Chapter 2
We know more about Beethoven than any composer who lived before him, and for that matter a great many who have come since. The sheer quantity of the historical record can seem overwhelming at times. The correspondence—more than 2,000 letters to and from him—extends across six hefty printed volumes. The document now known as the Heiligenstadt Testament, written in 1802 but secreted away and not discovered until after his death, is a deeply personal and emotionally direct confrontation with the growing reality that he was losing his sense of hearing. In his later years, when his deafness had become severe, visitors often communicated by a combination of shouting and writing, and the 139 conversation books that have survived give us detailed insights into his daily concerns, with entries that range from the mundane to the metaphysical. The diary he kept sporadically between 1812 and 1818 records both philosophical and practical observations. Reminiscences of those who knew him personally fill two substantial volumes. And we have some 8,000 pages of musical sketches that range from brief melodic fragments to extensively drafted complete movements. These sketches allow us to trace the step-by-step growth of many of Beethoven’s landmark compositions, along with countless others he abandoned.
We also have to sort through reams of spurious evidence. The first biography, published in Prague shortly after his death and written by one Johann Aloys Schlosser, an otherwise almost completely unknown figure, is full of inaccuracies. In the 1830s, the author Bettina Brentano von Arnim, who knew the composer, published a series of colorful but largely fabricated letters from him and about him. The words she put into Beethoven’s mouth are often still repeated as if they were genuine. Anton Schindler, his personal assistant at various times toward the end of his life, published an “I-Knew-Beethoven” biography in 1840 that contains many dubious claims, claims that grew more detailed in a later edition. Scholars have since discovered that Schindler forged entries in the conversation books to make his relationship with the composer seem both longer and closer than it actually was. The fiction surrounding Beethoven’s life has consistently reinforced the image of The Scowl, and it has taken on a life of its own. We cannot simply ignore it, for it has shaped the way generations of listeners have heard his music.
The outlines of his life are nevertheless clear enough. Bonn, where he was born on December 16 or 17, 1770, was not a large city, but there was nothing small about it. With a population of just under 10,000, it was the residence of the Archbishop-Elector of Cologne. This was a position that was at once both clerical and political. From 1784 until 1794—Beethoven’s formative years—Bonn’s ruler was Maximilian Franz, the youngest brother of the Habsburg Emperor, Joseph II. Both brothers were sympathetic to many of the Enlightenment’s ideals and encouraged what at the time was a relatively free flow of ideas. Maximilian Franz opened a portion of the palace’s library to the public and played a key role in elevating the city’s center of learning to the status of a university.
Bonn was also a musically active city, even before the arrival of the music-loving Maximilian Franz from Vienna. Beethoven’s grandfather, also named Ludwig, was the court’s music director and a prosperous businessman on the side. He had grown up in Mechelen (Malines), in what is now northern Belgium, hence the “van” in the family name. But his only son, Johann, the composer’s father, squandered his inheritance, suffered from alcoholism, and neglected his duties as a singer at the court. In 1767 Johann van Beethoven married Maria Magdalena Keverich, a widow, and the couple had seven children, three of whom survived infancy. Their two younger sons, Kaspar Karl and Nikolaus Johann, would eventually follow their older brother to Vienna but were not themselves musicians.
How much older? To the very end of his life, Beethoven seems to have been confused not simply about the day on which he was born—baptized on December 17, he may have been born a day or even two before—but the year as well. Some writers have blamed the confusion on his father, who may have tried to promote him as a child prodigy by shaving a year off the boy’s advertised age. Later in his life, Beethoven came to believe that he had actually been born in 1772, even in the face of documented and notarized evidence presented to him on more than one occasion.
In any event, Johann van Beethoven recognized his oldest son’s musical abilities early on and saw to it that he received instruction from a series of able teachers. The most notable of these was Christian Gottlob Neefe, who in a report on the musical scene in Bonn in 1783 described his young pupil as a “promising talent” who had already published a set of keyboard variations. “This young genius,” Neefe announced, “deserves support that would enable him to travel. He would certainly become a second Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart if he were to make progress in the same way he has already begun.”
Beethoven was duly appointed deputy court organist in Bonn in June 1784, his first salaried position. He also played viola in the court orchestra and opera house and in the process acquired firsthand knowledge of the contemporary repertory, most notably symphonies by Haydn and Mozart and operas by Haydn, Mozart, Gluck, and Grétry. He was surrounded by an array of talented young musicians as well, figures who would go on to enjoy eminent careers of their own. These included the composer and theorist Anton Reicha as well as the violinist Andreas Romberg and his cousin, the cellist Bernhard Romberg, both of whom were also composers. Nikolaus Simrock, a somewhat older horn player, would later establish what would become one of the continent’s leading music publishing houses.
Though his formal schooling ended sometime around the age of ten, Beethoven remained determined to educate himself throughout his life. He attended lectures at the university, read widely in fields beyond music, and years later would claim that “without making the slightest claim to actual book-learning, there is no treatise that could be too learned for me, for from my youth onward I have taken pains to grasp the import of the better and wiser individuals of each age. Shame on any artist who does not consider it an obligation to do at least this much.”
But aspirations and accomplishments are two different things, and Beethoven remained painfully aware of his shortcomings in speaking and writing throughout his life. He seems to have learned the use of uppercase letters only in adulthood, and he consistently struggled with numbers. The concept of multiplication eluded him altogether. In one of the conversation books, for example, we can see him adding the number 16 seven times instead of simply multiplying 16 × 7.
The musical talent, on the other hand, was obvious to all early on. The Elector financed Beethoven’s continued musical education in Vienna with the understanding that he would eventually return to service in Bonn. Maximilian Franz was himself a Mozart enthusiast and no doubt saw in the youth the possibility of a second such genius. Indeed, Mozart himself commented in 1782 that the Elector-to-be—still in Vienna at the time—“thrusts me forward on every occasion. And I can say almost with certainty, that if he were already Elector in Cologne, I would also already be his music director.” We can only wonder how the history of music would have unfolded if a few years later Mozart had indeed left Vienna for the Rhineland, where he would have met a fourteen-year-old Beethoven.
When Maximilian Franz did finally arrive in Bonn in 1784, he found a well-entrenched music director already in place. With an eye to his new court’s musical future, and at the urging of Count Ferdinand Waldstein, one of his advisors, the Elector funded Beethoven’s journey to Vienna. In a notebook Beethoven kept at the time, Waldstein wrote this remarkably prescient inscription in late October 1792:
Dear Beethoven: You are going to Vienna to fulfill your long-frustrated wishes. The spirit of Mozart’s genius still mourns and weeps over the death of her pupil. It found refuge but no engagement with the inexhaustible Haydn; through him it wishes once again to be united with someone. With steady diligence, you shall receive Mozart’s spirit from Haydn’s hands. Your true friend, Waldstein
The “long-frustrated wishes” were a sad fact: Beethoven had already traveled to Vienna once before, in early 1787, with the intention to study with Mozart. While it seems likely they met, there is no documentation to confirm this. That first visit to Vienna had in any case been cut short when Beethoven returned to Bonn to be by the side of his gravely ill mother, who died a few months later. Mozart himself died in December 1791, and so Beethoven turned instead to Haydn, who had himself only recently returned to Vienna from an extended and enormously successful sojourn in London.
Why Vienna? It was widely known as one of the most musically vibrant cities in all of Europe, and Maximilian Franz’s sponsorship of the young composer assured him of ready access to the city’s aristocratic families, who vied with one another to bestow their own patronage on promising young artists. With the exception of opera and sacred music, Vienna’s musical life in the 1790s took place largely behind closed doors. There were relatively few truly public concerts, and some of the more affluent aristocrats even maintained their own private orchestras. It was in these salons that Beethoven made his reputation as a composer, virtuoso performer, and above all as an improviser on the piano. In a celebrated “duel” that took place in 1799, he and the pianist Joseph Wölffl took turns improving on themes each provided the other. Years later, the composer Ignaz von Seyfried would recall that “in his improvisations even then Beethoven did not deny his tendency toward the mysterious and gloomy,” whereas Wölffl, “trained in the school of Mozart, was always equable; never superficial but always clear and thus more accessible to the multitude.”
The dedicatees of Beethoven’s early works reflect his ability to attract and cultivate powerful patrons. A composer could not presume to dedicate a publication without the permission of the dedicatee; the dedicatee, in turn, was expected to reward the composer with payment of some kind. A list of the patrons to whom Beethoven dedicated his published works during his first decade in Vienna reads like a Who’s Who of the city’s aristocracy: princes and princesses, counts and countesses, barons and baronesses, and even the empress herself, Marie Therese.
Prince Karl Lichnowsky was especially generous. A serious music-lover, he established a fund of 600 gulden annually on which Beethoven could draw until such time as he could secure a permanent salaried position. This was no small sum. One contemporary on the scene estimated in 1793 that an unmarried man could live modestly in Vienna on 775 gulden a year, and Beethoven had several other sources of income at the time as well as through teaching, performing, and publishing. Beethoven also received lodging and food in the prince’s household, even dining at the prince’s table on a regular basis for a time. As a token of thanks, he dedicated a number of major works to Lichnowsky, most significantly the very first of his publications he deemed worthy of an opus (“work”) number, the Piano Trios, op. 1, and beyond that the Piano Sonata in C Minor, op. 13 (“Pathétique”), the Piano Sonata in A-flat Major, op. 26, and the Second Symphony, op. 36.
This seemingly ideal arrangement with Lichnowsky created problems of its own, however. “Am I supposed to come home daily at 3:30, change into better clothes, shave, etc.? I can’t stand it!” he declared to one of his friends. And indeed, the more firmly he established himself in Viennese society, the more frequently he refused entreaties to perform or improvise in the presence of others. This was the immediate cause of a major break with the prince in 1806, though the two eventually reconciled. Beethoven struggled all his life between the financial support he needed and the independence he craved.
He was not a physically imposing figure. Friends and acquaintances recall him as stocky, muscular, and of roughly average height for his time, about 5´5˝. His sense of rhythm seems to have been entirely internal. Ferdinand Ries, a former student, would later recall that the composer was “very clumsy and awkward in his movements; his gestures were totally lacking in grace.…It is difficult to understand how he succeeded in shaving himself.…He could never learn to dance in time.” But he was not indifferent to fashion. Like most of his generation, he disdained wigs and wore his hair fairly short, an outward symbol of republican sentiments. A year into his time in Vienna, he wrote to Eleonore von Breuning back in Bonn requesting her to knit another waistcoat for him on the grounds that the one she had given him earlier was now “so unfashionable that I can only keep it in my closet as something most dear to me from you.”
Quite aside from his problems with hearing, he complained frequently about his health. Gastrointestinal ailments plagued him constantly. The years took their toll, and when the Englishman John Russell visited him in 1822, he described Beethoven’s “unpromising exterior” in some detail:
Though not an old man, he is lost to society in consequence of his extreme deafness, which has rendered him almost unsocial. The neglect of his person which he exhibits gives him a somewhat wild appearance. His features are strong and prominent; his eye is full of rude energy; his hair, which neither comb nor scissors seem to have visited for years, overshadows his broad brow in a quantity and confusion to which only the snakes round a Gorgon’s head offer a parallel. His general behavior does not ill accord with the unpromising exterior. Except when he is among his chosen friends, kindliness or affability are not his characteristics. The total loss of hearing has deprived him of all the pleasure which society can give, and perhaps soured his temper.
Nor was he known for his tidiness. One visitor to his two-room flat in 1809 described it as “the dirtiest, most disorderly place imaginable,” with moisture on the ceiling and an unemptied chamber pot underneath a piano. The chairs were covered with clothes and with dishes that bore “the remains of last night’s supper.”
He acknowledged his deafness for the first time in a letter to Wegeler in 1801, but only because Wegeler was in Bonn and not in Vienna. Beethoven wanted his condition kept secret. But by the fall of 1802 he had come to realize that this was no longer possible. While seeking a cure at the spa village of Heiligenstadt, he wrote a long letter to his two brothers that gave voice to his despair. Intended to be read only after his death, the Heiligenstadt Testament is the central verbal document of Beethoven’s life. He confessed that the pain of his deafness—both physical and social—was so great that he had contemplated suicide. “It was only art that held me back,” he declared.
Committing his darkest thoughts to writing at this time seems to have had a cathartic effect. Soon afterward he composed the monumental “Eroica” (“Heroic”) Symphony, and over the next ten years he would go on to compose an astonishing number of masterpieces, including the Fourth through Eighth Symphonies, the Fourth and Fifth Piano Concertos, the Violin Concerto, the String Quartets opp. 59, 74, and 95, and his only completed opera, Fidelio.
He created all these works, as well as many of his earlier ones, against a backdrop of war. When the French occupied the Rhineland in 1794, Maximilian Franz had fled to his family home in Vienna. But even there he was not safe from the reach of Napoleon, who would go on to occupy the city twice, first in 1805 without resistance, and then again in 1809 after a bombardment that sent Beethoven to a cellar, clutching pillows to his ears to lessen the pain of the cannon thunder. It was around this time that Beethoven received an invitation from Napoleon’s youngest brother, Jérôme, ruler of the newly formed Kingdom of Westphalia, to become music director at the court in Kassel. Beethoven leveraged this offer to secure a generous annuity funded by three Austrian patrons, Prince Lobkowitz, Prince Kinsky, and Archduke Rudolph, with the understanding that he would remain in Vienna.
Beethoven experienced another pronounced deterioration of his hearing beginning around 1812, the year in which he became involved with a woman whose identity remains unknown but whom he called his “Immortal Beloved.” The affair was brief but intense. We know of it only from a single letter he wrote to her and which she at some point presumably returned to him. Along with the Heiligenstadt Testament, this letter was discovered only after his death.
The end of this affair—which presumably coincided with the return of the letter—appears to have shaken the composer deeply. He began to keep a diary of sorts shortly afterward, resorting to words once again to help him work through his thoughts at a time of personal crisis. This is not a diary in any conventional sense but rather an unsystematic and occasional collection of jottings and observations, some of them personal, others mundane. It seems to have functioned as the verbal counterpart to the musical sketchbooks, a repository of ideas worthy of further consideration.
The years 1813–15 saw a marked decline in both the quantity and quality of the music he composed. This may have been caused by accelerating deafness, his failed love affair, or some combination of the two. Paradoxically, he was enjoying unprecedented popular success at this moment. In the fall of 1814, leaders and diplomats from all over Europe assembled for the Congress of Vienna, and Beethoven’s pocketbook and reputation benefited directly from the many concerts put on to entertain the city’s well-heeled visitors. They were there to redraw the continent’s boundaries in the wake of Napoleon’s defeat, and works such as Wellington’s Victory and Der glorreiche Augenblick (“The Glorious Moment”), written in a more “popular” style than most of his other compositions, won wide critical praise at the time, even if subsequent critics have for the most part preferred to keep their distance from them.
A new phase of Beethoven’s life began shortly after the death of his brother Kaspar Karl in November 1815, when he assumed joint legal guardianship of his brother’s nine-year-old son, Karl, with the boy’s mother, Johanna. There were problems with this arrangement from the start. Beethoven considered his nephew’s mother both morally and intellectually deficient, and the two guardians engaged in a nasty five-year court battle over physical custody of the boy. Beethoven eventually prevailed. He carried out his paternal duties conscientiously and devoted countless hours to Karl’s upbringing. But the youth’s attempted suicide in August 1826 ultimately persuaded the composer to cede guardianship to Stephan von Breuning, who helped secure Karl an appointment in the army.
In spite of these increased demands on his time and energy over the last decade of his life, Beethoven somehow managed to resume his earlier level of intense artistic creativity. “Apollo and Muses will not yet deliver me to the Grim Reaper,” he wrote to one of his publishers in 1824, “for I still owe them a great deal, and before I depart for the Elysian Fields, I must leave behind what the spirit provides me and commands me to finish. It really seems to me as if I had written hardly any music at all.” At this point Beethoven was in fact in the middle of a five-year span in which he would complete such monumental works as the Missa solemnis, the Diabelli Variations, the Ninth Symphony, and the five late string quartets.
But the Grim Reaper did finally call in March 1827. The autopsy report suggests any number of possible causes of death, most of them involving his liver, kidneys, spleen, and pancreas. Franz Grillparzer, one of Austria’s leading literary figures, wrote the funeral oration, a noted actor of the time declaimed it, and tens of thousands turned out to witness the procession. “Who shall arise to stand beside him?” Grillparzer asked. The question remains just as relevant today.