The impatient Beethoven, vexed at the tardy improvement of his health under the treatment of Vering, made that change of physicians contemplated in his letter to Wegeler. This was done some time in the winter 1801-1802, and is all the foundation there is for Schindler’s story of “a serious illness in the first months of this year for which he was treated by the highly esteemed physician Dr. Schmidt.” The remarkable list of compositions and publications belonging to this year is proof sufficient that he suffered no physical disability of such a nature as seriously to interrupt his ordinary vocations; as is also the utter silence of Ries, Breuning, Czerny, Dolealek and Beethoven himself. The tone of the letters written at the time is also significant on this point.

Concerning the failure of his project to follow the example set in 1800 and give a concert towards the close of the winter in the theatre we learn all we know from a letter from his brother Carl to Breitkopf and HÄrtel dated April 22, 1802. Therein we read:

When one looks down from the Kahlenberg towards Vienna in the bright, sweet springtime, the interesting country is almost worthy of Tennyson’s description:

Conspicuous are the villages, DÖbling, hard by the city Nussdorfer line, and Heiligenstadt, divided from DÖbling by a ridge of higher land in a deep gorge.

Dr. Schmidt, having enjoined upon Beethoven to spare his hearing as much as possible, he removed for the summer to the place last named. There is much and good reason to believe that his rooms were in a large peasant house still standing, on the elevated plain beyond the village on the road to Nussdorf, now with many neat cottages near, but then probably quite solitary. In those years, there was from his windows an unbroken view across fields, the Danube and the Marchfeld, to the Carpathian mountains that line the horizon. A few minutes’ walk citywards brought him to the baths of Heiligenstadt; or, in the opposite direction, to the secluded valley in which at another period he composed the “Pastoral” symphony. The vast increase of Vienna and its environs in population, has caused corresponding changes; but in 1802, that peasant house seems to have offered him everything he could desire; fresh air, sun, green fields, delightful walks, bathing, easy access to his physician, and yet a degree of solitude which now is not easy to conceive as having been attainable so near the capital.

Part of a letter written hence to Breitkopf and HÄrtel, but no longer in the possession of that house, affords another illustration of Beethoven’s excellent common sense and discrimination in all that pertained to his art.

The difficulties here mentioned, it will be noticed, are those of transcribing pianoforte music for other instruments; the contrary operation is so comparatively easy, that Beethoven very rarely performed it himself, but left it for the most part to young musicians, whose work he revised and corrected.

Without calling in question here the general statement in this citation, it may be remarked, that if Ries is right in respect to the arrangement of the Septet as a Quintet, the work remained in manuscript, for the one published was by Hoffmeister. But the Trio was begun and, as is believed, finished this year. Its history has been told. Ries’s statement is neither exhaustive nor altogether exact touching the arrangements of the Septet. Moreover, in 1806, without Beethoven’s knowledge or consent, he arranged the six Quartets, Op.18, and the three Trios for strings, Op.9, as Pianoforte Trios.

An interesting anecdote from the “Notizen” may be introduced here. “Count Browne,” says Ries,

The seclusion of Heiligenstadt was of itself so seductive to Beethoven, that the prudence of Dr. Schmidt in advising him to withdraw so much from society, may be doubted; the more, because the benefit to his hearing proved to be small or none. It gave him too many lonely hours in which to brood over his calamity; it enabled him still to flatter himself that his secret was yet safe; it led him to defer, too long for his peace of mind, the bitter moment of confession; and consequently to deprive himself needlessly of the tender compassion and ready sympathy of friends, whose lips were sealed so long as he withheld his confidence. But, in truth, the secret so jealously guarded was already known—but who could inform him of it?—though not long nor generally, as we learn from Ries.

It was well for Beethoven, when the time came for him to return to the city, and to resume the duties and obligations of his profession. To what depths of despondency he sometimes sank in those solitary hours at Heiligenstadt, is shown by a remarkable and most touching paper, written there just before his return to town, but never seen by other eyes until after his death. Although addressed to and intended for both his brothers, it is, as Schindler has remarked, “surprising and singular,” that the name “Johann” is left utterly blank throughout—not even being indicated by the usual.... It is couched in terms of energetic expression, rising occasionally to eloquence—somewhat rude and unpolished indeed, but, perhaps, for that reason the more striking. The manuscript[130] is so carefully written, and disfigured by so few erasures and corrections, as to prove the great pains taken with it before the final copy was made. The closing sentences, in which he discovers his expectations of an early death, have acquired double importance since the publication of Schindler’s suicide story, for the decisive manner in which they remove every possible suspicion that, even in his present hypochondria, he could contemplate such a crime.

Ries’s paragraph upon Beethoven’s deafness, in which he relates a circumstance alluded to in the document, is its most fitting introduction:

Following is the text of the document:

De profundis clamavit! And yet in that retirement whence came a paper of such profound sadness was wrought out the Symphony in D; a work whose grand and imposing introduction—brilliant Allegro, a Larghetto “so lovely, so pure and amiably conceived,” written in the scenes which gave inspiration to the divine “Pastorale” of which its serene tranquility seems the precursor; a Scherzo “as merry, wayward, skipping and charming as anything possible,” as even Oulibichef admits; and a Finale, the very intoxication of a spirit “intoxicated with fire”—made it, like the Quartets, an era both in the life of its author and in the history of instrumental music. In life, as in music, the more profoundly the depths of feeling are sounded in the Adagio, the more “merry to the verge of boisterousness” the Scherzo which follows. But who, reading that in October that beloved hope had been abandoned and the high courage which had often inspired him in the beautiful days of summer had disappeared, could anticipate that in November, through the wonderful elasticity of his nature, his mind would have so recovered its tone as to leave no trace visible of the so recent depression and gloom? Perhaps the mere act of giving his feelings vent in that extraordinary promemoria may have brought on the crisis, and from that moment the reaction may have begun.

The following letter to Zmeskall (to which the recipient appended the date, November, 1802) is whimsically written on both sides of a strip of very ordinary coarse writing paper fourteen and a half inches long by four and three-quarters wide:

Another letter to Zmeskall (who noted the date November 13, 1802, on it) runs as follows:

“Production” of what? The next Quintet, Op.29, no doubt. “At my house”—no longer in the Hamberger House on the Bastion, but in the one pointed out by Czerny: “Beethoven lived a little later (about 1802) on the Petersplatz, the corner house beside the Guard-house, vis-À-vis of my present lodgings, in the fourth (?) storey, where I visited him as often as I did (in the Tiefen Graben). If you will give me the pleasure of a visit (No. 576) beside Daum, second storey, I will show you the windows. There I visited several times every week.”[132]

What whim could have induced Beethoven to remove to this house with the bells of St. Peter’s on one side and those of St. Stephen’s sounding down upon him on the other, and he so suffering with his ears? Perhaps because friends were in the house. FÖrster’s earliest recollections of Beethoven date from this winter and this house; for his father’s dwelling was in the third storey above him. He remembers that Beethoven volunteered to instruct him in pianoforte playing, and that he was forced to rise at six in the morning and descend the cold stairs, child as he was, hardly six years of age, to take his lessons; and on one occasion going up again crying because his master had whipped his little fingers with one of the iron or steel needles used in knitting the coarse yarn jackets worn by women in service.

The composition of the Marches for Four Hands (Op.45), ordered by Count Browne, dates also from the house in the Petersplatz.

According to Jahn’s papers this statement came also from Czerny.

It is now necessary to turn back to November and again undertake the annoying and thankless task of examining a broad tissue of mingled fact and misrepresentation and severing the truth from the error; this time the subject is the relations which existed between Beethoven and his brothers in these years. A letter written by Kaspar is the occasion of taking it up here. Johann AndrÉ, a music publisher at Offenbach-on-the-Main, following the example of Hoffmeister, NÄgeli, Breitkopf and HÄrtel and others, now applied to Beethoven for manuscripts. Kaspar wrote the reply under date November 23, 1802:

This ludicrous display of the young man’s self-importance as “Royal Imperial Treasury Official” and Ludwig van Beethoven’s factotum is certainly very absurd; but hardly affords adequate grounds for the exceeding scorn of Schindler’s remarks upon it. It is in itself sufficiently provocative of prejudice against its writer. But a display of vanity and self-esteem is ridiculous, not criminal.

The general charge brought by Ries against Kaspar and Johann van Beethoven is this:

Two years after the “Notizen” left the press Schindler published his “Biography.” In it, although he first knew Beethoven in 1814, Johann some years later and Kaspar probably never, and therefore personally could know nothing of the facts of this period, yet he made the picture still darker. The special charge against Kaspar is that “about this time (in 1800) he began to rule Beethoven and made him suspicious of his most sincere friends and devotees by means of false representations and even jealousy.”

There is a class of writers in Germany, whom no regard for the feelings of the living, no veneration for the memories of the great dead, no scruples on the score of truth, and even, in some cases, not respect and admiration for the greatest living genius, talent, and literary or scientific fame, restrain from using, or moderate their use of, whatever can add piquancy to their appeals to the prurient imaginations of certain classes of readers. Delicacy of feeling and nicety of conscience are not to be expected of such heartless traducers of the living and the dead; but that even the most contemptible of the tribe, regardless of the pain which such a slander of her husband’s father must have caused to a widowed mother and her amiable children, could venture to represent Karl Kaspar van Beethoven as the seller of his wife’s virtue and a sharer in the wages of her shame, is as inconceivable, as that his book should be received with praise by critics and applause by the public; that it should gain its author pecuniary profit instead of a prison. The story is utterly without foundation; a pure invention and a falsehood, and is told, moreover, of poor Kaspar, at a time when as yet he had no wife! Unfortunately, this treatment of Beethoven’s brothers is not confined to writers of novels and feuilletonists. They, who profess to write history, no sooner strike upon this topic, than fancy seems to usurp the seat of reason and imagination to take the place of judgment. The lines of Ries expand into paragraphs; the sentences of Schindler into chapters. But the picture, thus overdrawn and exaggerated, in some degree corrects itself; for if the brothers were really as represented, what is to be thought of Beethoven if he in fact was so led, controlled and held in subjection by them as described?

Now, what is really known of Karl Kaspar and Johann, though it sufficiently confutes much of the calumnious nonsense which has been printed about them, is not fitted to convey any very exalted idea of their characters. The same Frau Karth, who remembered Ludwig in his youth as always “gentle and lovable,” related that Kaspar was less kindly in his disposition, “proud and presumptuous,” and that Johann “was a bit stupid, yet very good-natured.” And such they were in manhood. Kaspar, like Ludwig, was very passionate, but more violent in his sudden wrath; Johann, slow to wrath and placable. Notwithstanding the poverty of his youth and early manhood, it is not known that Kaspar was avaricious; but Johann had felt too bitterly the misery of want and dependence, and became penurious. After he had accumulated a moderate fortune, the contests between his avarice and the desire to display his wealth led to very ludicrous exhibitions. In a word, Beethoven was not a phenomenon of goodness, nor were his brothers monsters of iniquity. That both Ries and Schindler wrote honestly has not been doubted; but common justice demands the reminder that they wrote under the bias of strong personal dislike to one or both brothers. Ries wrote impressions received at a very early time of life, and records opinions formed upon incomplete data. Schindler wrote entirely upon hearsay. Ries had not completed his twenty-first year when he departed from Vienna (1805). Howsoever strong were Beethoven’s gratitude to Franz Ries and affection for Ferdinand, fourteen years was too great a disparity in age to allow that trustful and familiar intercourse between master and pupil which could enable the latter to speak with full knowledge; nor does a man of Beethoven’s age and position turn from old and valued friends, like the Lichnowskys, Breuning, Zmeskall and others of whatever names, to make a youth of from 18 to 20 years, a new-comer and previously a stranger, even though a favorite pupil, his confidential adviser. Facts confirm the proposition in this case. We know that Beethoven in 1801 imparted grave matters to Wegeler and Amenda, of which Ries a year later had only received intimation from Breuning; and other circumstances of which he knew nothing are recorded in the testament of 1802. The charges against the brothers, both of Ries and Schindler, are general in terms; Ries only giving specifications or instances in proof. Schindler may be passed by as but repeating the “Notizen.” Now, the onus of Ries’s charges is this:

First: that Kaspar thrust himself impertinently into his brother’s business; second: that both brothers intrigued to isolate Beethoven from his intimate friends and that their machinations were in many cases successful.

To the first point it is to be remarked: Besides Beethoven’s often expressed disinclination to engage personally in negotiations for the sale of his works—although when he did he showed no lack of a keen eye to profits—his physical and mental condition at this period of his life often rendered the assistance of an agent indispensable. Accounts were to be kept with half a dozen publishers; letters received upon business were numerous and often demanded prompt replies; proof-sheets were constantly arriving for revision and correction; copyists required supervision; an abundance of minor matters continually coming up and needing attention when Beethoven might be on his long rambles over hill and dale, the last man to be found in an emergency. One asks with astonishment, how could so obvious a necessity for a confidential agent have escaped notice? Who should or could this agent be but his brother Kaspar?[133] He held an honorable place in a public office, the duties of which necessarily implied the possession of those talents for, and habits of, prompt and skillful performance of business which his early receipt of salary and his regular advancement in position show that he really did possess; his duties detained him in the city at all times, occasional short vacations excepted, and yet left him ample leisure to attend to his brother’s affairs; he was a musician by education and fully competent to render valuable service in that “fearful period of arrangements”—as it is well known he did. What would have justly been said of Beethoven if he had passed by one so eminently qualified for the task—one on whom the paternal relation and his own long continued care and protection had given him so many claims—and had transferred the burden from his own shoulders to those of other friends? But if, after adequate trial, the agent proved unsatisfactory, the case would be changed and the principal might with propriety seek needed assistance in other quarters. And precisely this appears to have occurred; for after a few years Kaspar disappears almost entirely from our history in connection with his brother’s pecuniary affairs. This fact is stronger evidence than anything in Ries’s statements, that Beethoven became dissatisfied with his brother’s management, and would have still more weight had he been less fickle, inconstant and undecided in matters of business.[134]

Seyfried, whose acquaintance with Beethoven ripened just at this time into intimacy, and who in 1802-’05 had the best possible opportunities for observation, beheld the relations between the brothers with far less jaundiced eyes than Ries. He says:

At that time Seyfried, like Ries, was ignorant of the circumstances detailed to Wegeler and Amenda and in the testament; but the admirable selection of words in the closing phrase will strike all who have had occasion to read Beethoven’s countless notes asking advice or aid in matters which most men would deem too trivial for even a passing word in conversation. The specifications of Ries in his charges against Kaspar will not long detain us. The story of the quarrel over the disposition of the NÄgeli Sonatas may stand in all its ugliness and with no comment save the suggestion of the possibility that Kaspar’s word as Ludwig’s agent may have been pledged to the Leipsic publisher. The one really specific charge of Ries is the one on page 124 of the “Notizen”:

By “trifles” Ries, of course, here refers to the “Bagatelles, Op.33, par Louis van Beethoven, 1782,” as the manuscript is superscribed, published in the spring of 1803. The manuscript itself proves Ries to be in error. The words “par Louis van Beethoven” are in a hand unlike anything known to the present writer from Beethoven’s pen. This fact, together with a something not easily described in the appearance of the notes, suggests the idea that this copy of the “Bagatelles” was made by Kaspar, and compiled, except No. 6 and perhaps one other, from the compositions of Beethoven in his boyhood. But the corrections—the words Andante gracioso, Scherzo Allegro, Allegretto con una certa espressione parlante, etc., written with lead pencil or a different ink, are certainly from Beethoven’s own hand; also, in still another ink, the thoroughly Beethovenish “Op.33.” No one can mistake that. This work most assuredly was never “secretly given to the public.”[135]

The only Album composition known to have been published in those years is the song with variations, “Ich denke dein”; and this Beethoven himself had offered to Hoffmeister before it was printed by the Kunst- und Industrie-Comptoir.

The “songs” referred to by Ries can only be those of Op.52. The original manuscript, having disappeared, neither refutes nor confirms his opinion. It is, however, exceedingly doubtful that Beethoven’s brothers would have dared give an opus number to a stolen publication. A priori Ries is more likely to be in error here than in regard to the “Bagatelles.” Now, the only contemporary criticism upon the latter which has been discovered, is a single line in Moll’s “Annalen der Literatur” (Vienna, 1804): “Deserve the title in every sense of the word.” Upon the “Song with Variations” no notice whatever has been found. But, Opus 52 was received by the “Allgemeine Musik-Zeitung” of August 28, 1805, in this style; Opera 47 and 38 having been duly praised, the writer continues:

And more like this, illustrated by copying “Das BlÜmchen Wunderhold.” These citations suggest an obvious explanation of Ries’s mistake, namely: Beethoven, mortified, ashamed, angry, purposely left him to believe that he was innocent of the publication of these compositions. It was one of the advantages of having Kaspar in Vienna, that the responsibility of such false steps could be shifted upon him. Those who are predetermined not to admit in Beethoven’s character any of the faults, frailties and shortcomings of our common human nature, will of course censure this explanation. Let them propose a better.[136] Finally: In the paragraph upon the efforts of Beethoven’s brothers to keep all of the composer’s friends away from him it is easy to read between the lines that it was Ries himself who oft “was rebuked for his good-nature and frankness,” which of itself to some extent lessens the force of the charge. But it is best met by the first half of the Will, or testament, which, with the confessions to Wegeler and Amenda, as above said, open to our knowledge an inner life of the writer studiously concealed from his protÉgÉ.

In this solemn document, written as he supposed upon the brink of the grave, Beethoven touches upon this very question. We learn from his own affecting words, that the cause of his separation from friends lay, not in the machinations of his brothers, but in his own sensitiveness. He records for future use, what he cannot now explain without disclosing his jealously guarded secret. That record now serves a double purpose; it relieves Kaspar and Johann from a portion of the odium so long cast upon their memories; and proves Ries to be, in part at least, in error, without impugning his veracity. It is very probable Ries never saw the will. Had he known and carefully read it, the prejudices of his youth must have been weakened, the opinions founded upon partial knowledge modified. He was of too noble a nature not to have gladly seen the memories of the dead vindicated—not to have been struck with and affected by the words of his deceased master: “To you, brother Carl, I give special thanks for the attachment you have displayed towards me of late.”

Pass we to another topic.

On frequent occasions (says Ries), he showed a truly paternal interest in me. From this source there sprang the written order (in 1802), which he sent me in a fit of anger because of an unpleasant predicament into which Carl van Beethoven had gotten me. Beethoven wrote: “You do not need to come to Heiligenstadt; I have no time to lose.” At the time Count Browne was indulging himself with pleasures in which I was taking part, he being kindly disposed towards me, and was in consequence neglecting my lessons.