Daniel Gregory Mason

CHAPTER IX
CONCLUSION

The third and last period of Beethoven’s life, from 1813 to 1827, during which he produced the remarkable later pianoforte sonatas and string quartets, the Quintet, opus 104, the Wind Octet, opus 103, the noble Missa Solemnis, which he considered his greatest work, and the immortal Ninth or Choral Symphony, was a time of affliction and wretchedness. The record of these bitter years of the deaf, lonely, poverty-hounded master, surrounded by unfeeling relatives and indifferent and dishonest servants, stricken with disease, and laboring through all to realize his grand artistic conceptions, is relieved only by his unflinching fortitude and grim humor. The heroic spirit of the man matched his misfortunes. For him, if for any one, the boast of the stoic poet would have been justifiable:

There was something almost diabolically sinister in the fate that placed Beethoven, so sensitive to personalities, so peculiarly in need of tranquillity for the pursuit of his ideas, in the midst of such a pack of rascally kindred. The great canker of his life was his nephew, Carl, left his ward, in 1815, by the death of his brother. A loafer in billiard-rooms, a devotee of cheap amours, a dissipated, frivolous, and wholly irreverent weakling, this young man looked upon his uncle simply as a source of florins, having apparently no respect for his age, his sufferings, or his genius. To make matters worse, Beethoven found it necessary, in order to secure the boy’s custody, to go to law against his mother, whom he picturesquely and significantly named “The Queen of the Night.” He was involved in endless lawsuits to gain the very responsibilities which proved so heavy and so fruitless. Carl rewarded all this care and love by holding clandestine meetings with his mother, by squandering his uncle’s hard-earned money, by neglecting the commissions which the composer, deaf and ill, was obliged to entrust to him; and finally, brought to the verge of despair by his own weakness, he attempted suicide, was locked up in an asylum, and was eventually packed off to the army. In all Beethoven’s struggles with his nephew he got no help from the boy’s other uncle, the “land-owner” of the anecdote, Johann van Beethoven, whom the composer bitterly called his “pseudo-brother.” This complacent apothecary saw no need of helping a brother who was one of the greatest artists living, and whose life was being slowly sapped by sordid anxieties. Doubtless Beethoven was a man difficult to help—a man of high temper, perverse whims, uncompromising speech. But the story, nevertheless, is an unpleasant one, in which young Carl and old Johann Beethoven play unenviable rÔles.

In his contact with these wretched relatives Beethoven was not supported by a comfortable, congenial home. A bachelor, poor, absent-minded, and engrossed in abstract pursuits, he was at the mercy of rapacious landlords and self-seeking or incompetent servants. After 1816, when, largely for his nephew’s sake, he began keeping house, he was given hardly a moment of ease by what he called his “domestic rabble.” His letters are full of indignant protests or half-humorous jibes against the old “witch,” or “Satanas,” as he called his housekeeper—a half-crazy beldame who not only neglected his table and let the dust thicken on his books, but on one occasion actually used the manuscript of a part of his great Mass to wrap around old boots. “My dear Son,” he writes (it was thus that he habitually addressed his nephew), “It is impossible to permit this to continue any longer; no soup to-day, no beef, no eggs, and at last broiled meat from the inn! Little as I require what nourishes the body, as you know, still the present state of things is really too bad, besides being every moment in danger of being poisoned.” Another time he exclaims: “Here comes Satanas.... What a reproach to our civilization to stand in need of a class like this, and to have those whom we despise constantly near us.” How must Beethoven have felt when the nephew whom he had trusted as a son descended so low as to borrow money surreptitiously from, this very “Satanas”? “Last Sunday,” he writes, “you again borrowed 1 florin 15 kreutzers from the housekeeper, from a mean old kitchen wench,—this was already forbidden,—and it is the same in all things. What avail even the most gentle reproofs? They merely serve to embitter you. But do not be uneasy; I shall continue to care for you as much as ever.”

Another constant harassment of Beethoven in his later years was poverty. The annuity settled upon him by his patrons was so seriously decreased by a depreciation in the value of paper money and by the deaths of some of the donors that it eventually amounted to only four hundred dollars a year. “If my salary,” he wrote in 1822, “were not so far reduced as to be no salary at all, I would write nothing but symphonies for a full orchestra, and church music, or at most quartets.” As it was, he had to devote a part of his time to writing for money, a servitude intensely distasteful to one so devoted to high artistic ideals, so constitutionally incapable of compromise. He puts the best face on the matter, jokes about it as he does about everything; but it is obvious that he suffered much to gather the florins his nephew so easily spent. “I wander about here with music paper, among the hills and dales and valleys, and scribble a great deal to get my daily bread; for I have brought things to such a pass ... that in order to gain time for a great composition, I must always previously scrawl away a good deal for the sake of money.” But his attitude towards publishers remained dignified, considerate; he knew how to respect his own work and rights without falling into the petty egotism of the so-called “artistic temperament.” “I must apprise you,” he writes Herr Peters of the well-known Leipzig publishing house, “that I cannot accept less than 50 ducats for a string quartet, and 70 for a pianoforte one, without incurring loss; indeed, I have repeatedly been offered more than 50 ducats for a violin quartet. I am, however, always unwilling to ask more than necessary, so I adhere to the sum of 50 ducats, which is, in fact, nowadays the usual price. I feel positively ashamed when I have to ask a price for a really great work. Still, such is my position that it obliges me to secure every possible advantage. It is very different, however, with the work itself; when I never, thank God, think of profit, but solely of how I write it.” It is a similar dignified sense of his responsibilities, far removed from vanity, that prompts him to request of an editor notice of his nomination as an honorary member of the Royal Swedish Musical Academy. “Although neither vain nor ambitious,” he says, “still I consider it advisable not wholly to pass over such an occurrence, as in practical life we must live and work for others, who may often eventually benefit by it.” The sincerity of these convictions is proved by the fact that after Beethoven’s death in poverty, eight bank-shares were found among his papers, carefully preserved by him for the legacy of his nephew.

Beethoven’s deafness went on steadily increasing. That is a pathetic picture his friend Schindler gives of him, improvising with all the enthusiasm of his inner inspiration on the violin or the viola, which, because of his inability to tune them, gave out the most distressing, discordant sounds. On the piano it was but little better; he had to guide himself largely by sight, and his touch became harsh and heavy. The effect of this malady on his character, already mentioned in Chapter VII, and recognized by himself in his “Will,”[47] grew as time went on more profound. He became morbidly suspicious, withdrew himself entirely from casual social intercourse, and distrusted even his best friends. Friendly consultations in his behalf he interpreted as collusions against him, and resented with all the violent anger of his intense, willful, and frank nature. When Lichnowsky, Schuppanzigh, and Schindler met at his room, as if by chance, to discuss a concert they were planning for the presentation of the Missa Solemnis and the Ninth Symphony, his suspicions were so aroused that he wrote the three faithful disciples as follows:

To Lichnowsky:

“Insincerity I despise; visit me no more; my concert is not to take place.

“Beethoven.”

To Schuppanzigh:

“Come no more to see me. I give no concert.

“Beethoven.”

To Schindler:

“Do not come to me till I summon you. No concert.

“Beethoven.”

The dogmatic, domineering habit of mind here illustrated, the obverse side of Beethoven’s strong will and high self-reliance, doubtless did much to intensify the loneliness and the difficulties of his old age. Yet even here there is something noble, something that commands as much admiration as pity, about this wounded hero, this lion at bay.

The last scene of Beethoven’s troublous life opens in October, 1826, when, already aged and broken, though but fifty-six years old, he was obliged to seek, in the house of his “pseudo-brother” Johann, at Krems, fifty miles from Vienna, a refuge for Carl, who had been ordered out of Vienna by the civil authorities after his attempt at suicide. Sir George Grove gives a picture of the oddly-assorted group of actors: “The pompous money-loving land-proprietor; his wife, a common frivolous woman of questionable character; the ne’er-do-well nephew, intensely selfish and ready to make game of his uncle or to make love to his aunt; and in the midst of them all the great composer—deaf, untidy, unpresentable, setting every household rule at defiance, by turns entirely absorbed and pertinaciously boisterous, exploding in rough jokes and hoarse laughter, or bursting into sudden fury at some absolute misconception.” Beethoven, whose health was already seriously undermined, was obliged to sit in a cold room at his work, his brother being unwilling to go to the expense of a fire, and to eat unwholesome, ill-cooked food, for which however board-money was rigorously exacted. By early December there was an open rupture between the two brothers, and the composer and Carl, resolved to leave the place, yet denied the closed carriage of the niggardly Johann, risked the fifty-mile journey, in winter weather, in a hired open wagon. It was Beethoven’s death blow. Reaching home after two days’ exposure, he took to his bed, with his digestive troubles much aggravated, and an inflammation of the lungs. A little later dropsy set in, and four operations had to be undergone. As the doctors drew out the water Beethoven said grimly: “Better from my belly than from my pen.” Early in the new year he rallied, and planned fresh compositions. He amused himself with the romances of Scott, but at last threw them down, exclaiming angrily: “The man writes for money.” Soon he began to fail again. On March 24th, rapidly sinking, he just found strength to whisper to the friends at his bedside: “Plaudite, amici, commÈdia finita est.” After a desperate struggle of two days, his vigorous constitution at last succumbed, and he died on the evening of March 26th, 1827.

Of the compositions of Beethoven’s last period the most conflicting opinions have been held. Musicians of the Wagner and Liszt school have seen in the Ninth Symphony the opening of a door into a new realm of art, greater, freer, more deeply expressive than any that had gone before. Critics less in sympathy with the tendencies of romanticism, however, have interpreted the last phase of Beethoven’s career as a decadence, the necessary result of flagging vitality and of his previous exhaustion of the legitimate effects of pure music. They have pointed out that his deafness made him indifferent to the actual sensuous effect of his combinations of tone; that his increasing fondness for the subtleties of polyphony was not supported by adequate early training; and that the isolation and sufferings of his life gradually undermined the sanity and marred the balance of his art. Probably there is some truth in each of these views.

It is certain that Beethoven, in his last quartets and pianoforte sonatas, and in the Ninth Symphony, showed for the first time the feasibility of those special, highly individualized expressions of feeling in music which were afterwards wrought out in great variety and profusion by Schubert, Schumann, Mendelssohn, Chopin, Liszt, and the other composers of the Romantic school. He not only made music, as we have already seen, a language as well as an art, but he set the fashion, in his last compositions, of regarding its powers of eloquent and definite utterance as of even greater importance than its general plastic beauty. From the point of view of interest, this was an advance; and judged from this standpoint Beethoven was a pioneer in that movement towards characteristic expression which has been so important a part of the musical activity of our time.

But every advance, in art as well as in life, is made at a certain cost, and the price of this increase in complexity and preciseness of expression was a loss of artistic wholeness and poise. As a monument of pure beauty embodied in tones, the Ninth Symphony hardly holds its own beside the Eighth, so much smaller and less ambitious. One misses in it the sense of reserve power, of restraint, of firmly controlled balance of means and ends. The passionate spirit of the work jars and disrupts its body. Music is strained to its limit of power; and great as is the result, the success seems too much like a feat of genius, done in despite of natural laws. In all Beethoven’s later works there is this uncomfortable sense of strain and labor. He achieves the well-nigh impossible, but it is at the cost of serenity.

In view of the circumstances, we may think it could hardly have been otherwise. Long-continued deafness had made Beethoven insensitive to the sensuous basis of music. He considered less and less the actual sound of his fabric of tones, more and more their purely intellectual and ideal relations. The pages of the final sonatas and quartets bristle with passages as distressing to hear as they are interesting to contemplate. This tendency to harshness was reinforced by his growing addiction to contrapuntal writing. His natural style was that monophonic or harmonic style initiated by the Florentine reformers and passed on to him through Haydn and Mozart. But as he meditated, ever more profoundly, he came to see its inadequacy, and constantly felt out more and more in the direction of polyphony; he endeavored to graft the fugue and the canon upon sonata-form. His early training, however, was insufficient for such a task; his limitations in counterpoint had been correctly gauged by his teacher, Albrechtsberger; and when in his maturity he attempted to write polyphonically, he became crabbed, awkward, and discordant. His instinct was right, but his skill did not support him. In choral writing, again, to which he devoted himself with increasing enthusiasm as he grew older, he was at a disadvantage. He disregarded the natural conditions of the voice; he never really mastered vocal style; and when he introduced a chorus into his last and most gigantic symphony, he attempted more than he could satisfactorily execute. The choral part of that symphony is exceedingly difficult; and the audience is made almost as uneasy by it as the chorus.

The isolation in which he finally came to live, and the natural independence of his character, added their influence to those of physical and technical limitations. As he cared less for general intelligibility, and more for the logical carrying out, to their extremes, of the implications of his ideas, his music became more and more abstruse. His constantly increasing interest in intellectual subtleties, on which his great and lonely mind naturally concentrated itself, was not regulated by a sufficient perception of the sensuous qualities of his work—for he was deaf; and consequently the balance was destroyed, the great sanative touch of the actual was lost, and his music became distorted and grotesque. Some of the fugues in his later quartets and piano sonatas sound more like audible problems in chess or mathematics than like “the concord of sweet sounds.”

Suffering so extreme as Beethoven’s had its inevitable effect, too, on the whole general tone and quality of his artistic utterance. He learned the lessons of sorrow as few men have ever learned them; temporal misfortune taught him to impersonalize his ideals, to turn to the eternal sources of hope in his inmost spirit, and to interpret the joys and sorrows not of his separate self merely, but of all humanity; but at the same time that his spirit was thus chastened, purified, and expanded, it was shorn of its primitive vigor, its pristine elasticity, energy, and animation. If the music of his prime is the music of pagan idealism, that of his later years is the music of stoicism—the stern and noble stoicism of Marcus Aurelius, touched with the tenderness and spiritual joy of Christ. It breathes a high serenity, a transfigured human happiness, attainable only to a great soul after much suffering. If any mortal artist could be justified in such a boast, Beethoven was justified when he wrote: “I do not fear for my works. No evil can befall them; and whosoever shall understand them, he shall be freed from all the misery that burdens mankind.”

As we take a last backward glance over the life of Beethoven, and over that larger life of the art of music in the classical period, of which it was the final stage, we cannot but be profoundly impressed by the unity and continuity of the whole evolution. From its first slight and tentative beginnings in the experiments of the Florentine reformers, secular music, the art of expressing through the medium of tones, the full, free, and harmonious emotional life of modern idealism gradually acquired, through the labors of the seventeenth-century composers, definiteness of aim and technical resources. Then, in the work of Haydn and Mozart, it reached the stage of maturity, of self-consciousness; it became flexible, various, many-sided, adequate to the demands made upon it; it emerged from childhood, and took its honored place in the circle of independent and recognized arts. Finally, it was brought by Beethoven to its ripe perfection, its full flowering. It was made to say all that, within its native limitations, it was capable of saying. It reached the fullness of life beyond which it could live only by breaking itself up into new types, as the old plant scatters forth seeds. And even these new types were dimly divined, and suggested to his successors, by Beethoven. Was it not his effort to express, in absolute music, the most various shades of personal, highly specialized feeling, vigorous, sentimental, mystical, or elfishly wayward, that inspired the romantic composers, Schubert, Schumann, Chopin, and their fellows, to pursue even further the same quest? Was it not his feeling out toward novel dramatic effects in the combined chorus and orchestra, in the Ninth Symphony, that showed Wagner the path he must take? Was it not his attempts, defeated by insufficient technical skill, to combine the polyphony of the sixteenth century with the harmonic and rhythmic structure of the nineteenth, that suggested to Brahms, more fully equipped, his great enterprise? Thus even the failures of a great man are full of promise; and Beethoven, and all his forerunners too, still live and speak to us in the music of to-day.