Beethoven Read online

  I find it beguiling to think that the famous composer of the ‘Choral’ Symphony and Fidelio stole hens’ eggs as a child.

  This is all in stark contrast to Ludwig’s brief spell as a schoolboy. The school’s head described him as ‘a shy and taciturn boy, the inevitable consequence of the life apart which he led, observing more and pondering more than he spoke’. When, later, musicologists and biographers sought out his schoolfellows, not one related anecdotes of playing games with him, or even described him as a friend. There was no talk of trips on the Rhine or rambles across the hills. As early as his schooldays, his prodigious talent for music set him apart.

  This sense of apartness was compounded by Ludwig’s physical appearance. His skin was dark and swarthy, unusual in northern Germany, and Fischer recounts that from childhood on he was nicknamed ‘Der Spagnol’ (‘The Spaniard’). It is inevitable, given how children are, that Ludwig will have been teased at school about his appearance. It might be conjecture, but it is not difficult to imagine playground taunts.

  This is made more likely by one highly distressing anecdote. One of his schoolfellows, who later rose to high office in local government and the law, relates that as a schoolboy ‘Luis v. B. was distinguished by uncleanliness, negligence, etc.’ and he attributes this to the fact that Ludwig’s mother was already dead.

  Maria Magdalena van Beethoven was far from dead. She in fact gave birth to a daughter in 1779, who died in the same year, and a son in 1781, who died two years later. The implication of this, and its effect on a ten-year-old boy, are dire. At its most basic it must mean that Frau van Beethoven was never seen either to drop her son off at school, or to pick him up later. If that is excusable on the basis that Ludwig was able to look after himself, it further suggests that nothing was known among the school community about his family. That implies no casual conversations, no playground chat, which in turn points to a lonely existence for Ludwig.

  Compounding that is the starkness with which his schoolmate described Ludwig’s appearance. To be in such a state of neglect suggests Ludwig was paid scant attention at home by his mother, if she allowed him to attend school unwashed and dishevelled.

  Finally, with regard to this brief, but portentous, anecdote, one can hardly begin to imagine the effect on a ten-year-old boy of his schoolfellows believing his mother was dead, when he knew perfectly well she was not. Given his state of disarray, and the penchant of schoolchildren to pick on a less fortunate schoolmate, it is more than likely he was the butt of playground jokes and jibes. He might even have been taunted over the (mistaken) belief that his mother was dead. It certainly seems as if Ludwig did nothing to correct matters, which in itself is puzzling.

  This is conjecture, and again the anecdote was related many years later. But, as with Fischer, it is unlikely to have been wholly invented, particularly since its author rose to become Electoral Councillor and President of the Landgericht, the state court.

  All in all, detrimental though it might have been to Ludwig to end his school career so soon, he might himself have welcomed it, since he could at least escape from schoolfellows with whom he had nothing in common, and devote himself to music.

  A YEAR, or possibly more, before being taken out of school, Ludwig began music lessons.4 If this was a good decision on the part of his father, it was rendered unhelpful by the fact that Johann chose unsuitable music teachers for him. The first was the venerable court organist Gilles van den Eeden, who had been good friends with Kapellmeister Beethoven, no doubt because of their shared Flemish heritage, and was witness at his friend’s marriage. Van den Eeden was over seventy years of age and had been in court service for more than fifty years when he began to teach the young boy.

  To suggest a clash of generations would be an understatement, and one can easily imagine Ludwig, even at such a tender age, impatient to move faster than the aged musician from another era was prepared to go.

  Details of the instructions van den Eeden gave his young pupil are unclear, as are the exact dates between which he taught him. What is certain, though, is that the arrangement, for whatever reason, did not last long, and Ludwig soon had a new teacher.

  Tobias Pfeiffer was, by all accounts, an accomplished artist. He was also, as several contemporaries avow, something of an eccentric. Pianist, oboist, and flautist, he was also an actor and singer with the Grossmann and Helmuth theatre company, which accounts for his arrival in Bonn at the end of 1779. He took lodgings with the Beethoven family, and soon found himself employed to give music lessons to the young Ludwig.

  He was highly accomplished on the flute, but apparently had little liking for it. Gottfried Fischer’s sister Cäcilie recounts how when she asked him to play the flute, he replied, ‘Oh, the flute. That instrument doesn’t interest me. You waste your breath for other people, and I don’t like that.’ However, when he did play, with Ludwig accompanying him on the piano, the result was so beautiful that people stopped in the street outside to listen. Gottfried said he heard several people say they could listen to the music ‘all day and all night’.

  This anecdote is of some importance. It is the first evidence – albeit, like all the Fischer reminiscences, recalled decades after the event – of Ludwig van Beethoven performing on equal terms with an adult professional, and already establishing a reputation.

  Unfortunately for the boy, though, Pfeiffer was an erratic teacher. After an evening’s drinking with Johann, the two of them would arouse Ludwig late at night, drag him to the piano crying, and force him to play. Pfeiffer would then instruct him often until daylight. It does not take a lot to imagine the horror of being aroused from sleep, forced to play no doubt surrounded by alcohol fumes, and being generally bullied by two men, one your father, the other a musician whose eccentric behaviour was earning him enemies.

  That eccentricity could be dangerous as well as harmless. When asked by Fischer senior, who lived on the floor below, to stop stamping up and down his room in heavy boots because it was keeping him awake at night, Pfeiffer agreed to remove one boot but not the other. On another occasion, when the barber came to tend to the men of the house, he said something to offend Pfeiffer, who picked him up bodily and threw him down the stairs, injuring him badly.

  It was perhaps as much of a blessing for the people of Bonn, as for the young Ludwig, that Pfeiffer left Bonn with his theatre company after just three months.

  WE KNOW from the records that Ludwig did not enter secondary school (Gymnasium) in the autumn of 1781. In mitigation of his father’s behaviour, it should perhaps be pointed out that it was common practice for parents in Bonn to remove their children from the education system after primary, lower-grade, school, with a view to apprenticing them so they could begin to earn a living. It had happened to Johann himself, who left before secondary school to take up an appointment as court musician.

  If Johann was thinking that this was an appropriate moment to test his young son’s earning power, the perfect opportunity presented itself. Through a family connection in Holland, an invitation was made for the Beethovens to visit Rotterdam. Johann’s court duties prevented him from going, but he sent his wife and son, with clear instructions that Ludwig should perform, and be remunerated for it.

  This episode is rarely mentioned in biographies, for the obvious reason that very little is known about it, and what we do know – as with the Fischer anecdotes – was related by a neighbour many years after the event. But again, as with Fischer, it is the small telling detail that rings absolutely true. That detail in this case, I believe, throws a fascinating and intriguing light on the relationship between Ludwig and his mother.

  The winter of 1781 began early with bitterly cold weather. Frau van Beethoven sat with her ten-year-old son on the deck of a sailing boat as it travelled down the Rhine towards Holland. Huddled against the wind, Ludwig became very cold. His mother coaxed him to lie on the bench, took his feet onto her lap, and rubbed them to try to keep them warm.

  Could this be the same woman w
ho allowed her son to turn up at school in such a dishevelled state that fellow schoolboys thought she was dead? If we believe the anecdotes, then there were clearly emotional complexities at work in the Beethoven family that we can only guess at.

  Two years before the trip to Holland, Maria Magdalena had given birth to a baby girl who died before the end of the year. In the same year as the trip, she gave birth to a son. Would a mother leave her infant of less than a year to make the trip? What arrangements did she make for the child to be looked after? Could she have suffered from post-natal depression after the death of the baby girl? And what feelings of guilt awaited her when the baby boy she left behind died at the age of two?

  Question after question, and we cannot answer any of them. But, as with the hens’ eggs and the cockerel, I cannot help but be bewitched by the thought that, as titanic an artist as he was, Beethoven still got cold feet.

  As for the trip, the hoped-for financial rewards were not forthcoming. The boy certainly played in the highest salons and was apparently showered with compliments, but little else. A performance before Prince Willem of Orange Nassau yielded a mere 63 florins. When his friend Gottfried Fischer asked him how it had gone, Ludwig replied, ‘The Dutch are skinflints. I’ll never go to Holland again.’ And he didn’t.

  Johann also was making efforts to earn money through his son. When the Elector was absent from Bonn, and court musicians were free, Johann would take trips with his son into the countryside around Bonn and alongside both banks of the Rhine, visiting wealthy noblemen and persuading them to listen to Ludwig perform.

  This afforded an opportunity not just for financial gain, but for father and son to develop a closer relationship. Although there is some evidence of the former, there is none of the latter. Neither these excursions nor the trip to Rotterdam appears to have brought the boy any closer to his parents. It is also fair to speculate that these trips, coupled with the Rotterdam experience, put him off performing ‘to order’ for life.

  From Johann’s point of view, if his son really was to be a source of income for the family, as young Wolfgang Amadeus had been for the Mozarts, then he needed to acquire more skills, and that meant finding another teacher.

  Whether it was Johann, or the Elector himself, who took the next step is not clear. Whoever it was, a decision was made on Ludwig’s behalf that changed his life. It was decided to employ a certain Christian Gottlob Neefe to teach Ludwig. A better man could not have been chosen. From the day he began lessons with Neefe, probably in 1781 at the age of ten, Ludwig van Beethoven began his life as a musician.

  1 Prince-Electors were senior members of the Holy Roman Empire who had a direct role in electing the Holy Roman Emperor, head of the Habsburg Empire, whose seat was in Vienna.

  2 In a bizarre turn of events almost a decade later, Johann and Maria Magdalena van Beethoven took out a suit against the Ehrenbreitstein court bailiff, who was related by marriage to Maria Magdalena and who was the guardian of her mother’s estate, accusing him of stealing the old lady’s savings. The suit was thrown out.

  3 Gottfried Fischer, Aufzeichnungen über Beethovens Jugend (Notes on Beethoven’s Youth).

  4 It is impossible to be precise. The chronology of Beethoven’s early years, as with the date of his birth, is uncertain.

  Chapter

  TWO

  The Right Teacher

  THE SMALL TOWN OF BONN, on the west bank of the Rhine, then as in more recent times, punched above its weight. Surprisingly chosen as the capital of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1949, it was, in Beethoven’s lifetime, the unlikely seat of the Elector, who was also Archbishop of Cologne and Münster. It was a medieval Archbishop who selected Bonn for his residence, rather than the more obvious choice of Cologne, possibly for the reason that the mighty Rhine narrowed at this point and could be blocked, thus bestowing on Bonn a crucial strategic importance. In later centuries it endowed Bonn with a certain grandeur, more than a veneer of aristocracy, a degree of wealth and prosperity, which its rival towns on the Rhine – Cologne, Mainz, Coblenz – could only look at with envy. And for the people of Bonn – fewer than 10,000 according to a survey in 1789 – it meant pleasant, well-tended surroundings and, more importantly, security and income. For a town with no manufacture or commerce, it was commonly stated that ‘all Bonn was fed from the Elector’s kitchen’.

  Clemens August, who made his solemn entry into Bonn as Elector in 1724, endowed the town with a fine palace (now the University of Bonn) and an ornate Town Hall (today used for ceremonial functions – President Kennedy made a speech there in 1963). But, of more importance to our story, in 1733 he employed a Flemish immigrant by the name of Ludwig van Beethoven as court musician, and twenty-three years later his son Johann.

  This Elector left his mark on Bonn in another way too. He danced himself to death, literally. Leaving Bonn to visit his family in Munich in early 1761, he was struck down with illness, and broke his journey to call on the hospitality of his fellow Elector in Ehrenbreitstein.1 At dinner he was too ill to eat, but not it seems too poorly to take to the dance floor afterwards with the alluring Baroness von Waldendorf, sister of the Elector. She must have been exceedingly alluring, because he danced with her not once, or twice, but for ‘eight or nine turns’. Other ladies, complaining of neglect, received their turn too. If his spirit was willing, his flesh could not withstand the exertion. He passed out on the dance floor, was carried to his room, and died the next day.

  I recount this story, not just to raise a sympathetic smile, but because of the impact it, and subsequent events, had on the Beethoven family. Clemens August’s successor as Elector, Maximilian Friedrich, had barely got his feet under the desk, as it were, when he received a petition from court bass singer Ludwig van Beethoven seeking elevation to the supreme musical position of Kapellmeister, the post being vacant following the death of the previous incumbent. The petition pleads with the Elector ‘to grant me the justice of which I was deprived on the death of Your Highness’s antecessori of blessed memory’, which suggests the elder Beethoven had made moves – if not in a formal petition – to be appointed Kapellmeister before the previous Elector’s untimely demise.

  We can assume the death of Clemens August, and the manner of his passing, was the predominant topic of conversation at all levels among the populace of Bonn, with varying degrees of ribald observation. Certainly, at court level, it led to immediate jockeying for promotion, in particular among the court musicians, since the top job itself was vacant.

  Beethoven senior’s bold approach paid dividends. By an order of the Elector dated 16 July 1761, he was appointed Kapellmeister, with an increase in salary, though less than he might have expected due to the fact that he was not a composer. A little over two years later he managed to secure a permanent position at court for his son Johann, as tenor and violinist. Between them, father and son (not yet married) were earning a comfortable sum.

  This was particularly fortunate, for under Maximilian Friedrich things changed for the burghers of Bonn. The Elector himself was an affable and kindly man, sharing with his predecessor a predilection for the fairer sex, and court entertainment carried on much as before. But his popularity with his people was in stark contrast to that of his First Minister. Count Kaspar Anton von Belderbusch had been instrumental in securing Maximilian Friedrich’s election. In return he demanded – and was granted – unrivalled political power. On examining the exchequer and discovering the previous Elector’s extravagance, he came down hard on all expenditure.

  Practically overnight the good life in Bonn ended. People suddenly found themselves out of work, some even losing what had previously been considered a ‘job for life’ at the court. At all levels there was a financial crackdown. A visitor from England was somewhat horrified to find that at dinner with the Elector, ‘no dessert wines were handed about, nor any foreign wines at all’, which, while it might say as much about the travel writer Henry Swinburne as it does about the Elector, at least suggests a comfo
rtable life was expected at court, if nowhere else.

  The easy-going and even-tempered Elector was not one to stand up to his First Minister, which might have something to do with the fact that Belderbusch knew rather a lot about the Elector’s private life. The two men shared a mistress, a certain Countess Caroline von Satzenhofen – who happened to be Abbess of a Benedictine nunnery close to Bonn!

  Once again, this is likely to have been common knowledge, at least among court employees. It is inconceivable that there were not hushed whispers when the two men were seen together, and the fact that the Elector was as much liked as his First Minister was disliked might have had something to do with resentment at the fact that Belderbusch not only behaved as if he was Elector, but even enjoyed the services of the Elector’s mistress.

  This, then, was the Bonn that Ludwig van Beethoven was born into, a town that had seen more comfortable days, that was nominally ruled by an ineffective Elector and governed by a strict disciplinarian First Minister, but that still boasted an enviable artistic life, with a busy calendar of performances by court orchestra and theatre, and was a desirable location for touring theatrical companies. It was this reputation for the arts, particularly music, that brought the thirty-one-year-old composer, organist and conductor, Christian Gottlob Neefe, to Bonn.

  A COMBINATION of circumstances made Neefe the ideal teacher for the budding young musician, Ludwig van Beethoven. As a young man in Chemnitz in Saxony he had had serious disagreements with his father, who wanted him to follow his example and take up law. Under protest he enrolled at the University of Leipzig to study jurisprudence, but was so unhappy he apparently contemplated suicide. Against his father’s wishes he gave up the law and turned to music. At the same time he immersed himself in the philosophy and ideals of the German Enlightenment, reading Gellert, Klopstock, and particularly the young Goethe.