Chapter 6
Money was a source of constant anxiety for Beethoven, and understandably so, for when it came to making a living as an independent composer, his ideals collided with reality in ways that were at times brutal. Throughout his career he sought a fixed court position that would assure him a steady and reliable source of income. He failed at every turn.
Bad timing played a major role. Beethoven came of age in an era when court appointments of the kind he desired were rapidly becoming extinct. Two decades of war and inflation had drained the coffers of those aristocratic families that had grown accustomed to employing their own private orchestras and the directors to lead them. Haydn, almost forty years older than Beethoven, had made his career in a very different musical world. He had spent nearly three decades as Kapellmeister—“master” of the Kapelle, the ensemble of instrumentalists and singers—for a single noble family, the Esterházys. In their winter palace in Vienna and summer palace in what is now Hungary, Haydn had at his disposal what was by all accounts one of the leading orchestras of Europe, supported by a prince both willing and able to spend lavishly on his court’s musical life. The summer palace even had its own opera house and marionette theater.
Haydn was responsible for all aspects of music at the court: hiring and firing, rehearsing, performing, composing. “My prince,” as he told one of his biographers late in life, “was satisfied with all my works, I received applause, and as the director of an orchestra I could make experiments and observe what elicited or weakened an impression and thereby improve, add, delete, take chances. I was cut off from the world; no one in my vicinity could cause me to doubt myself and torment me, and so I had to become original.” There were drawbacks to this arrangement, to be sure: it was not until the 1770s that Haydn received permission to sell his own compositions, and even as late as 1790 he was still chafing at the prince’s restrictions on his freedom to travel. But he enjoyed a steady income and could concentrate on his work. These were precisely the goals that would elude Beethoven.
They had eluded Mozart for the most part as well. After moving to Vienna in 1781 he repeatedly sought a permanent appointment of some kind but could do no better than a minor and essentially part-time position at the imperial court. The responsibilities were few, the pay was modest, and the inevitable palace intrigues did not help. In the end, Mozart had to string together an income from his published music, performances of his operas, concertizing, and giving private lessons.
For all his connections at court and among the aristocracy, Beethoven was even less successful. He assured the publisher Franz Anton Hoffmeister in 1803 that he would gladly convey to him all his new works to publish if that alone would assure him of sufficient income. “Yet consider that everyone around me holds appointments and knows exactly what they have to live on. But Good Lord! Where would one appoint such a parvum talentum quam ego—at the Imperial Court?” There is a distinct tone of bitterness beneath Beethoven’s self-deprecatory jest about his “small talent.” Quite aside from a lack of long-term financial security, he resented the incalculable hours devoted to what he called the “sour business” of haggling over fees with publishers. In another letter to Hoffmeister he sketched out a possible way to avoid this: a “storehouse of art” (Magazin der Kunst) to which “the artist would only have to hand over his works in order to take in return what he needed.” Commentators have since noted the congruence of this scheme with Karl Marx’s later dictum “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” Beethoven knew full well that this was another one of his utopian ideals and altogether unworkable, especially in Vienna in the early 1800s.
In the meantime, he mused in his diary about traveling and eventually securing a position at “a small court” with a “small musical ensemble,” and performing there “the hymn to the glory of the Almighty, of the eternally infinite.” On another occasion he entertained the idea of serving at the court of Napoleon in Paris. Even as late as 1822, when he learned about the death of Anton Teyber, the Habsburg court composer, he was making inquiries behind the scenes about securing an appointment as Teyber’s successor.
The only meaningful offer Beethoven ever received came in October 1808, not from Napoleon but from Napoleon’s youngest brother, Jérôme, ruler of the newly formed Kingdom of Westphalia. For all his claimed indifference to titles and nobility, Beethoven became quite agitated when the press reported the nature and circumstances of the offer incorrectly. He wrote to the editors of Leipzig’s Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung asking them to set the record straight:
I thank you for the article…but I request that you at some point correct the matter as concerns [the composer Johann Friedrich] Reichardt. I was not in any way engaged by him. To the contrary, it was the Chief Chamberlain of His Majesty the King of Westphalia, Count Truchsess-Waldburg, who arranged to have the offer made to me, and specifically as Chief Kapellmeister of H[is] M[ajesty] of Westphalia.…At the next opportunity…you should present the truth about the matter, for it is vital for my honor.…I laugh at such matters, but there are those misérables who know how to cook up and serve such things.
Beethoven clearly placed great weight on exactly who made the offer to him and the exact title of the position: he writes “erster Kapellmeister”—“first” or “chief” music director—in large letters and underlines each word three times. His claim that he “laughs” at such things rings hollow, given his table-pounding insistence that the record be corrected.
In the end, Beethoven declined Jérôme’s offer and leveraged it for the annuity of 1809 that kept him in Vienna. For the moment, at least, he seemed to have achieved his goal of a steady income, and better still, without the responsibilities that came with any court position. The reality of the arrangement played out quite differently. Only Archduke Rudolph paid his share from the start; contributions from Princes Kinsky and Lobkowitz got tied up in legal battles that dragged on for six years before being settled; and inflation ate away at the original value of the fund. Over the long term, the annuity did provide a steady source of income but one smaller than Beethoven had at first anticipated and in any case insufficient by itself to support him adequately, even according to his own relatively modest standard of living. In the end, he was able to afford a servant and cook, and though he had to borrow funds from time to time, he was always able to repay his debts. He even lent money on occasion, most notably to his brother Kaspar Karl.
Like Mozart before him, Beethoven had to make his living by drawing on a variety of sources. Beyond the support of patrons—the grant from Prince Lichnowsky early on, the annuity of 1809 later—his primary sources of income were performing, teaching, commissions, and sales of his published works. Performing—both in public and in private—could be lucrative if unpredictable and sporadic. Particularly in his early years in Vienna, Beethoven played the piano frequently in the palaces of his aristocratic patrons and received some form of payment in return. He also organized a number of occasional concerts (“academies,” as they were called) for a ticket-buying public that would have included many of those same aristocratic patrons. Beethoven typically served as impresario, composer, conductor, and piano soloist at these events and kept the profits for himself after covering the expenses. For his first such production, in 1800—“the most interesting academy in quite a while,” one contemporary reviewer remarked—he rented out one of the city’s major theaters, hired an orchestra, and presented a program that paid homage to his two great predecessors in the form of a symphony by Mozart and two arias from Haydn’s Creation but otherwise consisted entirely of his own works: the Piano Concerto no. 1, op. 15; the Septet, op. 20; an improvisation at the keyboard; and as a grand finale, the premiere of the First Symphony.
More ambitious still was the academy of December 22, 1808, in the Theater an der Wien. Its all-Beethoven program consisted of the Fourth Piano Concerto (with the composer as soloist), the concert aria “Ah, perfido!” op. 65, the Gloria and Sanctus from the Mass in C, op. 86, a solo improvisation on the piano, and the premieres of the Fifth and Sixth Symphonies. As if all this were not enough, the evening concluded with the premiere of the Choral Fantasy, op. 80. But there things went off the rails. Beethoven had to stop the performance in order to get all the musicians on the same page. He later apologized for humiliating them, who, like the audience, had had to endure not only Beethoven’s temper but also four hours of bitter evening cold. The composer Johann Friedrich Reichardt stayed to the end and concluded that one could have “too much of a good—and beyond that, powerful—thing.”
5. Vienna’s Theater an der Wien was the site of Beethoven’s “academy” of December 22, 1808, which included the public premieres of the Fifth and Sixth Symphonies, the Fourth Piano Concerto, and the Choral Fantasy. In 1803–04 Beethoven lived in a flat that was part of the theater complex.
Beethoven did not like teaching: he considered it a drain on his time and energy. Even in his early years in Vienna he took on only a few piano students and in 1801 a single composition student, Ferdinand Ries, the son of a family friend from Bonn. Ries also doubled as the composer’s personal assistant for the next several years. Beethoven’s only other composition student, from about 1809 onward, was the Archduke Rudolph, a more-than-competent composer and by all accounts an excellent pianist. Theirs was an unusual relationship, for he was a patron as well as a student. Small wonder that Beethoven should dedicate some of his most important works to him, including the Piano Concertos opp. 58 and 73 (“Emperor”), the Piano Sonata op. 81a (“Les Adieux”), the Violin Sonata op. 96, the Piano Trio op. 97 (“Archduke”), the Piano Sonatas opp. 106 (“Hammerklavier”) and 111, the Missa solemnis, op. 123, and the Grosse Fuge, op. 133. The relationship was complicated still further by Rudolph’s familial connections to the very center of power at the Habsburg court, for he was the youngest brother of the emperor Franz I. Two themes emerge from the correspondence: gratitude and resentment. On the one hand, Beethoven was grateful for the archduke’s steadfast support for the 1809 annuity and for the payments he received for lessons. More important still was the prospect of a permanent court position. Yet he begrudged the time devoted to lessons and especially resented the idea of being available at a moment’s notice to accommodate the archduke’s schedule.
Finally, Beethoven’s own compositions: these produced income in multiple ways. The dedicatee of any new work would typically reward the composer with some sort of payment. Prince Lobkowitz, for example, gave the composer 400 gulden in return for the dedication of the “Eroica” Symphony, along with exclusive rights of performance by the prince’s own private orchestra for half a year. That sum alone represented two-thirds of the annual support he was receiving at the time from Prince Lichnowsky. There was also the occasional commission, such as Count Razumofsky’s request for three string quartets (op. 59), Prince Nicolaus II Esterházy’s call for a setting of the Mass (op. 86), or Prince Galitzin’s invitation for “one, two, or three new string quartets,” which eventually became opp. 127, 130, and 132. Beethoven could also solicit subscriptions—advance purchases—for new works, as he did in the case of the op. 1 Piano Trios and the Missa solemnis.
Beethoven assured publishers on more than one occasion that he did not write for money alone, but in the next breath would almost invariably try to negotiate a higher payment. And he would occasionally sell the same work to more than one publisher. While this might strike us today as unethical, we should remember that there was no effective system of international copyright at the time, and that publishers themselves often issued pirated editions of their own. Great Britain, in particular, functioned as a largely separate market from that on the continent, and Beethoven did a lively business with British publishers.
He also had to think about which genres would work “more or less” to his advantage, as he confessed to the publisher C. F. Peters. In a half-joking, half-serious letter of 1818 to his friend the cellist Vincenz Hauschka, he reported from rural Mödling, outside Vienna, that he was…rambling about in the mountains, ravines, and valleys here with a piece of music paper, smearing various things on it for the sake of bread and money, for I have reached such heights in this all-powerful former Land of the Phaeacians that in order to gain some time to write a great work I must first do a vast amount of scribbling for the sake of money so that I can survive while writing a great work.
The category of “great” or “large” works (grosse Werke) played a key role in Beethoven’s vision of his calling. While the dividing line between these and presumably “lesser” genres is not always clear, he seems to have thought of symphonies, masses, and operas as qualitatively different from sonatas, string quartets, or songs. He repeatedly expressed the wish to devote himself to large-scale works even while recognizing the far greater public demand for compositions in smaller genres. “My situation demands that I take every advantage into consideration,” he wrote to C. F. Peters, one of his publishers, in 1823. Once he had resolved to work in a particular genre, however, he focused on the task at hand. “Thank God I never think about the advantage” in writing smaller-scale works, he assured Peters, “but only about how I write.”
This was true enough. His contemporary detractors complained repeatedly about the difficulty of his music, no matter what the genre, and even his supporters conceded that his works were challenging for performers and listeners alike. From a purely technical point of view, his music was hard to play. And it ran counter to conventions so often that listeners had trouble absorbing it. Beethoven knew this. As he wrote to the pianist and composer Andreas Streicher in 1796, “I am satisfied even if only a few understand me.” This is a long way from his teacher Haydn’s alleged (and widely circulated) statement that his own musical language was “understood throughout the world.” It also contradicts the spirit of Mozart’s oft-quoted assertion that he had written a set of three piano concertos in such a way as to appeal to connoisseurs and amateurs alike. In this respect Beethoven’s attitude was radical. He could not and did not ignore the music-consuming public’s tastes and abilities altogether, but he did challenge them repeatedly.
This came at the cost of bad notices. Reviewing a set of early variations issued in 1799, one critic sniffed that “Herr Beethoven may be able to fantasize, but how to vary is something he doesn’t understand well.” The variations, in other words, were so imaginative that they departed unrecognizably (and thus unacceptably) from the original theme. The set as a whole, moreover, was marred by “ugly” dissonances and a generally “labored” nature. Another critic that same year took the composer to task for “going his own peculiar way” in the three Violin Sonatas of op. 12. “And what a bizarre, cumbersome way!…A hunt for unusual modulations, a loathing for conventional transitions, a piling up of difficulty upon difficulty to such an extent that one loses all patience and joy in the process.” And these, it should be noted, were responses to works that today are scarcely considered to be among the composer’s more innovative.
Reviews of this kind from Beethoven’s day are too common to be ignored or dismissed simply as the product of small minds. Then, as now, there was the occasional dullard critic, but listeners of the time simply did not consider it their responsibility to make sense of what a composer had written. The composer’s obligation, as they saw it, was to satisfy listeners, not puzzle them. In retrospect, then, we can see that Beethoven’s career coincided with a period of transition in the history of listening, for the idea of listeners making an effort to grasp the thought of a composer would not become common until later in the nineteenth century.
Negative reviews also inevitably cut into sales. “Advise your reviewers to show more discretion and intelligence,” Beethoven wrote to the editors of Leipzig’s leading music journal in 1801. And critics did in fact adjust gradually. They initially regarded the “Eroica” Symphony, for example, as diffuse and overly long, but it became an audience favorite within a few years. By the end of the composer’s life, only the works of the “late” period continued to puzzle audiences, though by that point at least some critics were willing to give the composer the benefit of the doubt. One reviewer who could make no sense of the Grosse Fuge, op. 133, called it “incomprehensible, like Chinese,” but hastened to add that “we nevertheless do not want to dismiss things too hastily. Perhaps the time will come when that which on first sight seemed to us opaque and muddled will be recognized as clear and pleasing forms.” The allusion to the words of Saint Paul in 1 Corinthians 13:12 (“For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face”) suggests that Beethoven’s music had by now achieved the kind of respect normally accorded Holy Writ.