Beethoven, A Life

BEETHOVEN

A Life

The publisher and the University of California Press Foundation gratefully acknowledge the generous support of the Roth Family Foundation Imprint in Music, established by a major gift from Sukey and Gil Garcetti and Michael P. Roth.

BEETHOVEN

A Life

JAN CAEYERS

Translated by Brent Annable

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

University of California Press

Oakland, California

© 2020 The Regents of the University of California

Originally published as Beethoven: Een Biografie by De Bezige Bij, Amsterdam, © 2009 by Jan Caeyers.

This book was published with the support of Flanders Literature (www.flandersliterature.be).

The music examples were prepared by Bryce Cannell.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Caeyers, Jan, 1953– author. | Annable, Brent, translator.

Title: Beethoven : a life / Jan Caeyers ; translated by Brent Annable. Other titles: Beethoven. English

Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2020] | Originally published as: Beethoven : een Biografie by De Bezige Bij, Amsterdam, ©2009 by Jan Caeyers. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020010304 | ISBN 9780520343542 (cloth) | ISBN 9780520975026 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Beethoven, Ludwig van, 1770–1827. | Composers—Austria—Biography.

Classification: LCC ML410.B4 C2313 2020 | DDC 780.92 [B]—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020010304

Manufactured in the United States of America

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For

Armand Caeyers (1924–1995)

Karl Heinz Füssl (1924–1992)

Frans Verleyen (1941–1997)

Geniuses are the most absurd of all creatures. Absurd, because of their normality. They are as everybody ought to be: a perfect synthesis of means and end, of challenge and capacity. Paradoxically, this means they do what others cannot—they fulfill their purpose.

EGON FRIEDELL

CONTENTS

Illustrations

Foreword by Daniel Hope

Prologue

PART ONE. THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN (1770–1792)

1 • Louis van Beethoven: A Grandfather Figure

2 • Jean van Beethoven: The Absent Father?

3 • The Early Years

4 • Christian Gottlob Neefe: The Mentor

5 • The Young Professional

6 • Bonn Turns to Vienna

7 • Beethoven’s First Crisis

8 • A Second Home, and New Horizons

9 • Renewed Vigor and the First Major Works

10 • Farewell to Bonn

PART TWO. A TIME OF PROVING (1792–1802)

11 • Vienna in 1792

12 • Beethoven’s First Patron: Karl von Lichnowsky

13 • Haydn and Albrechtsberger

14 • Career Plans

15 • Family, Friends, and Loves in Vienna

16 • In Anticipation of Greater Things

17 • Lobkowitz’s Center of Excellence

18 • The Immortal Beloved: Episode One

19 • The Road to a Broader Public

20 • A Word from the Critics

21 • The Disciples: Carl Czerny and Ferdinand Ries

22 • The Heiligenstadt Testament

PART THREE. THE MASTER (1802–1809)

23 • A New Way Forward

24 • The Laboratorium Artificiosum

25 • Publishing Pains and the Warehouse of the Arts

26 • Composer in Residence

27 • Salieri’s Opera Lessons

28 • The Mystery of the Eroica

29 • The Immortal Beloved: Episode Two

30 • In Search of the Perfect Piano

31 • Leonore: A Work in Progress

32 • The Golden Years

PART FOUR. CROWDS AND POWER (1809–1816)

33 • A New Social Status

34 • New Prospects

35 • An Imperial Pupil

36 • Beethoven and Goethe

37 • The Immortal Beloved: Episode Three

38 • Se non è vero . . .

39 • The End of the Classical Symphony

40 • Music for the Masses

41 • A Lucrative Sideline

42 • From Leonore to Fidelio

43 • From Coffee and Cake to Congress and Kitsch

44 • The Fight for a Child

45 • From the Immortal Beloved to a Distant Beloved

PART FIVE. THE LONELY WAY (1816–1827)

46 • Longing for Greater Things

47 • Post-Congress Vienna

48 • London Plans

49 • A Faustian Sonata and a Diabolical Contraption

50 • The Missa solemnis: A Mass for Peace

51 • The Circle Is Complete: The Late Piano Works

52 • Estrangement

53 • Encounters with the Younger Generation

54 • An Ode to Joy

55 • Decline

56 • Karl’s Emancipation

57 • Money Matters

58 • The Discovery of Heaven: The Late String Quartets

59 • Comoedia finita est

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Illustration Credits

Index of Works

Index of People

Beethoven in 1802

Mechelen town center, mid-nineteenth century

The Electoral Palace in Bonn

Coadjutor Maximilian Francis’s visit to Bonn, 1780

View of the Rhein and Siebengebirge Mountains, Bonn

Garden view of Beethoven’s birthplace in Bonn

Beethoven at age fifteen

Silhouette of the von Breuning family

Grandfather Louis van Beethoven

Helene von Breuning

Franz Anton Ries

Franz Gerhard Wegeler

Promenade at the Vienna city limits

Kohlmarkt Square, Vienna

Letter from Beethoven to Franz Gerhard Wegeler, June 29, 1801

Heiligenstadt in the early nineteenth century

Beethoven in 1815

St. Augustin’s and the Palais Lobkowitz in Vienna

St. Michael’s Square and the riding school in Vienna

The Kärtnertortheater

Theater an der Wien

University Square in Vienna

The Razumovsky Palace

Josephine Deym von Stritetz (née von Brunsvik)

Joseph Deym’s palace on Rotenturmstrasse

Antonie Brentano and children Georg and Fanny

Giulietta Guicciardi (presumed)

Therese Malfatti

Christine Gerhardi

The bathhouse in Teplitz (Teplice)

Inside the main bathhouse in Karlsbad (Karlovy Vary)

Sketch of the Eighth Symphony (op. 93)

Sketch of the incidental music for King Stephan (op. 117)

Beethoven in 1823

People promenading in Prater Park

The main Redoutensaal ballroom in the Hofburg Palace

Archduke Rudolph

Beethoven’s Wittgenstein sketchbook

Letter from copyist Ferdinand Wolanek, with Beethoven’s response, 1825

Beethoven on his daily walk, ca. 1820

Beethoven’s calling card

Small wax seal with Beethoven’s initials

Page from the conversation notebooks, September 9, 1825

Ear trumpets ordered by Beethoven from Johann Nepomuk Mälzel in 1813

Beethoven’s final lodgings on Schwarzspanierstrasse

Beethoven on his deathbed, March 1827

The funeral

FOREWORD

The music of Ludwig van Beethoven has always been very much an integral part of my life, in my school days, as a member of the Beaux Arts Trio, and as a soloist. How often have I plunged into this cosmos, which is simply inexhaustible for my instrument? I was able time and time again to feel all the freedom, the conflict, and the optimism that emanates from this unique music. Nevertheless it continues to challenge me. I have never felt that I have grasped it completely. On the contrary, I am forever discovering new aspects to it. This is the fascination of Beethoven’s music. It never fails to thrill me.

The jubilee year BTHVN2020 offers us a wonderful opportunity to celebrate Beethoven’s magnificent music. But at the same time it invites us to make a closer study of the man behind the music. To this end we are promised a very special journey through time by way of this biography by the Belgian conductor and musicologist Jan Caeyers, which as a result of close cooperation with the Beethoven-Haus is published here for the first time in a revised edition in English. Rarely has Beethoven been portrayed in such a knowledgeable, enthralling, and entertaining fashion. Caeyers places Beethoven in the context of a time of transition, that was sparked by the French Revolution and that was fundamentally challenging the established courtly society. In the light of this period of transition, Caeyers describes how Beethoven matures not only musically and culturally but also politically into a figurehead of the new and emancipated bourgeois era. By paying attention to the family members, friends, and patrons who accompanied and supported Beethoven throughout his life, the biography presents a particularly vivid character portrait. The composer is not glorified as a genius, but instead is experienced in all his inconsistency.

I hope that this biography will provide you with stimulating reading and that your fascination with Beethoven’s life and work will increase with each page of the book!

Daniel Hope

President, Beethoven-Haus, Bonn

PROLOGUE

Mechelen (Belgium), Saturday, March 29, 1727. Michiel van Beethoven sits at his windowsill, reflecting on life. Having turned forty-three the previous month, he now feels he is getting old, and he yearns for new challenges. For twenty long years he has been rising early to run the bakery that once belonged to his father-in-law, and that novelty has well and truly worn off. In fact, he has derived far more enjoyment in recent years from the purchase of property in Mechelen, the city where his father had come to settle fifty years before. In addition to his own home on Jodenstraat, he has managed to acquire two others on the same street (albeit with the aid of a hefty mortgage). He inherited an additional two houses from his father’s side—Meersman and the Appolonia Guild—and will soon take possession of a third (Molenkarre). His penchant for real estate has put him in the footsteps of his great-grandfather Hendrik, who had done exactly the same a century before, only on a more modest scale, as he had made it as a major landowner in Boortmeerbeek, a small village nestled between Mechelen and Leuven.

Most of Michiel van Beethoven’s fortune, however, came from his (only slightly shady) dealings in antique furniture and artworks. This is the one area where he now wishes to expand, although he also has his sights set on the lucrative market for Mechelen lace. The risks, he knows, are substantial; earning real money in the lace sector would mean importing cheaper lace from Brussels and Courtray (Kortrijk), which in turn would require sizeable investments and the use of tenuous promissory notes. But he is determined to take the plunge, to satisfy his desire to enter high society and to secure a place among the city’s wealthiest.

Michiel’s motivation is also fueled by a score that he has to settle with history. Over a century earlier, his great-great-grandmother Josyne van Beethoven was burned at the stake after having been accused of witchcraft by her neighbors. Josyne was a unique woman: emancipated, self-assured, and idealistic. She also had a lively and independent spirit, which hardly worked in her favor at a time when the lines between faith, naïveté, and superstition were very fine indeed. Paradoxically, this characteristic was precisely what prompted the suspicion that she had concluded a pact with the devil. A small, targeted campaign by several jealous villagers was all that was needed to gather the necessary evidence, and the deadly cocktail of intrigue, slander, and gossip worked its own magic. Josyne van Beethoven was arrested, and after initially refusing to confess (further proof of her diabolical collusion) and subsequently being subjected to horrendous torture, she finally submitted and was publicly executed. For a while it also seemed that all the property belonging to her bewildered husband would be seized, but that fiasco was staved off by a combination of dexterous diplomacy and Beethovenian tenacity.

This traumatic experience was deeply etched into the memories of the Van Beethovens, who went on to nurture a deep-seated and healthy distrust of society in general. At the same time, it also became a source of strength, as all the Van Beethovens possessed an unshakable conviction in their own beliefs and ideals, a quality that they owed to their ancestral mother and martyr, Josyne.

Michiel van Beethoven passed on this ethos to his two children. The eldest son, Cornelius, showed great promise. With his level head, sense of duty, and innate knack for business, he was certain to make a surefooted way through life and the world. The younger son, Louis, was the black sheep of the family. He had a fine voice and as a six-year-old was accepted into Het Koralen Huis, the choirboys’ school attached to St. Rombout’s Cathedral in Mechelen. Once his son’s voice had broken, Michiel drew up a private teaching contract with cathedral organist Antoine Colfs, who was to instruct Louis further on the organ and teach him basso continuo. For make no mistake: Michiel might let his son pursue music, but not without ambition. A mere organist’s post at some far-flung parish church was out of the question.

Vienna, Thursday, March 29, 1827. Ludwig van Beethoven died three days ago. Today is his funeral. Because of the many guests expected to attend—townsfolk and visitors from outside the city—the ceremony has been rescheduled for the afternoon. But the turnout far exceeds all expectations; despite the cold (and even the odd remaining patch of snow), an estimated twenty thousand people from all levels of society flock to the House of the Black-Robed Spaniards (the Schwarzspanierhaus) near the city wall, close to Schottentor Tower in Alservorstadt. Beethoven’s coffin lies prepared in the inner courtyard, and police have been called in to hold back the pressing crowds at the entry gate. Four trombonists and sixteen singers perform a special arrangement of the Equali for Four Trombones (WoO 30), which Beethoven had composed for All Souls’ Day in 1812 in Linz. Another arrangement follows, of the funeral march from the Piano Sonata in A-flat Major (op. 26). The music, with its Beethovenian darkness and chilling penetration, stirs the emotional crowds to the very core.

The majestic cortège sets off at three-thirty that afternoon. Led by a bevy of priests, the richly decorated coffin is borne by eight singers from the opera, surrounded by as many Kapellmeisters wearing white stoles, and joined by about forty other friends and fellow artists—poets, actors, composers, and musicians including Schubert, Czerny, Schuppanzigh, and Franz Grillparzer. All are dressed entirely in black (right down to the gloves), with a white lily in their left hand and a decorated floral torch in the right. Next comes a delegation of conservatory students (the schools are closed as a sign of mourning), and the procession concludes with an impressive assembly of dignitaries.

The entourage presses its way through the undulating crowds with great difficulty, taking an hour and a half to travel five hundred meters and reach the Minorite Church of the Holy Trinity on Alsergasse. After the funeral service, Beethoven’s body is placed in a beautifully ornate hearse carriage led by four horses, and driven to Währing Cemetery, escorted by an impressive caravan of around two hundred coaches. At the gates of the cemetery, in a solemn, stirring voice, actor Heinrich Anschütz reads the funeral oration composed by Grillparzer. Graceful and elegant, and with the perfect blend of grandiloquence and pathos, Grillparzer speaks on behalf of the nation and of German-speaking peoples everywhere. He talks of Beethoven, who is now among the greatest men of all time and who inherited and surpassed the immortal fame of Handel and Bach, of Haydn and Mozart. He foretells that all those succeeding Beethoven can go no further, since their predecessor ended where art itself ends, and concludes with words of consolation to all those present: Look back to this moment and remember: we were there when he was buried; and when he died, we wept!¹

The crowd listens with bated breath, and tears are shed. Once the coffin, bedecked with three laurel wreaths, has been lowered into the ground, several hundred copies of memorial poems by Castelli and Schlechta, printed specially for the occasion, are distributed. As the last of the crowds trickle out of the cemetery, the sun sets.

Leuven, Thursday, March 29, 2007. With a sense of wonder, I picture the spectacle that took place exactly one hundred and eighty years ago around the Schottentor in Vienna. Even if the estimated crowd of twenty thousand is a little dubious, the massive turnout and all the pomp and circumstance must have lent an exceptional allure to the occasion. In Vienna such a funeral is what people would call a scheene Leich—literally, a pretty corpse. There can be no doubt that nowadays such a funeral would be televised live, to the great satisfaction of the Viennese, who have always held a fascination for both death and the theater.

Another sign of Beethoven’s importance was the sheer level of hypocrisy demonstrated that chilly afternoon. The surging crowds and emotions were, after all, directly at odds with the marginalized existence that Beethoven had led toward the end of his career. For nearly fifteen years before Beethoven’s death, the Viennese cultural scene had been dominated by the common tastes of the Biedermeiers, who wallowed comfortably in their cocoons of simple, pedestrian, nonthreatening art. They were captivated by the brilliant, effortless, and effervescent music of the next generation: Joseph Lanner and Johann Strauss senior, in particular. It was music that titillated the senses but placed no demands on the mind.

Beethoven stood for the opposite of Biedermeier values and had long ceased to be a man of his time. His later works were the very antithesis of agreeableness and elegance. It was willful music, requiring much effort to write, to perform, and to hear—very different from the works he had written for performance at the Congress of Vienna more than ten years before, which were pleasing to the ear and had earned him the greatest fame and fortune he had ever known.

Eyebrows might also be raised at the Italian opera singers who literally bore Beethoven to his grave, since not a single note of the late master’s music had crossed their lips for over fifteen years. Vienna was under Rossini’s spell and had fallen head over heels for his light and bubbly champagne music. Beethoven and Rossini were musical antipoles, living in different times and writing for different audiences. Rossini’s remarks during their only meeting in April 1822 most likely fell—both literally and figuratively—on deaf ears.

And what of the eight Kapellmeisters who with great humility (and possibly even greater relief) accompanied Beethoven to his final banishment outside the city walls? Among them, only the Bohemian composer Johann Nepomuk Hummel could boast enough talent, personality, and success to be justified in his effulgent words and estimation of Beethoven.

And yet there are reasons why so many Viennese felt the need to bid farewell to a man with whom they fundamentally shared little, and whom for years they had treated almost exclusively as a local curiosity. They must have known that Beethoven’s principal works were being performed in Europe’s major capitals. The Missa solemnis had premiered in St. Petersburg, and by 1827 the Ninth Symphony had already been aired in London, Frankfurt, Aachen, Leipzig, and Berlin. They might also have already caught wind of the fact that Beethoven had declined a potential commission from Boston, in far-off America. They knew that Beethoven—born as a common citizen in an age that was extremely sensitive to the subtlest shifts in social hierarchy—had succeeded in penetrating the uppermost echelons of society. The list of emperors who knew and appreciated his music and who commissioned or even played his works was long indeed: Emperor of Russia Alexander I, Kings Frederick William II and III of Prussia, King Frederick Augustus I of Saxony, King Jérôme Bonaparte of Westphalia, and King Charles XIV John of Sweden—not to mention the Hapsburgs, among whom the Archduke Rudolf stood out as an excellent pianist and Beethoven interpreter. And although by then the noblest aristocrats had already withdrawn into their complacent bubbles of seclusion and social irrelevance, Beethoven’s status as an icon of their elite cultural identity must still have appealed to the common people.

I too am fascinated by the sheer dimensions assumed by Beethoven’s fame within the space of only a few decades. Nowadays the notion of a meteoric rise to fame is all too familiar: stories of children making it from paperboy to media tycoon or escaping abject poverty and neglect to become a head of state. But such tales were unimaginable in the eighteenth century, when society was far more static and lines of communication infinitely slower. In this context, the legend of how the great-grandchild of a provincial Belgian baker came to be one of the most illustrious residents of the Viennese musical metropolis, as well as a pivotal figure in European cultural history, captures our imagination—even today.

It is this exceptional tale that I wish to tell: of the journey made by the little boy from Bonn; of the abundance of improvised ideas cascading from his piano and captivating the minds of those around him; of the subsequent struggle to channel his creativity effectively as a piano virtuoso in Vienna; of a tragic auditory condition that forced him to give up his career as a performer and seek renewed and deeper meaning as an artist by devoting himself exclusively to composition; and finally, at the end of his life, of Beethoven the Tonkünstler (or the tonal artist, as he wished to be known), who had obtained such a mastery of his craft that—in complete liberation, utter detachment, and full self-assurance—he could once again give free rein to his imagination despite, or perhaps because of, his deafness.

I also wish to describe the perilous nature of his journey: the many obstacles and setbacks that Beethoven was forced to overcome, as well as the bouts of uncertainty, desperation, and crippling doubt to which he fell victim more than once. I will occasionally even suggest that things might have turned out differently, as Beethoven’s fate was not always in his own hands. Several weeks after Beethoven’s death, Georg August von Griesinger (a Saxon diplomat in Vienna, friend to Beethoven, and Haydn’s first biographer) had the right notion when he claimed that the principal driving force in Beethoven’s life was his profound genius.² Genius is hardly a guarantee of world fame, however. The same can be said of a genius as of a child prodigy: no gifted child ever becomes a wunderkind through sheer force of will alone. The child’s surroundings, support base, upbringing, and circumstances—even marketing—are all factors that help exceptional talent achieve exceptional status. I therefore wish to unravel the networks that influenced Beethoven’s career, to paint portraits of those who supported him, and to outline the many interests (both direct and indirect) that were at play.

Of course, no Beethoven biography would be complete without an examination of how the nineteenth-century music scene—and indeed music itself—was radically altered by his influence. After Beethoven, nothing was the same. Composers were no longer the default performers of their own music; musical scores became straightjackets, granting fewer liberties to performers; the onus of creativity had shifted from improvisation to interpretation; composition had become a separate discipline, subject to loftier abstract and aesthetic ideals; music was infused with greater complexity and gravitas, forcing audiences to take a different approach to listening; the gap between connoisseurs and ordinary music lovers widened; and composers enjoyed a new social status, accompanied by the associated economic perils and prospects (we need only recall Beethoven’s rocky dealings with the increasingly influential publishing world). In short, composers had evolved from craftsmen into artists, a fact of which they were themselves only too aware. In Beethoven’s case, one sign of this mindset was the fact that he rarely threw away a single score, draft, or sketch—he was cognizant of his own oeuvre from the very beginning. It is an intriguing realization that this metamorphosis took place within the span of one man’s career, a man who fought constantly and mercilessly against the limitations of his time. Of course, these shifts in society were already brewing to some extent. But is genius not characterized by the ability to grasp latent and nebulous trends and bring them to expression with brevity and clarity? Any Beethoven biographer, therefore, cannot sidestep the analysis of what Egon Friedell dubbed the complicated and inscrutable reconciliation between a genius and his time.³

Beethoven biographers are also expected to pepper his life story with other commentaries on that very story. Biographers are, of course, at the mercy of the arbitrary manner in which history covers its tracks, and the portrait one paints is largely determined by whatever information still happens to be available. (One can only imagine how different this account would be if, for example, we still had access to the ten thousand or so letters that specialists believe were sent to or by Beethoven, of which only slightly more than two thousand remain.) In Beethoven’s case, the view afforded us is especially blurry due to the egregious treatment suffered by many of the source materials immediately following his death, supposedly with the aim of protecting his image.

The perpetrator of these acts was a man named Anton Felix Schindler. He was a prototypical sycophant, obsessed with infiltrating the famous composer’s intimate circle of friends in the hopes of somehow—if not during Beethoven’s lifetime, then at the very least afterward—deploying his status as a Beethoven watcher to catapult himself out of his own mediocrity. (The fact that Schindler warrants extensive discussion in this very prologue is a testament to his unwavering dedication in this respect.) Schindler claimed to have worked as Beethoven’s personal secretary from 1816 until the composer’s death and to have done so unpaid, thus earning him the rare and privileged title of ami de Beethoven.⁴ That he did perform secretarial duties for Beethoven cannot be denied (although it should be noted that matters of genuine import were attended to by others). Beethoven’s supposed regard for him as a true friend, however, is a barefaced lie. In reality Schindler was a source of irritation, and Beethoven was usually cold and abrupt with him. In their mutual correspondence, Schindler was one of the rare figures on whom Beethoven never wasted a term of address or even a friendly greeting, and his tone barely rose above a snarl. Schindler was also seldom tolerated at the table. And the more Beethoven rejected Schindler’s attentions, the more Schindler longed to be a meaningful presence in his life.

Along with Beethoven’s trusted friend from Bonn, Stephan von Breuning, Schindler eventually succeeded in spending the final few weeks of the ailing composer’s life at his bedside and thus became a privileged witness to the grim battle with death waged by one of the most important figures of the day. What is more (according to Schindler), several days before Beethoven’s passing, he and Breuning had been charged with the solemn responsibility of preserving his creative legacy and reputation. They were asked to see that the right person was appointed to write his biography so that Beethoven could be certain that his name and body of work would not be tarnished by his many enemies who stood to benefit. To this end, Breuning and Schindler were permitted to leave with important documents in hand: Breuning took the papers of a more commercial nature, and Schindler took the rest. Two months later, however, Breuning himself passed away, and his death marked the disappearance of the only eyewitness who could testify to Beethoven’s (extremely profitable) bequest to Schindler. The suspicion that Schindler did not receive but rather appropriated his biographical remit and the accompanying documents would shadow him forever.

In September 1827, Schindler asked German music critic Friedrich Rochlitz to do the final editing for the first Beethoven biography. Schindler claimed it had been Beethoven’s express wish; it was more likely Schindler’s own confection. Rochlitz refused, citing health reasons. Franz Wegeler, a doctor from Koblenz and a childhood friend of Beethoven’s, was also asked to supply the material for part 1 of the biography, but ceased collaboration once he saw that Schindler was making little headway with the publication. Wegeler suspected that Schindler had a hidden agenda, and in 1834 he began work on his own biography project. Almost immediately he was joined by Ferdinand Ries, a former pupil of Beethoven’s whom Schindler had asked not long before to write about Beethoven’s early years in Vienna (to replace the deceased Breuning). But Ries felt it was also important for readers to learn about the great artist’s less congenial qualities, and on that score he had several juicy anecdotes of his own to tell. This met with a veto by Schindler, who was determined to keep his deathbed vow to Beethoven; the book was to be a hagiography, plain and simple. As a result, Schindler was ultimately isolated. The circumstance was not entirely to his disadvantage, as he thus retained the exclusive rights to an official biography supposedly authorized by the composer himself, although this can never have been Beethoven’s real intention.⁵

The truth is that Schindler was not in a position to bring the project to a successful end. He had only known Beethoven for a short while, after all, and most of the accounts at his disposal were secondhand at best. He also knew too little about music to write effectively on Beethoven’s works, and all evidence suggests that his claim of having taken lessons from Beethoven was a further concoction. When his Biographie von Ludwig van Beethoven appeared in 1840, the reviews were scathing. Schindler’s authority in general was called into question, which troubled him deeply given his primary aim of putting himself in the spotlight. He defended himself by appealing to the unique source materials in his possession, which he called his magic books—the nearly two hundred conversation notebooks that he had scavenged from Beethoven’s lodgings after his death.⁶ Beethoven had been almost completely deaf since 1818, with no choice but to communicate with others in writing, especially in public spaces where for reasons of discretion or to avoid embarrassment he wished to avoid having people bellow into his ears. Occasionally he would use a slate, which was periodically wiped clean. But generally he would resort to small notebooks, in which mainly his interlocutors but sometimes he himself jotted down words and phrases. Like his musical scores and sketches, Beethoven held on to these notebooks, clinging to artifacts from the past as though they could compensate for a lack of human contact. The notebooks are a rich source of information, although they usually contain only half of the conversation, and it is sometimes impossible to guess what Beethoven himself might have said. (The notebooks can probably best be compared to cassette tapes used to record only one half of a telephone call.)

Schindler had access to this unique body of material, and in the second edition of his biography he included an appendix with key citations from the notebooks, in an attempt to show how implicitly Beethoven trusted him (Schindler even compared their friendship to that between the mythical heroes Orestes and Pylades⁷), and also to demonstrate the elevated caliber of their discourse.

Scholars worked out early on that Schindler—in his well-intentioned attempt to keep Beethoven’s image intact—had destroyed many of the conversation books and ripped pages out of others that he believed contained compromising material. But it was not until the 1970s that a far more serious offense was unearthed: the addition of fictitious exchanges between Beethoven and Schindler himself. It was then that researchers from the criminology department of Berlin’s Humboldt University made one of the most important discoveries in all of Beethoven research. Using techniques that were originally developed to decipher terrorist communications and letter bombs, they not only demonstrated that many of the notebook entries had been added later by Schindler, but through meticulous analysis of the ink they could also date the forgeries to the precise period between 1840 and 1845. Their forensic expertise also revealed that the culprit’s personality had changed in the meantime; whereas Schindler had previously been a timid and subservient party to the conversation, by 1840 his handwriting had changed to that of a scared, threatened, and even neurotic man who, with his back against the wall, doctored the facts to suit his fiction.

The discovery sent shockwaves through Beethoven scholarship, as it proved that much of the information used to sculpt his likeness over the previous 150 years had been falsified and could be relegated to the scrapheap. Even certain seemingly incontrovertible theoretical insights about Beethoven’s music—which had provided the basis for an entire tradition of Beethoven interpretation—could no longer be maintained.

But possibly even more distressing is the fact that all of the events reported faithfully by Schindler in his biography are now enveloped in a shroud of uncertainty and are the subject of endless and futile debate between believers and nonbelievers. Conscientious Beethoven biographers will often—and far more often than they would like—face agonizing choices, and the temptation is great to perpetuate fabricated or embellished anecdotes for the sheer pleasure they give in the telling. The stories about Beethoven are, after all, as much a part of the Beethoven story as the story itself.

PART ONE

The Artist as a Young Man

(1770–1792)

1

Louis van Beethoven

A GRANDFATHER FIGURE

LOUIS VAN BEETHOVEN’S STUDENT CONTRACT with Antoine Colfs in Mechelen expired in the spring of 1727. What he did immediately afterward is unknown, but we do know that in November 1731 he took a job as a tenorist at St. Peter’s church in Leuven. Several positions had become vacant there following an enormous clearing-out of staff, when all those suspected of Jansenist sympathies were shown the door.¹ This purge had been championed by Rombout van Kiel (himself originally from Mechelen), who in his capacity as university rector always carried out the archbishop’s directives to the letter. As thanks for his diligent service, van Kiel had been promoted to canon at St. Peter’s church in June 1731. He was a former classmate of Michiel van Beethoven’s, and we can assume that it was he who facilitated the relocation of Michiel’s son Louis to Leuven. Music at St. Peter’s was also led by another former Mechelen resident, Louis Colfs, who helped his cousin Antoine’s ex-pupil settle into his new position quickly. And successfully: several weeks after his arrival in Leuven, Louis was asked to step in for the choir conductor, who had taken ill.

Louis van Beethoven did not stay in Leuven for long. Following a successful audition in August 1732, on September 2 he was appointed as a singer at St. Lambert’s Cathedral in Liège. The transfer from Leuven to Liège was facilitated by the close ties that had existed between the two cities for centuries. Many professors in Leuven were originally from Liège, and vice versa; the university in Leuven enjoyed appointment privileges for religious posts in the Prince-Bishopric of Liège, and many of the appointments there were arranged in Leuven. A key figure in these transactions was theology professor Jean-François Stoupy, director of the College of Liège in Leuven and a colleague, friend, and neoconservative comrade of Rombout van Kiel’s. It was likely he who put Louis van Beethoven forward for the position in Liège.

Louis van Beethoven’s time in Liège would likewise only last several months: in March 1733 he was transferred to Bonn, the residential city of the archbishop-elector of Cologne. The elector himself had probably been charmed by the warmth of Louis’s voice during one of his many visits to the Prince-Bishopric (which had been under Cologne rule for several centuries). Clemens August of Bavaria was a connoisseur and had a nose for musical talent. In accordance with proper aristocratic tradition, he had received a thorough grounding in music and was a passionate player of the viola da gamba. During his many travels, he had also become well acquainted with music from both Italy and France, and when expanding his own musical forces he always strove to engage the best musicians from these two countries—a fact that would be of no small consequence for the musical development of the young Ludwig van Beethoven several decades later.

By attracting and supporting elite musicians, Clemens August perpetuated a long family tradition. In the second half of the sixteenth century, his two forebears the dukes of Bavaria Albert V and William V had amassed the most prestigious musical ensemble in Europe by importing the best Dutch and Italian musicians to Munich. In the late eighteenth century, Elector Charles Theodore (of the same house, Wittelbach, albeit from the Palatinate branch) followed suit in Mannheim. His orchestra, which recruited musicians from far and wide, was considered the finest in Europe and set a new standard for ensemble discipline. The group was also instrumental in the life of the young Mozart, who was invited to compose his opera Idomeneo for the star troupe (and equally stellar vocal ensemble) in 1780, several years after Charles Theodore had also become Elector of Bavaria and had moved the orchestra to the capital in Munich. Perhaps the most striking example of such musical idolatry was provided by King Ludwig II, whose adulation of Wagner in the second half of the nineteenth century prompted him to build his own private Odeon in Bayreuth, centered entirely around the composer’s unique talents.

The Wittelbachs had a reputation for being ingenious, megalomaniacal, and occasionally slightly mad. They were also fully aware that they could not compete politically with other ruling houses (the neighboring Hapsburgs, in particular), which drove them to develop fertile, niche ambitions in the less treacherous domains of representational art and music, where their efforts were unconditionally productive and inspired.

When Clemens August of Bavaria was appointed archbishop-elector of Cologne in 1723, his position seemed hardly enviable. Consisting as it did of five separate miniature states—none of which even shared a border, and whose secular and religious groupings did not coincide—the archdiocese and electorate of Cologne was difficult to govern. To make matters worse, electoral Cologne was situated in very sensitive European territory. Not only did part of it occupy the area known as the Left Bank of the Rhine (making it a constant bone of contention in French-German border conflicts); it was also a buffer zone and a thoroughfare for attacking troops during times of war. The elector of Cologne’s chief political duty was therefore to adopt as neutral a position as possible in the strategic game of diplomacy being played by the powers that be, which in practice boiled down to constantly raising the price of the neutrality on offer. Here Clemens August was in his element: he took the electorate’s structural weaknesses and turned them to his maximum financial advantage. It was no surprise that he developed a rather unflattering reputation as a Wetterfahne, or weathervane.

In addition to the copious winnings landed from this diplomatic game of poker, Elector Clemens August had yet another, centuries-old source of funds: the Teutonic Order, or the Order of Brothers of the German House of Saint Mary in Jerusalem. Over the centuries this knightly order, originally founded on lofty, Christian-inspired ideals, had degenerated into a kind of spectral, extragovernmental framework that existed alongside the various duchies, principalities, dioceses, and districts. It also acted as a lobbying group advocating the interests of rulers and major landowners. Although the order’s once-palpable political and ideological significance had since dwindled to almost nothing, the Teutonic Order still maintained a real estate portfolio that generated considerable rental income. This alternative flow of funds worked like a magnet on the German aristocracy, as it provided a means for their second-born sons and daughters to maintain a lifestyle befitting their status. And just as in the military and the church, the Teutonic Order was also subject to another age-old aristocratic principle: the higher up one was in the pecking order, the more flexible the appointment and promotion criteria became. It was thus that Clemens August was appointed grand master (a kind of secretary-general) of the Teutonic Order in 1732. And so, roughly ten years after his installation as elector of Cologne, he also stood at the head of one of the most influential networks in central Europe, furnishing him with plenty of additional funds to divert into his mini-Versailles by the Rhine.

Clemens August made no attempt to hide the fact that he was primarily interested in the more ceremonial aspects of his post. The story goes that while studying in Rome, he was once plagued by doubts regarding his spiritual calling. It was only following a personal intervention by the pope himself, who made him the dual promise that he would be permitted to (a) concentrate mainly on the secular aspects of his position, and (b) take a fairly liberal view of his vows of poverty and chastity, that he finally accepted his promotion to archbishop.² It is believed that he thus obtained a kind of papal sanction to thenceforth adorn and conduct his life as though it were a piece of French theater. Amid the sumptuous decor of brand-new and lavishly appointed castles, churches, theaters, and parks, Clemens August orchestrated life at court in such a way that the boundaries between actual theater and theatrical representation, between fiction and feigned reality, became increasingly indistinct. The day would commence with an extravagant mass, the archbishop occupying center stage. Next the horses were saddled for a hawking party—the archbishop’s true specialty. Dinner followed in a specially appointed palace restaurant, fitted with bespoke theatrical machinery that raised the bountifully laden tables up out of the floor. The day concluded with theater or dance performances, with or without the participation of the aristocrats themselves. A typical example was the so-called country wedding (a bucolic cousin to the traditional masked ball), in which the aristocrats drew lots for the roles of bride, groom, parents, pastor, village notary, and local peasantry—on the express understanding that the central role of the innkeeper was, of course, reserved for the elector.

This was the weird and wonderful world to which Louis van Beethoven, a baker’s son from Mechelen, was introduced in 1733. His life had clearly taken a turn for the better, as had his earnings (especially after a promotion in 1746), enabling him to live comfortably and with some prestige. But he was ambitious and hoped someday to become Kapellmeister, the musical director at court. His disillusionment was therefore profound when not he but the Frenchman Joseph Touchemoulin was appointed as the new Kapellmeister in 1760. Louis van Beethoven boasted a longer period of service, true; but Touchemoulin really was the obvious choice. A brilliant violinist, he had been the elector’s favorite for many years. Besides having studied with Tartini in Italy, he had also earned some distinction as a composer in Paris. Louis van Beethoven’s references paled somewhat by comparison. He also had a double handicap, so to speak, being merely a singer and probably never having composed a single note in his life. Of course, there were examples in the eighteenth-century musical landscape of Kapellmeisters who were themselves not instrumentalists (Hasse in Dresden, and Graun in Berlin), yet these were composers of outstanding international repute. In any case, Louis could not resign himself to this state of affairs. He lodged an official appeal in the form of a long letter, which was summarily dismissed by the elector.³

Just when it seemed that Louis van Beethoven’s career had plateaued, Elector Clemens August unexpectedly passed away on February 6, 1761, sending Louis’s life in a new direction. The archbishop-elector of Cologne died as he had lived, collapsing and perishing in the arms of Baroness von Waldendorf, one of his many mistresses, during a ball at Ehrenbreitstein.⁴ The appointment of his successor, Maximilian Friedrich von Königsegg-Rothenfels, represented a break with tradition in Bonn. Like his predecessor, the new elector was no great proponent of asceticism and took equally few pains to suppress his interest in members of the opposite sex. Nevertheless, he understood fully that perpetuating the flamboyant lifestyle of Clemens August would undoubtedly put the electorate on the road to bankruptcy, the more so since the changing political landscape (the Seven Years’ War, which raged from 1756 to 1763) had dried up all international sources of funding.

Maximilian Friedrich economized where he could, and one of the first casualties was Kapellmeister Touchemoulin, whose princely income was reduced by two-thirds. Naturally this was unacceptable to Touchemoulin, especially since he was well aware of other available options. He promptly resigned and left for Regensburg. Louis van Beethoven saw his opportunity and gladly accepted the proposition to combine the roles of singer and Kapellmeister for more or less the same salary (his raise was a mere 30 percent). But the rationale of those in charge—the belief they could fill two vacancies for the price of one—was rather naïve and shortsighted. It ignored the simple truth that a tutti violinist who becomes concertmaster will always remain a tutti player in the eyes of his colleagues, and a concertmaster-turned-conductor will never be deemed a real conductor. For a choral singer, any such attempt to rise through the ranks was positively death-defying. But there could have been no doubting Louis van Beethoven’s dedication. Lacking the natural authority of raw talent, in an attempt to survive he resorted to the qualities traditionally instilled in middle-class children: diligence, discipline, and organization. By all accounts, however, these were not enough. Although there are indications that Louis van Beethoven lobbied earnestly for the interests of the instrumentalists and singers, there were also reports of repeated incidents where the authority of the new Kapellmeister was so severely called into question that the elector himself was forced to intervene.

The wine-trading business that Louis van Beethoven had been running for some time was not affected in the slightest by his new social status. He primarily supplied to Dutch clients and kept a generously stocked cellar. Consequently, private consumption in the Beethoven household increased markedly, allowing alcoholism to take a fatal hold on the family. The first victim was Louis’s own wife, who spent her final days in an insane asylum. His only son, Jean, was later stripped of his paternal rights due to excessive drinking, and when Louis’s grandson (the composer Ludwig van Beethoven) died in 1827, his liver was all but destroyed.

Exactly how much Louis van Beethoven earned from his wine business is unknown. We do know that after his death in 1773, his son Jean was left in the difficult position of negotiating both the settlement of outstanding debts (for which he was even called to court in 1774) and the collection of moneys owed, not all of which had been properly recorded. The final balance was most likely a profit, however; recent research has shown that Jean van Beethoven inherited quite a sum of money, which allowed him to live in relative comfort for some years. The traditional belief that Ludwig van Beethoven grew up in poverty is therefore romanticized and inaccurate.⁵

The Beethoven family’s general inability to handle money seems to have been hereditary. Louis’s parents were prosecuted for conducting illicit trade for the first time in 1732, and in an attempt to multiply their assets they subsequently dived ever deeper into a maelstrom of loans, mortgages, and bills of exchange, finally hitting bankruptcy in 1740. Their court conviction in 1744 occurred by default, for in 1739 they had fled Mechelen for Kleve, settling afterward in Bonn where they both passed away in 1749.

Incredible tales of the Van Beethovens’ creative entrepreneurship can also be found later in history, of how they nimbly walked the thin line between the possible and the permissible. The late-nineteenth-century business career of a certain Ludwig van Beethoven represents a spectacular low in this family tradition. Ludwig, the only son of Beethoven’s nephew Karl and thus the famous composer’s great-nephew, was sentenced to four years in prison on major fraud charges. He fled to America, where he initially worked for some time in the railway industry. He then ran a messenger service in New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia and finally embarked on a futuristic, original, and lucrative venture: a wheelchair service for retirees and the disabled at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago (1893). Some years later, Ludwig hung up a sign outside his Fourth Avenue offices in New York, bearing the proclamation New York Commissionaire Company—Louis von Hoven, Managing Director. He ultimately returned to Europe (presumably to Paris, but he may have also visited Brussels) and died penniless and destitute early in the twentieth century. The misery was compounded for his only son, Karl Julius van Beethoven, who wasted away in a Viennese military hospital in 1917. As he was the only remaining scion of the family, his demise also spelled the sad end to the Mechelen branch of the Van Beethoven name.

Since grandparents are usually exempt from childrearing responsibilities, to children they generally appear more likeable than their parents. This was certainly the case with Beethoven, who nurtured boundless admiration and affection for his grandfather, despite hardly having known him at all (Beethoven was barely three years old when Louis van Beethoven died on Christmas Eve in 1773). Beethoven cherished his idealized memories, and he dutifully transported his grandfather’s official portrait like a relic from one house to the next, all his life. For a long time, Beethoven’s greatest ambition was to follow in his grandfather’s footsteps and become Kapellmeister (preferably in Bonn or, failing that, at some prestigious court or other). But although things would ultimately take a different course, nothing could change the fact that the virtual presence of Beethoven’s grandfather served as beacon and buoy to him throughout his life.

2

Jean van Beethoven

THE ABSENT FATHER?

BEETHOVEN’S GRANDFATHER LOUIS generally receives gracious treatment by most Beethoven biographers and is portrayed as a respectable citizen: competent, dedicated, moral, kind wherever possible, and firm when necessary. Jean van Beethoven¹—the only surviving son of Louis, and Ludwig’s father—fares very differently. He is invariably portrayed as an outright failure: a frustrated, career-less, and debauched musician patently incapable of caring for his family, and the source of all of Beethoven’s childhood traumas. The stories are legion of the brutal, even tyrannical first music lessons given to Ludwig, of the way Jean supposedly projected his own failed musical ambitions onto his obviously gifted son. Nevertheless, a little perspective is in order. Leaving aside the obvious difficulties we face in relating to any eighteenth-century childrearing methods, it must be kept in mind that extreme forms of child discipline will always come across as objectionable, especially if administered by a parent. The fact that Beethoven, at five, received his first piano lessons standing on a footstool may have been unpleasant but was probably unavoidable. Forbidding Beethoven to play without a score or to improvise freely may have been cruel, but it was understandable in view of a training method that valued reproduction over production. Jean also quickly relinquished responsibility for young Ludwig’s musical education, much to his credit.

Jean van Beethoven’s negative image is primarily the result of the destruction wrought on his character toward the end of his career—particularly following his wife’s death in 1787—and the tendency among musicologists to extrapolate this tragic decline across his entire life. In reality, at least the first half of Jean van Beethoven’s career was completely normal. After primary school and a failed preparatory year at the Jesuit college, he was accepted into the electoral Kapelle as a soprano at the age of twelve. His father had given him a thorough grounding in singing, keyboard, and violin, and he was adequately equipped for a life as a professional musician. After his voice broke, he was appointed court musician in 1756 (at the age of sixteen). The position entitled him to a salary, but it would be 1764 before he earned enough to make ends meet. While it was common at the time for children to follow in their fathers’ footsteps, under the circumstances it is a fairly safe assumption that the adolescent Jean van Beethoven had a difficult time escaping the clutches of his ever-present and domineering father, who controlled his life both at home and at work. The release offered by his late-night jaunts in his father’s absence are therefore more a sign of a healthy mind rather than of depravity. The fact that these juvenile escapades had no effect on his work and reputation at the time is evinced by the private lessons he gave for many years, not only to the daughters of court officials and members of the aristocratic elite but also to the children of discerning colleagues. By all accounts he acquitted himself of his teaching duties most adequately.

Around the year 1770, two events took place that would leave a lasting impact on the rest of his life. In 1767, when he was twenty-seven and still unmarried (a rarity for the time), he met Maria Magdalena Keverich. A twenty-one-year-old from Ehrenbreitstein (Koblenz), she had already suffered many a misfortune. She lost her father and four of her five siblings at an early age, then married at sixteen, only to be bereaved of both her husband and her only son several years later. Louis van Beethoven initially objected to the match and even refused to attend the celebrations at Fort Ehrenbreitstein—clearly he considered the bride to be beneath the station of the Van Beethovens. Such was not the case, however; her deceased father had been head chef at the court in Trier and therefore enjoyed the same social status as a Kapellmeister in Bonn. Louis’s objections were more likely fueled by fears that the arrival of a young woman on the scene might undermine his authority within the family.

The second key event occurred in the spring of 1770, when Jean van Beethoven was offered a lucrative opportunity to join the Kapelle at St. Lambert’s Cathedral in Liège—further evidence that he was still functioning well at the time. He was eager to accept the invitation, perhaps in order to finally lead a life of his own (his father had already moved out, but lived on the same street and was still Jean’s immediate superior at court). Why Jean remained in Bonn is unknown; what we do know is that the elector objected to the transfer, and since there were no employment tribunals in the eighteenth century to represent workers’ fundamental rights and freedoms, Jean van Beethoven was forced to spend the rest of his career in Bonn.

This turn of events gives rise to a rather haunting prospect. If the transfer had gone ahead and Jean van Beethoven and his wife had moved to Liège in 1770, Ludwig van Beethoven would not have been born and raised in Bonn but would instead have been exposed to an entirely different set of experiences, influences, and career opportunities. He would have undoubtedly become a very different composer, if he had become a composer at all . . .

Some sources claim that in 1774 Jean van Beethoven submitted an application to succeed his deceased father as Kapellmeister.² This seems unlikely, as his curriculum vitae paled in comparison to those of Cajetan Mattioli and Andrea Lucchesi, who that year were appointed director of music and Kapellmeister, respectively. These brilliant Italians succeeded in breathing new life into music at the court in Bonn, in part by securing several prominent musicians for the ensemble who would later play a key role in the musical development of the young Ludwig. Such a feat would have been genuinely beyond Jean van Beethoven, and those responsible for the appointments undoubtedly knew it.

From that point on, Jean van Beethoven’s career fell into gradual decline. His rising alcohol consumption compromised the quality of his voice, and it was only his friendly relationship with Cologne’s first minister Kaspar Anton von Belderbusch that spared him any immediate repercussions. Like the Van Beethovens, Belderbusch had Flemish roots, and was also a family friend and even godfather to one of the children. We will delve more deeply into this intriguing individual’s extraordinary career later on, but suffice it to say that the questionable protection he offered to Jean van Beethoven was one of the few generous abuses of power that he exhibited during his many years in the electorate.

Jean van Beethoven collapsed utterly in 1787 when both his wife, Maria Magdalena, and his only daughter, Maria Margaretha, died within the span of several months. As a result, the family responsibilities landed squarely on the shoulders of the eldest son, Ludwig van Beethoven. This arrangement was later formalized