Beethoven

By Emil Ludwig

Was he not ugly? Squat, sturdy, broad-shouldered, with a short neck, a massive head, a snub nose; swarthy, with hairy hands and broad finger-nails. So he looked, standing and walking, always stooping a little; at home they called him the Spaniel, and meant nothing flattering by it. But Friend Wegeler was quite different to look at, and at the Breuning mansion there were moments of tension, explosions, confessions—in short, the first of those breaches between Beethoven and his friends of which there were to be so many more. It was not caprice or temper which then and later brought upon him perpetual chagrins—it was nothing but sheer good faith, the candid longing to take every heart by storm; and yet his sociable spirit was always seeking a friend, both among men and women. Like Mozart, he had worldly ambitions, and these urged him to establish social relations—continually repulsed, he was to become more of a solitary than he ever wished to be. For now the friendship between Eleonore, her brother Stefan, Wegeler, and Beethoven rose to ecstatic fervours, and led to her rupture with the latter, her marriage with the former, until at last they who had been friends in youth were reconciled—a trio who were never again to lose touch with one another.
But no one recognised and helped him better than young Count Waldstein. He had drawn the attention of the fat Elector to the young genius in his orchestra and got the boy-organist his appointment; and now he sent the youth to Vienna. There he was to be heard by the master.
Mozart in Vienna—in 1787, at the zenith of his fame—stood surrounded by his idolators, and the dark shy boy from the Rhine country sat before him, gazing at him with burning excited eyes, for he was waiting to be given a theme. It was given—he began to make variations upon it, but soon it was abandoned, he left it far behind in his soaring curves of flight, then swooped upon it again, lost sight of it again. In the next room Mozart was listening; in a low voice he said to his friends: “Keep your eye on that one; he will be talked about someday!” Beethoven went back to the Rhine—he had passed the test.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Classica Libris
• Release date: May 24, 2020
• ISBN: 9788835834779

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BEETHOVEN

Copyright

First published in 1930

Copyright © 2020 Classica Libris

Original title

Beethoven

Dedication

I have never seen so intense so concentrated an artist.

—Goethe

Chronology

1770 December 16th, born in Bonn.

1778 First public appearance at Cologne.

1781 Three sonatas for pianoforte.[1]

1782 Makes acquaintance with Wegeler and Breuning.

1787 Death of his mother.

1787–1827 In Vienna.

1792 Studies with Haydn.

1792 Death of his father.

1795 Three Trios. Op. 1.

1796 Goes to Prague and Berlin.

1799–1800 Six string-quartets. Op. 19.

1800 Begins to grow deaf.

1801 First Symphony.

1802 Second Symphony. The Heiligen stadt Will.

1803 Kreutzer Sonata.

1804 Third Symphony (Eroica).

1805 Fidelio.

1806 Fourth Symphony.

1805–07 Fifth Symphony.

1807 Sixth Symphony (Pastoral).

1809 Yearly income assured to him.

1811 B-major Trio. Op. 97.

1812 Seventh and Eighth Symphonies.

1812 Cast taken of his face; letter to the Immortal Beloved.

1814–18 Illness and domestic misery.

1815 Death of his brother Karl. Guardianship of nephew.

1816–23 Ninth Symphony.

1818–22 Missa Solemnis.

1822 C-minor Sonata. Op. 111.

1824 E-major Quartets. Op. 127.

1825 A-minor Quartets. Op. 132. B-major Quartet. Op. 130.

1826 C-minor Quartet. Op. 131. F-major Quartet. Op. 135.

1826 Dropsy. Nephew’s attempted suicide.

1827 March 26th Beethoven dies in Vienna.

Chapter I

A SERIOUS BOY

Two hundred years ago there lived in Flanders a poor tailor, who went to Antwerp in search of better fortune; but twelve children were too many for him, and his cousin the vintner could not give him any assistance, so the tailor was glad that one of the boys, who possessed a beautiful voice, could be packed off to the Choir-School at Lyons, whence they originally came. The boy had a middle-class name, like all the other boys, for he was called Ludwig van Beethoven. When after the change of voice he developed a tenor, he looked about him—a short, sturdy man with fine eyes—to see if he could not discover a Prince who would pay him better than the small parish did. Had not his prosperous cousin migrated long ago to the Rhine? And now he was established as a tallow chandler in Bonn, and had stories to tell of the riches at the Electoral Court, where the Archbishop was a minor Roi Soleil and would light his thousand candles on feast-days? So the singer made his way to Germany. If that cousin had not done well with his candles in Bonn, the Fleming would have stayed where he was and founded a Flemish family.

But as it was, the young foreigner made the acquaintance of a girl from the Cologne region, one of the people as he was himself, and perhaps of even less standing, for neither her father nor her date of birth can be ascertained, and nothing is known of her except that in later years she spent every penny she could get in drink. Meanwhile he came out as a musician, performed on the little stage at Court, learnt more than one instrument, and in time rose to be Court-Organist. He was watchful for any signs of inherited musical talent in his children, and put his son Johann into the church-choir, just as his own father had put him; soon taught him the violin and thought him provided for—for he was not much better-off than his father the tailor had been, despite the grand title, which brought him in no more than 300 rix-dollars a year. He would gladly have transferred his post, or even a better one, to his Johann.

If only Johann could have been steadier, more regular in his ways! But the son seemed to take after his mother, drank a great deal, and with his gifts and weaknesses needed an energetic wife with some little fortune. So the father was angry when, in about his middle twenties, he brought home a Rhenish bride, whom the Court-Organist thought a come-down, for she was the daughter of a cook and the young widow of a gentleman’s valet. It was true that the cook-father was now called Court-Inspector of Kitchens, and the bride, before her brief married life, had been ladies’ maid to the Electoral Royalties, and on her travels had learnt a good deal about the manners and customs of the great world.

The insignificant marriage began with money troubles, and in a few years the delicate young wife’s health broke down. Before her thirtieth year she had given birth to seven children, of whom only three sons survived. The grandfather stood sponsor for the eldest, and so the child was called Ludwig. Of this Ludwig’s four grandparents, that was the only one who was not of German birth. The date is 1770; Mozart was fourteen, Goethe twenty-one, Napoleon just born. The boy grew like his grandfather in face and figure, later liked better to hear about him than about anyone else and felt that in him he was reflected. He loved his mother too; and as she sat beside him, never tired, always sewing, cleaning, cooking, shrivelled at forty, she looked like Rembrandt’s mother as an old woman. Once she had been pretty and slender; now she was bent with cares, and a friend tells us that she never saw her laugh.

What had she to laugh at! It was a little stuffy house in a Bonn side-street, and the room where she bore her first children was an attic; the pale December sun fell but corner-wise through the gable-window across the bed on which the boy first opened his eyes. But even this poor abode was left in a hurry; they moved every few years—there was nothing permanent to give childish hearts the sense of home.

Not even the lovely Rhine, which just here flows more spaciously by the gently-falling hills between vineyards and meadows. For the boy could enjoy nothing of all that—he could only gaze from his attic window at the Seven Hills; for every day brought fresh domestic troubles. The 125 rix-dollars of the father’s salary barely sufficed to keep them going, even though the thrifty mother managed the purse; she would say indignantly: I never pay drinking debts! But the father did not mean badly; he was a sociable soul who liked a chat with his neighbours; and when on Mother’s birthday he contrived to deck the room with flowers, and led her to the handsome sofa under Grandfather’s portrait, and they began to make splendid music, and went on to eat and drink a lot, it was the cherriest day in the year, and perhaps then the mother laughed with the rest.

Ludwig was his father’s hope. Was not the world ringing with the name of Mozart, the wonder-child? And the father began to set the three-year-old on a little stool at the piano, and soon taught him how to hold a miniature fiddle. No shirking—he was set to work in grim earnest, daily were his fingers exercised. He learnt his notes before his alphabet, and so Beethoven’s music-lessons were often interrupted by tears. When he was seven, his father produced him as a six-year-old, and the child played trios and concertos on the pianoforte.

A year later he was set to learn the art of pure composition; but the musician who boarded with his father and gave music-lessons in part-payment, had little time to begin with, and was pleasure-loving to go on with, so sometimes he dragged the boy out of bed at night for a lesson. At this time, his father sent him to the Franciscan Fathers; there he learnt to serve the organ from Father Wielibald. Soon he began to play it himself, longed for a larger instrument, and found a kindly teacher in another monastery; him the boy relieved of the six-o’clock Mass. At eleven he was appointed extra-organist at the Electoral Court.

There the child of the proletariat caught some of the glitter of that palace before whose haughty façade he had always hitherto crept humbly; riches, taste, and the joy of life rushed violently into a consciousness inured to pinching and scraping. When on the great feasts he stood in the organ-loft among the singers, he saw beneath him, amid gorgeous [Hofchargen], beside Gobelin tapestries, on a red velvet faldstool, the magnificently-attired Archbishop kneel—he was the Empress Maria Theresa’s own son, a foreign archduke from Vienna; and when he rose from his knees the precociously observant boy above his head looked down into a bloated face, and under the vestment he could see the paunch and knew, as all the little town knew, that the Archbishop had had a round piece cut out of his dinner-table to accommodate it. So, at the vision of power, both dazzlement and scepticism must have found their way into his heart.

When in the new Court Theatre the boy played the bass-viol in the orchestra to Don Juan and Figaro, or during the summer sojourn at Brühl performed in Haydn’s new symphonies—a little court-musician in a green coat with pigtail and peruke—he felt the soft carpet of the gleaming music-room under his feet, stared up into the bronze gallery that so gracefully spanned the