His first public appearance as pianist and composer was on 29 March 1795 at the Burgtheater (the Imperial court theatre), at the first of the two annual benefit concerts for the widows and orphans of the musicians of Vienna. He performed his Piano Concerto no. 1 in C major, and the story goes that he finished the Rondo only two days before the concert, and as the piano was a semitone flat, he had to play his part in C# major, with its seven sharps. The same year, on 22 November 1795, he made his debut as an orchestral composer in Vienna, when he was commissioned to write the dances for the small ballroom in the Redoutensaal at the annual masked ball for the pension fund in aid of the Society of Artists. This was a great honour—Haydn had been asked in 1792—and he conducted his own twelve minuets and twelve German dances. In February 1796, in the company of Prince Lichnowsky, Beethoven set off on a concert tour lasting several months, and performed in Prague, Dresden, Leipzig and Berlin; in November that year, he again left Vienna to give concerts in Pressburt (Bratislava) and Pest (Budapest). He returned to Prague in 1798.

By the end of the 1790s Beethoven was beginning to move away from composing only for the piano, although perhaps his most famous piece from this time is the piano sonata in C minor, p. 13, the Pathetique (this title appeared on the first edition), which was published in 1799. His first set of string quartets, op. 18, belongs to this period (they were written in 1798 and published in 1800), and his First Symphony, op. 21 in C, was first performed on 2 April 1800, when he organized a benefit concert at the Burgtheater and hired the orchestra of the Italian Opera. This concert also included the first performance of his Septet, op. 20, which became very popular. He intended to dedicate the First Symphony to Maximilian Franz, the Elector of Cologne, who had settled near Vienna in 1800, but the Elector died in July 1801 before it was published, and it was dedicated to Baron van Swieten instead.

By 1800, therefore, Beethoven was making a comfortable living as a performer and composer. His salary from the Elector of Cologne had not been paid since March 1794, and he was relying on aristocratic patronage. But after 1795 he no longer had to support his brothers, and he was also making some money from the publication of his works, and from concerts and teaching. Although in general he disliked teaching, he had a soft spot for some of the aristocratic young ladies who came to him for lessons, and when the young countesses Josephine and Therese von Brunsvik came to Vienna from Hungary in 1799, he taught them for four or five hours a day on sixteen consecutive days, and refused any payment. In 1800 Prince Lichnowsky settled an annual salary of 600 florins on him, which was to be continued until Beethoven found a permanent position paying more. But he had not settled down. He seemed incapable of staying at one address for very long, nor did he seem able to form a lasting relationship with a woman, although, according to his friend Franz Wegeler, he was always in love, and in 1795 was even supposed to have proposed marriage to Magdalena Willmann, a singer from Bonn, who had moved to Vienna. But by 1800 his increasing deafness was beginning to have a profound effect on his outlook on life.

Beethoven probably began to go deaf after 1797, but he tried to keep it a secret, while consulting doctors and trying various remedies. He was extremely anxious about its possible effect on his career as a musician, and embarrassed by its effect on his social life. In the summer of 1801 he wrote to two friends. To Franz Wegeler in Bonn he wrote that he was very busy, with more commissions than he could cope with, and publishers competing to get hold of his latest works, but he was worried about his health, and particularly about his gradual loss of hearing. He had been leading a miserable life for the previous two years because of his deafness, and had avoided human company because he found it hard to tell people that he was deaf. "I live entirely in my music". Two days later he wrote to Karl Amenda, a more recent friend, on the same lines, expressing the anxiety that his best years would pass "without my being able to achieve all that my talent and my strength have commanded me to do". His fear that his deafness would prevent him from realizing his artistic potential led him to contemplate taking his own life, but in October 1802, he said that he had rejected suicide, and was  resigned to his condition. He explained that his deafness was the reason why he had been withdrawing from people's company, because he found it so humiliating not being able to hear, but he did not want to tell people about it. Although tempted to kill himself, "the only thing that held me back was my art. For indeed it seemed to me impossible to leave this world before I had produced all the works that I felt the urge to compose." During the summer of 1802 he had spent six months in Heiligenstadt, thirteen miles outside Vienna, on the advice of one of his doctors who thought that his hearing might improve in the peace and quiet away from Vienna. But his pupil, Ferdinand Ries visited him in the summer, and during a walk in the woods pointed out a shepherd playing a flute made out of an elder twig. Beethoven could not hear it, and this made him very morose. As the winter approached he realized that his hearing was no better, and that it was likely to get worse, and he might end up totally deaf.

However, it was some years before this happened, and Beethoven coped with the problem to a certain extent by giving up those aspects of his career which were most affected by his defective hearing. He also appeared less frequently at aristocratic soirees, and gave up plans to go on concert tours. It could be argued that Beethoven's deafness helped the development of his art: isolated from the world, and unable to perform, he could devote all his time to composing. He was already composing less at the piano, and the first of his bound sketchbooks, in which he made detailed drafts of the works in progress, date from 1798. In his panic, at the beginning, Beethoven may have believed himself to be deafer than he really was. In the early years of his deafness, he suffered from tinnitus (humming and buzzing in the ears), and loud noises caused him pain. In 1804 his friend Stephan von Breuning wrote to Franz Wegeler about the terrible effect his gradual loss of hearing was having on Beethoven: it had caused him to distrust his friends, and he was becoming very difficult to be with. But Beethoven did not start using an ear trumpet until 1814 and his earliest Conversation Books, in which his friends wrote when he could no longer hear what they were saying, only began in 1818.

During the summer of 1803 Beethoven composed one of his most famous orchestral works, the Symphony no. 3, op. 55, the Eroica, which he originally entitled Bonaparte. The inspiration for this title derived from Napoleon's expedition to Egypt in 1789, and the second movement, a funeral march, was inspired by the rumours of Nelson's death at the Battle of Aboukir Bay. To Beethoven, as to so many, Napoleon Bonaparte had seemed to embody the ideals of the French Revolution and "enlightened" leadership, and in many homes throughout Europe portraits of Napoleon replaced even pictures of Christ. But as Napoleon's armies marched into neighbouring countries doubts crept in. As early as 1802, when Hoffmeister, Beethoven's publisher in Leipzig, suggested that Beethoven compose a sonata in celebration of Napoleon, Beethoven angrily rejected the idea because he felt that Napoleon had betrayed the Revolution in signing the Concordat with the Pope in 1801, re-establishing the Catholic religion in France. He said that while he might have composed such a work once, now everything was slipping back into the old ways. However, it seems likely that Beethoven originally wanted to dedicate the symphony to Napoleon, but because his patron, Prince Lobkowitz, wanted the rights to it, he changed his mind, and gave it the title Bonaparte instead. There is a well-known story that when Beethoven heard the news that Napoleon had proclaimed himself Emperor in May 1804, he tore the title page in half, in despair and rage that Napoleon was just an ordinary person after all, who would trample on the rights of man and would become a tyrant. The publisher subsequently gave it the title Sinfonia Eroica, although the title page also says it was written "to celebrate the memory of a great man". There could be a very straightforward reason for the change of title. In 1803 Beethoven was thinking of visiting Paris or even moving there permanently, and he might have thought it wise to dedicate it to Napoleon. But he changed his mind about Paris, and meanwhile war between Austria and France was imminent, and the censors were clamping down on any signs of sympathy with the French. Beethoven might well have felt that to keep "Bonaparte" as a title or dedication would be frowned on in Vienna, and so removed the title, although on 26 August 1804 he was writing to Breitkopf and Hartel, the publishers, that "the title of the symphony is really Bonaparte". According to Baron de Trmont, a French official in Vienna during the French occupation of 1809, Beethoven continued to admire Napoleon as one who had risen from humble origins. The symphony had a mixed reception, and many people felt it was far too long. Although Beethoven refused to make any changes, when it was published in 1805 he added a note that because of its great length it should be played near the beginning of a convert before the audience got too tired.

(2 887 words )

 Text