We are now to learn of the calamitous consequences of Beethoven’s effort to be a foster-father to the son of his dead brother Kaspar. The tale is one that has been fruitful of fiction in most of the writings which have dealt with the life-history of the great composer; nor is the circumstance to be wondered at. There is still some obscurity in the story, and if there is anything in the melancholy lot of the great man, next to his supreme affliction, calculated to challenge the pity of the world, it is the manner in which his efforts to attach to himself the one human being for whom he felt affection were requited. There is no more pitiful picture in the history of great men than that presented by his devotion to the lad in whom, for a reason which must have seemed to him more inscrutable than his own physical calamity, he could not inspire a spark of love or a scintilla of gratitude. It was an unwise devotion and an ill-directed effort, but that does not alter the case. From the beginning, all of his friends recognized Beethoven’s unfitness for the office of guardian of his nephew. He was incapacitated for it by his occupation, his irregular mode of life, his lack of understanding of a child’s nature, his irresolute mind, his infirmities of temper, and the wretchedness of his domestic surroundings due to his ignorance of and indifference to the things essential to the amenities and comforts of social life. He did not assume the guardianship in a spirit of gentle obedience to a dying brother’s request; he violently wrested it unto himself alone in defiance of that brother’s last entreaties. There can be no doubt but that he believed that in doing so he was performing a pious duty toward his own flesh and blood and acting for the good of the child and the welfare of the community. He was proud of the boy’s intellectual gifts, which were out of the ordinary; he dreamed of seeing him great and respected in the eyes of the world; he wanted loving companionship now, and in his old age; he hungered for sympathy and for help which would not keep him in bonds of obligation to men whose disinterestedness he could not understand because of his suspicious disposition; he desired to see by his side and in his kin an incarnation of that polite learning and that practical knowledge of worldly affairs which had been denied to him. All his aims were laudable, all his desires natural and praiseworthy; but he was the last man in the world to know how to attain them. There can be no doubt that his stubborn insistence upon making himself the sole director of the welfare of his ward cost him the sympathy, perhaps also the respect and regard, of many of those whose counsel he was perforce compelled to seek. For a long time until the final and woeful trial came it separated him from the oldest and truest friend that he had in Vienna—Stephan von Breuning. It tested the patience and tried the forbearance of those who helped him in his mistaken zeal.

Moreover, it may be said without harshness or injustice to his memory that its consequences to his own moral nature were most deplorable. In a mind and heart prone to equity and tenderness it developed a strange capacity for cruel injustice. Aided by his native irresolution it twisted his judgment and turned his conduct into paradox. To satisfy his own love for the boy he strove fiercely to stifle a child’s natural affection for its mother. He thought that love for himself would grow out of hatred of the woman, though the passion which he tried to evoke was abhorrent to every instinct of nature. It matters not that the mother of Karl was profligate and lewd. Once a glimmer of that fact dawned upon him. It was while he was struggling to prevent all intercourse between the widow and her child in the early years that he was compelled to admit that to a child under all circumstances a mother is a mother still; but he made the confession to extenuate the conduct of the boy, not to justify the solicitude of the woman. His memory of his own mother, the sweet, patient sufferer of Bonn, was to him like a benison his whole life long. “Who was happier than I when I could still speak the sweet word ‘mother’ and have it heard,” he wrote to Dr. Schade, who had helped him on his sorrowful journey from Vienna to Bonn in 1787. But from the time that his brother Kaspar died until he himself gave up the ghost he was unswervingly occupied in preventing communication between Kaspar’s widow and her son. After more than twelve years he found that what he had tried to eradicate in the child, still lived in the youth. He had fought against nature and failed; and the failure filled him with bitterness, added to his hatred of the woman and his disappointment with the son. Such intensity of malevolence, though it may have had its origin in the profoundest conviction of virtuous purpose, could not fail to be prejudicial to his own moral character. So, also, his solicitude for his ward’s material welfare, which extended to a time when he should no longer be able to make provision for him, seems to have warped his nature. It weakened his pride; distorted his moral view; subjected him, not always unjustly, to accusation of dishonesty in his dealings with his patrons and publishers; made him parsimonious, and at the last brought upon him the reproach of having begged alms of his English friends, though possessed of property which might easily and quickly have been converted into money to supply his last needs more than generously.

To protect him against indictment for these moral flaws, many of Beethoven’s biographers thought, and still think, it necessary or justifiable to veil the truth and magnify the transgressions of his kindred and friends. His earliest apologists may have had other reasons besides these for so doing; his present biographers have none. By his own decree the world is entitled to know the truth. Schindler was embittered against Holz; Holz against Schindler; both against Johann van Beethoven, the brother; Beethoven himself taught his nephew to despise his uncle Johann as well as Schindler; and all three—Schindler, Holz and Johann—commissioned to that end, reported their observations of the lad’s shortcomings to his guardian. He accepted everything they said against the boy as he did everything they said against each other; indeed, his suspicious nature made him prone to believe evil of everyone near to him; and we do not know of a certainty that their reports were always within the bounds of strict veracity. After the tragedy they were unanimous in condemnation of the misguided, wayward, wicked youth and in praise of Beethoven’s magnanimity and self-sacrifice; but the evidence of helpful advice, warning and admonition to the mariner who was sailing a craft on a sea full of dangers to which nature had made him blind is not plentiful. Holz was young. He had scarcely finished sowing his own wild oats, and he seems to have been more lenient in his judgment than his elders, though just as convinced of the dangers into which the young man was running during the fateful last two years; but the few practical suggestions which we find him making do not seem to have been accepted. He was himself, like everybody else, under suspicion in Beethoven’s mind.

Concerning the details of the always disgraceful and at the end tragical conduct of Beethoven’s nephew much obscurity is left after the most painstaking study of the evidence to be found in the contemporary documents which have been preserved; but it is to these documents that appeal must be made if the truth is to be learned, not to the generalizations of romancing biographers. Twenty-nine letters written by Beethoven to the youth came into the hands of Beethoven after the attempt at suicide and through Schindler into the Royal Library at Berlin. However they may be viewed, they are a pathetic monument. They are a deeply affecting memorial of his almost idolatrous love for one wholly unworthy to receive it; but they also help measurably to explain why Beethoven defeated his own benevolent intentions. In them the paradoxes in his nature are piled one on top of the other. Alternately they breathe tender affection, gentle admonition and violent accusation; pride in the lad’s mental gifts, hope for his future, and loathing of his conduct; proclamations of his own self-sacrificing devotion set off against his ward’s ingratitude; pleadings that the boy love him and hate his mother; proud condemnation and piteous prayers for forgiveness; petitions for the boy’s reformation and promises of betterment in his own conduct. They give out the light in which the story must be told, though they contribute but little to the record of concrete facts. They leave us to conjecture and surmise as to many of the nephew’s motives and actual doings. It is from the pages of the Conversation Books of 1825 and 1826 that practically all of the attested truth concerning the happenings, their causes and effects, must be learned. Letters and these records of conversations are at the base of the following recital.[159]

Karl was taken from his studies at the BlÖchlinger Institute in the fall of 1823 and matriculated at the University of Vienna, where he pursued studies in philology from that time until the summer of 1825. Though his gifts were unquestioned and his attainments such as to make Beethoven eager to exploit them, he was not an industrious student. He seems to have experienced a desire to abandon the career which his uncle wished him to follow—that of a professor of languages, no doubt—before he had sat under the university lectures a year. His zeal for study soon evaporated, he spent much time in idle amusements, neglected to visit his uncle with the regularity expected from him, and soon broached the subject of a change in his intended pursuits. As early as 1824 he expressed a desire to enter the army. The thought was little short of appalling to Beethoven, who was obliged, however, at last to listen to arguments in favor of a mercantile career. Karl pointed out that a bookkeeper earned a great deal more money than a professor, that trade was honorable, and that he intended to keep on with his study of the languages, especially Greek, for his own pleasure and intellectual profit. Meanwhile he had continued his attendance on the lectures at the university, and it was not until towards the end of the Easter semester of 1825 that Beethoven consented to the change, entered him in the Polytechnic Institute, and arranged to have the vice-director of the Institute, Dr. Reisser, appointed co-guardian in place of Peters, with whom he took counsel as he also did, in great likelihood, with Stephan von Breuning. There were two great admirers of Beethoven’s music in the Institute, Reisser and Dr. Ignaz von Sonnleithner, one of the teachers, and after Karl had been placed under the supervision of a government official named Schlemmer, who lived in the Alleegasse adjacent to the Karlskirche, with whom the lad took lodgings, all seemed again to be well. He entered the Institute about Easter, 1825, and, if his own statements are to be accepted (Dr. Reisser, too, makes favorable reports of him), he made a good beginning in his new studies. His Sundays and holidays during the ensuing summer were spent with his uncle at Baden, where he was kept at work, too assiduously perhaps, writing Beethoven’s letters, and filling numerous other commissions. But his zeal did not endure. He became negligent in his studies; work became irksome and the pleasures of the city alluring. He was drawn willingly into the maelstrom of Viennese life. He grew fond of billiards, dancing and the theatre; he kept low company. Of all this there can be no doubt. Beethoven kept himself informed as to his conduct through Holz, through his brother, and sometimes went to Vienna himself to make inquiries. When Karl comes to Baden, Beethoven charges him with his shortcomings and there are unseemly scenes between the two. At first Karl seeks to be conciliatory, but it is only too plain that he is not always frank and truthful in his replies. The chronological course of events as learned from the Conversation Books cannot be set down with exactitude; nor is it necessary that it should. A young rake’s progress can easily be imagined, but some incidents may be included in this narrative, as showing the changing attitude of guardian and ward, uncle and nephew, toward each other, and some of the steps which led to the final catastrophe.

At an early date in this period Beethoven had become suspicious of the character of some of Karl’s associates, particularly of a lad of his own age named Niemetz, whose acquaintance, it was said, he made at his mother’s. Whether or not this is true cannot be proved; but if Beethoven believed it that fact sufficed to convince him of the young man’s moral turpitude. Certain it is that the mother knew Niemetz and thought as well of him as the uncle thought ill, for one of her exclamations after the attempt at self-destruction, reported to Beethoven, was, “What will good Niemetz say!” Beethoven forbade the association and a violent quarrel ensued in Baden, where Karl introduced his friend to his uncle. It seems likely that the encounter took place in a public room and that Beethoven could not wait until he had reached the privacy of his lodgings before expressing his dissatisfaction with the young man; for his remarks to Karl as well as the latter’s replies are written in the book. Beethoven’s denunciations stir up a spirit of defiance in his ward; he finally declares flatly that Niemetz had cheered his unhappy hours at BlÖchlinger’s and that he would not now lie by saying that he would cease loving his friend or admit that he had a bad character.

Beethoven learns that Karl goes to the theatre, has been seen in the company of lewd women, frequents dancing places, plays billiards and borrows money. Holz, who once suggests the advisability of assuming the co-guardianship, thinks it might be a good thing could he attach the young man to himself by becoming his often companion. He invites him to a beerhouse to learn his drinking habits and reports favorably upon them. He talks with Karl about the theatre and advises him to go less to the Josephstadt playhouse and oftener to the Burg, where classical pieces are played; and learning that Karl attends the former because it costs him nothing, ventures the statement that his uncle will allow him money for the theatre if he will but go to the better place. Beethoven’s views on the subject are expressed in a letter: “Let the theatre alone for the present.” After the wicked deed, Holz reminded Beethoven that Johann van Beethoven had said that Karl knew every strumpet in Vienna and that investigation had disclosed that he was right. Karl goes to dances; Beethoven is so solicitous as to their character that he expressed a desire to go to some of them with Holz so as to learn what they are like, and Holz dissuades him on the ground that he would be stared at and it would cause public comment; but he offers to take him to a hall “of the reformed” in the Apollo Room, where he would be less observed. Beethoven fears that Karl’s passion for billiards will lead him astray, and Holz says he will sometime go with the lad to see how well he plays and thus learn whether or not he plays much.[160] Karl is now nearly 20 years old, but Beethoven does not, or will not, know that he is no longer to be disciplined as a child. He commands Schlemmer that he is not to be permitted to go out at night except on written permission signed by him. He exhausts Dr. Reisser’s patience with his frequent calls to learn of the young man’s habits and conduct. He takes upon himself the task of the ancient pedagogue and waits for him upon the steps of the Institute to accompany him home. His illness and melancholy, due to his solitary life in Baden, increase and he is haunted by premonitions of death. In a Conversation Book he once writes what seems to be the title of an imaginary composition “On the Death of Beethoven.” On June 9, 1825, he writes to Karl: “You know how I live here. To this is added the cold weather. This solitude weakens me still more, for my weakness really often borders on a swoon. O, do not pain me more! The man with the scythe will not give me much more time.” In the same summer: “God will set me free from them. Libera me domine de illis etc.” and “God be with you and me. It will soon be all over with your faithful father.” His loneliness oppresses him more and more as fears for his nephew’s fate and recognition of his own impotency to avert it pursue him. “God has never deserted me. Somebody will be found who will close my eyes,” he writes on September 14. Tenderness and reproach alternate in the letters written from Baden in the summer of 1825. With the young man’s habits of extravagance he has no patience whatever. He insists on a strict accounting for every florin which he allows him and is enraged when he hears that Karl has not forgotten his boyish trick of borrowing from the servants. He contrasts his own habits of thrift with the prodigence of his ward: “I should have gotten along two years with the walking-coat. True, I have the bad habit of always wearing an old coat at home, but Mr. Karl—O, what a shame! And why? The money-bag Mr. L. v. B-n is here only for this purpose.”

The thought of laying down the guardianship occupies his mind over and over again and his friends without exception urge him to do it; but he clings to the office, hoping against hope for his nephew’s reclamation. Crises of apprehension and foreboding produce tender appeals and piteous expostulations like these:

In the beginning of October, 1825, Karl absented himself from his lodgings for several days. Where he went and what he did is a secret held by the dead; but repentance of some sort, or consideration of the fact that he was dependent upon his uncle, seems to have persuaded him to write to Beethoven and beg his forgiveness. On the 5th of the month Beethoven wrote from Baden:

The letter has been mutilated and the remainder is unintelligible, all but a request in bad French for matches. But his impatience to see the returned prodigal was stronger than his purpose to wait for him in Baden. He went to Vienna and evidently sent the following letter from Karl’s lodgings:

In the summer of 1826, Beethoven’s plans with reference to the supervision of his nephew are divided between an abandonment of the guardianship and taking the young man back into his own lodgings. The latter alternative at least did not meet with Karl’s approval, who pleads against it the great loss of time in coming and going to the distant Institute; besides, he says, “it is only one year more and then there will be no more separation.” With such feigned expressions of gentle feeling, with smiles and occasional cajolings, Karl had learned that he could at any time bend “the old fool,” as he once called him in a letter to Niemetz, to his wishes. The fact is that Beethoven’s attempts at discipline had long ago become irksome to his nephew and his authority a burden which it was pleasant to forget in the opportunities which freedom brought. He absents himself more and more from Beethoven’s lodgings and spends less and less time at his own. The “miserable brother” is told by Beethoven to find out why, and reports the result of a talk which he had upon the subject with Karl, who had replied, in effect: the reason he did not come oftener was that he dreaded the noisy encounters which always followed and the continual reminders of past transgressions. Also the turbulent scenes between his uncle and the servants. Johann takes occasion to tell his brother that he might win the young man to him by a different mode of treatment. He is apprehensive of the consequences of idleness and urges that as soon as Karl completes his studies at the Institute, a place be found for him in either a local or foreign business house. “In the latter case,” he continues, “place the guardianship in Bach’s hands. You are as little able as I to run after him always.” Beethoven’s concern is so great that he is willing to take counsel of Schindler, whom he had so unsparingly and, we believe, unjustly denounced to his nephew. Schindler is ready with advice, but first takes advantage of the opportunity to air his grudge against Holz: “do not depend upon him in this matter,” he says in a recorded conversation. Karl’s requests for money excite his guardian’s misgivings and he demands to see the receipts for tuition fees and other expenditures. The growing feeling between guardian and ward, and some of its causes, are reflected in the record of a conversation at Karl’s lodgings in 1826, when the crisis is rapidly approaching. It is Karl who speaks, but the tenor of Beethoven’s utterances is easily to be surmised:

This is not the speech of filial love and obedience, but neither is it the language of a naughty child. There ought to be no doubt but that such exhibitions of independence and resentment, coupled with intimations of still greater independence of conduct, frequently filled Beethoven with consternation and apprehension. Once, to judge of a recorded remark by Holz, Karl seems to have raised his hand in physical violence against the uncle. Holz says: “I came in just as he took you by the breast. At the door, as he was coming out.” It is the only allusion to the incident in the book and we know none of the particulars; but it and other scenes of tumult and the utterances which they provoked must have inspired the dreadful conflict of emotions which finds expression in a letter written at this time:

A poor heart, indeed! One that knew not how to win the love for which it hungered; and a mind “perplex’d in the extreme.” That love still went out to the unworthy mother in spite of entreaties, warnings, lamentations, threats. In May, 1826, already at Baden, Beethoven hears that Karl has again visited her; and on the 22nd he writes:

Late in July, 1826, an intimation of some desperate purpose formed and expressed by the nephew was carried to Beethoven. The date is uncertain, but it was probably on Saturday, the 29th. The intention may have been self-destruction, but it needed to be no more than a purpose to go out into the world, beyond an irksome supervision, to fill Beethoven’s soul with a terrible fear. He called Holz and together they went to Schlemmer’s house in the Alleegasse. Schlemmer told all he knew in a few phrases which must have seemed shrouded with a pall as they fell upon the page of his book:

Holz went at once to the Polytechnic Institute and there found Karl, who agreed to go back with him to Schlemmer’s, but said that he must first go to a friend’s house and get some papers. Holz engaged Dr. Reisser in conversation while he waited for Karl to return. “A pistol!” remarked Reisser, “the young comedy hero!” But Karl had lied; he did not come back to the Institute and Holz returned to Beethoven with his story:

Beethoven apparently rebukes him for letting his ward out of his sight. Holz:

Schlemmer reported the finding of another pistol. A new suspicion seized upon the mind of Beethoven. For some reason, though he may also have uttered it orally, he wrote it down in the book: “He will drown himself.” Probably he did not want the bystanders to know his thoughts, and the fear was therefore committed to the written page for the instruction of Holz. What else was said at the time we do not know, for the book here shows a mutilation; some pages are missing. Perhaps Schindler removed them in later years to save the integrity of his account; or they may have been torn out by Beethoven himself when, some weeks later, Holz advised him to look through his books against their possible demand for examination by the police magistrate; they might contain references to affairs which he did not want to bring into public discussion. The missing pages might have helped us in the chronology of the story, but the main facts are before us without them. It was resolved first to go to the house of Niemetz, who it was thought might be privy to Karl’s intentions, and then if necessary, to call in the help of the police.

Meanwhile Karl, having given Holz the slip, went straight to a pawnbroker and pledged his watch. With the money he bought two pistols, powder and balls. He did not dare go to his lodgings for the pistols which he had in readiness for the contemplated deed, and the new ones were therefore necessary. For him the circumstance proved fortunate. He drove out to Baden, and spent the night in writing letters. One was to his uncle, and this he enclosed in one to his friend Niemetz. The next morning, it being a Sunday, he climbed up to the ruins of Rauhenstein, in the lovely Helenenthal which his uncle loved so well, and there discharged both pistols toward his left temple. He was a bungler with firearms. The first bullet flew past harmlessly; the second ripped up the flesh and grazed the bone, but did not penetrate the skull. Holz said afterwards that, had he taken with him the pistols which he was obliged to leave at his lodgings, he would have been a dead man; their barrels were charged with powder and ball to above the middle. A teamster came upon him lying among the ruins and, no doubt at his request, carried him to his mother’s house in the city. There Beethoven found him, whether in a search for him or because of intelligence brought by the teamster is not clear. The uncle is anxious to learn the particulars of the tragedy, but he receives a sullen answer; “It is done. Now, only a surgeon who can hold his tongue. Smetana, if he is here. Do not plague me with reproaches and lamentations; it is past. Later all matters may be adjusted.” “When did it happen?” Beethoven asks and the mother writes the answer: “He has just come. The teamster carried him down from a rock in Baden and has just driven out to you.—I beg of you to tell the surgeon not to make a report or they will take him away from here at once, and we fear the worst. There is a bullet in his head on the left side.”

Smetana was the physician who had treated Karl when he was a boy at Giannatasio’s school. Beethoven knew him as a friend. To him he wrote:

Holz took this letter for delivery but before he left the place a surgeon named DÖgl had been called in. Smetana said that DÖgl was a capable practitioner and that in order not to compromise him he would not come unless DÖgl desired to see him in consultation. Karl expressed himself as satisfied and the case was left for the time being in DÖgl’s hands. Beethoven went home, but Holz remained some time longer. The matter had to be reported to the police and Holz thought it best to do this himself, as he wanted to be able to inform Beethoven what the consequences of the young man’s act were likely to be in case of his recovery. He learned, and so reported, that there would be a severe reprimand and thereafter police surveillance. He told Beethoven that, after he had left him, Karl had said, “If he would only not show himself again!” and “If he would only quit his reproaches!” He had also threatened to tear the bandage from the wound if another word was spoken to him about his uncle.

On August 7th, the day being a Monday,[161] the wounded youth, who by his act was fallen into the hands of the law, was removed from his mother’s house to the general hospital by the police authorities. The deed was committed on a Sunday, as appears from parts of the conversations which took place between Holz and Beethoven after the fact was known. Holz says: “He left me yesterday, went straight into the city, bought the pistols and drove to Baden”; and later: “He sold his watch on Saturday and with the proceeds bought two new pistols.” The obvious conclusion would seem to be that Karl shot himself on Sunday, August 6; but there is evidence pointing to an earlier date. The police authorities were not informed until somewhat late in the day. An investigation had to be made and formalities complied with before the removal to the hospital could take place. Schlemmer, in reply to a question touching Karl’s indebtedness while Beethoven and Holz were probing for a cause, said that he had been paid “for this month, but not for August,” which indicates that the inquiry was made in July. On September 11th, discussing the disposition to be made of the nephew when he should leave the hospital and trying to persuade Beethoven to grant Karl’s request that he be permitted to visit his mother, Holz says: “In my opinion one day will make no difference, inasmuch as she was with him whole days after the shooting.” There are, besides, evidences that conversations were held for several days during which he was in the care of his mother. It is therefore probable that the nephew made the attempt upon his life on Sunday, July 30. Schindler says “in August” without giving a specific date. The evidence is not entirely conclusive; but if Beethoven consented to leave the would-be suicide in the hands of his mother for an entire week it was most likely because the police authorities commanded it; he did not yield her a day after her son came out of the hospital. At first, however, Beethoven’s spirit was broken by the awful blow and he may have been more pliant than usual. Holz, reporting to Beethoven, tells of an interview at the hospital when he met the woman at her son’s bedside. “If you have anything on your mind,” she enjoined, “tell your uncle now. You see, this is the time; he is weak, and now he will surely do anything you want.” Karl replied, sullenly: “I know nothing.” “How,” Holz explains to Beethoven, “can any one find out a single trace so long as he persists in remaining silent?” And he tells his friend of the lack of “mercy” in the weeping mother for denouncing the conduct of the guardian of her son!

No doubt the blow was a crushing one to Beethoven. On the fateful Sunday, or the day after, he met the wife of Stephan von Breuning and told her the tragical story. “And is he dead?” she inquired in tender solicitude. “No,” was the answer, “it was a glancing shot; he lives and there is hope that he will be saved. But the disgrace which he has brought upon me! And I loved him so!” The occurrence was soon noised about the city and much sympathy was expressed for Beethoven, as Holz took occasion to inform him. Schindler says that the blow bowed the proud figure of the composer and he soon looked like a man of seventy. To add to his sufferings he was compelled to learn that many persons placed part of the blame for the rash act upon him. Karl was placed in the “men’s three-florin” ward, which was under the care of a Dr. Gassner. He had an assistant named Dr. Seng, who told Gerhard von Breuning long after, how Beethoven had come to visit his nephew and described him as a “dissolute fellow” and “rascal,” one “who did not deserve to be visited” and had been “spoiled by kindness.”

Strenuous efforts were made by Beethoven through Holz and others to discover what direct cause had led the misguided young man to attempt to end his life. The inquiries made of him at the hospital during the weeks spent there brought scarcely more information from his lips than the first question asked by his mother. Schindler seems to have been persuaded that it was his failure to pass his examinations at the Polytechnic Institute; but this theory is not tenable. Aside from the fact that he had time till September 3 to make up his neglected studies, he never himself advanced this as an excuse or explanation, but explicitly denied it. In the hospital he told Holz that it would have been easy for him to make himself fit to pass, but that, having made up his mind to do away with himself long before, he had not thought it worth while to continue his studies. “He said that he was tired of life,” Holz reports to Beethoven, “because he saw in it something different from what you wisely and righteously could approve.” He also phrased it thus: “Weariness of imprisonment.” To the examining police magistrate Karl said that his reason for shooting himself was that Beethoven “tormented him too much,” and also “I grew worse because my uncle wanted me to be better.” To Beethoven’s question if Karl had railed against him, Schlemmer replied: “He did not rail, but he complained that he always had trouble.” Holz’s explanation many years after to Otto Jahn was that Beethoven was “rigorous to excess in his treatment and would not allow him the slightest extravagance.” The chief cause, in greatest probability, was that he had hopelessly involved himself in debts by a dissolute life. Schindler told Beethoven that he not only played billiards but played with low persons, coachmen and the like; and that he did not always play honestly. There is a memorandum in a Conversation Book which discloses that Beethoven received specific reports about his conduct, and noted them for reference: “One night in the Prater.—2 nights did not sleep at home.” Beethoven stinted him the matter of pocket-money, and the scores of reckonings in the Conversation Books show how close was the watch kept upon every kreutzer placed in his hands. So he had recourse to borrowing and no doubt, though the fact does not appear plainly in the books, he went into debt at the places which he frequented for pleasure. When he shot himself he had paid his lodging bill for the month but owed his tutor. A matter which gave Beethoven great concern was the discovery that he had disposed of some of the composer’s books at an antiquary’s. This was theft, a penal offence, and Beethoven seems to have been in great trepidation lest the fact, and something more dreadful still which he did not know, be discovered by the magistrate charged with an examination into the case. Under the Austrian code an attempt at suicide seems to have been an offence against the Church and guilty persons were remanded in the care of priests who imparted religious instruction until a profession of conversion could be recorded. In the case of Karl, this medicine for the mind and soul was administered by a Redemptorist, and, the Liguorian penances being proverbially strict, Holz inspired the hope in Beethoven that Karl’s secret would be discovered by the priest. “These Liguorians are like leeches,” is one of his remarks to the composer while Karl is lying at the hospital. It is pathetic to note that Beethoven himself, willing as he was to charge his nephew with prevarication, extravagance, deception and frivolity, yet sought an explanation for the act outside of these delinquencies. In his hand appears a note in a Conversation Book: “Mental aberration and insanity; the heat, too—afflicted with headaches since childhood.”

Immediately after Karl’s removal to the hospital Holz visited him and made a long report to Beethoven, from which it appears that there was no delay in considering plans for the future. In fact, a prompt decision was necessary, for it was the penal aspect of the case which had the greatest terrors for Beethoven. Holz says: “Here you see ingratitude as clear as the sun! Why do you want further to restrain him? Once with the military, he will be under the strictest discipline, and if you want to do anything more for him you need only make him a small allowance monthly. A soldier at once.... Do you still doubt? This is a marvellous document.” The last remark may have been called out, indeed, it seems more than probable that it was, by the letter written by the nephew on the eve of his attempt—a letter which has never been found. Holz also urges: “Resign the guardianship; this will make an impression on him.” Beethoven must now needs listen to upbraidings because of his lenient treatment of his ward: “If your good nature had not so often got the better of your firmness you would have driven him away long ago”; but Beethoven still hungers for the ingrate’s love. He asks about his feelings towards himself. Holz answers: “He said it was not hatred of you which he felt, but something entirely different”; and then he puts the question: “Did he mean fear?”

The day after the deed, Stephan von Breuning, himself unable to come, sent Gerhard to his friend with a message: his parents wanted him to take his meals with them so as not to be alone. Then Breuning comes, and now he will receive advice on the advisability of a military life from one fitted to give it, for von Breuning is a court councillor in the war department. “A military life will be the best discipline for one who cannot endure freedom; and it will teach him how to live on little,” is one of Breuning’s first utterances.

Holz continues his visits to the hospital and his reports. His help was now invaluable and he gave it unselfishly and ungrudgingly, winning that measure of gratitude from Beethoven which found expression in the letter empowering him to write his biography. He tells Beethoven that Karl receives visits from four physicians four times a day. That the magistrate is investigating the case and will send a priest to give the patient religious instruction, and that his release from the hands of the police authorities must wait upon his “complete conversion”; but so long as there is danger of too much mental strain this instruction will not be given. At ease in his mind touching the physical condition of his ward, Beethoven is kept in a state of anxiety about the inquiry, which is so protracted as to excite his apprehension that something awful may be disclosed. He wants to go himself to see the “Minister” (of Police, evidently) and dreads the ordeal of examination. “The court will not annoy you,” Holz, tells him; “the mother and Karl at the worst.”

Dr. Bach joined Breuning, Schindler and Holz in advising Beethoven to resign the guardianship; but while the other three favored placing Karl in the army, Bach urged that he be sent off at once to some business house in Trieste, Milan or Hamburg without waiting for him to make up his studies and pass the examination which seems necessary to Beethoven. “Away with him from Vienna!” is the general cry, but Beethoven hesitates; he still thinks that he must keep his ward under his eye. In the Conversation Book he writes: “I wanted only to accomplish his good; if he is abandoned now, something might happen.” Meanwhile von Breuning in pursuance of his plan consulted Baron von Stutterheim and persuaded him to give the young man a cadetship in his regiment, and on September 11 Breuning is able to communicate the success of his efforts to Beethoven who, as soon as he began to consider the military proposition at all, had thought of his old friend, General von Ertmann, the husband of his “Dorothea-CÄcilia.” But the project failed, and Breuning carried the day for his plan and agreed to accept the guardianship which had been laid down by Reisser. The Court Councillor goes at matters in a practical way; he brings to Beethoven von Stutterheim’s advice as to the allowance: he must not give more than 12 florins in silver a month, as that was all that the richest cadet in the service received.

Karl was unwilling to see his uncle, and Beethoven knew it. The latter wrote to his nephew, however, and the affectionate tenor of the letters met with the disapproval of both Holz and Schindler. Beethoven hoped with them to win back his nephew’s love, but his advisers told him they would do no good. He seems to have thought it necessary to learn Karl’s opinion before consenting to von Breuning’s plan. He visited Karl at the hospital, who, after asking his uncle to say as little as possible about that which was past alteration, said that a military life was the one in which he could be most satisfied and that he was entirely capable of making a firm resolve and adhering to it. As a cadet, promotion would be open to him. Beethoven, in planning to keep the young man in Vienna, had suggested to his advisers that the mother might be sent away—to Pressburg or Pesth. After it had been fixed that Karl should enter the army as soon as possible after his discharge from the hospital, the question arose as to what disposition should be made of him in the interim. Beethoven was unalterably opposed to his being with his mother even for a day. In an interview he brought the subject up and began to berate her as usual; but Karl interrupted him:

Very reluctantly Beethoven gave his consent that his nephew should become a soldier, and he continued his solicitude for him, as is disclosed by letters to Holz and von Breuning. His first thought was to send him to a military institute and have him graduated as an officer. This proved impracticable. Now he lays down three conditions as to the cadetship: he must not be treated as a culprit, not be compelled to live so meanly as to preclude his advancement, not be too much restricted as to food and drink. The plans for this disposition were made. He was to be presented to von Stutterheim as soon as he was discharged from the hospital, take the oath of service the next day, and leave Vienna for Iglau, where von Stutterheim’s regiment was stationed, within five or six days. He was discharged as cured on September 25. Breuning, who had assumed the guardianship, now found himself confronted by a serious embarrassment. Where should the young man be sent while the preparations for his entry into the military service were making? Karl did not want to go to his uncle’s, nor did von Breuning want to send him there, and frankly tells Beethoven his reason: “If he were here you would talk to him too much and that would cause new irritation; for he testified in the police court that the reason why he had taken the step was because you harassed him too much.” Beethoven feared that the magistrate might allow him to go to his mother’s, and to guard against this he wrote two letters to that official, a man kindly disposed toward him, named Czapka. In the first he wrote:

In a second letter he suggests that the magistrate admonish the young man and give him to understand that he will be under police surveillance while he is with his uncle. Beethoven’s brother was again in Vienna. He had repeated his offer to give the composer a temporary home and his nephew a harbor of refuge at Gneixendorf; but haste was imperative, both on account of his business affairs and Karl’s status. In three days the business of finishing the corrections in the manuscript copy of the Ninth Symphony which was to be sent to the King of Prussia, placing it in the hands of Haslinger, who was to have it bound, and writing the letter to the King, was disposed of and on September 28 the two brothers and their nephew set out for Gneixendorf.