Chapter 7
Beethoven was born into—and died in—a world of strict social hierarchies. The most fundamental division was that between nobility and commoners. Each of these realms in turn had its own defined strata, from emperors to common nobility, from affluent merchants to common laborers. Musicians occupied a roughly middle position in the ranks of the non-nobility. Society regarded them as highly skilled craftsmen. Those who, like Beethoven’s grandfather, rose to the position of Kapellmeister—musical director—could generally count themselves among the highest-paid members of a court’s staff.
Beethoven was also born into a world in social and political flux. He was eighteen years old when the French Revolution broke out, and he witnessed changes that transformed not only the map of Europe but its mind as well. Small wonder, then, that his own political views so often seem contradictory. His attitude toward Napoleon, the most important political figure of the day, lurched from one extreme to the other. He was inspired by the French leader’s ideals and planned to dedicate the Third Symphony to him, at one point even calling the work “Bonaparte.” But at some point—possibly when he learned in 1804 that the First Consul had crowned himself emperor—he canceled the name so violently on one copyist’s manuscript that his quill ripped a hole in the paper and he renamed the work Sinfonia eroica (“Heroic Symphony”).
But now the contradictions begin. He later added in pencil at the bottom of the same manuscript’s title-page “Geschrieben auf Bonaparte” (“Written on Bonaparte”). He suffered tremendous pain in his ears when Napoleon’s troops bombarded Vienna in May 1809 and in a marginal note to the score of the Fifth Piano Concerto, which he began sketching around the same time, observed that “Austria owes Napoleon payback.” A few weeks later he asked a visiting French officer if he thought Napoleon would receive him in Vienna and soon afterward gave serious consideration to becoming Kapellmeister to Napoleon’s brother at the court of the Kingdom of Westphalia. The following year he contemplated dedicating his Mass in C, op. 86, to Napoleon. Then in 1813 he wrote the hugely popular Wellington’s Victory, an orchestral work that portrayed in graphic musical detail one of Napoleon’s key defeats. A year later he contributed to the celebrations surrounding the Congress of Vienna, which established a blueprint for post-Napoleonic Europe.
What are we to make of so many contradictions? Once again, Beethoven’s ideals had collided with reality. Almost everything he said or did about politics has to be evaluated through the prism of his overarching drive to fulfill his calling to compose. He embraced the core ideals of the French Revolution—liberty, equality, and fraternity—and was appalled when Napoleon’s actions violated them. Higher still, though, was his own vision to produce everything he “felt called upon to bring forth,” as he had put it in the Heiligenstadt Testament of 1802. This objective took precedence over all else, and by 1809 he had come to realize that an appointment as Kapellmeister, no matter how imperfect the court, offered the best path to his goal. The ruler at his own court in Vienna, after all, was scarcely a paragon of liberty, equality, or fraternity.
Tempting as it might be, then, we should not read too much of Beethoven’s personal views into the seemingly “reactionary” pieces he wrote for the Congress of Vienna: the cantata Der glorreiche Augenblick (“The Glorious Moment”) and the chorus Ihr weisen Gründer glücklicher Staaten (“Ye Wise Founders of Fortunate Nations”), both to texts lauding the assembled rulers, and Germania, for bass solo, chorus, and orchestra, a rousing paean to an imagined German state. True to form, Beethoven viewed the whole affair from multiple perspectives. He recognized the opportunities the Congress would present in the form of commissions, which he duly fulfilled, and of potential gifts, which he duly received. The empress of Russia, impressed by works like the Seventh Symphony and Wellington’s Victory, sent him a gift of 200 gold ducats—roughly twice the annual income of an experienced musician at the court opera—and he reciprocated by dedicating to her his Polonaise for piano, op. 89.
He also knew that these illustrious visitors would need to be entertained. The prestigious Kärntnertor Theater presented Fidelio some thirty times between May 1814 and July 1815, and Beethoven gave no fewer than three academies over the course of the Congress. The last of these was a benefit concert for the almshouse of Saint Marx, conducted by the composer himself. In recognition of this act of generosity, the City of Vienna granted him honorary citizenship.
Beethoven was also able to take a more jaundiced view of things. As he wrote in the fall of 1814 to the lawyer Johann Nepomuk Kaňka in Prague, himself an amateur composer and pianist: “As you yourself know, the creative spirit must not be shackled by the miserable needs of life.…I shall report nothing to you of our monarchs, etc., our monarchies, etc. The newspapers will tell you everything. The empire of the mind (das geistige Reich) is the one dearest to me and the one superior to all spiritual and secular monarchies.”
The “empire” of Geist: the German noun is notoriously untranslatable. “Mind” is probably the best we can do in English, but it goes far beyond intellect to encompass the spirit or soul, as well as a certain sense of verve and wit, what the French call ésprit. And as far as Geist was concerned, Beethoven considered himself superior to any and all members of the nobility, for his was a nobility of the spirit. “As for ‘being noble,’ ” he wrote to Schindler in 1823, “I believe I have sufficiently shown you that I am so in principle.” Like so many noblemen, he also had no difficulty looking down on commoners. In August 1794 he reported to his friend Nikolaus Simrock in Bonn that “important persons here have been locked up; there was supposed to have been a revolution. But I believe that the Austrian will not revolt as long as he has his brown ale and sausages.” And in the much later legal battle over guardianship of his nephew, he wanted nothing to do with the city’s court for commoners, which he dismissed as suitable only for “innkeepers, cobblers, and tailors.” He certainly never corrected those who mistook the “van” in his name—a common surname prefix in the Low Countries—for “von,” an indicator of nobility in German-speaking lands.
In practice, Beethoven had to navigate carefully among his noble patrons, even as they negotiated their own dealings with him, for patronage was a mutually beneficial relationship: he used the nobility to enhance his reputation and income, and the nobility used him to enhance its cultural prestige. Music-making was an important feature of life in Viennese salons, and his ready-made connections to the court through the early patronage of Maximilian Franz helped him establish his footing in the upper echelons of Viennese society with relative ease.
Maintaining those connections over the long term proved more difficult. For all the nobility’s professions of friendship and affection, distinctions of class inevitably arose and grated on the composer time and again. A romantic attachment to any patron’s daughter was out of the question: he was not one of their kind. And he resented in particular the slightest hint of servitude. Even Prince Lichnowsky, who had been so extraordinarily generous to him for so many years, fell victim to the composer’s sensitivity on this point. While entertaining a group of French officers at his Silesian estate in 1806, the prince asked Beethoven to perform at the piano. He refused, tensions escalated, and he left the estate that night in a rage. Back in Vienna, he smashed his plaster bust of Lichnowsky by throwing it to the floor, declaring: “The nobility are all dogs!”
Napoleon’s conquest of Vienna in May 1809 brought politics closer to home in even more tangible ways. The battles fought just across the Danube, at Aspern-Essling (an Austrian victory), and at Wagram (a decisive Austrian defeat) filled the city with wounded and dying soldiers. Casualties from Wagram alone are estimated to have been around 72,000, the costliest battle in European history up to that point. “What a destructive, desolate life around me,” Beethoven reported to a publisher in Leipzig. “Nothing but drums, cannons, and human misery of all kinds. My current situation compels me once again to haggle with you.”
Like many of his musical colleagues in Vienna, Beethoven was caught up in the patriotic fervor sweeping the city, and he capitalized on it. He wrote several marches for military band and started to make a setting of the poet Heinrich Joseph von Collin’s “Österreich über alles” (“Austria above All Else”). The events of the day found their way into his Piano Sonata in E-flat, op. 81a, through its title, “Les Adieux” (“Farewell”), and its movement headings, which reflect the departure of Archduke Rudolph from Vienna in advance of the approaching French troops on May 4, 1809 (the first movement), his absence over the ensuing months (the slow movement), and his return on January 30, 1810 (the finale). The opening notes of the first movement’s slow introduction are even underlaid with the German word “Lebewohl” (“Farewell”).
Critics have often pointed to this sonata as Exhibit A in drawing direct connections between Beethoven’s life and works. In truth, it reminds us that the motivations behind any given composition could be multilayered. We now know that the title and descriptive movement headings were added after the music had already been written. The entire sonata conforms to the standard format of the genre: a fast first movement is followed by a slow, contemplative middle movement, and the whole concludes with a fast, jubilant finale. Aside from the opening slow introduction (in itself not unusual), the bulk of the first movement is quite lively and spry.
The sonata thus masks a more complicated relationship with a member of the royal family and by extension, with royalty in general. In a remarkably blunt note to himself on a sketch leaf from October 1810—just a little more than eight months after Archduke Rudolph’s return to Vienna—Beethoven memorialized his thoughts on the matter: “It should be clear enough to you for all time that the requirement to be near the Archduke always puts you in the most tense state, hence the gout-like constraint when staying with him in the countryside. There is always a tense relationship, and this is not suitable for a true artist, for the artist can be a servant only to the muse he worships.”
Nor does the situation seem to have changed much over the next decade. In 1818 he wrote to his former pupil Ferdinand Ries, who was by this time in London, that “my unfortunate connection to this Archduke has brought me close to beggardom; I can’t see myself starving, I have to give in. So you can contemplate how I suffer all the more in these circumstances!”
Beethoven could not afford to say such things in public to friends in Vienna, for police and paid informants were part of everyday life. Censorship had become increasingly stringent under the rule of the emperor Franz and all the more so later under the eye of his close advisor, Clemens von Metternich, the chancellor of state. If the ideals of the French Revolution were to be suppressed, public discourse of all kinds had to be monitored and regulated. The text for the opera Leonore—which eventually became Fidelio—aroused deep suspicion from authorities on multiple occasions. Joseph Sonnleithner, who had transformed an earlier French text into the libretto, conceded in his appeal to the censors that the plot did indeed involve a government official who had abused his power, but he pointed out that this was “only a matter of personal revenge—in Spain—in the sixteenth century,” and that the villain was subsequently “punished by the court,” with the whole juxtaposed against the “heroism of female virtue.” Spain was a conveniently remote setting for stage productions that portrayed the ruling class in a light that was anything less than noble. Like Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro and Don Giovanni, Beethoven’s Fidelio was set there, and at a temporal remove far from the present. In the end, moreover, it is an enlightened ruler, the minister of state Don Fernando, who saves the day by liberating those unjustly imprisoned.
The conversation books abound with grumblings—by Beethoven as well as his companions—about the climate of repression. At one point his young assistant, Karl Holz, observed that “One has to travel to North America to give one’s ideas free rein.” In another entry, the composer’s nephew Karl admonished the composer not to be so open about his opinions in the coffee houses where Beethoven liked to spend afternoons with friends or a newspaper: “Silence! The walls have ears.” But the police on the whole gave Beethoven a fairly wide berth, in part because of his fame, in part because they regarded him as something of an eccentric, in part because they believed that instrumental music posed no threat to the social order.
Or so they thought. In one especially intriguing entry in a conversation book from 1823, the poet and playwright Franz Grillparzer told the composer that “the censor cannot hold anything against musicians. If they only knew what you think about in your music!” Among cognoscenti at least, instrumental music in general and symphonies in particular were in fact regarded as sublimated forms of public expression. They likened the symphony to an ideal society in which each instrument contributed its own distinctive voice to a harmonious whole. Though the political content of any given symphony might be opaque, the very act of performing one constituted a political statement of its own kind. Beethoven would take full advantage of this in his Ninth Symphony, with its message of joy as a unifying element of all humanity.